Periodic table challenge

There was a phenomenal response to my blog post on the periodic table with emphasis graphic (thanks everyone!). While I still hope to uncover more information about the history of the graphic and gain insight into what Sheehan thought about it in his later years, I suspect that Sheehan was always aware that the relative sizes of the different element blocks did not accurately represent the abundance of the elements. For the target audience of pre-college (elementary?) students however, it no doubt succeeded fantastically in generating curiosity about the periodic table and stimulating interest in chemistry. As I hope was clear, my criticism was not directed at Sheehan's pedagogical efforts but rather at the indiscriminate spread of an inaccurate "meme" portrayed as a truism. The Sheehan periodic table appeals to both our aesthetic sensibilities as well as a human desire to simplify the complex. For the same reason it was an effective outreach tool, it became the perfect mechanism to propagate misinformation.

As several have pointed out, this will not be the last time Sheehan's graphic surfaces. We can point of the errors in the graphic every time that it is shared (maybe using my blog post), but a better approach would be to displace it from the zeitgeist. Since I lack the necessary artistic skills, I'm issuing a challenge for someone to create a periodic table that illustrates relative abundance. Sadly, I can't think if anything to offer as a reward, unless there is a sudden uptick in demand for signed reprints of my papers. 

As I cited in the original blog post, several versions of the periodic table showing abundance exist; however, each have shortcomings. The new periodic table with emphasis should meet the following criteria:

1. The periodic table must be visually striking. It should be more aesthetically appealing than Sheehan's graphic. It must encourage sharing and therefore promote education.

2. The periodic table must show all the naturally occurring elements (i.e. at least up to neptunium, element 94). Obviously, this the hardest thing to achieve. As we've pointed out, the magnitude of the difference between most abundant and least abundant elements precludes presentation on anything resembling the standard periodic table. The weakness of the existing elemental abundance cartograms and the Google table is that one could conclude that rare elements do not exist. Using Google's periodic table as an example, it is accurate to say that astatine is present at 0 ppm in the Earth's crust, but it is incorrect to say astatine does not exist on earth. If one looked in locations with deposits of radioactive uranium and thorium ores, astatine would be detectable. Google also shows radon at 0 ppm. If radon was nonexistent on earth, radon abatement systems would be relegated to the dustbin of pseudoscience with the QRay bracelet and rhino horn. Radon can be found at approximately parts per trillion in the crust, but concentrated in uranium and thorium ore. 

While the cartograms pass criteria 1, Google's periodic table offers nothing beyond a standard visual. The same lack of artistry applies to all the other abundance tables that I have found.

To get people thinking, I have the skeleton of 2 possible ideas

A) An interactive periodic table that operates like Google Earth. A wide view would show the abundant elements, and the less abundant would come into view as the user zooms in closer. The big difference between Google Earth and this hypothetical periodic table is the amount of zoom required. The transition from a complete map of the continents down to the the standard street level map requires zooming through approximately 6 orders of magnitude. The abundance of elements is a much larger range of values (ca. >20 orders of magnitude).

B) A 2-fold Sheehan-inspired periodic table. The basis for this would be a color coded log scale. Colors would follow the electromagnetic spectrum such that each order of magnitude corresponds to a color (e.g. 10^-16 abundance = violet with colors red shifting as the magnitude increases). Within a given color/order of magnitude, the blocks are sized relative to one another similar to Sheehan's graphic and cartograms.

To get you started, here's one possible resource for finding the amount of the elements in the crust or oceans.

Periodic Table with {wildly inaccurate} EMPHASIS

Studies show that scientists and those interested in science are susceptible to misinformation contained in memes.¹ In 1976, William Sheehan published an article entitled "Periodic Table with EMPHASIS".² This publication remained virtually undiscovered for 36 years until a series of events appears to have brought this obscure document to the forefront of chemical (mis)information. A Google investigation suggests that a Tumblr user posted a periodic table graphic with the caption "Totally in love with this image". The Radiolab Tumblr reposted the illustration, and finally io9 posted the image on its website. The unique version of the periodic table has been tweeted, retweeted, shared, +1 and liked into viral status,³ which would be quite a coup except that no one in the initial series of postings appears to have investigated or critically analyzed the veracity of the science this periodic table purports to illustrate. 

