The Mind of Dr. Pion

First Day of Class

2012-01-04T09:04:00.003-05:00

Amusing and thought-provoking blog about first day of class rituals from Gradhacker at IHE.

I usually waste way too much time on the syllabus and am fighting to get pro-forma nonsense down under 10 minutes. I want to do some physics on the first day.

More detailed comments later, but I also like to give a quiz.

Sense of Progress

2012-01-03T07:46:00.000-05:00

I always know when Dean Dad has written a great column: I am composing a reply before I even get to his thesis statement!

That was true for his first post of the new year, about progress and cycles. As soon as he wrote "The one idea of this book is that the feeling of “progress,” even when small, is a powerful motivator." I was thinking about a key part of my teaching style. But then he started talking about ... semesters? Yeah, he has a point there as well. And on one other topic he could have addressed. And another.

Lets take up both my thoughts and his. That will also keep my comment on his blog a bit shorter than normal in a case like this.

Dean Dad's Semesters Question:

Dean Dad asks "How do you handle the lack of a sense of progress that attends the semesterly reset?"

Since I teach a subject that consists of a two-semester sequence, I don't suffer as much as some people because there is a huge sense of progress at each reset. Those that make it through the distillery that is my classroom (not to mention those of my math colleagues) are generally not at the level of finely aged "sippin whiskey", but they sometimes get close! I have come to expect a 90 to 95% pass rate in my second semester class, and it would be higher if I didn't have some students slip in from a nearby university. [And, as noted in my next topic, those students also benefit from the objectively valid sense that they can now learn anything.]

I view the reset in the first semester class as a new opportunity. (I hope the students attempting a second pass through the distillation apparatus see it that way also, rather than repeating their original flawed approach.) Now that "outcomes assessment" and a revise and evaluate cycle are being institutionalized here, there are things one learns from each class that feeds back into the next. I have always done some of that, usually focusing on some specific problem, but the gift of "outcomes" from our accrediting agency has led me to look at the entire course once again with new eyes. That is something I wanted to blog about over break.

In the interim, I'll just say that I concur completely with Dean Dad that "a deliberate focus at the cc level on pedagogical and curricular experiments over time could pay off" in more than one way. It has always been that way for me. So maybe it is a bigger problem for Administrators? They only see the classes being taught, not the students in them, unless something has gone horribly wrong.

My Teaching Version:

I am a huge believer in "small victories". That drives the intense, short cycles I use for homework and increasing use of active learning in the classroom.

That wasn't my original motivation for tightening up due dates or using active leraning. It started my first semester teaching at a CC, following someone else's previous syllabus with homework due on Friday. I quickly saw that students procrastinated so badly that they didn't know what they didn't know until almost a week had passed since a topic was introduced. The lurkers didn't even know that they had no clue what had been going on as the engaged students participated as we did problems on the board. I cut the sets in half, more like the twice-a-week recitation approach I had experienced as a grad TA. Better. On-line homework let me push it further. Sets open up early so they can see what is coming, but the first basic problems on a topic are due within a day or two of when the concept is introduced.

Get an easy one under your belt, and away you go to harder problems.

Ditto for active learning in the classroom.

The only thing I can't seem to deal with is "active failure". Never do the homework, sit with a pencil napping on the paper while texting about something more interesting at that millisecond, refuse to even start a problem when everyone else is working at their desks, or not attend at all. Actually, I view that as a small victory for all of us because someone with an attitude like that should never have thought for one second about becoming an engineer!

My Dean Dad Semesters Snark:

Dean Dad often promotes eliminating semesters, although he always does so with nonsensical references to an agrarian calendar and without ever offering a functional alternative that would allow employers and others to evaluate what students might know. I suspect he wants shorter grading periods tied to competency exams. I ride a similar hobby horse, arguing for shorter terms like those in the "quarter" system that has three 10+1 week terms rather than two 14.5+1 week semesters in an academic "year".

Both of these makes the faculty problem he writes about worse, but does help students get some small victories at the course level unless they don't start attending class until 8 of the 10 weeks have gone by.

Frankly, I have no idea what has driven the movement to semesters other than filling football stadiums from August through November. It certainly seems more of a herd mentality than anything that is research driven.

Overlooked Analogy in Developmental classes:

Some of the more promising approaches to developmental math at a CC make use of the "small victory" approach. Diagnostics locate problem areas, and targeted homework along with instructor feedback -- often in a computer classroom -- attacks that weakness until it is corrected. The alternative, where some students remain forever weak in a particular tiny area as the class moves on, is ultimately fatal in math.

Programs where a student can pass all of it in one semester by working at their own pace appear to hold great promise. They also have the distinct advantage that none of these classes transfer anywhere as college credit, so all we need is a clear way to document internally that they have met the requirements to move into college algebra. That is where other colleges need to know what something on the transcript really means.

Followup on Chinese engineering problems

2011-12-28T09:02:00.002-05:00

I'm a big fan of the book "To Engineer is Human", so I can't be too hard on the people involved in the investigation of a bullet train crash in China. (See my previous article and Carl's comment on it) The adults in the room took a serious look at the causes of the accident and they will clearly learn from it.

What I wonder is whether the fawning business media will also learn a lesson: It is one thing to say you have software engineers and quite another to have ones who eliminate dangerous flaws before the product goes into use in an environment where there is a major risk to innocent life. The fact that managers were also singled out for blame brings back memories of the Challenger explosion, where management ignored the pleas of engineers who knew better.

Here's to hoping the same people aren't working on their aircraft.

Aside:
The article appears to blame the crash for reduced spending on their train system, but I suspect this is just cover for the severe budget problems China is facing. What has been bad for low-end retailers in the US has been really bad for China.

A million actual engineers?

2011-08-12T13:03:00.003-04:00

This article about the cause of the many deaths and much disruption caused by a high-speed rail crash in China contained the unsurprising conclusion that there was a design flaw in the system.

This is a reminder that it is one thing to produce a million engineers every year, as we are told they are doing in China and India, and quite another to produce highly competent licensed Professional Engineers with the guts to stand up to management. I wonder how many of those graduates in China are "engineers" in name only.

Of course, incidents like the Challenger explosion remind us that even our system can fail when the engineer can't stop management, particularly politically astute management, from doing something not based on sound science.

Reflections on 30 years of the PC

2011-08-12T11:40:00.003-04:00

Today is the 30th anniversary of the release announcement for the IBM PC. At the time, this was a key breakthrough in standardization of software for individuals and companies, as the platform allowed clones with the same Intel 8080 processor to have the same functionality at much lower cost.

Making the computer into a commodity changed the world, although it almost stifled innovation because money could be made on software without any vision at all. We are incredibly lucky that Apple survived the Lisa to produce the Mac with a mouse and a full GUI interface or we might still be waiting for devices like the iPad.

A long flashback digression. Although I had been programming and using computers for more than a decade at that time (my first access had been to a Honeywell system while in HS, where a teacher ran decks for us when it wasn't being used by the school system), they weren't suitable for writing. Good word processing systems that could handle special characters and equations were extremely expensive and limited to the business world. Our department got a home built using 8" floppy disks running the CP/M system with WordStar. WordStar could handle bold, italics, and greek letters along with superscripts and subscripts, which was like a dream come true when Word was still a dream and WordPerfect was not yet on the market. It still amazes me how many features of WordStar exist in HTML and the hot keys that somehow also appear in Word. (Learning basic HTML was trivial to someone who had used WordStar, since it was essentially a markup language for documents.) Later we bought a PC clone for home use, but the real revolution was when our department got a Mac and Adobe Illustrator as well as Photoshop. This was so far beyond the PC world as to boggle the mind. It is often forgotten how important the Apple consumer world was to the adoption of Adobe products like Pagemaker when PC users were still taping pictures into empty rectangles on a printout. Since our work machines ran one of the flavors of UNIX windows systems and I could use a Mac for fancier graphics, I was never as beholden to the M$ version as some. Now that I have an iPad it irritates me no end that I can't click on a link by touching the screen of a PC or laptop. For me, the iPad's only limitation is that I haven't adapted to either the glass keyboard or the nice portable keyboard for rapid touch typing. Hence the remark below. End of unnecessary digression.

As I commented over at Dean Dad's today, hand-held devices are changing the way we look at computers and what they do for us and how they hold us back.

IMHO, the most important choice today is your keyboard.

For example, M$ bloatware means even really fast hardware takes forever to boot compared to a MacBook, not to mention an iPad. This is a big deal in a classroom, where just booting up the computer can take a substantial part of the between-class time if you find it locked or off. [All of our classroom machines go into a single-user locked mode if left unattended, for security reasons. The only way out is a power-button reboot that takes several minutes.] It is truly remarkable how slow the Vista operating system is, almost as remarkable as how M$ has never admitted it was an utter failure. (I love that if you go to a Windows Vista page, it says you should buy Windows 7.)

A big change from the early days, mostly because of the internet and World Wide Web standardized interfaces, many computers are used only to "consume" information. Examples are the web sites Dean Dad was asking about, or e-mail, or various enterprise systems like our CMS, internal grading or advising systems, and college databases. Most of these involve minimal typing so they work great with a tablet like the iPad. I definitely see this as the future.

But sometimes you need a portable keyboard as nice as the one I am typing on now.

CCPhysicist channels Dean Dad

2011-08-09T18:28:00.004-04:00

I never post or comment over on College Misery, but it makes a fun read once in a while to see what a wide spectrum of faculty and adjuncts are thinking. Last week there was a real eye opener that reminded me of what a nightmare it must be to be Dean Dad or my Dean dealing with spineless snowflake faculty.

I'm talking about Candy from Casa Grande on Plagiarism. Sigh. Talk about a failure to think before you write.

When you've put your policy against plagiarism in your syllabus (namely, plagiarism = FAIL), ... (much snipped) ...
WHAT DO YOU DO...When a student STILL decides to plagiarize?
What is your process for dealing with plagiarism?

What do you do? You do what you said you were going to do!

The time to ask this question is before you put it in your syllabus. Did you seriously think that no one would ever cheat in your class? That you would never have to confront a student in something other than a passive-agressive way with just a warning about cheating?

Can you imagine that nightmare that is your Dean's life when students show up complaining that you didn't enforce your policy, or treated two students differently at different times, or violated college policy on plagiarism? Trust me, the cheaters know the rules. Many have been caught more than once and know the system inside and out. You should also.

Aside:
I'm not really channeling Dean Dad. I'm channeling my own Dean. He always reminds the new adjuncts and the old faculty of the importance of having uniform grading policies in your syllabus that are uniformly enforced, ideally with a clear rubric that is built into how you grade but need not be in your syllabus in our science classes. What goes in your syllabus is what you are going to do.

If plagiarism is an important part of your grading system, you need to decide what you are going to do -- consistent with college policy -- and then put what you will do in your syllabus. Then just do it.

There was a lot of good advice and some bad advice (to me) in the comments. Some of the bad advice (to me) might simply reflect the different policies in place at a different college. For example, I don't think an F for the entire course would be enforceable at my college for plagiarizing an essay that makes up no more than 10% of the grade, but I'm not in that business so I don't pay attention to that detail. YMMV.

I rather like our system, where the first instance of cheating gets penalized however you think appropriate (pick up exam if they answer a cell phone, for example) and is final unless they appeal the penalty. In my experience, no one ever does. Second offense gets the full treatment, but my experience is that they can't pass any later test if you are standing next to them. But that is our college's system, not mine, so I won't offer it as advice.

Did I mention that you have the right to seat a student anywhere in the classroom when they are taking a test? One Silverback Snowflake at my college once complained that two cheaters sat in the back row and appeared to have swapped exams. On every test. Uh, try saving a seat for them in the front row on opposite sides of the room on the second test, if you can't catch them in the act the first time.

Oh, and before I close, don't ever hand back the actual assignment that they cheated on. Turn back a photocopy and keep the original in your records.

And if you don't know the trick of turning back a photocopy of their Scantron sheets and keeping the originals, you've never heard about one of the most common schemes for cheating. (Those who like paperwork turn back the originals and keep a copy, preferring to punish those who claim their exam was mis-graded by the machine.) I don't use those infernal things, but I still take precautions to catch anyone who changes or adds a free-response answer after the exam is returned. I can't claim to catch everything, but I think I catch most of them.

Vote of No Confidence

2011-07-28T23:29:00.002-04:00

Or, should I say, No vote (on the debt ceiling) at all shows no confidence in House Speaker Boehner's leadership.

Decades after learning, theoretically, about how a vote of no confidence works to bring down the Prime Minister in a parliamentary system of government, I finally get it.

I guess it helps to have a front row seat, watching the process in slow motion, rather than just reading about it in a news story.

Of course, Boehner hasn't lost his position as Speaker, nor have fragments of his party joined with Democrats to elect a new Speaker, but his powerful voice seems muted this evening. He let an assistant announce, implicitly, that he can't get enough votes for his budget plan for him to dare bringing it to a vote.

This is a REAL mess now.

Special financial aid to start at a CC

2011-07-21T18:29:00.000-04:00

Dean Dad wrote an interesting column today about a new program in Illinois that rewards a select group of students who choose to attend a community college by allowing them to carry forward the financial aid savings for use in their third and fourth years of college.

The program is described in detail here. It has a number of interesting features, one of which has the potential to be extremely effective. That feature is the tight linkage between groups of CCs and a specific university. [Note: Some CCs are linked to more than one university, but the one I looked at -- Shawnee CC -- is only linked to SIU-Carbondale.] This, along with the presence of an SIU academic advisor at Shawnee CC (as reported by the Chronicle in an illustration above the paywall) should help with one of the biggest obstacles to effective transfer.

Even at a CC where only a tiny fraction are in AS programs and where most students transfer to one of two universities that have a very strong and clear articulation agreement with us, advising is an ongoing challenge. Program requirements change, and those changes sometimes include courses that don't exist at our college. We are always the last to know, and proper articulation seems like it is usually a semester or two late. (I even know of one case where one course remains a mystery after decades. We have an articulated course, but they seem to want an additional one that is only taught at the junior level. Very annoying.) In principle, we should have two years notice because changes are supposed to affect only students who are freshmen when the change in a course catalog takes effect, but it also affects new (transfer) students immediately. In practice, the university knows about curricular changes when they are proposed, but the CC doesn't find out about them until after they go into effect.

In addition, articulation agreements don't spell out course sequencing, and what might be obvious to an historian might not be obvious to a chemist, and vice versa.

Both of these problems should be reduced by having an employee of the university assigned to the CC. There is nothing like having an expert insider nearby. I know, because I maintain irregular contact with former students who are now in engineering school -- and sometimes their faculty as well -- and this gives me insights that I would never get from the paper record.

Interesting pluses and minuses

The program in Illinois is quite limited. A student has to be admitted to a 4-year university and then choose to attend a (specific, linked) CC to be eligible. You don't qualify if you have to start at the CC for academic reasons, or if your home-town CC is not linked to the out-of-town university you want to attend.

If you have to go to an out-of-town CC, the economics shown in their example are not quite as favorable. Your tuition as an out-of-district student is higher, and the allowance for room and board might not be adequate. However, you will still do better in the long run, just not as well as that example shows.

One might be tempted to assume that students who were admitted to a university will be guaranteed to succeed at a CC, but I would warn against that assumption. The risks of partying or Facebooking your way to an F are still there. They might be higher if the student thinks they are stepping down to a glorified high school. Orientation becomes even more important, as are professors and fellow students who notice who is in class each day. Professors might find new problems to deal with. I know that I have had to make adjustments to deal with kids who come in thinking that an AP class was taught at a college level and pace.

IMHO, setting a professional tone on the first day of class is always important in helping students transition from being childish learners to adult learners.

Cost to the CC?

Dean Dad argues that a program that gives needy (Pell-Grant) students almost a full ride [*] at the CC will "squeeze quality" because it directs the money to "students instead of institutions". The problem, he says, results because "community colleges charge students far less than what it costs to educate them". I couldn't disagree more, and I base this on experience at my CC as well as the even more favorable situation at Shawnee CC in Illinois.

I already made some terse comments about this on his blog, so I will give the promised details here.

First, my experience is that a policy that slightly increases some state scholarships if they are used at a CC (where they go much further) has made us much more attractive to students at the margin -- ones who could get into nearby Wannabe Flagship (or a similarly ranked university in the state) but would be in the bottom half of the incoming class. They follow the money, but find the small classes to be an unexpected bonus and that word seems to slowly leak back into the high schools. (Many don't appreciate what they had until after they transfer. Advertising sometimes has to help make that point.) Similarly, the faculty find that having a broader mix of students, in terms of entering SAT scores, helps everyone in the class. There aren't enough great students to improve success rates all by themselves, but the pool of student tutors gets deeper when you have sophomores who have finished calc 3, and those students learn and help others learn at the same time.

Second, our economics are similar to those in Illinois even if our pay rates for adjuncts and faculty are somewhat higher. Adding students is a net plus at the margin. Shawnee tuition is $92 per credit hour (apparently with no additional fees). Note that there is an extra fee for "out of district" students because local property taxes help support the college.

The state of Illinois maintains a central portal where you can find the FY10 salary report (pdf) for all of the state's community colleges. Detailed tables toward the end show that adjuncts earn $450 per credit hour and regular faculty on overload earn $600 per credit hour (Table 5) for individual classes at Shawnee CC. Those define part of the marginal cost of adding a class, with the rest coming from incremental printing costs (exams and quizzes). You might double the salary cost to get a conservative estimate of the total, based on the rough fraction of our total budget that goes to faculty salaries. However, some major budgeted costs are fixed (we heat and cool classrooms whether they are in use or not) and we have to grow a lot before we need to hire more permanent office staff.

On this basis, a 25 or 30 student class staffed by an adjunct or as a faculty overload will turn a "profit" of well over $1000. More if they use an adjunct. Even more if the students are "out of district", which I consider to be more likely under this financial aid scenario.

Long term is a different issue, because it depends on whether the larger student population is going to stay that way. What if Shawnee has to add another full time professor? Table 2 suggests their starting salary is around $42,000 (lowest) to $47,000 (25th percentile) for the regular 2-semester year that teaches 15 credit hours per semester. According to Table 20, their fringe benefits were under $6,000 (compared to a state average of $11,600 in Table 18). CHEAP! So the regular load of a new full-time professor works out to be about (45k + 6k)/30 = $1700 per credit hour. With only $2300 to $2760 coming in from a class of 25 to 30 students, this does not break even when other staffing costs are included ... but you might be able to cut it close for five lean years.

However, once you are talking about long-term budgets, other intangibles come into play. For example, our state funding formula takes enrollment into account. If we grow relative to other CCs, our base budget will grow. Or, I should say, it will grow if the depression ends.

Other costs:

Dean Dad also referred to this article on financial aid regulations as an example of unfunded mandates. However, as I read the Illinois description, it looks like the state system will keep track of what is owed to the student. I think the new GI Bill and other things are a bigger deal for our college than the basic tracking of student credit hours for a state scholarship, and eligibility is determined by a state office, not us.

Side remark

I've always, both as a HS student and a professor, been around a CC where most students are interested in transfer rather than career programs. I gather from DD's comments that this is rare in the community college world. Perhaps the anomaly is because both places have (or had) a significant vocational program run within the public school system, although there are some other similarities that play a role. Nonetheless, my views here about transfer reflect a situation where the vast majority of our graduates get an AA degree and transfer to a university.

