My latest piece in the Joongang Ilbo is online, this time about swine flu and the preventative measures taken to keep it under control in South Korea.
If you're wondering what the premise of the column is, read the introductory remarks I made here and here.
13 comments:
I've often said that a PhD is just a piece of paper that proves you jumped through a shitload of hoops and have a *modicum* of intelligence.
After reading that professors are telling students not to eat pork--my opinion is reinforced.
J
@ Jason
I understand your sarcasm. But if you are referring to a quote made by someone regarding certain professors advising their students not to eat pork, i think there are certain points you need to consider before jumping into any conclusion
1. Are these alleged professors really PhD holders? Not all professors are PhD degree grads..what if they are just Instructors?
2. If indeed they are PhD degree holders..IM SURE they dont hold a PhD in Virology, Epidemiology or any Science degree relevant to the matter. The fact is whatever PhD they are having might be very far from a field that deals with this topic. Thus making them prone to making non sense remarks. Does that make a PhD degree non sense and just a piece of paper?
I dont understand why you are undermining the importance of graduate education (all fields) and u said ....with.."modicum" intelligence? I can sense bitterness in that sentence. If you dont have PhD (or on the way to get one) then just be happy with it and enjoy your life, be contented on what you know. If you have, then justify it.
What Jason means....lets be blunt...is that it does not take a smart person, or even much studying for that matter, to recieve a higher degree in Korea. We all know the Korean educational system is a joke (and abusive in the mid levels)from Kindergarten through schools of "higher" (cough) learning (cough).
Brian,
Great piece. I really enjoyed it on many levels.
Going through a PhD program myself, Jason, I can tell you that the "shitload of hoops" is a body of knowledge you have to acquire and show you can apply. I'm working on my second and third graduate degrees right now, and they are no cakewalk. When I do finally complete them, they will be an achievement way beyond a mere "shitload of hoops."
From the article:
“The professors at my husband’s university . . . in his culinary arts program told the students yesterday not to eat any pork because that is how it is spread,” writes fattycat.
BiJNd <= FC <= FCH <= Ss (KxE) <= Ps
That's a lot of degrees of separation, with one language cross over. I wonder what was actually said* (granting the possibility that the professors said exactly that).
At any rate, depending on the PhD the professors have, even if they had said that exactly that way, it does not necessarily impugn their doctorate.
* It is a defensible statement that not eating pork may help curb future outbreaks of diseases like this, and an ESL student may muck that up when retelling in English such a thing they'd heard in Korean. The swine flu was traced to a pig farm lagoon in Mexico. Those lagoons — and they exist in the US as well — are a direct result of excessive production and consumption of pork. In southern China, another hotspot for these pandemics, the confluence of people, pigs, and poultry make for a toxic breeding ground for future bugs. The answer is simple: eat less pork, less beef, and less chicken, if you can't eliminate it completely
nb wrote:
We all know the Korean educational system is a joke (and abusive in the mid levels)from Kindergarten through schools of "higher" (cough) learning (cough).
So, Jason and nb, do you have a graduate degree? If so, from where (not necessarily the school, but type of school and region)? What field?
Has your master's or PhD helped you gain better work in Korea or elsewhere? Has it helped you do a better job?
Do you have any experience studying at a Korean university?
And while I'm sorry for writing three posts in a row, I forgot to mention that I really liked the last sentence.
WORD VERIFICATION: body LG
@ kushibo
My husband is a student at the school not a teacher and speaks fluent English and Korean. The professor told my husband and the rest of the students in the culinary arts class not to eat pork because that is how you can get pig flu. He said it exactly like that. Whether or not the instructor has his PhD I am unsure.
@ Kushibo
"At any rate, depending on the PhD the professors have, even if they had said that exactly that way, it does not necessarily impugn their doctorate."
- What im saying is that if these people have indeed PhD's in Culinary science for example, that has nothing to in dealing with issues relevant to how a certain disease is transmitted or the DOs and DONTs of Epidemiology, then you can expect that answer. Its not their expertise. If indeed they said that, they said that not as a PhD holder (relevant to their degree) but as a normal individual like everyone else, unless they were misquoted. It just so happen that they are Professors. (If indeed they are)
You dont take seriously the advice or comments of a Professor of Music in solving your problems in Statistical Physics for example..right?
A PhD in linguistics or planting sweet potato, liberal arts, TESOL etc is not the same as a PhD in hardcore Science or Math that deals with FACTS and analysis. (Where unfortunately not everyone is capable of, not even being admitted in a certain program where everything is paid and subsidized ).
fattycat, if you say that's exactly how it was said, I'll defer to your account.
I will be the firs to admit that I am often suspicious of retellings of stories when they are used to make a negative point, especially when there is a long chain from original mouth to current ear and especially when there is a language crossover.
When I've had time to look into some of the more outrageous things I've heard, about half the time it was a case of someone misinterpreting another language, someone not expressing themselves in another language, something exaggerated, something misremembered, or something taken out of context.
While I admit this has made me jaded, I do try to take the time to verify or get to the bottom of things, but my incredulity is rarely impenetrable.
At any rate, I wouldn't bash doctorate programs across Korea based on (a) a person who may not even have a PhD to begin with, (b) is probably talking about a field other than their own field of study, (c) is shared by millions of people across America and the leadership of at least twelve countries.
That said, it is a defensible position that consumption of pork as it is done today does lead to things like swine flu, just not directly from the Spam™ itself. I said as much a week ago. If that was the context, then they would be on to something.
Our over consumption of beef and pork and, to a lesser extent, chicken, is making ourselves sick and wasting valuable resources.
arvinsign, I don't disagree with what you just wrote, and I did get your point earlier.
I had other reasons for those questions to Jason and nb, who pooh-poohed graduate degrees in general and, in nb's case, Korean higher education specifically, which I may get into after they answer.
Last year, there was similar nonsense (epidemic paranoia) over roma tomatoes in the U.S. when the culprit was really the jalapeno pepper. It took weeks for some actual CDC doctors/PhDs to figure it out. It just decimated the tomato industry in two countries and cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
People get sick. It's part of life. They also get run over by buses and die in wars and from peanuts. Strange that we haven't heard much about that peanut butter problem from a couple of months ago, they must have better lobbyists than the hog farmers.
For the worrywarts out there, wash your hands, wash your food, and wear a full body respirator....damn, full body respirator...sounds like a money maker if I ever heard of one here in South Korea, hell...maybe even China to boot.
Whether jalapeños or roma tomatoes or spinach, what we as the public should wonder is why lately we are so often finding illness-causing strains of salmonella and e. coli, bacteria which are typically found in the intestinal track of animals, on our vegetables.
This can be multifactorial but one of the culprits for this is the evolution itself of these bugs (on the molecular level). Our body was designed to ward off any "foreign" invaders using receptors (or tags) found on the surface of these bugs. Its a clever but efficient process. But since microbes have undergone a series of changing habitats in the course of time, they have learned (through nature) how to manipulate their simple less than 5 million bases genomic machinery, thus changing their receptors (tags), their mechanisms, their cloak and making our immune system shocked and awed. Most of these emerging and re-emerging bugs are simply strains (variants) of a major species and not necessarily a "new" one thus making evolution as the likely reason for their emergence. Another common way by which they do it, is by acquiring new weapons (long strands of DNA) from other bugs and incorporating it on their own as part of their new system, and presto you have a new strain. Its like Afghan rebels getting financial support and military hardware from USA during their war with the Soviets.
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