Two versions of the "Periodic Table with EMPHASIS". The version that appeared in 2012 and was subsequently went viral (top), and the original version from the article (bottom).

Take a look at the graphic (top). Anyone with sufficient background in rare elements will immediately spot problems with this periodic table (more on that later), but it's easy to see why this caught people's attention. You could get a contact high from the vintage LSD that the previously normal periodic table dropped before having its picture taken. This is probably what Salvador Dali would have produced if the periodic table commissioned him to paint its portrait. As my good friend and frequent co-author Brett mused "It looks very retro...You can smell the early 70s from the unshaven armpit between Y and Zr." After explaining on twitter for the umpteenth time that the information in this graphic was terribly wrong, I ordered the source paper through interlibrary loan.⁴ The original version of the picture is less striking as it lacks the color scheme (bottom), which as an aside does not correlate exactly with any normal categorization of elements.⁵ While it is unclear exactly who modified the original, the tie-dyed version was the one posted on Tumblr in 2012. 

To defend Sheehan, I don't believe he intended this to be anything other than a thought experiment to stimulate interest in the periodic table with children. The "paper" contains almost no information on how it was constructed. The only citations are to papers on other artistic versions of the periodic table from the educational literature. The article is 1 ¹/₂ pages long. The bottom half of the 2^nd page contains two poems written by high school students – one a ballad on Mendeleev and the other an ode to chemical bonds. The page also contains two separate lists of chemical puns. Not exactly the material you find in most scholarly journals, but a staple of internet science. I am unsure of what kind of publication Chemistry was, but the Sheehan "paper" has never been cited according to Scifinder. The composite evidence suggests that the article is from a magazine targeted toward a more general audience, not a peer reviewed journal.

So, what are the most egregious errors in this table? Tc (Technetium, element 43), At (Astatine, element 85), and Fr (Francium, element 87) are the most striking. At occurs naturally as a product of uranium and thorium radioactive decay, however, the half-life of all At isotopes are so short that less than 30 g of the element exists at any time on earth. A similar amount of Fr exists for analogous reasons. Their neighbors Po (Polonium, element 84) and Rn (Radon, element 86) exist at approximately 10^-10 and 10^-13 mg/kg in the earth's crust respectively. Small numbers certainly, but still 7 orders of magnitude greater than the estimates for At or Fr. The element boxes in the image are roughly the same size, not 10 million times larger.⁶

I discussed the table's problems with my friend Brett. His musings:

"Did I say that that table was actually impossible to display on a computer monitor correctly? I checked the math. It's amusing:

For argument's sake, let’s say that naturally occurring Tc is 10^-10 the amount of U (Uranium, element 92). There are about 6 orders of magnitude less U in the earth’s crust (at least) than O (Oxygen, element 6) or Si (Silicon, element 14) the 2 most abundant elements. So there is 10^-16 less Tc than O in the earth. I think this overestimates the amount of Tc, but 10^-16 is bad enough.

To have a visible block for Tc requires how many pixels? If you want to read the "Tc" symbol, you need at least a 6×6 pixel square by my estimate. 36 pixels for the smallest element "block" on this hypothetical table. That means the largest block (O) would have (roughly) 3.6×10¹⁷ pixels. I don't have the motivation to figure out the exact size of all the other element blocks, but the earth's crust is dominated by just a few elements, so let's say that the total pixels required for the table would be about 2×10¹⁸ pixels (this is the worst estimate in this calculation, but it would take longer to calculate exactly and it's not off by more than an order of magnitude).

I'm typing this on a screen with 1920×1200 pixels, or about 2.3 million pixels. At the same resolution as my monitor, to be able to SEE the Tc element block, the monitor would be 8.68×10¹¹ times larger. Yes, the screen would need to be 868 BILLION times larger.

