California Dreamin': On the Road

Picturesque La Jolla, California.

---

I've not been a very good blogger in 2008. My irregular posting has led me, at times, to think about shutting it down altogether.

This has been an incredibly busy summer with classes, writing, and masters thesis. Still, there has been time for fun.

Last week was spend on a road trip with my dad, driving around Southern California.

We brought bicycles and found riding trails along the Pacific coastline. We spend time at the beach, and we visited various university campuses, including Cal Tech, one of my new favorite places.

It was a great week for being a human; however, it was not such a great week for being a blogger.

The visit helped me set some long-term goals, and it helped me find some great places to take my kids on a next trip to California.

The last such trip I took with my dad was 1991. I'm hoping we won't wait 17 years next time.

Comparing California, Texas Higher Ed

Updated: 9:53 p.m., June 24, 2008 (see below)

A former mentor and colleague pointed me to these faculty productivity rankings by the Chronicle for Higher Education.

The same former mentor also talked about how Texas (population 23,507,783) higher education compares to California (population 36,457,549) higher education. That is, how do the two most populous states stack up?

As an imperfect measure of university quality, let's look at the institutions listed by the Chronicle. How many public programs are nationally ranked in terms of top faculty productivity? There is a problem of apples and oranges, as Texas has separate listings for medical schools, and California does not. In the interest of fairness, I will include all Texas public institutions including the medical schools.

Texas
University of Texas, Austin -- 28
Texas A&M University -- 14
University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston -- 6
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas -- 3
Texas Tech University -- 3
University of Houston -- 2
University of Texas Medical Branch -- 2
Sam Houston State University -- 1
Texas A&M, Kingsville -- 1
University of North Texas Health Science Center at Fort Worth -- 1
UTEP -- 1
(Private school Rice has 6 ranked programs)

That gives Texas a grand total of 62 ranked programs at public universities including medical schools. How does California stack up? With 50% more population, California should have about 93 ranked programs if the two states are equal.

California
University of California, Berkeley -- 59
UCLA -- 41
University of California, Davis -- 21
University of California, San Diego -- 19
University of California, San Francisco -- 16
University of California, Santa Barbara -- 11
University of California, Irvine -- 8
University of California, Riverside -- 6
San Diego State University -- 5
University of California, Santa Cruz -- 1

It turns out that California has 187 ranked programs -- more than three times the state of Texas. Fifty percent greater population translates into 300 percent more ranked programs.

The top two Texas programs have 42 ranked programs. The top two California programs have 100. The top two Texas programs have 96,236 students, according to Wikipedia. The two top California institutions have just 71,564 students, also thanks to Wikipedia. More than double the ranked programs spread among 14,000 fewer students.

I make no inferences here, but rather I leave them to you, the reader. In terms of objective productivity, my California compatriots far outpace me and my Texas colleagues.

(Meant to be humorous) It brings to mind the current California Dairy Board advertising campaign: "Great milk comes from happy cows. Happy cows come from California."

---

Update: This page is getting a good deal of traffic from a blog by the Texas Faculty Association. Although I am all for a good crusade, this was not the crusade that I had intended. The quip about California cows was meant to be a throwaway at the end. Instead it can quite logically be read as me saying Texas faculty are unhappy.

This may be the case; however, it is at best a hypothesis. There is clearly a cause for the disparity outlined in these data, but it assuredly boils down to something more complex than faculty satisfaction. I have zero data concerning the relative happiness of the respective faculties.

With the current economy and the price of oil, one could make a not-so-bold prediction that Texas universities will soon make up much ground on their California counterparts. Texas' budget future looks far more rosy than that of California. When you combine Texas' oil and gas revenues with how long California took to come out of the last recession, it's a great time to be in Texas.

As a resident of Texas -- and a faculty member in Texas -- I found these data to be interesting. However, I did not intend to slight the state of Texas. Trust me. I live here, and I know better.

It is worth understanding why this disparity exists. But a throwaway quip should not be interpreted for my estimate of the answer. It remains an empirical question.

---

* Population estimates for 2006 courtesy of the U.S. Census Bureau here and here.

I Absolutely Love Northern California

Thank you, Half Moon Bay, California, for existing.

I enjoyed visiting you today.

Headed to California to Talk Advertising

I'm headed to the annual meeting of the American Academy of Advertising in San Mateo, California today.