[*] Full ride comment

The example student appears to be one whose FAFSA form leads to a particular maximum state grant along with a Pell Grant. Under the assumption that the student is living at home when at a community college (often a poor assumption), the room and board number is realistic and the remaining $600 can be earned doing work study or with limited work hours that will allow plenty of time for studying. Not quite a full ride scholarship, but close.

Mom scientists in the news

2011-05-17T20:22:00.004-04:00

Although the story itself (concerning possible carcinogens in unnamed baby products) is interesting -- albeit the usual promotion of a university of its status as a major research center -- what suddenly caught my eye was what was in the the background as the director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences was interviewed about the results of this study.

Photos of her children (and a grandchild?) next to her two computer screens. [Guess confirmed via a bio turned up by Google.]

I thought "that was a hidden positive part of the story".

Then came the punch line, as we saw a second interview with the lead researcher. At home -- rather than in the classic p.r. laboratory shot used to lead the story -- with her new baby as she explained how she had made the decision to remove foam pads that she no longer trusted from her kid's room. Best of all, she discussed the trade off between fire safety and the risk of known carcinogens (in California, at least), suspected carcinogens, and other chemicals whose risk might not have been assessed because you don't have to prove something is safe vis-a-vis asthma or autism before using it in a product.

The sub text, successful women scientists with families, was there for some to see on the CBS Evening News. You can see the video here for yourself.

The safety issue remains an open one, as this was one of those classic preliminary studies. However, my comment would be that flame retardants are of greatest value if you have lit cigarettes, candles, or an open flame from a gas burner or fireplace near the child's bedding or car carrier. What are the odds of a fire starting in a crib if the parents and the baby don't smoke?

Don't believe what the press is telling you!

2011-03-26T11:40:00.007-04:00

Consider this news story (and accompanying video) from the BBC about radioactivity in the sea within 300 m of the Fukushima nuclear plant:

Levels of radioactive iodine in the sea near the tsunami-stricken Fukushima nuclear plant are 1,250 times higher than the safety limit, officials say.

The readings were taken about 300m (984ft) offshore. It is feared the radiation could be seeping into groundwater from one of the reactors.

But the radiation will no longer be a risk after eight days, officials say. [Emphasis added]

There is no explicit by-line on this article, but the video contains an interview with BBC reporter Chris Hogg in Tokyo that repeats that a half life of 8 days means "that after 8 days the risk will have dissipated".

The reporter is WRONG. Twice, because that is also not what the officials said. His ignorance of basic physics, in this case a topic I always teach in a college general education class, led him to misinterpret what was actually said by a government spokesman and hence mislead the public.

The risk will not dissipate after 8 days.

First, what did the official say? The article reports that

"Generally speaking," spokesman Hidehiko Nishiyama told a news conference, "radioactive material released into the sea will spread due to tides, so you need much more for seaweed and sea life to absorb it." He continued: "And, since [the iodine] has a half-life of eight days, by the time people eat the sea products its amount is likely to have diminished significantly."

This (emphasis added) is correct.

The most significant effect is dilution. Levels will be very high near the source, but get reduced significantly as the source gets mixed into a larger volume of water. (Like smoke when you are a long way from a fire.) It also matters what the ratio is of radioactive iodine to the iodine that is naturally in the water, since the seaweed can't tell the difference.

It is also correct because in 8 days the radiation level in the seawater will be half what it is today. Half. Not "dissipated", half. The radiation level of the iodine in that bay will only fall to 625 times the safe level, not zero, in those 8 days. The risk is reduced, but not gone.

But there are other factors. For example, I have no idea how long it takes from the time seaweed is harvested and when it shows up on shelves all nicely dried and packaged, but it is unlikely to be a few days. Only fresh items like milk and vegetables appear "just in time" in supermarkets. Radiation drops every day it sits in a warehouse. It falls to half after 8 days, one quarter after 16 days, one eighth after 24 days, and one sixteenth after about a month.

The obvious fact (pull out your calculator) is that what remains after a month is still 1250/16 = 78 times the safety limit if all of the iodine stayed in the ocean near the plant. This shows why dilution is so important.

Side comment 1:

The other contaminant in seafood, mercury, does not go away with time and is not as easy to detect and monitor as radiation from I-131. I-131 emits a gamma ray which can be detected through the usual plastic packaging used for seaweed, right on the shelf. Mercury requires a careful (and destructive) chemical test.

Side comment 2:

The reporter quite correctly puts attention on cesium, which has a 30 year half life. Isotopes with very short half lives are "hotter" but go away quickly, so you just have to keep your distance for a month or two. Gram for gram, cesium isn't as hot but you have to avoid it for a longer time. That can be hard to do.

However, this ignores the other significant factor, which is biological activity. Our body needs a regular supply of iodine, so it will go looking for it in anything you eat. (Naturally iodine deficient diets in the Ukraine contributed to the uptake of I-131 after Chernobyl.) Further, it gets concentrated in one place, the thyroid.

Cesium (Cs) is in the same chemical family as sodium (Na), in table salt, and potassium (K), in sports drinks and bananas, which are both essential to the operation of our body. However, since it is much heavier, I doubt if it can substitute for the many ionic processes the body uses Na and K for. Any biologist or chemist know if Cs is concentrated by the body?

By the way, one reason I knew this was a major incident was that Cs-137 could be detected above background in California. You see, it takes a significant release to see it above the Cs-137 that still remains from atmospheric nuclear testing. As big as Chernobyl was, its Cs-137 was barely detectable over the stuff left from weapons tests done decades earlier once it got diluted by one trip around the globe.

Side comment 3:

There has been no new I-131 made since fission was stopped on March 11, fifteen days ago. That means only one quarter of the original I-131 remains in the fuel rods inside the three reactors that had been operating at the time of the quake.

The most important thing in this article might be that the levels in sea water had increased by a factor of 8 in the past week. That means I-131 from inside fuel rods inside the reactor vessel is not only finding its way into the water, but a larger fraction of it has been released from the fuel rods. (There is less I-131 available to leak out, but more of what remains is getting out. Did I say that clearly enough?) This is further indication that the fuel rods have been damaged significantly, which we already knew, but might just result from the iodine -- already vented from the reactor vessel -- being washed out of the containment building as they can now pour more water onto and into the containment building.

Side comment 4:

That observation in the quotation at the top of this article, that radiation "might" be seeping into ground water, struck me as strange. There is I-131 in Tokyo drinking water. This is because Tokyo's water supply comes from surface water (mostly behind dams based on a city water department document I found), which will be contaminated by radioactive rain carrying I-131. But everyone should know that rain also soaks into the ground. Apart from geochemical processes that would capture iodine, it will go into the ground water.

Measuring "pi"

2011-03-16T18:38:00.000-04:00

Rhett Allain had an interesting post for "Pi Day" concerning the use of a simple harmonic oscillator consisting of a mass on a spring to measure pi. Clever!

However, he neglected the effect of the spring mass. The correct formula for this problem requires the addition of 1/3 of the mass of the spring to the mass hanging on the spring, which appears inside the square root used to calculate the value that goes on the x axis of his fit. Although it is really hard to tell what his fit looked like or what the mass of the spring might be, including this necessary effect should increase the slope and make his result worse.

Nice idea, however. I'll have to give this a try when we have the lab setup.

That said, I have special praise for his OUTSTANDING blog about how to build you own energy balance thing. I did the human demo in one class before spring break, and might have saved some students some money if the showmen are out on the beaches this week. The plastic version looks like it might make a good demo all on its own ... even without the cute crown with its cell phone re-receiver energy recycling thingy.

From ridiculous to sublime

2011-03-15T22:55:00.003-04:00

Time to weigh in, quickly, on the nuclear crisis in Japan.

As I commented on a link dump at Uncertain Principles that points to a half decent article that has since been moved and corrected to some degree, the news reporting about the reactor problems was truly awful for the first day or two. What an abomination.

It has, however, improved a LOT. Tonight I was stunned at how well MSNBC covered the subject. And not just with the experts, who no longer need scare quotes around their titles, but also in a lengthy intro by Rachel Maddow on her show. Yeah, she was still a bit confused by the fact that rust is oxidation (of iron) but the oxidation of zircalloy is not rust, but the presentation was not wrong and well pitched to a (scientifically illiterate) audience.

It is worth watching on Hulu or wherever they archive it.

The real key, however, is that they have real experts. I missed the name of the guy from Sandia who was on an earlier show, but they had Frank von Hippel from Princeton on the Maddow show along with some others of similar quality but whose work is not personally known to me. Clearly a whole bunch of people were as horrified as I was by the junk that was being broadcast and had the pull to get the attention of the networks and change what is out there. It probably also helped the DOE Sec Chu can teach as well as do physics, and did a good teaching job in front of Congress.

The changes are dramatic.

The comparisons to Chernobyl are now rational, rather than nonsensical.

No idiot is out there saying that a scrammed boiling water reactor will go prompt critical if it melts down. The "expert" that didn't seem to know that the heat in the shut down plant comes from internal radioactive decay of fission products is long gone, replaced by one that knows spent fuel rods are also hot -- and "hot" with radioactive elements that live just long enough to be very dangerous if they were to be released.

OK, one Congressman (who as a physicist should know better) was out confusing a civilian nuclear power program that only uses fuel under IAEA supervision with a rogue state operating a clandestine enrichment program probably designed with help from North Korea and Pakistan, but let's ignore that one.

Actual facts, like the location of the spent fuel storage pools 40 feet in the air !! ????? !! above the containment structure in an earthquake zone, are now clearly featured in the stories. Ditto for giving radiation levels in Sv rather than in "chest x-rays" (which deliver much less radiation than they used to). Even Livermore managed to get out the fact that they have a nuclear weather forecasting program for this, and other purposes.

And I am particularly impressed that we are sending some of our specialized monitoring equipment (I'd guess it is the stuff developed to look for weapons or the result of a "dirty bomb" or an event just like this one) to Japan. I hope it works as well as advertised.

That is about all that I have time for tonight, but I will try to blog about some specific details when I get a chance.

I'll close with the most important point that hasn't been emphasized in the reporting so far, and might have confused people about the extent of the radioactive plume. Radiation detection is EXTREMELY sensitive. I heard of a case where the detectors outside of a nuclear plant were set off by the alpha radiation from the Thorium and Uranium in the smoke from a coal plant that had been pushed down to the ground by an inversion layer. A nuclear carrier would have similarly sensitive monitors on the ship, so we would need to be told the level that was detected -- not just the fact that radiation was detected -- to get a sense of what our carrier picked up off the coast of Japan. Further, it can be far more discriminating that a simple Geiger counter. You can tell what radioactive isotope is out there as well as how much, and the specific isotopes tell you where they came from. That is how people know fuel elements have been damaged without being able to see inside the plant.

Beware the Ides of March!

2011-03-15T09:18:00.002-04:00

A belated "Happy Pi Day" and "Happy Einstein's birthday" ...

... as well as my fourth blogiversary (the day before).

Reaction Time

2011-02-15T20:26:00.002-05:00

"Watson" didn't have to push a button, a huge advantage when everyone knows the answer well before the question ends on "Jeopardy".

You could see it in real time, but I'd like to see data equivalent to what was used to determine the lock-out time for a false start in track when they shifted to electronic timing. I'd guess that "Watson" rung in at the same instant every time as it didn't have to worry about moving a finger or the delay as flesh meets button. After all, it could devote a processor to that task without any distractions from the main task at hand.

Indeed, this raises two questions about how "Jeopardy" determines when the board is open to ring in with an answer.

1) Does a human press a button, or is the end determined by an electronic sensor listening to the host's microphone? If the latter, a machine with a non-mechanical reaction time can learn to anticipate when the lights will come on.

2) Does the system lock out for a reasonable reaction time after the lights come on, the way they do for false starts in track? In track, extensive tests with world class sprinters showed that none had a reaction time less than 0.1 s, with the best around 0.12 s. Since visual responses are, reportedly, slower, does Jeopardy have a 0.2 s lockout for a valid response?

If it doesn't, "Watson" had a huge advantage.

Unacceptable humor?

2011-02-05T13:42:00.003-05:00

Comments complaining about Rudbeckia Hirta's snark about psychology and biology at her university sound like they also don't appreciate where she is on the "Purity" continuum! (And it appears that Psychology and Sociology are reversed at her university.)

They also reminded me of the kerfuffle created by the Top Gear guys being their usual selves. Complaints that their remarks were "offensive, xenophobic and humiliating" led me to say "and this is news?". Ever notice what they think of the US, particularly the southern parts of the US, and our giant cars designed to hold our giant bellies? Or what they think of France?

But back to the academic question of easy majors that drew the ire of RH's commentariot: You don't have to do much advising at my CC before you encounter students who wish there was a tool to help them select a major at Wannabe Flagship based entirely on a list of classes they don't want to take. Each time you click on the radio button next to a class, the possible majors would change. The opposite of the way we usually do advising, which is to pull up the major and tell them what they need to take next.

Their exclusion list usually starts with any math above about what I characterize as the 9th grade level (basic algebra with some inequalities, the occasional exponent but no exponential or trig functions,a few fractions, and the rules of probability), but can also include "too much reading" or "science".

The people who teach the HS-level science classes perceived as the easier choices among those that meet our liberal arts requirement have my greatest sympathy. Imagine students complaining about exponents being used to give the size or age of the universe, because there isn't supposed to be any math in the class, and you get the general idea.

Forcing the horse to drink

2011-01-22T15:21:00.004-05:00

You can lead a horse to water ... but you can't make hir drink.

Did you know I was talking about "Academically Adrift"? (IHE articles here and here point to the main story lines.) That's right, I'm talking about the folks who don't realize that you can send a kid to school ... but you can't make hir learn.

I've commented about this book twice, and was ready to comment again when I decided it was time to put those comments here in my blog.

Just for background, it first came to my attention in a January 18 comment on Dean Dad's blog that pointed to a column by someone from “The Hechinger Report” in the Sacramento Bee. That led to the following observation:

That article about Critical Thinking was interesting until we got to the inevitable “decline of civilization” comments from various experts. How can you compare the results of an Unprecedented One-of-the-First Study with guesses about college life 30 or 50 years ago? You can’t. I’m pretty sure we spent 50% of our time socializing in the dorms back in the good old days.

I’m impressed that almost two thirds !! of the study group made significant gains in critical thinking, even if the journalist chose to emphasize the negative side of the same results.

And I was stunned to learn that students in “business, education, social work and communications” showed the least gains, not to mention that “students learned more when asked to do more”. Who would ever have imagined such a result.

When Sherman Dorn questioned the reliability of the assessment tool used to generate data for the book (and later decried the over generalized conclusions drawn from it, I ventured the opinion (on the former article, slightly rewritten here) that:

Commentary based on perceiving a single data point as if it were a century long time series does not show any critical thinking on the part of the commentator.

I would also add that I think I would not have shown any significant improvement in my critical thinking skills after 4 years of college because I entered college with spectacularly good ones due to my high school experiences. I’m sure I improved, but not within the uncertainties of an instrument like they used.

The best article, however, is the one Chad wrote in Friday's Uncertain Principles. What makes it the best is, of course, is that he agrees with me that it is no surprise that 1/3 of all students in college are coasting. Well, that and he links to reports on the actual study the book is based on.

I'll add to his comments that the headline findings are based on an evaluation instrument that Sherman Dorn, a professor of the history of education and an expert on assessment in K-12, thinks is not suitable as an accountability measure.

Further, I'd guess that his students at Union and his fellow students at Williams are and were, like me, likely to have scored pretty high on the "critical thinking" essay they were given and thus less likely to improve. You have to push such students REALLY hard if you want them to improve their already high-level skills.

And I'll also add that I use a very good textbook (Wolfson's "Essentials" for calc-based physics) that runs about 22 pages of reading per week for the first semester (Mechanics and Thermodynamics) and 18 pages for the second semester (Electricity and Magnetism and Optics) -- a total that includes the textbook problems. Yet few students in any random sample at any university would trade that (not to mention homework assignments that are thick with critical thinking challenges) for 40 pages of a history book.

The worst article, however, is the NYTimes interview with one of the authors. There we discover that he actually thinks surveys and a single essay test -- likely taken without any academic (grade) or monetary (continued employment) motivation -- actually measures learning, for example, marketable engineering skills. What a load of narrow minded crap. As if the only job in the world is writing a sociology book.

And I take any claim that grades have been inflated to a Gentleman's B in my classes as a personal insult. My students know better.

But I will agree with the conclusion that challenging students makes them better. What bothers me is that someone who is a professor Emeritus at NYU thinks this is news. This has been known for centuries and obvious to me since elementary school.

Teaching Majors

2011-01-15T20:36:00.002-05:00

Dr. Crazy is back from sabbatical with shorter hair and fully energized to teach the class that introduces students to the real subject matter of the discipline they are going to major in. Now English is not exactly Physics or Engineering, but I've found plenty of common ground with her in the past and this topic is no exception.

I'll start with the comment I posted on her blog:

I never really thought of my Physics for Engineers class as an intro to the major until reading how you described your course, but maybe I should. It has many of the characteristics of yours (mini-PhD curriculum, viewed as a service course, foundation for everything that follows).

Technically, there is another course that physics majors take that is actually the start of the major program, but students won't take it if they don't like the view of physics they get in the class I teach! Once physics departments figured out that they were losing future majors to engineering (where you can also make a living), they put more emphasis on having their best teachers in the intro class and trying to make it more engaging and hands-on ... within the limits of a 200 student lecture hall.

Continuing here, so as to avoid thread hogging "man splaining" behavior ...

And within the limits that the room is not big because there are 200 physics majors in the university. No, most of those students are wannabe engineers and that fact is why calc-based physics devolved into a service course that often discouraged potential physics majors along with potential engineering majors.

Now my classes are not that big. Not even close. Furthermore, I rarely saw a self-identified physics major until recently so I view most of my students as engineering majors and teach the class with that in mind. The result is that I might actually be teaching an into to engineering course! I need to think about that this weekend to get ready for next week.

[Side remark: Some, but not all, engineering majors at nearby Wannabe Flagship have an actual "intro to the major" course with that name, but many have a course that inculcates a particular way of doing things into their majors and require that they take it during their first semester by making it a pre-req for just about everything else. Others appear to trust that someone will teach that new way of looking at the world in a core course for the major.]

And maybe that is why my better students often turn into stars after transfer. Even people who get the concept of prerequisites don't always pick up key basic skills the first time. Learning is hard. But if you fight the battle in my class at least once, your chances of picking it up for good in the actual "Intro to Whatever" class probably gets close enough to 100% to make me happy. Or at least Not Unhappy.

So what do I do? In addition to using the "This week in lab" method of making connections between lecture and lab, I use the "Next year in ..." method of making connections to the next level of application of skills that might blend both physics and, say, third semester (vector) calculus. I use the latter to put an explicit emphasis on skills I know their profs will want them to employ in their major, whether it is physics or engineering. (The computer science majors get hung out to dry here, although the term "algorithm" has been known to cross my lips.) Dare I say the "O" word - Outcomes - in this context?

I shall. (I'll worry about the "A" word - Assessment - to a lesser extent for the time being.) For a course like this it is really all about aligning Outcomes with the most basic needs of the classes that will come along later. And that isn't easy.