I think there MAY be enough pixels on all the monitors in the world to do this. Especially now that there are so many smartphones around. Right? A little Googling reveals that in March 2014 Apple sold the 500 millionth iPhone. Let's be generous and assume that all iPhones to date had the large high-res screen size available at that time, 1136×640 pixels (A slightly bad assumption, but since each iPhone has outsold its predecessors, not a terrible assumption). So each iPhone has 727,040 pixels. The block for oxygen would require 495 BILLION iPhones to display. The entire table would require about 3 TRILLION iPhones to display.

Yikes. Looks like smartphones are still a growth market."

So just like every other meme and viral post, take things shared on the internet with a grain of salt until you do some research. Fortunately, Google has a better version of the periodic table by relative abundance. Not as groovy as the Sheehan table, but more accurate. Our analysis of the problems with the graphic are by no means comprehensive. I would encourage readers to highlight their pet peeves about the table in the comments, so this post can be a resource to educate people about the true natural distribution of the elements.

Update: 7:32 PM 12/31/14
Here are a couple of other representations of the periodic table showing abundances. These cartograms are both aesthetically appealing and informative. This one by geochemists is also interesting if not all that artistic.

Update: 3:47 PM 1/2/15
Here is an in memorium from the Santa Clara University website on William Sheehan that references his periodic table graphic. Further updates or a new blog will be posted if/when I can track down further information.

Update: 11:25 AM 1/3/15
EUREKA! After doing a lot more digging and coming up with very little from Santa Clara University, I found a J. Chem. Ed. paper from 1993 by Kathleen Carrado at Argonne. It's copyrighted material and behind a paywall. The article discusses using a black and white version of the Sheehan table as a coloring book exercise with elementary-aged students. The paper also references a 1978 calendar by Instruments for Research and Industry that used Sheehan's graphic. Confirmation pending, but this seems like where the colored graphic originated, and further proof that this table was not intended to be an absolute representation of relative abundance.

Update: 11:34 AM 1/4/15
Another calculation analogy from Brett:
A properly scaled table would cover an area of about 3×10¹² × ((58.6/1000)*(123.8/1000)) m², or 21764 km² or 8403 square miles. That’s an area about 7 Rhode Islands or 80% of the size of Massachusetts. Kind of hard to carry around or print out 

_________________________________________________________________________________

1. This is an anecdotal observation made by one blogger, which seems to be sufficient evidence of validity in the internet age.

2. W. F. Sheehan. Chemistry. 1976, 49, 17-18.

3. What counts as viral in the chemistry world anyway.
4. I would post the paper in total, but this would probably violate copyright law. How about a link to the pdf in Google drive instead?
5. Colors correspond to relative electronegativity. This has been clipped off of some of the images being circulated. Also, the colors do not accurately represent electronegativity. See here. For example, Kr and Xe have approximately the same electronegativity as their halogen neighbors. 
6.  The Sheehan graphic has the disclaimer "To accommodate all elements some distortions are necessary. For example, some elements shown do not occur naturally", but does not provide details. The transuranium elements fit the latter characterization, nevertheless 7 orders of magnitude seems like a broad interpretation of "some distortions."

Protactinium’s Discovery Redux: Kasimir Fajans and Oswald Göhring discovered element 91 in 1913

The great Periodic Table of Videos series on YouTube a few weeks ago published a video on element 91: protactinium. Protactinium is an element that is (a) obscure and rare (b) has a confusing discovery story, and (c) had linguistic issues with its name. Given our interest in discovery, isotopes and nomenclature, we found a few details in the video that should be revisited. For an element such as protactinium, which has few applications today, an element’s entire “story” concerns how it was discovered.

The Periodic Table of Videos series is exceptional, but things go slightly awry beginning around 3:00 in the protactinium video with the still frame of Frederik Soddy & John Cranston. These two British scientists, along with Lise Meitner & Otto Hahn of Germany, are credited with the discovery of protactinium. That’s incorrect: Meitner & Hahn published their successful precipitation of element 91 in 1918, but this was not the discovery of the element—it wasn’t even the first precipitation of the element. The independent work of Soddy & Cranston, also published in 1918, also was not the true discovery.