There, members of the Texas Tech team will present research on:

Straight Eye for the Queer Ad: Stop, Look, and Dislike
James Angelini, University of Delaware
Samuel Bradley, Texas Tech University

Love is in the Heart: Physiological Responding to Preferred Brands
Wendy Maxian, Texas Tech University
Nikki Siegrist, Texas Tech University
Wes Wise, Texas Tech University
Jessica Freeman, Texas Tech University
Kayla Altman, Texas Tech University
Samuel Bradley, Texas Tech University

Physiological Responses as a Measure of Effectiveness of Brand Placements in Video Games
Harsha Gangadharbatla, Texas Tech University
Samuel Bradley, Texas Tech University
Wes Wise, Texas Tech University
Brandon Nutting, Texas Tech University
Kelli Brown, Texas Tech University
Wendy Maxian, Texas Tech University
Nikki Siegrist, Texas Tech University
Lakshmi Tirumala, Texas Tech University

Gender, Arousal, and Presence as Predictors of Recall of Brands Placed in Videogames
Harsha Gangadharbatla, Texas Tech University

Hope to see you there!

Pictures: So Much More Than 1,000 Words

In my home office, I have a bunch of the clear plastic storage containers.

For whatever reason, this picture fell against the edge of one of the containers.

So I've been seeing it for several weeks.

As photographs go, it is pretty bad. I took an inexpensive disposable camera to San Diego that May 2003 weekend for the annual meeting of the International Communication Association.

Nonetheless, this was the view from the hotel room I shared with Byungho Park, now an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore. The great view made it a great room, and we hung out there at night.

Of course, I did not know about San Diego's "may grey." So other than a blazer, I did not even pack a jacket.

The point is that this photograph triggers so many memories. Although that conference is now more that four years ago, this photograph triggers memories of fish tacos, my friend Nancy's craziness, our jaunt to La Jolla.

Unfortunately, the photo also reminds me that my grandmother died just as I was leaving for the conference.

If I were to describe all of those memories, the resulting text would span far more than 1,000 words. That's the power of photography and human visual memory.

I'm grateful that my father inspired my love for photography at a very young age.

Red Raiders on the Golden Gate

SAN FRANCISCO -- The Texas Tech contingent freezes atop the Golden Gate Bridge. Wendy Maxian, me, and Wes Wise.

Career Began in Northern California

Ten years ago this month I was assigned to The Modesto (Calif.) Bee as a copy editing intern. It's a great newspaper. And I loved it there.

My assignment to Modesto came as a quirk. Having gone to school at New Mexico State, the decisions committee at the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund slated me for the Tucson Citizen.

I still remember the phone call clearly (but probably not as well as I think). Dr. Bill Tillinghast called to offer me the job. I trembled with excitement as I heard the news. I wanted that internship more than anything I ever wanted in life.

Dr. Tillinghast explained that I would attend the center for editing excellence at San Jose State for two weeks (read about a related memory) before heading back to Tucson.

I'm still not sure what came over me. I told Dr. Tillinghast that I might never leave the Bay Area once they got me out there.

He paused.

"We have an opening in Modesto, " he said.

"Where is Modesto?" I asked.

"About 90 miles east of San Francisco," he said.

"I'll take it," I said, pumping my fist in the air.

Life took a left turn in that moment. My love affair with the Bay Area only grew. In 1997, the goal of living in the Bay Area nearly consumed me.

So off I went.

Things went well. My dad drove out with me. We visited San Francisco together. It was amazing.

Dad flew home. I went through boot camp with Dow Jones (the greatest educational experience of my life), and I moved to my apartment in Modesto. My wife, Emily, joined me in Modesto after her summer class.

I had an interview with the Contra Costa Times, an east Bay paper. Life was awesome.

My wife became pregnant about that time. Although I had finished my degree at NMSU, she had a year left. There was no way that I was going to be apart from my first born. Life took another left turn.

So I picked up the phone. I called Harold Cousland at the Las Cruces Sun-News. I asked Harold for a job. Ten weeks before I competed with his paper as the editor of the NMSU student newspaper, the Round Up. That day I wanted a job.

Luckily Harold had a job for me.

So on August 31, 1997, I loaded all of my belongings into my white Pontiac Sunbird, and I headed south on Highway 99.

I left Northern California in the rear-view mirror that day, and I have not been back since.

In the interim, a decade went by. I tired of journalism's long hours and low pay. I wound up with a Ph.D. and three daughters.