So that is my advice to Dr. Crazy. It is GREAT that her department has settled on a common book for the course while developing it collaboratively. As a result, it will be more likely that students will come out with the experiences they expect. Along the way, keep talking about what those expectations actually are.

I've changed my physics class a lot after discovering what engineering faculty were expecting based on their vague recollection of when they first picked up a certain basic skill. We "covered" it, but only in a way that a future PhD in Engineering would be likely to pick it up right away. The Engineering Way is to expose, as much as possible, the inner workings of your analysis of a problem by making certain procedures mandatory. Physicists tend to not do that, using those processes on an as-needed basis, so I have to be even more conscious of each problem solving step when we do problems in class. However, that way and The Physics Way share an emphasis on analysis. Is there also an English Way? Probably, although I'd guess it is more like the let-a-thousand-flowers-bloom physics approach given my past experiences.

Winter prep time

2010-12-29T12:36:00.002-05:00

Unbalanced Reaction posted an interesting thought about when to refocus on work over the holidays -- on the 28th of December. I left a quick, off-the-cuff, answer that I work on Wednesday (which happened to be the 22nd and 29th this year), but that was before I settled down to work today and started noticing the time stamps on various files that needed attention.

You guessed it: Lots of them were dated around the 28th, regardless of the day of the week over the past five years or so! Fascinating.

There were quite a few others dated around the 20th (circa the Winter Solstice as I mentioned in my comment). Those were usually the syllabus, which I got done quite a bit earlier this semester that in the past. In fact, I noticed that I was about a week early on quite a few things this year, things that would normally get done after Christmas around the 28th.

I never noticed that work pattern until you brought it up, UR. Great insight. We both work in that natural gap between Christmas and New Years (what feels like a Wednesday), although I clearly also like to work about 5 days before Christmas.

So, no, Unbalanced Reaction, I'm not generally the model of efficiency, but this year has been an unusually good one for keeping focus on priorities by doing them as soon as I could rather than when they absolutely had to get done. I don't know if I was more stunned that I thought of working on the massive revision of my teaching plan while proctoring, or that I actually did it.

Well, I worked on work things, at least. Christmas lights didn't get put up nearly as soon as they should have.

And blogging. You should see the queue of semi-written articles. I think they will all get finished up tomorrow, but at least this one is going out only a day late.

Productivity

2010-12-15T11:24:00.002-05:00

My blog friend Dean Dad has a couple of bees under his bonnet that rival those of much older, semi-senile faculty. One of them is his obsession with the Credit Hour, even when (at other times) he worries about articulation and the transfer of course "credit" from one institution to another. He reminds me of one college that got rid of grades to foster creative risk taking, only to discover that no one wanted to hire their students because it took too much effort to evaluate the individual portfolios. That college no longer exists.

His latest version of the argument, in a blog last month, is to blame it for a lack of productivity in academia:

Third, we've defined what we do in a way that defeats productivity improvements. We measure learning in units of time. Until we stop doing that, no amount of efficiency-tinkering will make enough of a difference. A three-credit class required forty-five hours of seat time thirty years ago; it still does.

Actually, it doesn't. We only require 42 or 43 hours of seat time (plus final exams) at our college. They have to learn the same physics content in 28 weeks of class time that they once had 30 weeks to learn. You see, we measure learning in units of chapters in physics books, and engineering schools expect the same prerequisite knowledge they always did. AFAICT, everyone deals with this by cutting back somewhat on topics that students never learned anyway, but that does not help the overall learning cycle for the core material in the course.

Side comment: Somehow the same has not happened in math. Calculus takes longer now than it did when I first encountered teaching it, although that change might be making up for the lost weeks I mentioned above.

Besides, this is all a red herring. Productivity is not what one student learns, it is the cost of producing that learning. Productivity is about the difference between one professor running a tutorial for a single student and having an 80 student lecture/discussion class. And there, I know my productivity has increased significantly in just the past decade because my annual enrollment has grown by more than 50%. That means a lot more money is paying for my time, which is all that matters for the college's bottom line.

Side comment: An assistant chairman in my distant past also argued that failing students was a way to increase productivity in the department. It enabled them to squeeze twice as much money for the same amount of learning. This doesn't always work, of course, because repeats can displace other students who might be more likely to learn the material and pass the class.

And my productivity has increased because, in the days of smaller enrollment, I was also teaching labs. That is three hours of my time that only generates one credits worth of income from a small number of students rather than three credits worth for twice as many students -- a factor of SIX in income for my time! Using an adjunct instead of a tenured professor has lowered our cost there while freeing me to generate more income for the college.

One complaint I don't understand is

Fourth, unlike almost every other sector except health care, we have to invest in technology even when it doesn’t improve our own productivity.

No, you don't. That is a cop out. Managers like yourself did not have to replace blackboards in every classroom with SmartBoards and projectors without doing any study to see if they improved learning. (By the way, that is not a one-time capital expense. Projector bulbs are expensive and projectors wear out. There is also more security required because of a significant theft problem.) Indeed, they didn't even do a study to see if increased use of Powerpoint might reduce learning!

He also blames tenure, although he is actually blaming a seniority-based pay system rather than tenure. You can have tenure without automatic pay increases and you might need step pay increases without tenure, to keep your best people. Besides, as I alluded to above, one way every college has increased productivity is the use of contingent faculty, particularly at universities where the benefits are the greatest. I say this because the fraction of classes taught by adjuncts at my college has been stable for a long time at about 50%. (I am counting classes rather than people for a good reason: we have a significant number of adjuncts who only want to teach one or two classes.) I think this is possible because the salary disparity is not as great as at universities.

And productivity gets harder to define when you shift from a Community College environment (where he and I work on the teaching side) to a Research University environment (where I used to work on the research side). Is a professor's time better spent in the classroom generating credit hours or in the lab generating grants with overhead and jobs for students that help support enrollment? I think we all know that the answer to the last question is "yes" at an R1 institution, where it even includes the creation of non-teaching faculty positions that exist solely to bring in additional contract dollars.

And that last detail is why I think, in another article from last month, Dean Dad completely misses the point made by Historiann. Historiann is at a Wannabe Major University, just the sort of place where managers do profit (pay increases and job jumps up the ladder) by shifting resources to areas where they are more likely to get more research grants that generate more "overhead" (indirect cost recovery) and more administrative positions. There isn't much (make that ANY) value to the university if Historiann publishes another book. There is a lot of value in the 40% that gets siphoned off of a grant, and even more if the professor's salary and benefits and all other expenses (office, light, heat, staff support) can get charged to the grant while an adjunct with no benefits and few of those expenses teaches hir class that semester.

I have little doubt that what I just wrote is "far removed from any reality I [Dean Dad] can recognize", but it is a reality I am very familiar with.

But I would not put all of the blame on the managers who made it happen. Many faculty are complicit in the expansion of the university research enterprise because their lives are devoted to research and graduate and post-doctoral education. It is an unfortunate reality that history cannot compete with biochemistry at this game, and tight budgets will push money to where it creates the most return for the people managing the university.

Students helping students

2010-12-11T14:19:00.002-05:00

Dot Physics offers an excellent suggestion for communicating good study habits to new students: have this year's students tell next year's students what they need to do. Better yet, he posted what his student's wrote.

I know it is a good idea because I have been doing something similar for several years. It started with an end-of-semester question about prerequisites. (If you follow my blog, you know that I have identified the failure of students to comprehend the meaning of "prerequisite" as a long-standing problem for advanced classes like calculus and physics.) That info got shared with the math faculty who taught those classes, and I think I have seen an impact on what students learned and brought with them to physics (and calculus).

Later, based on discussions with a colleague at another school, I tried something similar to what Rhett Allain is trying: collect advice from current students (mine is entirely anonymous) and distribute it via Blackboard to the incoming class. (That mechanism is still a weakness because our students don't get access to their Blackboard shell until the first day of classes. They really need this kind of info before then.) They seem to appreciate it, but I'm less certain how much it helps.

Measuring changes in the success rate of any class is tricky. There are lots of variables. (To name just one that could be measured, I started getting a significant number of kids with AP calculus experience after the depression of 2008 hit.) The biggest is that they are busy (work or play or both) and sometimes just lazy and unprofessional, still looking for the easiest way to pass. Thus, even though my students, like Rhett's, offer the excellent advice to read the textbook before class and start their homework early, they just won't do it no matter who tells them about it. But they will form study groups, and that sort of collaborative learning has grown significantly in the last few years.

Has anyone else tried this? Any suggestions on how to get them to read?

Dot Physics gets Power wrong

2010-12-07T21:12:00.000-05:00

Rhett Allain has a great blog at Wired.com, but I will not create yet another account just to comment there so my comments will be here instead.

Usually he is on the money, but in this case his bad experiences with ESPN Sport "Science" gets in the way of his analysis of a video about the power of NASCAR cars. For convenience or future reference, I'll embed the video here

and then get to the analysis.

Rhett first objects to the statement that the weightlifter being shown "exerts about 1 hp per rep". Yes, they meant "during", but what is wrong with that? The numbers are right if you take the 275 pound lift as being 2 feet (61 cm) rather than 50 cm (about 20 inches) in 1 second. The weightlifter is producing pulsed power during the lift, which is about half of that 1 second rep, but hardly resting during the other half.

Check out this video of a power lifter doing 26 reps on the NFL 225 pound lift, or this one where the guy does 72 reps at 225 pounds. The first one takes around one second per repetition, locking the arms out each time. The second one is a much shorter, but faster, lift that might make for an interesting video analysis to see what his power output is.

Estimating the average power is trickier, because you really can't use the work done ON the weights as your metric. If you did, the average power would be zero because there is negative work done on the weights as you lower them! !! However, if you shift your focus to the work done by (within) the muscle, it might be more than 1 hp for the entire time the weight is moving. Controlling a weight as it comes down is not quite as hard as lifting it, but it isn't being done for free!

What I like best about this example is that "power lifting" is one of the few cases where a physics term is used correctly in sports. Power lifting, where the emphasis is on multiple reps, is entirely about the rate of doing work in a way that reflects what is done in competitive athletics rather than just lifting the most weight. That is why the NFL tests on the number of reps of 225 pounds. (The NFL record is supposedly 43.) Yes, that is power. And I think it is more obviously power than the similar output required to climb a mountain on a bicycle even though that is probably the most extreme case of continuous power output by humans.

Rhett next complains about a statement that he actually misinterprets. The statement in the video (around 0:50) is that horsepower of a car engine is "calculated by measuring torque". This is 100% correct. Rhett says "First, horsepower is not measured by calculating torque (at least not in physics)." Right but not relevant, because they don't calculate torque. They measure torque and rpm and calculate power by multiplying the two together. Rhett says "I guess the only problem here is using “fast” to describe the relationship between torque and power." except that is not what they are doing. They are using fast to describe the angular velocity, just as you might use "fast" to describe the linear velocity if you said that power was about how fast you can apply a force (Power = force * velocity). This is 100% good physics. Rhett, you messed up this time.

For the record, in physics and engineering and the real world of dynamometers, you determine horsepower by measuring a torque curve (torque in foot-pounds as a function of angular velocity in rpm) with a load cell (which measures force) on the end of a lever that is connected to the load on the engine. Modern ones do the multiplication and plot both power and torque versus rpm, but the actual measurement is torque (or, if you like nits, force that gets autoscaled into torque on the graphical output).

I'll go along with the final nitpick about lifting the space shuttle. Yes, they should have included "in one second" at the end of that last sentence. 850 hp is, indeed, like bench pressing the space shuttle in one second. Time is important. But no one would confuse using a jack (in his video example) with "benching". Everyone knows that you bench press a weight in less than a second unless you are totally whipped, so the same would apply to benching the space shuttle.

My negative nit pick: The video correctly describes the historical origin of horsepower as a marketing term, but the draft horses shown in the video (e.g. at about 0:30) produce more than 1 hp. James Watt used the small horses used in mines as his reference point for selling his steam engines.

My other negative nit pick is that engine size is not nearly as important as the rate of fuel consumption. After all, a top fuel dragster only needs about 550 cu.in. (compared to 358 cu.in in NASCAR) to make over 8000 hp (rather than 850 hp). It is all about the fuel and the rate you can burn it -- and how long the engine lasts! You have to put power in to get power out. Like the co-host commented during his 259 mph test drive of the Bugatti Veyron Super Sport on "Top Gear", before the pro took it to 267, you can actually see the gas gauge moving when you are burning 1.7 gallons per minute pushing out about 1200 hp. Wide Open Throttle is like that. (I'll have to save for another day the effort to figure out the Reynolds number comparison between air and treacle they used. I like it, but I'm not buying it.)

But I also have a positive nit pick. I loved their description of the added power from opening up the exhaust, although they oversimplified it a lot. Part of it is to "tune" the exhaust so it resonates at a frequency that matches the rate at which you want to pull exhaust out of the cylinder. Back pressure from the exhaust makes the engine less efficient. Getting a rarefaction as the exhaust valve opens is ideal.

However, the distinctive engine sound they played comes more from the Doppler effect than the resonating pipes. You need to stand next to one to appreciate that.

PS - The best thing about the Top Gear Bugatti video is you can actually see the exponential approach to terminal velocity as the spinning of the digital speedo slows down.

PPS - This was started ages ago, but only finished up and posted at the end of December. I'll try to monitor comments to be sure they don't sit too long in the moderation queue.

News Flash!

2010-11-02T21:08:00.004-04:00

Rand Paul promises to carry the message to Washington that Kentucky is not happy that big government turned an incipient depression into a recession; they want a full fledged great depression along with reduced military spending, cuts to Medicare, and tax cuts for New York billionaires.

OK, those aren't his exact words, but it is what his words meant. He never would have gotten elected if he had said what would result from cutting government in the middle of a depression.

Earlier today, Rick Santelli (a former hedge fund manager now reporting for CNBC, who practically created the Tea Party with a live rant from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade) argued that the Fed action in September 2008 along with Bush's TARP bailout of major banks (October 2008) and Obama's stimulus plan (February 2009) is responsible for the depression that started in the summer of 2008 ... and then moments later hoped that the Fed would ignore his economic ideas and come through with more quantitative easing, arguing that the markets he follows would collapse if we don't get more stimulus because the Republicans in Congress sure won't provide it!

I can see why he got out business and became a reporter.

I have to wonder what Santelli would say on Wednesday if the Fed were to announce that there won't be a second phase of quantitative easing (QE2 in current parlance) in response to public demand for less government intrusion in the markets. I'll bet he would panic as the bond market collapsed.

Assessment

2010-10-26T23:04:00.003-04:00

Not sure if I have much to say about this particular story, but it definitely deserves mention here because of my "promise" to engage in questions about the A word in response to an excellent article by Dr. Crazy last month.

An article today in IHE asks the musical question Why are we assessing? (I know why we are -- our accreditor insists on it -- but that only begs the question.)

Sorry, nothing to see here for the moment. Well, not nothing. This particular observation

We now have a number of intriguing published instruments although, for many, evidence of their quality and value remains a work in progress.

from the article definitely deserves flagging. Are they really saying there is no "there" there? That no one knows if there is any value in the institutional effort we have started? Sure sounds like it.

Fortunately, we have a functioning system at our college so faculty have been given the lead to design assessments that make sense in each general area (composition, math, science, history, etc) and for different courses within that area. Agreeing on what is Really Important has been an interesting exercise, as has been the process of comparing how each of us might assess a particular item in our own courses. We don't often talk about tests, and different ways of testing or grading, so that has led to an interesting conversation that will continue for years.

I think what we are doing will have value to each of us, even if it proves worthless on a cross-institutional level to the ed bureaucrats.

Future engineers at Auburn!

2010-10-23T17:53:00.004-04:00

One way to tell a university has an engineering program:

A fan is seen holding up a sign that says kg m/s² to celebrate a touchdown by their freshman QB, Newton!

That kid's physics prof needs to count that as a "win" for applying physics knowledge in a new situation.

More on class prep

2010-09-21T20:32:00.002-04:00

One of the "career advice" articles in IHE contains an outline of what is termed the Sunday Meeting.

This is first rate, although I don't find it all that revolutionary. I've always done that.

Indeed, I've done some of it over the summer so my entire semester is planned out on a calendar that combines all of the major tasks for every class I teach or have important managerial responsibilities to carry out.

Now it is time to get back to my regularly scheduled Tuesday Grading.

Preparing for class

2010-09-19T20:33:00.002-04:00

There is a nice question/poll today from Unbalanced Reaction concerning prep time for class. I'm in the 1 to 15 minute category, but that is for classes that I have taught (many times) before and represents an average that often includes zero if "prep" means actually writing out detailed notes for what will happen in class.

And that isn't because I use my old notes in class, even though I have them with me.

I sensed this incipient digression as I wrote my comment at UR's place, so I will digress here instead. Most of my prep time is spent on the broad outline of what I will do, what might be considered a lesson plan if actually contained any detail beyond Problem x or Example of topic y.

Prep is usually more about clearing my mind to see if there is something new I should try. Lately that means what I write below, but also an approach that puts EVERY key formula for a new subject up on the screen, rather than having them show up here and there as we deal with new parts of a single topic. Then I only use those few things in everything else I do.

I used to have problems worked out so I could "work" them without having to pause to do calculations, but I have decided that is a bad model for the students even if I pause to use an air calculator before writing the answer down. It turns out that, despite being a digital non-native (wrote my first computer program my senior year in HS and didn't own a calculator until I started grad school), I am a lot faster than most of them are at slamming the keys.

So I might project a problem, either prepared or out of the book, but then all of it gets done for real in class. I've observed people who have the answers on plastic or ppt, and the kids (who I am also observing) just don't get the details. Sometimes they can't see the details, other times they just follow the terse bits on a ppt printout outline -- but never put together a coherent solution. Of course, some don't ever take good notes or recognize my board work as how I actually do the problem myself, but that is a different problem that requires constant teaching effort.

The only time I make sure I have the worked version handy is when I put up a problem for them to do. Then I want to be able to flash memorize the key results so I can provide right/wrong advice as I move around the room.

The important thing is that I have fixed in my head the need to be very procedural in everything I do in class. I don't need notes for that. In fact, my notes are not as good as what I put on the board.

Three Un-related Topics

2010-09-19T15:13:00.007-04:00

All below the jump ... thoughts about perceived quality of faculty at a CC, the Gates Foundation and education, and keeping happy as a professor -- all triggered by recent items in IHE.

Faculty quality at the CC Level

Hat tip to an IHE Quick Take, pointing to this article in the Detroit News. Michigan is apparently facing the question of whether community colleges should be allowed to offer 4-year degrees in selected fields. They probably got the idea from other states where CCs now offer BS degrees in nursing or education.

Michael Boulus, executive director of the Presidents Council of State Universities of Michigan, said:

"Community colleges do not have the base of professional educators needed to provide accredited bachelor's degrees."

to which I say "BS". Reminds me of nearby Wannabe Flagship, where they try to claim that our organic chem class (30 students) is worse than theirs (300 students) when our professor used to teach ... THEIR class as an adjunct!