Starting around 4:00, the professor explains that the isotope ²³⁸Pa, which has a 32,760 year half-life, was discovered by Meitner & Hahn and “a few years earlier” Kasimir Fajans discovered ²³⁴Pa. ²³⁴Pa has a much shorter half-life and was named “brevium” (Fajans’ co-discoverer Oswald Göhring is not mentioned).

Shouldn’t Fajans & Göhring be the credited as the discoverers of element 91? They beat Meitner & Hahn and Soddy & Cranston by five years! In 1913, Fajans & Göhring had three separate publications on element 91 including the precipitation of ²³⁴Pa (K. Fajans & O. Göhring, Phyik. Z., 14, 877, 1913). This work is discussed explaining “[Fajans'] was the first discovery of protactinium, but it turns out that there is a custom if several different isotopes of an element are discovered, whoever discovers the longest lived isotope, wins, and they’re deemed the discoverer.” Wait, what??? That sounds like redefining the word “discovery”!

What is explained in the video is only half the story. The other half is that Kasimir Fajans pushed the idea that the elements should be given the name of the longest lived isotope (in his 1919 book Radioaktivität und die Neueste Entwicklung der Lehre von den Chemischen Elementen). In the 1910s, isotopes were a very new idea and it was still unclear whether or not they should be treated as separate elements. Meitner & Hahn’s 1918 paper clearly claims a new “element” even though they knew they knew that their “element” had the same atomic number as Fajans & Görhing’s “element” discovered 5 years earlier. Meitner & Hahn were using the definition of the word “element” as was common in 1918 when it was still unclear how to classify isotopes. When chemists say “element” today, they clearly mean all isotopes with the same atomic number. Fajans never intended to give away the credit for element 91’s discovery to Hahn & Meitner or Soddy & Cranston. In fact, one of Fajans’ last papers defends his discovery priority.

There is one other element that was renamed based on its longest-lived isotope: radon. Radon’s discoverers wanted to call the element emanation. For decades, “radon” was only the name of the longest-lived isotope of emanation. After the name was changed, history began to forget who had actually discovered radon. Just like protactinium, people preferred to give credit to the individual or group who had discovered and named the longest-lived isotope of the element. We wrote quite a bit about the linguistic twists of radon last year in Nature Chemistry. In an accompanying blog post, we explored protactinium’s naming and discovery confusion. There is also an excellent Nature: In Your Element piece that delves into the protactinium story.

Is there is a lesson here for chemists? If you get to name something, you might get credit for discovering it, even if you didn't. That can happen both inside and outside of chemistry, which might be a more than a little disconcerting.

It’s incorrect to say that “the discover of the stablest isotope gets to name the element” as a general rule, especially today. Since most superheavy elements are created as highly unstable, neutron-poor isotopes first, only later are (slightly) more stable isotopes created. No one is ceding naming or discovery priority to anyone who years later makes the most stable version element 112 for example. The Periodic Table of Videos project is great and everyone should follow their work, but examine the protactinium discovery a little more closely to get the complete story.

- Brett F. Thornton with editorial assistance by Shawn

Winning the "War on Chemicals" by redefining victory

With some rudimentary photoshop skills I could appropriate one of Stephen Colbert's "War On _____" graphics as a post banner. Alas, I have none.

With clock-like regularity, some synthetic compound bearing the unnerving label "chemical" is brought to the public's attention. To make matters worse, the "chemical" also is identified by its proper name, an intimidating number of consonants and vowels jumbled together into a seemingly incomprehensible order to the untrained eye. The end result is most often a demand that the offending substance be expunged from existence because of the inherent risk in coming into contact with "chemicals." The public's irrational fear of chemicals has been dubbed chemophobia, which is also a popular hashtag for connecting discussions of the subject online.

The most recent dustup involves the use of azodicarbonamide in Subway's flour/bread. This instance has all the hallmarks of chemophobia: bad analogies, (wildly) exaggerated claims of health risks, insinuations of conspiracy. Chemists immediately took to twitter and blogs to defend chemicals and debunk claims that led Subway to decide to phase out azodicarbonamide. In the Pipeline had previously summarized why the risks of using azodicarbonamide are extremely small, and the Curious Wavefunction discussed the real danger of chemophobia. The response is typical of how we chemists have combated these controversies, and we are losing.