In two more days, I'll fly into San Francisco again. In many ways, it will be as if the decade never passed by.

Spending Your Life on U.S. Highway 101

I am not sure where paradise on earth really is, but if I had to guess, I would guess that it lies somewhere along the Pacific Coast Highway. In March 1996, Emily and I packed up our little gold Audi 80 (which I loved until the transmission died) and headed west.

We spent the night somewhere in Southern California (a theme with me, it seems). The next morning we woke up and headed west on some nondescript California highway (likely highway 58). It was foggy as could be, and there was much more livestock than I had imagined for "California."

A few hours later we came through the mountains and descended into the general San Luis Obispo region (details escape me 11 years later). We made our way to the Pacific Coast Highway (U.S. 101) and headed north.

From time-to-time, we would stop and look. But these stops were far too short. In fact, 11 years later, a part of me wishes that I were still standing on the side of that highway staring out at the majesty of the Pacific Ocean.

---

---

We were in a hurry that day. We were headed to Monterey and then San Francisco. On the return trip, we came through Las Vegas. Less than a week later we were back in classes.

You see, I think that life would have worked out just fine if we had parked the Audi somewhere in central California and stayed. It's beautiful. There's an ocean. There are plenty of universities there.

But that's not the kind of thing that I do. It's the kind of thing that I think of doing someday. But one of the cruel facts of humanity is that someday never comes. Today is always today. And there are chores to be done. Running away to California is just a little too Jack Kerouac for me, I guess. Hopefully it won't always be. And hopefully some day will come sooner than later.

At nostalgic moments such as these, I think about slowing down a bit. In fact, I find some great irony in the fact that -- as of today -- if you Google the terms "taking life slow," the No. 1 hit is this Weblog. I'm not exactly the poster child for smelling the roses.

But it seems that when the opportunity presents itself, I am too quick to worry about the "plan." If the plan was to make 600 miles that day, then 600 miles were made. Silly, right? I cannot remember the plan 11 years later. But I can remember that view.

I'm sure that Emily and I made it wherever we had planned for that night. We spent 5 or 10 minutes staring at the breathtaking beauty and then moved on. We breezed through the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

If you've never been to the aquarium, it's breathtaking (watch Webcam here). It's pretty much the kind of place that they should have to kick you out of at the end of the day. Yet somehow you determine it's time to go. It should never be time to go.

I cannot wait for the day when it is not time to go.

Chinese Food Interesting Memory Trigger

The International House at San José State University provided sleeping quarters for journalism interns for two weeks in summer 1997.

---

Last week I pulled up to the stop sign at Sunrise Point Road and Mission Road in Las Cruces, N.M. It made me think of a similar stop a decade earlier.

In May 1997, I packed up my white Pontiac Sunbird to head for San José, Calif. My dad was my travel partner as I headed out to participate in the center for editing excellence as part of the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund internship.

Some of my college buddies had come by the house the night before and written farewell messages on the cars' windows. That gesture made it even more difficult to head out to California -- especially considering that my wife, Emily, was staying at NMSU for summer classes.

My dad and I drove to Bakersfield, Calif., that day and onto Modesto the next day. My actual internship was with The Modesto Bee, and I had to find an apartment before heading to San José.

It was one of many great road trips with my dad, but as always it was over too soon. I dropped dad off at the San José airport and headed over to San José State for my two week copy editing boot camp.

On the first day, we were given a stipend for food. We tried a lot of inexpensive restaurants in the eclectic neighborhood around SJSU. I found a little hole in the wall Chinese restaurant on San Fernando Street just a few blocks from Dwight Bentel Hall, our newsroom for the time being.

As tends to be my habit, I get into habits, and I must have eaten at that little place eight or 10 times during the two weeks. They served a great kung pao chicken with zucchini that I could never find after leaving the silicon valley.

---

---

Ten years later I am living in Lubbock, Texas. My life took many twists and turns during the past decade, most of which I could never have imagined while embarking on a journalism career 10 years ago.

One day over the winter, I heard my colleague Tom Johnson talking about Chinatown restaurant here in Lubbock. We tried it, and sure enough, they have what I would call San José-style kung pao chicken.

As you might surmise, that was on the dinner menu. When combined with last week's stop sign and today's chat with a student about graduation, I have been flooded with memories. It's been a great 10 years, and 1997 was a great summer. But the thought that comes up again and again is, "where in the world did 10 years go?"