I'll use nursing as an example, since it is an area where there remains some prejudice against licensed RNs who earned an AS rather than a BS degree. (Yes, I know that you cannot move up into surgery or anesthesiology without the BSN degree, but I am talking about entry level positions.) It is convenient because I can look at the requirements for the degree at Wannabe Flagship and see clearly that (a) they do require important non-nursing courses that are not in our AS program, and (b) our CC teaches every one of those non-nursing courses at a level that they accept for transfer students, and (c) that many of their classes are taught by adjuncts and typical adjuncts and full-time faculty have an MSN as their top degree. There are some doctorates (including an EdD or two), but those are only needed for the MS and Doctoral programs, not the undergrad BSN degree program, which explains why there are so few of them.

Our faculty are just as educated, experienced, and licensed as theirs are and could teach the same upper-division classes that theirs teach. Our program is accredited for the RN license by the same national organization that theirs is, and ours has the same high pass rate that theirs does ... and higher than some other programs in the state. Yes, we do need to hire more faculty, but that is just for our growing AS degree program. You see, Wannabe Flagship has very limited admissions and does not offer any program that can be taken by non-traditional students, so we turn away many qualified students. And there is no shortage of demand, even in today's economy.

The propagandist for the state universities in Michigan is either a liar or ignorant.

Education Research

A Friday Viewpoint at IHE posed a challenge to the Gates Foundation to fund more research, but I have in mind some nonsense embedded in the article.

The author says:

There were some 65,000 doctorates in education granted over the last 10 years for which we have data (1999-2008). During the same period, there were about 21,000 doctorates awarded in chemistry. Which do you think has had the greatest consequences, knowledge-wise?

I know that comparing education and chemistry in this way is unreasonable; for one thing, many of the education degrees were awarded to practitioners, rather than to researchers.

BZZZZT, but thank you for playing. Those persons with a chemistry PhD are all, every last one of them, practitioners. And that identifies the main problem with education degree programs. Few of them have faculty whose research is based on actually doing (say, teaching elementary school) what they teach. In contrast, that chemistry PhD actually does chemistry, including the ones who are teaching chemistry at a university. In my opinion, that is why education research has not made as much of a dent in our national K-12 problem as, say, chemistry research has improved batteries and many other important products.

I might add more (like references to what others said about Gates and accountability for outcomes from those projects), but time to move on.

Enjoying the job

Also from Friday, we have this ad dressed up as Career Advice from IHE. There are some good things in there worth thinking about, but I'll start by observing that if you get migraines as a stress reaction to the research demands of your 1-1 teaching job at an R1, you really should think about moving to a teaching intensive college or do what the author did: Join a leadership program to learn how to manage research (rather than do research) and start the move up into Provost world.

The real lesson in there, which does not require buying the book, is that you need to identify your "soulful values" and set your goals around them. Since regular goal setting is part of what every professor at my college does each year (as a way to encourage us to stay "fresh"), that is a useful way to think about how to choose among many things that one can do to improve teaching.

English?

2010-09-05T16:43:00.003-04:00

Ah, two nations separated by a common language.

I see every indication that the following part of a story is written in English, but I have only the vaguest idea[*] what they are talking about. See for yourself:

Spinner Graeme Swann found massive turn to take 2-14 as Pakistan struggled.

England also had batting problems, but Eoin Morgan and Michael Yardy put on 67 from 43 balls in a five-wicket win.

They came together after Luke Wright had been bowled on the sweep for a duck, leaving England in a precarious position at 62-5 after 10 overs in Cardiff.

Many players on both sides had made batting look difficult on a slow wicket, with the ball stopping in the pitch.

I wonder if the British feel the same way when they read the description of someone "throwing a pitch" in baseball!

But one thing I like about British sportswriters is that they don't mind being rude when describing someone who "produced a series of desperate swishes at fresh air". We could use a bit of that when a millionaire strikes out.

[*]
I know a bit more than I let on. I've actually played a bizarre version of street cricket (using trash cans for wickets) with some Aussie-Americans, but it would take a lot of gin for me to sit and watch a match on TV. But I am only guessing at what "2-14" means, and I have no clue at all what a "duck" might be.

Mentoring

2010-09-01T22:38:00.004-04:00

Today I am blogging to myself. You see, I know I wrote several brilliant ?? comments giving advice to new faculty and my thoughts on mentoring new faculty, and ... well ... now I am a mentor to a new faculty member. So what was it I said?

Took more time to find these than I thought it would.

Mentoring New Faculty (April 2008)
Concerning my thoughts about our college's mentoring program.

Advice for a New Professor (March 2009)
Includes links to two other articles and a few thoughts of my own.

New Adjunct (July 2007)
Although directed at a question from a first-time teacher, some of this is probably relevant in many situations.

I'm sure there are others (like in my "jobs" area or dialogs on other blogs), but I don't have time to track those down right now. Will update later when I think of one.

Dean Dad on becoming an Administrator
On one level, completely irrelevant. On another, totally relevant. Anyone in a new job has to learn, and listening is how you learn. For that matter, even people who have been on the job for years still have things to learn. Listening is how learning happens.

It's a miracle!

2010-08-24T21:03:00.002-04:00

The VERY long-awaited assessment of research doctoral programs by the National Research Council is, so they say, going to be released on September 28.

I think that makes this update of the 1982 and 1995 reports about two years late.

Why? Could the fact that they will release a revised version of the Methodology guide, updating the 2009 update of the 2003 report that proposed a methodology for this new set of rankings have anything to do with it?

It sure sounds like they kept tweaking the methodology until they got what they wanted. Will there be a hue and cry? We will see. The biggest problem is that the data it uses are so old that they will probably have to start the next study before ink is dry on this one.

However ...

I can't wait to see if that means "traditional" top schools remain above one physics program that I thought should have been marked with a bullet (record rating lingo) based on some of the raw data from 1995. Those data suggested that one program in particular had higher cites and other objective measures of research quality than the schools between it and #1.

For the record, that program was #10 UC Santa Barbara. Their Pubs per faculty number was second only to #1 Harvard, and their cites per faculty (178) exceeded Harvard (170) as well as #2 Princeton (110) and #3 MIT (121). Notice that gap? I sure did.

It's Showtime, Folks!

2010-08-22T22:15:00.002-04:00

Syllabus ready? check

On-line homework ready? check

First day activities prepared? check

Lab instructors prepared? looks like it

Campus parking lots empty? not for long!

I love visiting campus on the weekend before classes start. There are always a few freshmen wandering around looking for their classes, probably under the mistaken impression that they will be able to drive up and park right in front of the buildings. Ha! Not unless they get there before 7:30 AM.

Offices

2010-08-17T08:35:00.002-04:00

Inspired by a dream Profgrrrrl had about being forced to swap offices, I remembered that I was talking to my old major professor this past week and he came up with an hysterical, slightly fictional, story:

All of the faculty in a certain new building spend all of their time walking around looking for a better office or any lab space that they might be able to steal. No one dares leave a lab too clean out of fear it might look vacant and get taken from them.

He added that the only thing that distracted these faculty from looking for more lab space was their attempts to get someone else to teach their class next semester so they could do more research.

Their challenge? No one wants to take over their class unless they get a nicer office or some of that precious lab space in trade. Catch 22! As a result, they wander the halls forever like Marley's Ghost, dragging a chain of publications behind them and moaning about offices and teaching loads to anyone who will listen.

When they need a rest, they go to the Dean's office and moan there.

Thesis Repulsion Potential

2010-08-10T19:54:00.002-04:00

Jorge Cham is brilliant.

Follow the link above to his latest cartoon at PHD Comics. Click to the previous comic to see the setup.

For those of you who don't know this, which might be everyone reading this blog, the potential shown in that cartoon is typical of the attractive force that holds protons and neutrons in the atomic nucleus. The nuclear force is short range and weakly attractive, but there is a very large repulsion at short distances that arises, essentially, from the Pauli exclusion principle acting between the quarks that make up the proton and neutron.

That repulsion sets the size of neutron stars.

Data Storage Media

2010-08-09T10:17:00.006-04:00

An important reminder from Unbalanced Reaction about data backup brought the following question to mind:

How many different types of storage media do you have at home? (I don't care if you have the hardware to read them or not.)

Although I suspect I am missing something, here is my list of the 9 (possibly 11) different types of media that are in my house:

Internal magnetic disk and external half-terabyte drive (I think it is also magnetic)
Flash drives
CD ROM
DVD
Zip disks! (that part of Zoolander is so out of date now)
3.5" floppies
[uncertain] 5" floppies (I might have tossed those)
[uncertain] 8" floppies (ditto, written under CP/M)
Magnetic cassette tapes for an auto-loader backup system
9 track tapes (plural)
punched cards

Time to do some more summer house cleaning ....

Mathematics (and Physics) and Calculators

2010-08-06T21:28:00.005-04:00

This is the third of three articles concerning calculators and mathematics triggered by a blogspot and IHE blog article by Dean Dad, a community college dean who appears to be writing from another part of the country yet has the same problems we have at our CC. The original article concerned calculator use in Developmental math classes that typically cover fractions and 7th grade algebra, but the comments spanned a range from that topic through mathematics and its applications beyond calculus. My first article merely laid out a common set of definitions, but does include a few assertions about various types of calculators and levels of mathematics that might deserve comment. The second article tried to focus on Developmental math but also included some comments about Algebra. In between these, I posted a shorter article that included a more polemical set of comments about the "modern" Z80-based Graphing calculators. Comments on the second article made me realize I also owe the community a long-deferred article about the math preparation of elementary ed teachers.

My second article limited itself to classes that are remedial in the sense that their goal is to get students to finally learn skills that were supposed to be taught in elementary and middle school as well as the first year or so of high school. College Algebra occupies a fuzzy territory because it is sometimes learned in high school (where it would be Algebra II) but is considered a college-level math class that is sometimes a general education requirement. I included it in my previous article because it is not the only gen-ed math option at our CC and serves many masters. In this article, I will take up the issue of most interest to me: whether students are prepared to use calculators and algebra to do physics, calculus, and (perhaps) engineering problems.

My expectations

As noted earlier, I allow my students to use a Scientific calculator and I expect them to have a decent one and be fairly fluent in its use. I do not allow them to use a Graphing calculator or one that is capable of doing computer algebra. The former is excluded because I do not have time to police all of them for cheat sheets, the latter is excluded because I want a level playing field. They can use MathCAD or Maple or Mathematica when they get into upper division classes where everyone will be using equivalent tools on any given assignment. I expect them to do algebra with pencil and paper in a freshman physics class.

The calculus teachers here have a similar expectation. Many (but not all) give exams where no calculators are allowed on part of the test, but a Graphing calculator (mainly for the numerical integration feature that is on some Scientific calculators as well) is allowed on others. Sometimes they even use a computer algebra program on an exam, but that is rare.

One thing I mentioned in a comment on Dean Dad's blog was the importance of defining outcomes. I forgot to mention that outcomes are best defined so the match the desired inputs for a subsequent class. It is for that reason that our calculus faculty require that students actually know certain derivatives cold, like times tables, and why they were stunned into disbelief when a student transferred here from a school where they used an Algebraic calculator that can do all of the basic derivatives and integrals symbolically. That outcome (being able to take a derivative with a calculator) is mismatched to the requirements of physics and engineering. (True, an engineer taking the "fundamentals" exam has a reference book handy that contains the basic derivatives, but the few minutes you are given to answer each question does not give you enough time to look up every basic result.)

Physics

In general terms, my views on calculators are similar to what Chad Orzel wrote in response to Dean Dad's blog. Real math (meaning math major math classes) have no need at all for calculators unless the topic is numerical analysis, and then you are better off with a programmable computer. Ditto for upper division physics majors classes, although they can have a computational component as well (that is, arithmetic rather than the symbolic mathematics of algebra or calculus). My impression from former students is that engineering expects correct computation as well as algebra, so exams require computation as well as the proper setup of the problem.

I should add that the exam security issues inherent in larger classes, where students are unavoidably sitting within copying range, also requires numerical variations between problems. (Exam fairness has, so far, kept me from putting totally different problems on versions used in the same class.) Most on-line homework systems also do this, although some have symbolic variations as well as numerical ones. This leads to an emphasis on problems with numerical values.

Further, because my students tell me what they do in their first engineering classes, I know computation is only part of it. Setting up the problem algebraically and simplifying before computing is ALSO part of it. For this reason, I require them to state the problem symbolically before plugging in the numbers. However, primarily because of their comfort level, I do not take off if they do the algebra with numbers present rather than keep the symbols until the end. (Having numbers and unknowns makes it easier for most of them to keep track of what is unknown and needs to be isolated or eliminated.) I'll let someone else break them of that habit later on, but I will encourage them to work on it in my class. That said, I do sometimes give exam problems where a symbol like L has to be in the final answer. See below.

Computing

What has surprised me is the degree to which students either cannot compute efficiently or use their calculators inappropriately when solving a problem.

The first problem has only become evident to me recently. I don't think it is a new development; I just happened to see a particularly egregious case last year where the student would evaluate something like A*B*C/D by doing A*B, write down the answer, enter the answer*C, write down that answer, then enter that answer/D. Painful. And slow. And prone to error. I should have suspected this sort of problem because the other version, entering ((A*B)*C)/(D), is a bit of craziness not uncommon in Algebra classes. They don't know order of operations and, even if they do, some have used bad calculators that violate those rules and been burned.

This is, however, a real handicap. They need to use one calculator type and use it enough to understand what it does under different circumstances, but might never have been taught that it is OK (and even necessary) to hit lots of buttons and see what they do under different circumstances. I'm going to mention that this year, going beyond such simple things as whether your calculator does -3^2 correctly or whether it knows automatically that the arcsin of 2 (or the ln of -1) is imaginary.

The second problem is doing algebra with long messy numbers in the equations. This came up in an earlier blog post about algebra, with some nice observations in the comments. This summer I've been thinking about where this comes from, and I am convinced it is because they never use realistic numbers in Algebra classes. Their equations all have numerical coefficients that are small whole numbers, not the 10 digit value for the y component of the velocity, v*sin(theta). There is no penalty for using 3 as a coefficient. There is a penalty for using 34.5619288 as a coefficient. They also seem to have not been exposed much to subscripts, so they are initially quite uncomfortable using Vx as a symbolic replacement for that nasty number.

My preferred solution would be to have pre-calc and trig classes use symbols with subscripts so they get comfortable with that math skill, just as I would like them to work with functions like g(y) or x(t) or even x(y). As we talk more about outcomes at my college, I have to see where those skills fit into the goals of our math curriculum. It might be that these are one-and-done skills (like some skills in physics) because instructors at one level don't know how important it is when you do kinematics in physics or power series in calculus and how much students struggle with those concepts. However, I also know that this is overly optimistic. Instead, I am thinking about ways to work those in from the beginning in my class, perhaps by starting with y(t) motion rather than x(t) motion and using v_y and a_y even when they aren't really required at that point.

Finally, there is the way I model doing problems in class. Comment number 4 on Chad's article mentioned math exams where you could only use a calculator on part two, something some of our math teachers do, but then came up with a nice insight:

it also could be used to introduce the concept of only taking out your calculator when you reach the stage where you've gotten the problem to its simplest state, and need only put in the numbers.

I've seen students do exactly that while taking an exam, just as I do, but I've never thought about really making a SHOW of pulling out the calculator at that point of the problem. I need to model that step as clearly and explicitly as I model algebraic steps when solving a problem. I also need to find or invent more problems where a symbol is in the final answer, like it would be if you were writing a program where a few values are fed in by the user but others are fixed by material properties or whatever.

65 years since Hiroshima

2010-08-06T08:15:00.002-04:00

One of these years I need to plan that vacation trip that includes a stop at Pearl Harbor before heading on to Japan in early August. I need to see where my car was built and visit ground zero of the first A-bomb used in combat as well as the place where it all started for the US in the Pacific. And Kyoto.

One of the odd things about these anniversaries is that, for my students, much more time has elapsed since Vietnam ended than had elapsed between the end of WW II and when I was finishing high school.

Another odd thing is that the film of the bomb going off was either taken or witnessed by someone I once knew, but he never talked about the experience. (In contrast, other people I know who worked on the Manhattan project or other war-related enterprises - such as code breaking - have shared that history and their views of the project.)

One particular irony is that there was an editorial about radiation exposure limits just a few days ago. (Hat tip to Chad at Uncertain Principles.) The dose limits were adjusted based on what was learned from single (acute) dose exposures at Hiroshima, but the editorial argues that we need to look more closely at the evidence from low level (chronic) exposures documented in the 60+ years since those first studies.

PS - I tweaked the posting time to match when (by Japan time) the bomb was dropped.

Does your campus web site suck too?

2010-08-05T09:05:00.009-04:00

I howled when I saw this on xkcd, which I read regularly:

Nailed it!

I visit college web sites while advising future transfer students, and it is rare to find one that makes it easy to find what a student needs, even if they have a "prospective student" link on the front page. And our college web site is as bad as most. So it pleased me a lot to see IHE pick this up in a story Wednesday.

I really like the comment objecting to the "three clicks" problem for key information, and REALLY like the person who is taking this cartoon to every meeting of a CC website revision committee meeting.

But the funniest part was the observation about pictures of "pretty girls studying under trees" on the home page.

Does your college have a photo roll including ethnically diverse but atypically good looking students studying under trees? Ours does. Using computers? (Yep) Interacting in a small group with a distinguished looking professor? (Yep) A link that takes you directly to the academic calendar or the college's majors with a clear list of requirements? (Sort of)

UPDATE:
IHE has a followup story about efforts at web redesign that starts with the student. Interesting followup. I know our college web site has been redesigned to use pull-down menus that have a laundry list of possible links, but we simply do not have a "prospective student" category nor any sense that most of the links off the front are not used.

However, I also have to wonder if "prospective" is too fancy a word for many of our incoming students, the ones that place into developmental reading classes.

Trucks and Trailers and Vans - Oh My!

2010-07-31T16:26:00.002-04:00

The first official sign of Fall!

Today appears to be the first Student Moving Weekend.

The first hint was the sudden appearance of U-Haul trucks over the last few days, some of which might have been people clearing out at the end of July, but students were clearly moving into rental houses around the area today.

Traffic accidents and under age parties won't be far behind.

Calculators and Basic Math

2010-07-29T22:53:00.001-04:00

This is the second of three articles concerning calculators and mathematics triggered by a blog article by Dean Dad, a community college dean who appears to be writing from another part of the country yet has the same problems we have at our CC. I have already commented on the blogspot version of this blog (more than once), which has collected a huge number of comments, but there are also a large number of comments on the IHE version of the same posting. I'll write as if you have at least read Dean Dad's article. The discussion has been quite wide ranging, often not bothering to make a distinction between the various levels of "calculator" available to students or the many levels of math classes they might be used in. (Definitions are given here to provide a common reference.)

In this article, I will take up the specific issue raised in Dean Dad's blog and the one I know the least about as an instructor - calculators and developmental mathematics - but also look at college algebra. I'm mainly interested in putting some of my thoughts on paper and seeing feedback I get from others about their opinions of the problem.

I'll start with a particularly telling comment from Dean Dad:

...part of me wonders if we’re sacrificing too much on the altar of pencil and paper. It’s great to be able to do addition in your head and long division on paper -- yes, I know, I’m old -- but is it worth flunking out huge cohorts of students because their high schools let them use calculators and we don’t?