As people who spent an inordinate amount of time in institutions of higher learning (including as a career), the "defend and debunk" strategy comes quite naturally. We like education and educating. Being scientists also makes exploiting this tactic even more amenable because we've been trained to collect, analyze and interpret data. When we see dubious claims or "chemical-free" products, our instincts take over and we make solid arguments backed by science; however, we are not engaged in a scientific debate with paper reviewers or grant referees. As has been documented previously, facts don't matter in these situations. When presented with evidence that a belief is demonstrably wrong, people often become more entrenched in their position. In order to defend chemistry, we need to change course and redefine what constitutes winning an argument. What strategies should we employ? Here are some ideas, but there certainly need to be more.

As the Curious Wavefunction alludes to, the biggest problem is when fear subverts the solutions to problems that science has produced. Feeding the world's +7 billion (and growing) people using only organic farming is almost certainly impossible. It has even been suggested that much-maligned GMOs will be necessary to produce enough food on a planet suffering from the adverse effects of climate change. These are more global versions of the problems science and chemistry has produced to deal with problems of food production, distribution and storage that are essential to modern lifestyles. In the discussion of azodicarbonamide, I have only seen passing references to its use as a flour conditioner, but not a justification. Oxidants like azodicarbonamide are used to oxidize sulfhydryls in gluten to disulfides. This conditioning ultimately speeds up flour processing, which historically was accomplished by the oxygen in air and takes weeks. As a non-food chemist, I conclude that azodicarbonamide was developed in the 1960s as a replacement for bromate as an oxidant. Bromoate, like azodicarbonamide, is banned in the EU, but it is unclear (to me) what has been adopted instead.

In a case like this, the discussion should be about the process and whether or not it is the best one available. Clearly, multi-week air oxidation of flour is incompatible with modern demand and production limitations, but azodicarbonamide is also +50 year old technology. While the risks may be small (or non-existent), is there an equally effective (or superior) alternative that would be more appealing to the public? The advantage of the alternative need not be limited to public perception, they could easily be more effective, efficient or cost-effective. As Carmden Drahl tweets, this may best be viewed as an opportunity to develop new chemistry and employment opportunities. Instead of focusing on the fear aspect, overcoming chemophobia may be easier by emphasizing the benefits of the chemical process and engaging in conversations about the alternatives. Such discussions may better illustrate what the safest option is, as well as why chemistry is essential. This may even be more convincing ways to show that the current methods were actually chosen because they are the safest/best.

The language and tenor of debate also does not help to advance the cause. When someone calls for a "chemical free" version of something, chemists are quick to point out that everything is composed of chemicals. There is even a line of t-shirts and posters that aim to show everything, including the humble banana, is nothing more than a complicated mixture of chemicals. While this is unarguably correct, this undoubtedly comes across as condescending and put those propagating erroneous information on the defensive. As indicated above, this will only serve to further entrench these people into the "anti-chemical" camp. Chemists are not particularly renowned for PR and marketing skills, but the chemophobia problem has more parallels with politics than science. To shift public opinion, we must be able to change the perception of chemicals. A better approach may be to suggest an alternative to "chemical-free" for the specific case without the condemnation. We like to be right, but proving we're right is losing the debate.

This brings us to the central thread of this debate, chemophobia. Like "chemical-free," the objections to synthetic additives based on uninformed opinions can undoubtedly be classified as an irrational fear. "Chemophobia" is certainly an accurate moniker that quickly summarizes what is, or what we believe to be, the basis for someone's objections to a chemical like azodicarbonamide; however, even though it's a relatively new term, chemophobia has already become a pejorative. Name calling and insults seldom (never) persuade someone to a different point of view. Godwin's Law could readily be applied to chemistry where every argument ends when we call someone a chemophobe.

The Right To Say "Aluminum" Instead of "Aluminium": the Real Reason the Pilgrims Fled England

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, a little bit of American vs British English discussion.

