Opinions in Class

Invariably I am the most conservative person in my PhD classes. Most of my colleagues in class are academics. They are all trying to become professors or administrators and they tend to live in the Northeast or Midwest. I've yet to have a class with anyone else who lives as far south as I do, or who is in an industrial field, much less in oil and gas.

With that being said, I like to poke at my colleagues and professors just a bit. I never know how much is too much, and there is an argument that I went too far this last time, but it was just too good an article and too timely to pass up.

We were talking about strong and weak experiment designs in our class lecture the other day. What makes an experiment design strong? What factors automatically make a design weak? 

One of the samples that the professor brought up was having an over-subscribed class. Meaning, that too many people wanted to be in the class. This allows the experimenter to accept some and take from the excess to create a control group. I read an opinion article (see HERE) that brought up that very design so I sent it to the professor. The problem? The opinion aspect of the article is heavy-handed and counter to the prevailing politics and paradigms I've seen from my colleagues and classmates traditionally.

The good news . . . the professor agreed with my comments on the article. She didn't share it with the class as is common, but she loved the example!