This isn't about LETTING them use calculators. Part of it is about spending time teaching them how to use a specific brand of calculator rather than how to do algebra. However, as I wrote in my first comment on DD's blog (9:11 AM time stamp about halfway into the 50 or so comments that are there now), I think this is mostly correlation without causation. The real problem lies elsewhere.

I think the problem starts in K-5 and gets compounded by pushing kids along into the next class and lying about the content level of that class. That is, I don't believe for a minute that a student I advised had passed a REAL pre-calc class in HS just a week before I talked to her. DD writes about similar cases:

...students who have passed algebra and even pre-calc in high school frequently crash and burn when they hit our developmental math, because the high schools let them use calculators and we don’t.

I don't buy it, and here is why: Our placement test will put them into Intermediate even if they can't do arithmetic, provided their algebra score is high enough. And you can't work with logarithms and exponentials or trig identities (a given if it is really pre-calc) if you can't solve a simple linear equation written symbolically like I asked the student to do.

You might forget 6 months of math in a week, the newest stuff, but not 3 years of it. And if you do forget that much that fast, you should have failed that pre-calc class. You can't get to much new material if you spend most of the year re-teaching three years of previously-taught material de novo.

K-5 Curriculum:

I don't want to belabor this, but one reason they can't do arithmetic might be that they never learned it. I'm convinced this is the biggest problem we face because it also lies behind the existence of pre-calc classes that are really teaching basic algebra. I'm sure part of it is that teachers who never understood math and hate it with a passion are teaching it by-the-book following a curriculum none of you could possibly imagine anyone would use.

My analogy is to the "look say" approach to reading, where guessing replaced phonetic decoding of words and Johnny (not to mention a cousin with a high IQ who is now an senior engineer at the VP level) couldn't read. Using guessing to construct your own mathematics might work with someone like me (I feel eternal guilt for, AFAICT, being an unwitting subject in a math ed research project that was run before the days of IRB and informed consent where they deduced that this curriculum worked really well), but it is unlikely to work with someone who was not going to get a PhD in physics. Really good algorithms were developed 12 centuries ago and survived for a reason. As is illustrated here, for the Everyday Math curriculum, the most efficient methods are not taught first or (in some cases) are not taught at all in some schools. The starting point for Dean Dad might be to get out into the feeder systems for his CC and find what they are doing in fourth and fifth grade.

If I know anything about learning, it is that students always favor the first method they get taught. (That is one reason you have to really emphasize when conservation of energy or momentum should be used instead of Newton's Laws: they learned F=ma first so it is the first thing they want to try. I'm the same way.) That means it is a really bad idea to start with an inefficient method, but which some people find useful when doing 'mental math', and teach the more efficient one last.

Now think about how to teach synthetic division or multiplication of polynomials to someone who only knows partial quotients division or the lattice method for multiplication. Not pretty. Then consider that they might never have even heard about "invert and multiply". Not pretty at all.

Outcomes:

The answer to Dean Dad's fundamental question, whether students should be allowed to use calculators in an Arithmetic class, starts at the beginning - the first step of course design. What are the desired outcomes for this math course? If the outcome is to be able to do a certain amount of arithmetic with pencil and paper (not in their heads), then the only use of a calculator is to check your own work as you make up your own problem and solve it. Ditto if the purpose is to simplify fractions involving simple whole numbers as preparation for a similar skill with symbols. You need to change the outcomes before changing what you do in the class.

Personally, I'd be happy if they taught them how to do arithmetic on their Basic calculator. Seriously! My biggest complaint when teaching physics isn't that they can't do arithmetic (they can't), it is that they can't calculate worth a damn. Digital natives my ass. I was 22 when I got my first calculator and I am faster than most of them are, and I'm slower than I used to be. (Sure, I've been using one longer than they have been alive, but that only proves they haven't used the thing enough to be competent with it.) I mean, I've watched a student work out a product by multiplying two numbers, writing it down times all of the others, entering it again !!! and multiplying it by the next, etc etc.

I know they use their calculators a lot in our Algebra (meaning College Algebra) classes, but it must all be with simple whole numbers like we used back when there were no calculators. That is the only possible explanation for their struggles with 3 and 4 digit decimal or scientific notation numbers or their mysterious belief in rounding intermediate answers.

Algebra:

There really shouldn't be many numbers in an algebra class, IMHO. Somehow the appearance of Graphing calculators changed the curriculum to emphasize numbers and, curiously, de-emphasize graphing. Since you can't actually read a graph on a TI display screen, let alone interpolate on it using a ruler, they don't appear to know how to make or read an actual graph rather than a cartoon of a graph. This is a nightmare in the physics lab, but also in the classroom when data are supplied in a graphical representation.

I don't believe anyone has tried teaching algebra with a Scientific calculator and graph paper in decades. I doubt if anyone other than the textbook and calculator companies have studied it, and studies like that are notorious for the difficulty in controlling the student mix or the instructor effect. However, stories about students who finally got algebra in a class where only symbols were used - no calculators needed - are common enough to make one wonder how it would work. The studies (see some comments toward the end) seem to lack a smoking gun in favor of the primitive Graphing calculators used today.

There is another side effect. Since they don't know how to use their calculators, particularly concerning order of operations, they use parentheses like they were the only operator known to man. ((3)(2))/((5)). One result is they don't see the key role of the parenthesis to denote "function of". I've seen calculus students who think x(t) means x*t, although this could be partly due to the fact that x is never a function in calculator-based Algebra. I have to wonder out loud if this would improve if they all used HP calculators instead of TI calculators. Also see my next comment below.

Commenting on the comments:

Some Anonymous, writing at 5:56 PM, about 3/4 of the way into the comments, writes:

A kid that is getting good marks in algebra screws up their physics equations. i check with their math teacher, and they don't make those mistakes in math class. So I test them myself, and they can manage algebra just fine when x, y, and z are variables and a, b, c, and d are constants. Anything else and they're lost.

This could be a result of using graphing calculators. The TI-83 will only plot Y(X) unless it is in one of the other modes (where it is similarly limited). Parametric mode, the only place where you can do X(T), does not appear to be used at all until they get to Calc III. This really bugs a chemistry colleague, because they are always plotting the log of this versus the sqrt of that, neither of which is X or Y. Similarly, we start out in physics by plotting x on the Y axis and t on the X axis and it blows their minds. I'm tempted to start by doing only y(t) problems at the start of fall, then moving to x(t).

Mthgeek, aka timfc, writing at 7:45AM of the second day of comments, listed several references. The first of these was

The Arithmetic Gap
Educational Leadership, v61 n5 p55 Feb 2004
Summary: The students using calculators in school classrooms result in lower math scores than students who never use them.

I'd like to know what grade level this was, but it sounds like K-8 from the title. As for the second one that was listed, I don't ever pay attention to something like a meta analysis of 42 other papers that span middle school through calculus. Apples, oranges, confounding variables, design differences, and systematic errors make a tasty goulash but don't help with teaching Basic algebra. One other reference, discussing "computer assisted instruction" would appear to be irrelevant to this discussion. You can use computers as an instructional aid (instant HW feedback, for example) without using a graphing calculator - or any calculator at all.

However, the last reference from Mthgeek is rather interesting. It is a link to an article (Refocusing Introductory College Mathematics Courses) that has a link to a new textbook (Contemporary College Algebra: Data, Functions, Modeling) that implements some of the ideas from the study. That is, the study and the textbook are closely coupled, but I recognize some things in that report that are reflected in what we do in our Intermediate class with a different book. (I'll have to ask around, but we might have made this choice because Intermediate is a pseudo-terminal course for many majors in our curriculum. The situation discussed in the article does not apply as much to our college Algebra course, because it normally leads to business calculus or trig. The statement in that report that biological sciences don't go beyond Algebra is patently false in our curriculum. They have to take Calculus even if they don't ever use it.) That said, I strongly criticize the textbook author for conflating a graph on a Graphing calculator with a graph produced on a computer. There is no comparison in detail or quality.

Some Anonymous, writing at 11:21AM on the first day, said (in part):

1) middle school math is more focused on algebra as early as 7th grade. So students don't have enough mastery of fractions, percents etc
...
3) More students attending college- so the lack of good high school prep is more evident.
4) Content of dev math courses in college are aimed at preparing students for a precalc/calculus track. But those going into sociology or psychology ...

Developmental math at my CC is about preparing students for 9th grade math, not pre-calc. The Intermediate course barely prepares them for real Algebra, and certainly not for the calculus track. (Our failure rate is spectacular at every one of those steps.) Besides. students going into Psychology need a real, college-level statistics class that has college Algebra as a pre-req. Criminal Justice, on the other hand, has no real math requirements and our statistics show that the combination of our Developmental and Intermediate classes does a GREAT job of preparing them to pass the basic financial math class that constitutes their "college level" math requirement while teaching them about compound interest.

The fact that they have not learned arithmetic or fractions by the time they get to 7th grade (which is when we started Basic algebra when I was growing up) is the real problem. Three years should be enough if the curriculum and teachers were any good, but if they aren't or the kids don't learn it in 3 years, our schools track those kids away from Basic algebra for another year, or more. But this does help strengthen my point that the problem is really in the K-5 classroom.

I don't buy the "more students" argument because the fraction going to college has not changed that much in the last few decades.

Finally ...

If you have read this far, thank you. I want to close by saying that the problem really is deeply rooted in our educational system and very frustrating for all involved. The high failure rate in Developmental classes is a major problem that no one is ignoring at our CC.

However, many students fail because they never attend class, or don't attend frequently enough to engage with the instructor. With any instructor, no matter how talented ze might be. I've written about that in an old bit of wishful thinking about new student orientation. Coming straight out of HS, they believe they were taught pre-calculus or Algebra II, so they just don't believe they need to go to class and actually learn math. Older students, out of school for years or decades, know they don't remember anything from school so they take it seriously and often do quite well. An age-based breakdown of performance in Developmental classes might be worth looking at, Dean Dad.

Or Dean Dad might only need to walk by a classroom or three on a regular basis and take a sort of visual attendance. Is the room still full after 4 weeks? Maybe that, rather than calculators, is the real problem.

Interlude - Calculator history

2010-07-29T13:21:00.002-04:00

This cartoon from last week really captured my view of "modern" calculators.

Click on the image to see the entire cartoon from XKCD, including the highly relevant punch line.

I was originally going to riff off of this cartoon to discuss "modern technology" in the classroom, but then Dean Dad's article came along. Just for perspective, the current model (TI-83 Plus) shows up priced between $89.99 (on sale at Staples for the new school year) and just under $100 (at Walmart and Amazon). For comparison, the CPI says $110 in 1996 will buy about $150 of normal goods today, but computer prices have been going down even as performance increases. For many decades.

Further, the cartoon is not exaggerating the connection to 1996. Today's TI-83 Plus is still running on a 6 MHz Zilog Z80 microprocessor, an 8-bit cpu that dates to the mid 1970s (as an upgrade to the legendary Intel 8080 chip). The Z80 was used in such memorable machines as the Kaypro II (running CP/M), the TRS-80, and the Sinclair and Timex notebook-sized computers. [The Kaypro, like the Osborne, was a "luggable" computer that would have to be sent in checked baggage today. I still remember using both of those.]

Not exactly MODERN technology, particularly when you consider the limitations of the 96x64 screen compared to, say, a (much smaller) iPhone. This has practical effects in that the calculator has great trouble graphing certain kinds of functions and the interface for "tracing" to a zero is really crude. More importantly, for whatever reason, I see no improvement in algebra skills associated with the month or more of time spent specifically on using this technology. Students do not use the graphs to check their answers, but that is a topic for my other postings on this topic.

Other observations:

The Plus indicates it has 512 kB of flash memory rather than 32 kB of RAM on the original model. The Silver Edition has a 15 MHz cpu and even more memory, but the added speed is one reason why you can clear its memory so much faster than on the Plus. AFAIK, the main difference is that you can clear uploaded programs on the 83 Plus but cannot clear the equivalent programs that are installed OEM on the Silver Edition. The main advantage for students is that you can connect any of these to a computer and download modestly sophisticated applications into Flash memory that are run with the Apps key.

Naive instructors believe that students have to laboriously type in crude crib sheets listing, say, trig identities or chemistry and physics formulas as fake programs. Many do this, but TI provides sophisticated, indexed crib cards - and similar tools are also available from others on the internets. Anyone who "limits" students to a note card of notes but allows a TI-83 without clearing it is laughably naive. Might as well let them bring in a notebook.

Calculators - Background Info

2010-07-29T08:19:00.007-04:00

This is the first of three articles concerning calculators and mathematics triggered by a blogspot and IHE blog article by Dean Dad, a community college dean who appears to be writing from another part of the country yet has the same problems we have at our CC. The original article concerned calculator use in "developmental" math classes that typically cover fractions and 7th grade algebra. I have already commented on the blogspot version of this blog (more than once) and the two together have generated more than 80 comments. I added some more in my second article of this series.

I won't actually comment on this topic here. My purpose is solely to set the terms of the debate, as it were, because the wide-ranging discussions of this topic by Dean Dad and others are seldom clear about which of the four or more levels of "calculator" available to students are being discussed and/or which of the three or more levels of math classes (plus physics and chemistry) provides the context for the discussion.

The divisions I make are somewhat arbitrary and perhaps idiosyncratic, so I want to spell them out somewhere without cluttering up a discussion of the teaching and learning issues as I see them. That way I can link here for future discussions of this topic and not have to repeat myself.

Although I think three levels of "calculator" suffice for most classroom use, and hence for later discussion, I think I need to list at least five to make the definitions as sharp as possible.

Basic - Here I have in mind a wide range of very cheap calculators that can do arithmetic, including parentheses and scientific notation, but cannot deal with trig functions.
SCIENTIFIC - These calculators can evaluate all of the basic functions (trig, hyperbolic, log, exponential, power) but cannot store text or programs. Some can work with complex numbers and/or hexadecimal numbers. At the high end, some can numerically evaluate definite integrals or derivatives or solve simple equations, but they cannot show any intermediate algebraic steps or work purely with symbols.
GRAPHING - Here I have in mind several calculators that are similar in capability to the TI-83Plus. They can do all of the calculations of a top end "Scientific" calculator, but can also make graphs and store programs (including large amounts of text that can serve as a sophisticated crib sheet). They can store text, but cannot work with symbols. Functions are limited to y(x) except in the rarely-used parametric or polar modes.
ALGEBRAIC - These calculators can solve equations written symbolically and can, in some cases, even show step-by-step the algebra or calculus used in the solution. They are typically somewhat limited in how much calculus they can do symbolically, but they make it unnecessary to learn any of the derivatives typically encountered in calculus.
Computer Algebra - Here I have in mind small computers that can run computer algebra programs like Maple, Mathematica, MathCAD, etc. Now you might say "a laptop is not a calculator", but there is actually a rather modest size difference between a notebook-sized laptop and the top end TI "calculator" that comes with a full keyboard and a wide screen. Besides, these are widely used in classes at the Junior level and above so they help frame the discussion.

The three in the middle, in all caps, are the ones I will refer to most often within the context of lower division classes taught at a community college.

For the record, I allow Scientific calculators in my introductory physics classes but do not allow formula sheets or cell phones or Graphing calculators to be used on exams. I encourage students to get one of the high-end Scientific calculators that can be used throughout their engineering career, including on licensing exams, so they become fluent in its use.

The four levels of mathematics classes are defined as follows:

Developmental - The content here ranges from arithmetic and fractions (what I characterize as 4th and 5th grade math) to basic algebra (the first class where "x" is used, taught in 7th grade when I was in school). These do not carry college credit. A well-calibrated placement test determines where a student starts, and some have an exit exam to verify competency at a certain level.
Intermediate - The content here is algebra through what I knew as the 9th grade level (the quadratic formula, for example, but no logarithms). This might earn college credit at a community college, but not at a university. It is not considered to be at the college level. A well-calibrated placement test is used to place students in or through this level of math.
College Algebra and Trig - I group all of the pre-calculus "college level" courses here but exclude other "college level" classes that exist mainly to ensure that liberal arts majors can graduate even if they can't do college algebra. (Those other classes usually cover enough about exponential behavior to understand compound interest on credit cards and enough probability so you should know better than to play the lottery, both very valuable life skills!) At our college, College Algebra serves many masters so skills not needed for the pre-business curriculum are put in an "advanced" college algebra class (pre-calc) and a trig class. (I know that some colleges, like my high school and undergrad university, combine these into a single course but I will use our curriculum as my reference point.) A different, also well calibrated, test is used to place students above this level although most students take the class.
Calculus - Although my students will usually take everything through differential equations and linear algebra, I'm mainly thinking about first semester calculus because that is where the bulk of students fail.

The distinction between Developmental and Intermediate might seem unnecessary to some readers, because both levels are usually non-credit classes at a university. Indeed, some universities define college algebra as a remedial course. I make the distinction because our math department teaches classes at the Intermediate level and above, while the Developmental classes are taught by a separate department that specializes in teaching those skills. I know that smaller colleges do not make this distinction, but we are not a small college. (We have more t-t faculty in our Developmental math department than a private school like Union College has in its regular Math department.)

If I just say "Algebra", I mean College Algebra. I will say "Basic Algebra" or "Arithmetic" when I am talking about Developmental skills classes.

For the record, our Developmental classes use a Basic calculator for some things but some exams must be taken without any calculator. (The placement test and exit exam do not allow use of a calculator.) I believe they allow the use of any calculator up through a Graphing calculator when they allow a Basic one, but that might depend on the instructor. Our Intermediate classes all use calculators. Our Algebra classes require a specific Graphing calculator that is also required for statistics. Our calculus classes are a bit less picky about which Graphing calculator students can use, but ban Algebraic calculators and computers except in some special situations.

A big day in history

2010-07-16T09:00:00.005-04:00

Today, June 16, is:

the 65th anniversary of the first test of an "atomic" bomb outside Alamogordo, NM;
the 41st anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11, the first mission to land men on an extraterrestrial body, the Moon.

It is also the 37th anniversary of Butterfield's testimony that President Nixon had been taping conversations inside the oval office, tapes that eventually showed he was guilty of obstruction of justice and other major felonies, but I want to talk about technology today.

So, in the context of "if we can put men on the Moon, why can't we stop the leak at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico", what is the relative difficulty of these three tasks?

Based solely on the time required to complete the project, the Moon mission was by far the most difficult and complex. The project started more than eight years earlier, before we had even put a man in orbit. Although the Saturn I was already on the drawing boards as an orbital launch vehicle, the Saturn V project started in early 1962. After about 4 years of research and development, there were two unmanned test flights (both showing problems that had to be fixed) before the first manned test flights. Even though we rather boldly used the first manned test flight to orbit the Moon, almost two years elapsed between the first unmanned test and the Moon landing mission. Given that this was a very high priority project that went as fast as possible (too fast, at times, resulting in three astronaut deaths) with essentially unlimited resources in the early years, it is almost nonsensical to compare design and construction of the "capping stack" to a Moon mission.

Next would be the development of the plutonium bomb first tested on this date in 1945. Plutonium was first isolated in 1941, so it only took four years to determine that one isotope, Pu-239, could be used as a nuclear explosive (it was already known that U-235 could be used that way) and figure out how to produce kg quantities of it and turn it into a weapon. Like the Moon mission, this was a "money is no object" project on the same scale as radar and a pressurized bomber that could fly at high altitude and carry a payload big enough to drop an atomic bomb. So, on the basis of time alone, this was easily half as difficult as going to the moon even if you include the U-235 weapon and the need for both radar and that bomber if the project was going to succeed.