A couple of days ago Kat Day wrote a blog post about the spelling of sulfur/sulphur, which started a conversation that eventually landed on the aluminum/aluminium controversy. I became aware when Stuart Cantrill brought me into the conversation on the basis of a Nature Chemistry thesis that Brett Thornton and I wrote recently on element suffixes. The aluminum/aluminium issue was mentioned in passing, but was one of many tangential anecdotes that were truncated due to limited space. A little web searching by others yielded a couple of articles by Grammarphobia and World Wide Words on the topic. Brett and I (but mostly Brett) did some more research and think there’s more here than the common knowledge. Here are some thoughts and speculation. Consider this a working hypothesis as there are pieces of the puzzle we are still chasing down.

First, the "Latin-sounding" argument is probably the reverse, as we noted in the thesis. Aluminum is too Latin-like, which was the complaint, not the reverse. We are not 100% sure about this as the Quarterly Review was a literary journal, and early 19th century English can be magniloquent. It was however, a literary argument similar to Ampere wanting to rename fluorine phtorine. Either way, Humphry Davy's original nomenclature clearly didn't stick, since everyone used aluminium. Bill Bryson's book The Mother Tongue credits Webster with pushing the aluminum spelling in America. That's plausible since Webster was big on simplifications; however, most of these were routinely ignored. As soon as he died in 1843, his heirs promptly removed many of his "simplified" words from his eponymous dictionary.

The 1870 edition of Webster's dictionary has neither aluminum or aluminium. The 1913 edition has both. We haven't been able to check all the intervening editions, but we believe the 1844 version, the last by Webster himself, has aluminum. If Webster was basing his words on Davy's chemistry texts, which is not an unreasonable assumption, he would have found the word "aluminum", which was promptly expunged after Webster died because no one was using it (just like other Webster spellings such as ‘tung’ for ‘tongue’). So the problem with crediting Webster is that no one paid any attention to aluminum before Webster died. If it wasn't Webster who changed the spelling, who did?

Wikipedia had a juicy, unreferenced tidbit in the entry for Charles Martin Hall of the Hall-Heroult Process fame. They credit Hall for misspelling aluminium on a "handbill publicizing his aluminum refinement process", and subsequently this spelling took off in the US. There is more on this in a book called "Boron Group." It adds that Hall used the -ium suffix on all his patent applications and the supposed handbill was from 1892. Hall's company (now Alcoa) was named the "Pittsburg Reduction Company" in 1888. It was changed to "Aluminum Company of America" in 1907, so clearly aluminum had supplanted aluminium by then. The archives have a lot of referrals to aluminum for the 1880s (before the 1892 handbill), exactly when Al went from curiosity to a practical metal, which is also when the nomenclature might have changed. Our hunch is that this was Hall's doing, perhaps unintentionally, but his 1889 patent says aluminium throughout. Why didn't he use the aluminum spelling that was also in use?

The Washington Monument cap, was cast from Al in 1884 just before Hall's work. The corresponding patent from William Frishmuth for refining Al from 1884 used aluminium just like Hall's patent. This suggests that the accepted spelling in the 1880s was probably aluminium, so it seems pretty conclusive that Webster's use of aluminum in the 1820s didn't stick. 

Of course ACS changed to aluminum in 1925, and IUPAC took the other route in 1990.

Be glad you're not our students (this week)

This was my contribution to the "First Day of School" photo meme perpetuating on Facebook for several week as children went back to school. You can clearly see how happy I am for the start of another school year. It has nothing to do with how pleased I am with my clever attempt at humor. I teach general chemistry this term, and our first class was Thursday. WPI has a unique (wacky) academic calendar. It's not quarters and it's not semesters. We have 4 terms between the end of August and the end of April, which means our classes are intense experiences packed into 7 weeks. Since we have such a short term, we have to hit the ground running and students have to work hard so they don't fall behind. Missing a week of class at WPI is equivalent to missing 2 weeks at other schools. All this makes the following situation all the more frustrating.