Of the two bomb projects going on at the same time, the Pu-239 weapon was by far more complicated technically. The only challenge with U-235 was producing the purified isotope. (That remains the reason it poses the greatest threat for the spread of nuclear weapons, but that is a topic for another day. Our confidence in the U-235 weapon was so high that it was never tested before being used on Hiroshima.) With Pu-239, you had to produce the isotope essentially one atom at a time in a reactor and then separate it chemically from a huge quantity of preposterously radioactive material. Even then, you have to figure out how to assemble it into a weapon that will explode. That was enough of a challenge that it required a test before being used in combat a few weeks later. Again, based on time alone, four years does not compare to a few months of work to develop the capping stack (and the tools to cut off the pipe and install it) as well as the temporary fixes that were used until it was ready.

It is a good thing that fixing the mistakes made by BP was not nearly as complicated as rocket science or weapons. Those took years, this took months.

As I said yesterday, I don't think most people realize how long it takes to design and build something, even something as "simple" as a highway. You don't notice it until construction begins, but the work was going on for years before that.

Failure of the New Media

2010-07-15T16:29:00.003-04:00

When looking for the official BP info about the status of the well in the gulf, I found the following comment on the Huffington Post's Social News prominently in the news stack on Google:

FREEDOM BELL

“Me either. When did Wells of BP issue email and comments during the past attempts. When did Obama ever go on TV during a past attempt?”

(This was a comment on a Huffington Post article reporting the great news that the well had been "shut in".)

Since Wells of BP issues a comment twice a day, and this one came during his regularly scheduled briefing, the answer is he always does this. How do I know? The link I was looking for when I Googled "BP" was their Gulf of Mexico response page. The schedule and transcripts of those briefings is the top link on that page, and shows a 2:30 CDT (3:30 EDT) briefing, the second of the day.

And anyone with a modicum of knowledge of politics knows that the President will hold a press conference or give a speech whenever he feels like it, usually several times a day.

Conclusion: This contributor to the New Media has no critical thinking skills and/or no ability to use the web to answer this question, or only has an interest in using rhetorical questions to malign the motives of the engineers trying to solve this problem and the politicians making sure they do what the law requires them (not the government) to do.

Much the same can be said of the following comment

Equinator

85 days, 16 hours. Why was this not done the first day? All that planning to watch out for the walruses must not have helped much.

Correct, but even if the planning had said they would try this, they would still have had to build the device after being sure it was engineered to work in this specific situation. I don't know what they teach the great unwashed masses in school, but nothing of any complexity can be done in a day. (It takes years to take a new car model from design to showroom floor. I saw a version of the Ford Fusion in 1999.)

The reality is that this is a magnificent accomplishment. No other failure of this type (there have been others) was stopped prior to the drilling of a relief well, let alone one at this depth.

Now, even if the casing below lacks integrity and they have to keep the valve open (which is what they have expected all along), they can connect this to surface ships and keep any more oil from going into the Gulf. Lets hope the pressure and seismic tests show no oil leaking down in the drill hole itself. That would be even better news.

OMG - It's July!

2010-07-08T14:18:00.002-04:00

I had planned to post this a week ago (obviously), so by now Dr. Crazy has beaten me to the punch. Yes, it is that time of year, the time when you realize that next month is August! The month when classes begin. Lest we forget, the month when meetings begin! The month when there will be a number of things on the table (figuratively and literally) that you know you could have done, oh, in July. Or June.

As an inveterate procrastinator, I have used false deadlines for ages. In this case, I am now pretending we are approaching mid August rather than mid July. Those things that need to be printed for the first few labs, the ones that don't even need to have a date changed? They are going to get done this month. After all, my classes are all full (and one is overflowing) so I know what the number count is likely to be and any leftovers can be used next semester.

Syllabus for fall? Almost done, apart from one tweak and final check of the calendar and exam schedule. Syllabus for the spring? Next on my list. (Winter break is always too short.) Busy work I know I will need to do during the semester? I actually got the template updated so I only have to work on the worst part of it during the next month along with one task I have simply avoided doing for, oh, about two years.

And I plan to clean my office. Next week.

Celebrate Independence!

2010-07-04T12:42:00.004-04:00

I think it was sometime in grad school, as I got to know more foreigners, that how odd it is that we celebrate "July 4th" as if a date could be the name of a holiday. (Do you have July 4th in your country? Of course, but it isn't a holiday.) Similarly, it is always celebrated as the "birth of the United States" even though it was almost 13 years later, in March 1789, that the United States government as we know it came into existence. But we don't celebrate a "constitution day" holiday like some countries do, nor do we celebrate the ultimate event that truly sealed our existence as a nation (victory in the War of 1812), although we could have celebrated two others of almost equal importance yesterday (victory at Gettysburg in 1863) or today (victory at Vicksburg, also in 1863).

So "Independence Day", or "July 4th", does multiple duty as holidays go. Including, of course, the opportunity to set off illegal fireworks while watching state-sanctioned fireworks, watching NASCAR fireworks (last night's wrecks were spectacular) and the start of the Tour de France (also featuring spectacular wrecks this morning) in HD, and dining on the least healthy food this country has to offer.

I didn't appreciate the length of the Revolutionary War or the huge gap between it and the formation of our nation until I took a middle school government class. I had a crazy radical teacher who thought we should know the real truths of the history that was behind the sound-bite myths of political speech. So I know that the Revolution War began in 1775, before we declared our independence. I remember that blew the minds of some of my classmates, but it made sense that they might have wanted to win a few skirmishes before putting it all on the line.

Ditto for the wonderful detail that George Washington wasn't the first President of the United States. There were something like a dozen of them (aha, Wiki has both the full list starting in 1774 and the ten who headed the government), each serving as the "President" of the single house of the US Congress that (weakly) governed the confederation that was the United States for 8 years, starting in March 1781 even before the Yorktown victory, negotiated the treaty of Paris in 1783 that actually granted us our independence from Britain, and developed a Constitution that would dissolve that government in favor of a stronger one.

One wonders if the United States would have been reconquered by Great Britain in 1812 if not for that stronger federal government. Ditto for surviving the unpleasantness that came along 50 years later. Would there be Spanish speaking nations of Texas and California to our west and Florida to our south if we had stuck with a Confederation that ended up a part of the UK (like Canada) or split in half across the Mason-Dixon line?

PS -
Our menu includes chili dogs, watermelon, and beer from Vermont. While you digest that, check out the great pair of videos that Unbalanced Reaction put up today. And Dr. Crazy got to watch fireworks from the porch of her new house!

Leaky Student Memories

2010-06-27T22:10:00.003-04:00

Dean Dad picked up on my article of a few days ago and wrote a great followup to my followup that linked it with an e-mail request for help and an anecdote of his own. If you didn't see it, go read it now (as well as the IHE version) along with the comments. There are good ones on both sites, several of which deserve additional remarks.

Since I already posted some comments as CCPhysicist on the original DD blog, I figured I should shift over here before getting carried away in his comments section.

First, I'll include the same back link to my early writings on the "concept of prerequisites". Those came in my first wave of academic postings three years ago when I started the blog. I find that early article interesting to read because some of my views have evolved since then as I have studied it further (sadly, I think some of that is unbloggable). I should also link to the article where my readers and I came up with the idea of using basics rather than prerequisites when talking to students. However, the one area that gets more and more of my attention is the role of K-12 testing, as mentioned in the comments on DD's blog. Those, first mentioned here, have strengthened every time I talk to students about their pre-college experiences and compare the current generation of students to ones who didn't grow up in that testing culture.

But enough of that. Let's get to the new stuff.

1.

Dean Dad told this story:

I recall a student I tried to advise at Proprietary U. He was several semesters into his program, and he was choosing classes for the following semester. I mentioned that course x was next in the sequence, and required for his program; he objected that it covered a software package he didn’t know. I responded that the software package was covered in the class he was currently finishing. His response, which haunts me to this day: “but that was over a month ago!” His tone suggested that I was being completely outlandish; he was just mannerly enough not to end with “duh!”

I found this fascinating because the student was still in the class that taught the prerequisite material! Presumably he still had a final exam to take, but maybe that is presuming too much about how they do things at Proprietary U. More likely it was a module on one programming tool that was tested with projects and the like before moving on to the next tool.

But I take some exception to DD's conclusion:

Some of that is just a cost of doing business. Memory can play weird tricks. .... But it’s also true that thoughtful course sequencing -- which presupposes both thoughtful curricular design and steady academic advisement -- can provide reinforcement of key skills.

precisely because the student was still in the class teaching that new skill. You see, not only didn't the student know the new programming language or tool, the student didn't know it was going to be used in the next class in what I assume (from the story) was a clearly defined sequence for a "workforce" type program like ones that my CC has. I see this as an oversight by the instructor, although it could very well be the fault of the university if the instructor was a part-time adjunct who was not even aware of the curriculum. (Why else would Prof DD be advising a computer science student, given what DD says about his academic background, rather than the instructor.)

What would I recommend in this case to a colleague? First, that the subject of this programming language should be introduced by identifying when (meaning both the future classes and semesters, but also the career types) it would be used. I recommend something similar to my calculus colleagues when they introduce limits to students who "just" want to learn derivatives, and do something similar at certain key points in my physics course. Second, maybe the exam on that language should include questions about where it will be used. Hey, that is an idea for my physics class! Third, don't just say it the first day. Say it at least every week, much as I use the "this week in lab" or "next week in lab" observation to link what we are doing (or did several weeks ago) to our lab class.

2.

Several comments made explicit reference to the known fact that it is always easier to relearn something than learn it the first time. I know this quite well, but that is not the problem I am talking about here. (Hey, I too forgot lots of things along the way, so I frequently use the prompting/review example technique Cherish wrote about in the comments. Ditto for what Ivory and Lisa wrote, as well as HS lab partner of Dean Dad. I'll come back to a few of those later, since I think they are worth emphasizing just for my own future reference.) The problem I am talking about is when students have allegedly learned something several times and still don't have a grasp of it. My favorite example (listed in one of my previous articles linked up above) is the logarithm. Widely used as an essential computation tool in pre-calculator days, it remains an essential tool because exponential behavior (and, hence, exponential functions) are so common in nature. But students don't seem to really get it until the fourth time around.

We first teach it in college algebra, and I have seen the test questions used as well typical final exam questions so I know the skill level in that class. We teach it again in a pre-calculus class, where (based on the principle described above) they should just pick it back up and move on to new applications. Yet I have seen students struggling well past the end of an exam period on a pre-calculus exam that mostly contained questions just like the college algebra class. That part of the class was effectively starting from scratch. However, the ones who survive that class and log integrals in calculus seem to have learned it when I give a pop quiz on them before starting RC circuits. The fraction that survive that sequence, however, is not large. I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that the lack of even partial retention plays a key role in our retention problems in math.

3.

Gordon McAlister mentions Problem Based Learning in a comment on the IHE version of DD's blog. Although I have an aversion to Three Letter Acronym solutions to all that ails us, I tend to note that all of physics and math is problem based. The trick is what problems you choose, and what problems you put on tests. My speculation that the student in DD's anecdote was in a class built around modules comes from my experience teaching physics. IME, the worst retention results from a class where the material is tightly compartmentalized. You know, where a student taking Test 4 asks "is this like what we did on Test 2?" Every test should be part "Final Exam" in the sense of sampling key older ideas. Some of the best math profs (in the sense that I love having their students in my physics class) do this on a regular basis, and I do it also.

4.

Ivory posted a link to this critique of the mini-PhD approach to the construction of a syllabus. Yes, this is part of the problem, and it is fascinating to see a familiar problem from physics addressed in the context of a history course. It is long, but all of it (along with the comments) is worth reading. Now we don't have the political baggage they do when deciding whether the Doppler Effect is worth our time (or an exam question) compared to some other worthy subject, but it is the same problem. Clutter obscures the essential.

For me, this is a work in progress, but I will state my criteria: will someone else expect them to know this topic, or is it one where they will be expected to look up the equation that applies to a particular problem and plug in the values? Is it a skill or is it a factoid? Will their BASIC skills get better if I go a bit deeper and challenge them in a familiar area or if I take up this new topic at a very shallow level? I think the answer is that we have to deal with the reduction from 15 weeks of classes (plus exams) to 14 weeks by dropping some things that used to be thought essential. However, I am always quite up front in telling my students that I am not skipping it because no one needs to know it.

5.

Ivory also pointed to an abstract that describes one of those Increasingly Common Five Letter Acronyms (that also needs a few lower case letters) for a teaching technique. It looks to me like this was used in a course that was originally modular (if this is Tuesday, it must be Botulism). This is something that is a lot easier to do in a course like physics, and is almost identical to what a math colleague does on his calculus exams. What I find interesting is the idea of making it explicit to the students that you are doing this: that is, that you value retention of a specific subset of the earlier material. Not by talking about it, but by testing on it.

Definitely something to think about in a survey course where this is rarely done.

But you know something? The humanities courses where I really retained the material (and that make visiting museums a joy) were ones where there was a unifying theme in the interpretation of disparate items. That made you look for patterns as new things showed up, and LOOKING is the first step to real learning. You don't learn if it just washes over you like a rogue wave.

Memo to Apple: Humans conduct electricity

2010-06-25T13:45:00.002-04:00

Perhaps you saw the news stories reporting many complaints about signal loss on the new Apple iPhone 4? (Here is one from yesterday.)

As I guessed, the problem is not with the antenna itself, but the fact that there are two antennas on the phone, separated by a small distance on the case. (See this news story, among others, on what the user must not do and how to fix it.)

The problem is that humans conduct electricity. No problem if there is only one antenna, since that just makes you part of the antenna if you touch it. The problem arises when the user short circuits the gap between the two antennas by touching both sides at the same time. (That means a quick fix would be a bit of electrical tape around that corner until you get the more expensive, but better looking, plastic or rubber case mentioned in the articles.) And since MSNBC does not have a physicist in the news room ... I'll add that connecting the cell and network antennas certainly could explain the problem.

It changes the tuning of both antennas, which is bad enough, but it also means that one poor antenna is feeding two separate receiver circuits rather than each one getting its own signal. It would also short the transmitted signal from one side into the input for the other side, reducing the energy that goes out of the antenna to the cell tower. I have no clue at all what those circuits look like, but a decent impedance match could kill the outgoing signal needed to keep the "line" to the cell tower open.

I don't have one or I would do the simple experiment of shorting the gap with a potentiometer to watch what happens as the gap resistance varies.

Job advice from the Academic Jungle

2010-06-24T16:46:00.005-04:00

A great new job-related series, this one oriented toward faculty at research-intensive institutions, has started up at IHE. Here is the link to the Academic Jungle index at IHE and to the first article, about the importance of service in the R1 world.

The same article appears in the home blog of the author, GMP. (BTW, "geek mommy prof" is a great nom-de-blog.) It makes the important point that you can't afford to zero out any part of the research/teaching/service triangle. It is sort of a counter-point to the emphasis I put on outside letters in Part 4 of my jobs series, which focused on R1 faculty jobs from the viewpoint of an outside observer.

(I was going to post some of the following additional comments on that blog, but for some reason Firefox does not play well with that particular comment form - so I'll put them here.) One of the comments over there had to do with teaching-intensive jobs. From my viewpoint, it is more than just a matter of flipping research and teaching. As I elaborated in Part 5, we expect a formal teaching portfolio, or its equivalent. Just as you might not know about outside letters until last in the tenure process at an R1, you might not know anything about teaching portfolio if you come out of a research university - which is the case for just about everyone looking for a teaching job.

I'll add that there might be more jobs out there than "Alyssa" knows about, because many teaching jobs are simply not advertised in the same place as research jobs.

I'm going to try again to comment on GMP's sited, but one reason I didn't comment on the IHE version of the article is that I don't like to dump a bunch of self-serving links on their site. But I have no problem doing that here. All of my articles related to jobs (some clearly about physics, but others not at all) can be found in this link summary. In addition to the two mentioned above, I think this one (linking to an IHE career advice column by a female mechanical engineer) is really good for R1 jobs because that article makes many strong points, including one about presenting your case so the inevitable holes are less visible. On the teaching side, this one riffs off of a great article by Dr. Crazy (showing that teaching Physics and English can have something in common) and makes the point about keeping useful records.

Good record keeping, meaning a good process, is essential if you want to document all of the service you have done. No one can do that for you. I use a small calendar whose sole purpose is to document "odd ball" stuff that has to go in my annual evaluation -- and I already have tenure.

Passing one class, failing the next

2010-06-22T20:23:00.009-04:00

Dean Dad always has great, thought-provoking blog posts, but today's blog rates a double comment.

First, it really shows the importance of having academic leadership (Dean, Provost) at a CC come out of the ranks of teaching faculty at a CC or comparable institution. (The key issues are different at a research intensive university, but the same principle applies there precisely because the key issues are different.) If Dean Dad the Professor had not had dealt with the question of a perceived conflict between passing rates in a given course and weak students who pass that course, Dean Dad the Dean might not have identified the middle ground he so succinctly describes in his blog.

Second, it identifies what I think is a key issue at any college: getting across the idea that prerequisites have real significance. As you can tell if you follow that link, I've written a lot on the subject. A couple years ago we (meaning my blog readers and I) came to conclusion that COLLEGE-LEVEL BASICS is a better term to use when describing pre-req skills. I have started using it, and have found it a helpful way to get the idea across to the upper level students taking calc-based physics, students who don't think of calculus as a basic skill.

I already posted some comments on the blog article itself under my nom-de-comment of CCPhysicist. My main observation is that the best way to define appropriately high standards for a course is by making it your objective that they leave one course prepared to pass the NEXT one.

IMHO, this is partly a matter of setting high standards from the first day of class and partly a matter of conveying (that is, getting them to absorb into their core beliefs) the radical idea that specific parts of the new and challenging material in my course are actually basic skills. Indeed, I think this second part is more important than the first.

Why?

One of the things we (meaning me and my colleagues who teach calculus and trig) talk about regularly is the fact that we all know that certain students knew skill "X" when they passed the previous class - including my own - and forget it within a month. We have to do our best to ensure that we each know that such regular occurrences are not the fault of the instructor, since we can't evaluate what happens a month later, and yet work on ways to reduce how often those situations occur. When I have control, like when students from my own Physics 1 class don't remember to draw a free-body diagram in Physics 2, I make it clear that the failure is completely unacceptable. That if they keep up that practice, they will be laughed at as "community college losers" when they get to engineering school.

(Now, I happen to know - from my graduates - that it is far more common that the university students are the ones who show up with heads empty of knowledge that they paid thousands of dollars to allegedly learn, but that is only because the ones who come back and visit didn't screw up less than a month after taking Physics 1. They learned it the first time. I'm working on getting some of them to talk to my class early in the semester. Students listen to other students more than they listen to us.)