At some point between when Socrates was walking around the agora bugging customers with questions and 2013, a bunch of professors looked around and said: "Do you like dealing with the logistics of running an educational institution? Me neither. We should really hire some people to take care of the administrative tasks so we can focus on the teaching and research that are the reason we started doing this in the first place." Thus began the slow decent to the system we have today.

General chemistry at WPI is divided into the lecture and lab. Although the grades are combined at the end of the term, both run independently; however, students only register for the lab. We have 3 lectures running this term and each lecture has six labs assigned to it, but since there is no crosstalk between lab and lecture, this is an arbitrary linkage. Each lab section is limited to 24 students for safety and space reasons, so once a section is full that's it. Compound the space problem with the largest incoming class in the history of the institute. Already faced with the universal difficulties of limited class sizes, the enrollment procedures seem to be geared toward hazing incoming students and punishing professors (for what crime, it is not entirely clear, but we must have done something to someone).

This disconnected-connected lab-lecture creates registration conflicts if a student wants to register for a lab section, but attend a different lecture when the preassigned lecture conflicts with another class. So starting off with a well oiled machine already. Students register for classes online (of course) as well as wait lists if the desired section is full. Students can also sign up for as many wait lists as they want however. I can only see the 6 wait lists of labs linked to my lecture, so a student could be on multiple wait lists assigned to either of the other 2 lecture sections, and I won't know. This wouldn't be that bad, except the registrar locks enrollment a few days before classes, a lock that lasts through the first several days of classes (with our short academic term, the drop/add period is 1 week to begin with). Students can still sign up for wait lists during this period. So if someone drops the class (e.g. tests out of that term of chemistry), no one from the wait list is automatically offered the opening until after the lock is lifted. So there are stressed out incoming students worried about getting into a class, none of whom are familiar with the procedures, tricks of the trade or what they can expect when wait listed.

The only way a student can add a class during the lockout period is with a drop/add form signed by the instructor, which is then delivered to the registrar. Although I can view the class roster and wait lists online, I cannot select someone from the wait list and enroll them automatically or request online that the registrar do it. The student must physically carry a piece of paper across campus. The general chemistry instructor has a harder task than most, because great care must be taken not to break the 24 student lab section limit. So this requires sitting at a computer looking at locked class rosters (6 different ones and only one can be viewed at a time), unlocked wait lists and no knowledge of what's going on with the other 2 lectures and 12 lab sections. Did I mention the students were stressed out? In going through the process of emailing students to tell them I could sign a drop/add form for them, a student asked "What form?" Not a surprising question from someone who has been on campus less that a week. Showing more patience than usual, I went to the registrar's website to find the form, which was nowhere to be found. I talked to one senior colleague, who also immediately went to the registrar's website to search. Finally, another colleague informed me that the drop/add forms were only available in paper from in the registrar's office. That makes perfect sense in the 21st century. Did I mention the students were stressed out? 

So, it's day 2 of the term. I have 6 unassigned seats in my lab sections. I have a dozen or so people signed up on different wait lists, but very little idea if these students are still really waiting or just artifacts left after a student signed up for another section. Did I mention the students were stressed out? At some point, the people who were hired to facilitate university business managed to outsource their job back to the professors, which is quite a coup. Yesterday, I phoned the registrar's office 3 times over the period of an hour in the middle of the afternoon. The call went to voicemail every time.

How much should it cost to study chemistry?

President Obama recently outlined his plan to address the high cost of a college education. Praise and criticism immediately followed, but it's undeniable the price tag for a college education has risen faster than the rate of inflation. It's actually an interesting exercise to play around with the scorecard tool at whitehouse.gov. My take home was that most prestigious/high profile universities fared well, as did most of the flagship state universities. I was taken aback at the low graduation rate (< 50%) for a lot of schools, including some that are relatively expensive. Some of my thoughts on this general problem include:

• The increasing number of administrators with the associated cost passed along to students: can the genie be put back in the bottle?
• While not responsible for tuition inflation (at least it shouldn't), schools are increasingly competing using amenities. New dormitories have suites outfitted with kitchens, single rooms, air conditioning, etc. Obviously these increase the quality of student life, but it's also more expensive than 4 walls, a roommate and a bed frame with an institutional twin mattress. It's just going to cost more.
• How can public universities become more affordable in a political climate where the trend is to cut state funding for higher education? States increasingly are ignoring the ROI of subsidizing residents' education (i.e. a short-term vs. a long-term mindset), and the shortfall has to come from somewhere. The student's pocket is the only logical option given the structure of the American higher education system.
• The scorecard graduation numbers (dropout rates) don't always account for students who transferred. This is a clear weakness in the data.
• The major gap in the data denounced by the President was the employment record for graduates. While I agree such information would be valuable for prospective students, has anyone tried to track where students go? I have a hard time keeping up with my former group members, and both departments I worked in have tried to collect data on former majors and Ph.D. students, but it's a Herculean task. Extrapolate that to an entire school. I doubt many alumni associations would be confident that their data is accurate or complete.
• The President's underlying message seemed to be that government support would be tied to student performance (graduation, employment, etc). While an abysmal graduation rate may point toward issues, it could also indicate schools giving students a chance to explore college (especially those who lacked the academic record to be accepted elsewhere). Many students discover that college isn't the right choice for them, at least for now, and pursue other options. Should a college be penalized for providing an opportunity? This would seem to direct public support toward students who already have a high probability of getting a degree, but do nothing to help students on the margins of higher education. This is related to a point others have made that such a metric could incentivize retention of students who are ill-equipped (skills or motivation) for college success who might otherwise choose different careers.

The above thoughts as well as the commentary from others on the same issue, led me to do some superficial evaluation of how I contribute to the cost of a chemistry degree to students. Chemistry and other laboratory-intensive majors can stick students with hidden fees, but as far as I can ascertain my current employer doesn't, which is fair since the tuition/year currently sits at a lofty $42,000. Conversely, I'm pretty sure UConn did charge fees for laboratories, but the tuition was less than half that of WPI. So far so good.

So what is required for my classes? For labs, a notebook and some safety goggles. Both items are affordable, and notebooks may have been used in previous labs and should still have space for future use. For a lecture class, students are "required" to buy a textbook. I have been guilty of being unsympathetic to students complaining about the cost of textbooks in the past. Textbooks were expensive when I went to college, and we complained too. Why should today's students miss out on experiencing the collective suffering that binds classmates together? Buying textbooks was worth hours round table moaning and groaning before the stress of the semester began. It was a red badge of honor to have the most expensive required textbook.

The only problem is that the inflation of textbook prices has outpaced the inflation of just about everything (see graph in the linked article). I've become aware of the magnitude of the problem recently. I teach one of several general chemistry sections, and the textbook we  use recently came out with a new edition. The publisher essentially forced us to adopt the new edition since they can't (won't) provide the bookstore with the previous one. The publisher doesn't profit from the secondary market for used textbooks, and as a business they are obviously motivated to sell as many textbooks as possible. A side-by-side comparison of the two editions shows very few differences though . The problems at the end of the chapter have been changed and the cover is a different color. The latter is a minor aesthetic change, but the former makes the earlier edition unusable if an instructor plans to assign practice problems. Clearly there are workarounds for these changes, but the inconvenience factor favors the publisher in the long run. 

From a content standpoint, any general chemistry instructor could probably assign reading and teach from a textbook printed +30 years ago. What differences would there be? Today's periodic table includes more transuranium elements and some of the sidebars that bring in recent examples of chemistry applications would be out of date when using an old textbook, but the basic concepts haven't changed. There are very few new textbooks or revisions that propose seismic changes to the accepted general chemistry teaching dogma. So students are paying hundreds of dollars to get content available in a used bookstore or from the discarded bookstacks of a retiring professor. Certainly publishers should be able to make a profit, but why create a system that depends on exploiting students with inflated prices?

This year, our general chemistry instructors adopted an online homework system. Students are charged for this service as well, which can add up to another $100* depending on how many terms of the sequence they are taking. In the absence of a required textbook, online homework provides a solution to being held hostage by publishers, but if the textbook remains a requirement, it adds another straw to the camel's back of college costs. 

*I need to verify this