It is not an easy battle. It has to be fought anew every semester. I have learned to make it a habit to mention where some skill will be used in a course next year. I have made it my mission to learn where those places are, by visiting my former students at nearby Wannabe Flagship. I share what I learn with my math colleagues. (What calculus did you use last semester?) Now that summer is here, I plan to head over there in my spare time. The people who teach physics at Wannabe Flagship are much closer than I am, but I doubt if they ever see their students again. They are rewarded for that. Well, neither am I (there are no performance bonuses in our pay system), but I get my reward every time I see the success of students who started out at our CC, particularly the ones who started out a year or more behind the kids at Wannabe Flagship, sometimes in developmental classes.

So, if someone at a university is reading this, visit a different building once in a while and talk about teaching rather than research or university politics. Find out what your students didn't retain, and share what theirs didn't retain. It can't be about blame. I've seen cases where you can document that a student did it perfectly on a final exam one week and could do nothing on the same problem a month later. Heck, I've done it. But only once. One thing I tell my students is to pay attention when they see something a second time. If you don't remember it, make sure you learn it permanently the second time. Anything that gets used in two classes is likely to be used in all of the rest.

To conclude, I want to draw on an example from the comments on Dean Dad's blog. Anonymous wrote at 10:30 AM:

the blame falls to the students for their own inability to learn the course material. They had me, a book, and any previous experience to fall back on (including Comp I and possibly II). Some students do not want to rise to any level that requires work.

The last statement is true, but that might not be the problem. Talk to the person who taught Comp I to a particular student. (At our CC, this is easy to look up but YMMV.) Or ask other students what they did in a particular Comp I class. It could be that the reason they can't "craft a thesis statement and defend it with evidence" is that this was not part of their class. Or it could be that they had learned in HS that each class will teach that skill all over again if it is needed, so there is no reason to learn it. That other teacher might not be able to solve the problem either, but together the two of you might effect a change for the better by the time they take a third class. At some point they need to learn we teach certain things for a good reason.

Or you might learn that the Comp 1 prof used oral presentations in class as a substitute for written work. Ah, the stories students tell other students when they think professors are invisible and deaf ...

Summer Classes

2010-06-21T17:44:00.003-04:00

I've been busy commenting on my fave blogs for the last few months rather than post here, but it is time to correct that oversight.

There was a great question, about teaching summer classes, posted Saturday in the unbalanced reaction blog:

Some of my colleagues complained nearly nonstop through the first summer term. I wonder, is summer teaching REALLY that bad?

No, but it is different. To elaborate on my comments on that blog, I'll start by saying that I just got done teaching the first half of summer here at good old Ishkabibble Community College, and it went well. I didn't quite match the overall success rate of some past summers, because more than 15% withdrew, but everyone who took the final exam got a passing grade in Gen-Ed Science. My success rate in summer is higher than it has been when I taught the class in a regular semester, and higher than the norm for this particular class. Which is not to say that it is actually easier in the summer, just that teaching can be more effective in a short semester. And a few even learned something.

The key?

This wasn't my first summer rodeo, so I started the semester off with a WARNING, some lecture material, a bit of active learning, some demonstrations, and a homework assignment. I gave them two days to do the homework, not because I am a softy, but because students could still add on the second day. I wanted to be able to treat them fairly without having to keep track of exceptions.

The warning is crucial. I share it with new faculty at this CC, just as it was shared with me, although the first time I taught in summer I didn't have enough experience to make the warning as effective as it is now.

I don't pull any punches, but I also don't lecture. Once everyone is settled in and has turned in the information sheets that tell me what I have to work with, I outline the high points of the schedule, and get down to business. I put the course calendar up on the projector and ask a simple question: Who has taken a class in the summer before? (Oh oh, only a few hands went up. If none go up, you have to make the sale on your own.) I ask the rhetorical question "Summer classes go pretty fast, don't they?". Or maybe I snark it with a touch of irony, saying something about how slow and easy they are. Either way, I get a dialog going with the experienced students, and let them warn the others.

That done, I point out that every two class days is like a regular week. Every week is like two and a half regular weeks. If we read two chapters a week in a regular semester, we read five of them in the summer. If we had an exam every 4 weeks or so in a regular semester, we have one every 1 1/2 weeks in the summer. If you normally do about 3 or 4 (rather than the expected 6) hours of homework a week for a regular class, you need to do 8 to 10 (and maybe 12) hours in a summer semester.

It's like drinking from a fire hose.

So what, you ask, makes it easier? The intensity. The final exam is only about a month after the first exam, and only a few weeks after the midterm. Less time to forget. If you review the stuff you missed when you get each exam back, you are halfway to doing really well on the final exam. For most classes, students do less well on a comprehensive final than on the hour exams. In summer, most do better than their exam average would predict, and some do a LOT better.

There weren't as many examples this summer as in the past, but I had one student fight the good fight and go from a low C - high D to a solid B after the final exam. Best of all, none went down.

There are other things I do differently. Like Unbalanced, my summer class is small. I take the time to give them a full grade estimate (exam plus homework) after the first exam rather than wait for the midterm. I point out how the homework partly makes up for low exam scores and remind them that the final exam is just 4 weeks away so they should review right now to be sure they can get those same questions right if they show up on the final. There is an element of coaching involved to keep them motivated in a class as challenging as mine is.

A few closing thoughts.

Some colleagues complained. Yep. Some of mine do, too. (I try to stay away from the ones who always complain. Bad vibes are infectious.) SOME. The others make it work. Talk to the happy ones more than the Complainers, although it never hurts to ask the Complainers what, specifically, the Snowflakes were up to. Your students are different from mine. Mine have jobs and kids, and one texts so much that she had 3 traffic accidents during the semester, but they are generally VERY motivated.

Your class is "just" over 2 hours long? Now I have no doubt that YOU are ready to handle it, but don't assume that they are. (Ours are only 80 minutes, about the length of a normal Tues-Thurs class.) I'd treat it like two classes. Or five or six, since I never stick with any single style for more than 20 or so minutes. Ask yourself, how long before you zone out in a faculty meeting? That would be about the time that you add NaOH to Al foil, trap the H2 in a balloon, and see what happens when you put the balloon near a candle. Then have them work out the reaction at their desks while you circulate to coach them when they get stuck.

Also, even if the class looks like it is long enough to have lots of spare time, you don't have any time to waste. Add them up to be sure, but you probably don't have any more (and might have fewer) minutes in the summer than in a regular semester. You also have to figure out how to handle exams so you don't blow off any of those valuable minutes. Students like to walk in and write an exam, but they hate to come back after it is over. One solution is to work the exam right after they take it, but some might find that depressing since they don't know they will get partial credit for their silly errors.

Finally, use the fact that the class is small to work on any teaching techniques you tend to avoid in a larger class. Work one example like you normally would, then start the next one and have them finish it, then have them try the last one themselves. What I do is wait a few minutes and then wander around, telling people when they have the first step right (or wrong) and giving individual or group hints - or have the ones who have finished give a pointer to the entire class.

Tea Partiers are Insane

2010-04-15T21:16:00.002-04:00

Either that or they are utterly innumerate or so blinded by racism that they can't tell the difference between the number 12 and the number 10.

Our taxes went down a lot this year compared to last, with almost no change at all in our income level and without benefiting from any of the "special" tax cuts in the ARRA plan (sales tax on a new vehicle or downpayment on a new house).

How much?

Most years I calculate an effective tax rate by dividing the income taxes due by the total income (bottom line on the front page of form 1040). It gives a sense of what my "flat rate" tax would be if income was taxed in the same way the FICA tax is figured. The result?

Last year we paid almost 12.4 % of our income in "income tax", while this year we paid less than 10.9 %. That is more than a 10% drop in our taxes whether you figure it from the percentages or the actual dollars paid. So I say "Thank you Pres. Obama, Sen. Reid, and Rep. Pelosi for cutting my taxes" even though we make well over the median family income for our area.

What didn't go down? We still pay (between out of my pocket and out of the pocket my employer pays me from) over 15% in FICA and Medicare taxes, a rate far higher than our income tax rate. Further, we pay (again between out of pocket and out of employer's pocket) about 12% for health insurance, even before you total up co-pays, which is a bit more than we pay in income taxes.

Conclusion:
Between Social Security taxes, Health "taxes", and Income taxes, our income tax rate is the lowest of the three. (Our state and local taxes are much smaller than any of those three.) Given our income bracket, this should also be true for more than half of the US population.

Lasers and Art

2010-02-28T13:41:00.002-05:00

Interesting story about using lasers to clean artwork from the BBC this weekend.

This application (and its cousin, removing tattoos) didn't make it into Chad's laser smackdown, but it is an interesting combination of applied physics and chemistry.

What was interesting to me was that they have had to design lasers with the specific frequency needed so the energy gets deposited in the grime rather than the paint of the frescoes they are using it on, and also research the duration of the pulse so the damage is limited to the undesirable material and not the pigments or surface coating on the wall.

What struck me as really clever was using a laser underwater to do in situ cleaning of a coin in a shipwreck. It must be really useful to identify the value of an archaeological site without having to excavate a found object and bring it back to the lab.

PhD Comics goes surreal

2010-02-14T11:35:00.004-05:00

Surreal, or real?

From the latest installment (Cecilia in Thesisland, Part 6) of an ongoing series by Jorge Cham's cartoon blog Piled Higher & Deeper, we find

Click on the image or the link above to go to the full cartoon.

What a wonderful combination of the reality of dealing with teaching duties while working on your dissertation and the daily reality of dealing with undergrads!

Well, not my daily reality. This (and the even better situations in other panels) only happens because other faculty send the message early and often that they will give credit where it is not due. It doesn't take long before students realize you mean every word in the syllabus, particularly if you give a quiz on the first day of class that asks them to find the place in the syllabus where you say how they can earn extra credit in the class.

Sure you can go to that wedding. That invitation will explain why you missed the first (and easiest) test of the year and will have to use that zero as the one exam you get to drop, but a wedding does not excuse you from having to learn the material.

Laser fusion milestone

2010-01-30T23:08:00.003-05:00

What better way to mark the 50th anniversary year of the laser than by producing a 669 kJ laser pulse (reported in Science), and then following that up with a 1 MJ pulse? (See BBC News article.)

Maybe getting it over the 1.2 MJ threshold and observing ignition of controlled thermonuclear fusion? This year?

They claim that it can be done this year, even though they did these initial experiments without the neutron shielding in place that is needed before doing that experiment because of the energetic neutrons that are produced by the d-t fusion reaction.

An algebra problem

2010-01-30T18:29:00.007-05:00

A story from the tutoring room, where I encountered a student taking first semester chemistry for science majors who was struggling with a simple density problem.

(Why they teach complicated algebra problems before they teach any chemistry is a mystery to me, but I no longer remember what pedagogy my chemistry classes followed.)

Given that our chemistry class has college algebra as a prerequisite, I think the problem itself is instructive.

After a significant amount of prompting on an easier problem, the student was able to get all of the given data for this problem into the appropriate chem-SI units of g and cm. This left something like the following problem, except written as a fraction:

2.705 = 276/(30.48 * 1219.2 * X)

Solve for X.

The student was,it appeared, utterly helpless when faced with all of those numbers.

My suggestion that he cross multiply the X and 2.705 met the sort of look I would expect if I had said it in Japanese. OK, clear fractions? Still no luck. I don't think he saw this as a fraction. Multiply both sides by X? Ah, progress. Now he could compute the right side and solve 2.705*X = Number. Just to check, I asked him about

5 = 7/(3*X)

No problem there, although slow as molasses doing it.

When I started telling this story to a chemistry colleague, she starting laughing so hard that she almost fell out of her chair before I was halfway through it. She regularly sees this at the start of every semester. Now I know why she says my students aren't like hers. Many (but not all) of the kids who make that kind of mistake are weeded out by pre-calc and trig before they get to me.

When I asked a couple of math colleagues about this problem, I learned that they include problems with "messy" numbers on pre-calc exams, but not in college algebra. They also said they suspect that not all pre-calc classes give messy application problems. So that is why I was not surprised that a student in Becky Hirta's Calculus Circus had trouble with a graph where the answer was not obviously going to come out in simple integer steps.

Footnote:

Two of my physics students messed up a problem essentially as follows:

2.66 = 7.79+3.47*X

2.66/7.79 = 7.79/7.79 + 3.47*X

0.3415 = 3.47*X

To save you the effort, 2.66/7.79 is about 0.3415. Bet you didn't know that 7.79/7.79 was zero!

Yep, that is how at least two of them "canceled" that number that was added on the right. Again, my math colleagues tell me that this sort of error is not uncommon among students entering calculus 1, and that they are more likely to make it with numbers rather than symbols. I have to wonder if they would have subtracted 7.79 if it had been at the end

2.66 = 3.47*X + 7.79

instead of at the beginning....

Engaged Learners

2010-01-17T22:52:00.002-05:00

I don't have a label for students? Well, I do now. (I'm not going to file it under peeves because it doesn't peeve me.)

Regular readers know that Rudbeckia Hirta is the wind beneath my wings at the start of most semesters. Like today, where she tells me her university has FOUR different kinds of "undecided" majors, going all the way down to "completely undecided". I smile just thinking of that student wandering aimlessly through academia.

But I digress. This post is about starting your homework, well, a bit late.

You see, I have some quasi-administrative duties that put me in charge of dealing with student problems with a homework system during times our college doesn't have anyone handling user support. So what do I see in my inbox this weekend, which is the second weekend of the semester, but 3 (count them, three) problems getting into the system. Haven't gotten one of those for days, and now three of them.

Does this sound like either this problem or this one from RH? Well, it would if we had started class this week, but we didn't. We started the week before, so it takes a special level of engagement to wait until the Sunday before the homework is due to see if you know how to get in.

Disengaged engagement, I would say.

Reading those e-mails after reading RH's blog was like deja vu all over again.

My students, of course, have homework due right away (like RH, on the Friday of the first week of class for a Wednesday start). I find that if you coddle them with a late start, they don't start. And I make sure the slackers know that the vast majority of their fellow students have done the problems the day before they are due. The instructor for one of the classes involved takes the opposite approach. Not a good idea, but it was useful to see the flaw in that plan confirmed once again. But I do need to talk to him about that.

Like I said up above, I'm not peeved. I'm just an amused spectator like when I read RYS. I'm gambling that these students will never make it to my physics class, but they will get quite a wake-up call on the first day if they do make it there.

Or on the third day, but that is a different story.

Jobs - Redux

2010-01-15T21:07:00.004-05:00

There have been quite a few jobs-related articles on IHE and in the blogs lately that deserve linkage and comment. I'll put those below, after pointing to the jobs category where I group articles I have written in the past. The series started with a pair of articles that looked at the supply side (focus on the cycles we have seen over the past 50 years) and demand side (focus on where the jobs and will be) for physics, but much of what I describe is being lived today by folks in history and humanities.

The biggest difference between physics and the liberal arts area is probably that 2/3 of Physics PhDs have always ended up working in industry, with only a short (but very significant) period when the vast majority went into academia. Significant because it resulted in a faculty that remains woefully ignorant of where most of their students will get jobs.

Now, on to the articles.

1) There is a fantastic article in IHE this week about hiring at two year colleges by an English professor. It is the perfect complement to what I wrote some time ago about getting a job at a CC, and pretty much proves my thesis that science and humanities are looking for the same thing at the CC level. There is a huge overlap between the suggestions in that article and the ones in mine, and both emphasize the difference between applying at a CC and what is expected at other types of colleges and universities.

As he said, you must know what we do and what kind of students we have (particularly if you are going to teach composition or algebra or general education classes) if you hope to have any chance of getting a job at a CC. And I will add that I think one of the comments in that article is from someone totally ignorant of what we look for. Having been an adjunct at a CC is NOT the kiss of death. Quite the opposite. Just as med schools want students who have seen the pukey side of a hospital so they don't quit two years in when they discover they have to spend all of their time with sick people, CCs want to hire people who know exactly what they are going to be dealing with for the next 20 years.

2) There was also an earlier article (Part One on 'The Two-Year Option') where Hurley (an English prof at Diablo Valley College) goes into some detail about why he finds the CC environment such a good fit. Like him, I think I have a terrific job that is quite different from what I thought might be my career goal, and like him I find my students an interesting group.

3) For the back story about the job situation in the humanities, history, etc, check out these articles from IHE: History and English and links therein. To me, this is all deja-vu of the situation my older friends and colleagues faced about 40 years ago, as detailed here. Only they had it worse, because their job odds went from 90% to 1% in just a few years, and stayed very low for a decade. And if you read that article you will know why I find comments about Boomers offensive: that pipeline got blocked by the generation that earned a PhD when the first Boomers graduated from high school and stayed in those R1 faculty jobs for 40 years or more.

I think I left something out, but that will do for now.

UPDATED 16 January:

Thanks to Dr. Crazy's blog about bleak job prospects (which contains links to two other articles on that topic), I know remember that I left out Dean Dad's blog about why undergrads go on to graduate school when the job prospects are so poor.

4) Dean Dad wrote a great analysis saying that it is the loss of a clearly legible path to other careers that leads high achievers to pursue the mostly dead-end path to a PhD in the humanities. I can see that, because there is quite a bit of truth to it even in physics, and physics is a field where there are jobs that clearly use physics even if faculty and career advisers don't know about them. It is much less clear how you would get a job in industry with a history degree than with a physics degree.

5) And read what Dr. Crazy wrote from the English end of the world (linked above, as well as what it looked like to Tenured Radical and Historiann from the history side.

6) Sort of unrelated, sort of related, I just read Malcolm Gladwell's article in the January 18 issue of The New Yorker about entrepreneurs. (Only the abstract is available on-line, but it gives a really good summary of the article.) The thesis (drawn from descriptions of some very successful businessmen that, like Ted Turner, have usually been described as gamblers) is that SUCCESSFUL entrepreneurs go after the sure thing. The unsuccessful ones are the gamblers. Gambling on a faculty position in the humanities at an R1 or Ivy where you teach one small class a year for a six figure salary might fall into the latter category, because even a job at a CC or at a regional comprehensive (what Dr. Crazy describes) is far from a sure thing and FAR from the "life of the mind" those students are gambling on.

I'm really glad my niece did not go to graduate school.

Happy New Year!

2010-01-01T13:48:00.003-05:00

see more deMotivational Posters

Or see the original ones: from Despair, Inc.

I like the one that's new for 2010: Bailouts

But let's not overlook this one or the T shirts for social media and the big bank bailouts.

Uncertain Christmas Gift

2009-12-25T16:52:00.012-05:00

At first, this gift was in a mixed state.

It was clearly a book, and the odds favored it being a particular book, but could we know for sure without opening it?

Ah, now we know for sure ...

It is a GREAT book!

Notes added to correct a major oversight -

Link to the How to teach physics to your dog book web site. (Chad gets an extra cut if orders go through there.)

Here are the two semi-famous blogs that started it all:

Those stories are the basis for two of the chapters. Each chapter starts with a dialog with Emmy, followed by an elaboration on the science behind that idea.

Chad deserves major kudos in my view for including a final chapter that debunks much of the junk that has been written based on pseudo-quantum non-science.

Other material can be found in Chad's general category of Physics with Emmy, but that is mostly about writing (including the story of how he got the book contract) and promoting the book. So you don't have to dig through all of that for the best bits, here is the link to one that includes the slides from a talk he gave, and two movies that deserve special mention:

The Bohr-Einstein Debates, with Puppets (*****)
Quantum Zeno Effect: The Movie (staring Emmy)

The Bohr-Einstein Debate (with puppets) should not be watched while drinking coffee. The choice of character actors is, shall we say, priceless. But it is not just whimsy. As a long-time student of those discussions and owner of a personal library of some of the key books, I think Chad did a very good job selecting what belongs in his little play.

It is almost Christmas ...

2009-12-24T12:02:00.003-05:00

... and it's not really Christmas until we hear dogs barking "Jingle Bells".

It was a sure sign of the approaching holiday when J. P. McCarthy would play that song on WJR.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Bank!

2009-12-22T19:59:00.003-05:00

Bank failures continue. Every week (usually on Friday), the FDIC moves in and takes over a few more failing banks. Most are in trouble because of bad commercial loans. There was one striking example locally where an investor group led by a Realtor bought a 5 million dollar property and couldn't even pay the taxes on it from the rents. It sold for less than half that in foreclosure. Although the bank that lost about three million dollars on that one loan was not in this state, some local banks have made similarly bad decisions.

[Memo to the right wingnuts: There has been no change in the law regarding loans to poor people to encourage home ownership, yet the banks have tightened up their lending practices. That is what mathematicians call a counterexample to the claim that politics rather than greed caused lenders to loan money without checking anything. Another counter example would be where a Swiss bank nagged an owner into refinancing a now-bankrupt resort so they could earn the origination fee.]

So how can you tell if your bank is over extended? How can you find out how many toxic loans it has, or how many bank-owned properties it owns? Easy:

An MSNBC story provided a nice, color coded map showing the extent of the problem on a state-by-state basis with links to a separate "bank tracker" site. The main article only does banks, but if you go to the main site you can choose (top of the left column) to look for banks or credit unions as well as their methodology and who has obtained TARP funding.

It is worth a look, although you do have to know where your bank has its headquarters.

What I like is that they show the time dependence of the bad assest ratio in a bar graph, so you can see the trend as well as the raw numbers in a table. For perspective, the reason their bar graphs don't max out when a bank gets to a 100% ratio between troubled assets and capital plus reserves is that the ones that have been taken over can be in the 300% to 600% territory. However, that is not the only metric. I saw one bank where the ratio was just over 100% but they had been losing over a hundred million dollars a quarter for a year.

I was glad to see that our banks and our credit union are in reasonable shape. One has a ratio around 40%, but it has been stable for most of the year and they are still making a profit. Not so for another local bank, which has advertised how helpful it is to local businesses. Their ratio has been going up by leaps and bounds, hitting 100% last quarter along with a large negative profit. I wouldn't buy any stock in that one!

And always remember: the cap on FDIC insurance applies to the sum of all of the accounts in your name, not each account.

Lazy American Students?

2009-12-22T18:39:00.002-05:00

There is an interesting "quick take" in IHE today asking the rhetorical question Do American Students Bring Down the Curve? based on an opinion column in The Boston Globe that answers it in the affirmative.

First, it is important to realize that this is the opinion of one instructor, and even she does not claim that all low grades go to Americans (which make up 80% of the undergrad population at her private business college) or that none of the A grades go to Americans. But, from where I teach (at a CC), I think she has it all wrong. She has a problem with Snowflakes, not Americans. Let us start with where she teaches, then look at what she might not be doing where she teaches.

The college:

She teaches at Babson College. Yeah, I had to look it up, although I suspect Bostonians would be aware of it. This is a small (the entire freshman class of 471 would fit easily in one half of the dorm I lived in at Enormous State University, with space enough for half to have private rooms) expensive private college ($37,824 for tuition plus $12,500 for room and board) that is basically devoted to business majors. [Aside: that room and board rate is almost twice what it is at Enormous State, so they probably do all have private rooms.]

They look selective (471 enroll out of 4100 applications), but their middle-50 on the SAT (1830 to 2070, meaning 610 to 690 on each part) puts about a quarter of their freshman class below the "aptitude" of most of my 2nd year CC students and in a range where we would likely be requiring remedial math or english classes. A bit over 20% are international students.

(These details are from their official facts page. Purely by accident, I saw an article in a November "Business Week" that ranked them highly for custom executive business education programs.)

Definitely "snowflake" territory. Many of the American students are probably Wannabe Trumps with well off (if not wealthy) parents and got by with minimal effort in suburban schools where you get a bonus point toward your GPA just for taking what is called an honors class. [Schools where a 4.0 is the new 3.0 average.] In that environment, the mere fact that the college gives out C, D, and F grades in a freshman composition or history class is probably a shock. I'll admit that I am shocked that grades like that are tolerated by a student-centered retention program where one mid-year drop out costs the college $25,000!

To continue my generalization, they have probably never had to work for a living, and might never have held a job. They know they want to be business men or women, but don't know what skills are used on the job.

I can definitely see how one tail of the distribution in her class might be made up of the 25% who combine mediocre skills from high school with poor motivation.

The teaching:

My thoughts here are driven by an observation I posted just the other day on FSP's blog in a discussion about why tenured professors should care about what is in student evaluations of teaching. My comment concerned a favorite student observation of decades past: An engineering major stated that ze hated physics and couldn't understand why ze had to take it. What did I learn? That one thing I need to teach real early in the course is why it is required for engineering majors! Turns out lots of them don't know why because they don't know what engineers actually do. This student probably would believe that something taught in an engineering class was relevant to a career, but didn't get the concept of prerequisites so everything else was just a speed bump that got in the way of what they thought they needed to study.

I'd be willing to guess that the problem is even bigger with rhetoric classes. Now Babson College knows it is relevant, but do the students?

Here is a key remark from Babson's About page that might put this in perspective:

The undergraduate curriculum integrates core competencies, key business disciplines, and the liberal arts into foundation, intermediate, and advanced-level courses. The competencies are rhetoric; quantitative and information analysis; entrepreneurial and creative thinking; ethics and social responsibility; global and multicultural perspectives; and leadership and teamwork; and critical and integrative thinking.

Notice that reference to "rhetoric", the subject taught by the author of this opinion piece?

[Side comment: I like the word FOUNDATION as a synonym for prerequisite, although I'll stick with BASIC for some of my applications. It sends the right message for engineering, in particular.]

I would hope something this basic to the learning goals of the college was part of their orientation. Of course, if those kids were busy updating Facebook (which might rival drinking as a reason for failing out of college) during orientation, they might have missed it so it needs to be said in every class, and not just on the first day. "Today we are working on the foundation for the report-writing skills refined in Business 301, skills that will get you that first big promotion." And I would hope that the teachers in their freshman business class refer to the importance of rhetoric just as I point to specific math skills they will learn later on and apply (along with physics) in more advanced engineering classes.

We all have to signal the importance of the whole of what they are learning if we expect them to retain the parts that really matter.

Happy Solstice!

2009-12-21T20:17:00.002-05:00

I've been pretty silent here, so should interject something.

The solstice this year was just after mid day, so the sun was at its highest point when it reached its lowest point (relatively speaking) in the southern sky.

Elsewhere ...

The topic of teaching evaluations and improving teaching at Female Science Prof's blog might be a jumping off point, but I'm not quite ready for spring semester yet. When I am, I might also pick up a few other loose threads, like math education.

Torque and Angular Momentum

2009-12-05T13:10:00.003-05:00

Rhett Allain has a very nice blog post about angular momentum featuring the precession of a bicycle-wheel gyroscope that he demonstrates here:

I find wearing a long-sleeve shirt with shorts to be an interesting touch.

In addition to my comment on his blog, I'll add the following about how I introduce it in my classes:

Based on experience as a student and an instructor, I think it is usually best to present the prediction before doing the experiment. However, in this case I generally interleave the two.

As with most intro textbooks, mine packages angular momentum along with the cross product definition of torque in its own section so it is easy to omit completely. I integrate tau=rxF into my initial introduction of torque and the various ways of calculating it, but then stick with tau = I*alpha until I get to L.

As soon as I introduce L, I go into the generalized second law as tau = dL/dt (pretty much the way we jump from F = ma to F = dp/dt once momentum is defined). After connecting this to tau = I*alpha, I then ask "So don't you wonder if that cross product in the definition of torque is real? Is torque really perpendicular to the force?".

Then I do the demo, quickly, just enough to see the rotation.

WTF? At this point I do the detailed calculation, exactly as shown in Rhett's blog, and then REPEAT the demo. This time, however, I slip an "L" arrow onto the handle so they can see it precess.

What if I hold it by the opposite handle? What is tau now? Aha, it goes the other way!

What if L = 0? Ah, so "falling" is actually rotation in this case.

... and finally ...

What force keeps the center of mass from falling with L is not zero?

The string! Now if I could only measure the force on the string during the demo with L not zero and compare it to the force when L is zero ....

But to summarize: In this case I think they need to see a taste of the phenomenon to understand why I would bother with such a detailed calculation. It also means that I end up doing the demo itself several times, and I use the wheel with the L arrow on it when doing the drawings, since they are not yet experienced at getting a 3-D image out of two projective views. Few have had a drafting class or Calc III.

Historic papers available on line

2009-11-29T23:06:00.002-05:00

The Royal Society has put 60 historic papers on line for free public access. It is available here.

Franklin's paper about his experiments with lightning and Newton's with color components in white light appear to be well worth a visit.

Must read!

2009-11-17T20:25:00.002-05:00

Check out the new PHD Comics offering: Buzzwords!

This clearly shows the evolving importance of various research topics. By the way, a big part of the "Carbon" peak would be due to the "nano" peak: Carbon Nanotubes.

Also, anyone from my generation has to be amused to see "blog" passing "postmodern" in the post-postmodern era.

Return to The Village!

2009-11-14T14:55:00.002-05:00

The Prisoner returns on Sunday on AMC.

Can it match what Patrick McGoohan created (all of the old episodes are available) back in 1967?

Only time will tell, but I rather like the updated version of The Village, with what look like the twin towers in the background. It has that ticky-tacky ersatz village feel one can see in the real town of Seaside, where "The Truman Show" was filmed.

It might also help that they pulled it into just 6 episodes. The original was a bit much for the casual viewer!

Now something for Sherman Dorn ...

2009-11-05T23:46:00.002-05:00

Time to post something amusing about educational outcomes and testing.

The british are complaining that math exams are getting easier while a separate article looked at how science exams were being dumbed down. The latter is particularly interesting because they slipped some 50 year old questions in among contemporary ones on a chemistry exam. This classic bit of exam norming was a real wakeup call.

But the best part?

Both articles contain links to old exam questions!

One of the conclusions in the article was not too surprising to me. "Experts who have been looking at the results concluded that students today are required to do fewer complex calculations." Less critical thinking has been the norm, but I think that statement is true even for my exams today compared to some I still have from the past. I am more likely to ask easily graded pieces of a problem rather than a complex problem where a class of 50 students might come up with 35 different answers resulting from 20 different mistakes. However, my exams today are getting harder as I find ways to challenge them while still being able to grade the problems in a reasonable time.

Upcoming unemployment data

2009-11-05T23:12:00.003-05:00

The lead in this article says "unemployment could crack 10%. I have little doubt of that, because passing an inflection point in unemployment only means we are on our way to a turn around, not that we are there already. I'd be surprised if monthly unemployment numbers for this depression fail to reach 10%, and not too surprised if they surpass those for the worst recession in my memory -- which was 10.8% (quarterly average of 10.7%) in late 1982.

Why?

The change in the slope seen between my first post on the subject in June and my most recent post in October is indicative of a turnover, but there are indicators that it will coast upward for a few more months.

As another recent article put it, the pace of layoffs is slowing ... which means there are still layoffs and that means unemployment is still growing. The weekly claims are falling -- but are still high at 500,000. As currently shown on this page, where the employment and unemployment numbers will appear on Friday, job cuts peaked in January (the inflection point?) but we are still losing jobs.

Except for changes as people drop off of the unemployment rolls, which becomes less likely as Congress again funds an extension of unemployment benefits, we need to see job growth -- not just jobs saved -- before the unemployment rate turns around.

That is bad news for the new Republican governor of NJ, who is clearly hoping that an Obama recovery will make it possible for him to cut taxes, eliminate an 8 billion dollar deficit, and balance his budget without draconian cuts in education, medical care for elderly in nursing homes, and public safety.

Ten Twelve

2009-10-12T08:06:00.006-04:00

Today is the ninth anniversary of 10/12.

Lots of people commented on 9/11, including myself and some other bloggers I follow, echoing the media emphasis on that important and memorable event. But the media gets it wrong when they assert that it was Al Qaeda's second attack on US territory. It was the fourth. And it says something sad about us as a nation that we give more importance to an attack on a civilian office building than one that left dozens of our servicemen either killed or wounded.

I am, of course, talking primarily about the attack on the USS Cole on 10/12/2000, which killed 17 sailors and left 39 others wounded. (The other event I allude to was "8/7", the attack on two US embassies on 8/7/1998. Embassies, like US flagged military vessels, are considered sovereign US territory.) Al Qaeda's first attack on the World Trade Center was not viewed as an act of war. Oddly, even their attack on a US naval warship was not viewed as an act of war. Even more oddly, it was their second attack on the World Trade Center -- not the simultaneous attack on the Pentagon and/or the White House and probably the Capitol -- that got recognized as an act of war.

This attack on our warship is so far off of our cultural radar that, when I alluded to this event on Dean Dad's blog last week, even my reference to "naval warships" left him scratching his head about 10/12, thinking I was talking about Hitler rather than Japan. No, I was not talking about Japan invading China or Germany invading Poland or France. I was talking about Japan attacking US Navy ships while in port at what was then US colonial territory (Hawaii) as well as on the seas in and around another US colony (the Philippines). Al Qaeda attacked a US Navy warship visiting a port in Yemen, almost a full year before it attacked the Pentagon. Both attacks on naval vessels provided an abundantly clear indication that they were at war with us, whether we liked it or not. Some might argue that both were wars of "choice", we could have chosen to let Japan control the Pacific as its own private lake and we could have disengaged completely from the middle east (including Saudi Arabia and Israel), but neither were likely choices for us to make.

Al Qaeda's timing was perfectly bad, by the way.

They hit a pair of embassies in the summer of 1998, when the US was totally preoccupied with a sex scandal and the subsequent impeachment of the President. The Clinton administration, weakened as it was by those events, seemed to view it as an isolated act of terror rather than part of a growing campaign against the US. That view seemed to be shared by the professionals in the DoD and CIA, as reflected in the refusal to attack bin Laden when we had him in our sights.

They hit the USS Cole in the late stages of the 2000 Presidential campaign, and the information about the connections to Al Qaeda were developed during the interregnum period that included a delayed handover because of the contentious recount in Florida. The report of the 9/11 Commission makes it pretty clear that the Clinton administration, having been unable to get the CIA and DoD to attack bin Laden himself for previous acts of war, did not even try to push that point during its last weeks in office. It also makes it very clear that the Bush administration seemed to think that those were attacks on the Clinton administration rather than on the United States, blowing off the new information developed in December and January by the FBI and others.

Forgetting the USS Cole seems typical of the way we have, as a nation, downplayed the significance of the war against Al Qaeda in response to its war against us. We had 8 years of the Bush administration talking about how much it cares about US servicemen, yet they did nothing when 17 of them were killed by Al Qaeda and continued to do nothing when reports surfaced that the same people were planning more of the same. When they complained that Oh, we didn't think they would attack the US, all I could think was What do you think a ship flying the US flag is, if not part of the US? Did Bush and Cheney really think it would be no big deal if Al Qaeda sunk more ships?

The people questioning the war in Afghanistan need to remember that there is at least one target on their list that they haven't hit yet, the Capitol, and that past history says they will not rest until they carry out their plans ... unless we stop them first. We need to remember 10/12, or 9/11 won't be the last we hear from Al Qaeda.

Breaking Even

2009-10-11T18:32:00.003-04:00

Two recent articles got me wondering about college economics when facing tight budget years, a news story in IHE about San Joaquin Delta College, pointed to by Dean Dad, and an off-hand comment by Dean Dad claiming "My cc loses money on every student."

This, and much of the discussion about Delta, made no sense to me at first.

How can you lose money by enrolling more students?

Then I discovered that Delta College only gets $26 per credit hour in tuition (in a semester system)! Mind bogglingly low. Almost free! Based on that, I could begin to believe statements like the one Dean Dad made. Nonetheless, that funding system is so alien to me that it is no wonder that people can make blanket comments that look like total nonsense to educators in one state while seeming quite reasonable to those in another state or region. At my CC, we profit from extra students and take a serious private-college-like approach to attracting and retaining those extra students.

Why the difference between Dean Dad's school and ours?

Well, I don't actually know if there is a difference - because Dean Dad has never produced even a crude outline of his college's income structure within something like the normalized college budget I suggested and then modeled with a sample budget for my CC. However, I do know what is going on at Delta College:

Out of every 10.0 million dollars in the budget, they get 5.9 million from the state, 2.7 from local property taxes, 0.5 from tuition, and the other 0.9 from a variety of sources that includes 0.5 from the federal government. Compare that to our budget: 5.9 from the state, 3.9 from tuition, and 0.2 from other sources.

That explains quite a lot!

I won't give our specific tuition level, but suffice it to say that it is more than twice what Delta students pay. Based on what I can discern from obscure collective bargaining documents, their full-time faculty are paid quite a bit more than ours are (but not enough to make up for the housing differences) while their adjuncts make somewhat more (but not much more) than ours do. The faculty salaries explain the very high classroom body counts, but those are sunk costs that are (like ours) covered by state funds. They don't impact the cost of adding an extra 100 students to the college's enrollment.

What does matter is the ratio between adjunct pay and tuition. If we have to add a section, our tuition appears to more than pay for the adjunct's salary once we get 12 to 15 students enrolled. (I don't know what other per-class costs, such as copying exams and the like, add up to. I do know that FICA and Medicare adds almost 10% to it, however.) My guess is that Delta needs more than 32, getting close to their normal load of 39, to break even on salary for a typical adjunct. But that is just salary! Add in FICA and other direct costs, and they lose money even with a full class. Working on the margin, when you might open a class with only 20 students during the last week of registration, they lose money and we profit.

Worse, their state income is set by enrollment but capped at a fixed value. That means they can get less but can never get more. Our state funds are based on a far more predictable formula.

PS -
If you are interested in some data related to the rising cost of tuition vis-a-vis state funding, you might look at this old article based on actual data for an R1 university. It is only one story of many, but it shows that very little of the growth in tuition (only $1500 of the $7000 increase) is due to reduced state funding (in constant current dollars).

Unemployment Inflection Point?

2009-10-10T21:19:00.005-04:00

The September unemployment data bring to a close another "quarter", so we now have an additional data point to compare to the naive projections made back when the incoming administration was hoping this was going to be a recession rather than the depression (four quarters of negative GDP growth) it turned out to be. [I figure "The Mortgage Panic of 2008" will make a good name for the triggering event.]

With that point, the inflection point is much clearer:

Click on the image to enlarge it significantly.

I emphasize the quarterly average because that was what was used in the original predictions, but also because it smooths out the noise in the monthly data.

The monthly data are still very noisy, but the break away from the rapid and accelerating ascent that had started a year earlier is much clearer now than it was just three months ago. The green and pink lines are explained below. [*] The noise is probably a result of the unseasonable timing of various things, whether it is the stimulus of car sales in what is normally an off season for car sales or the layoffs of teachers in the fall when they would normally be hired.

Unemployment is still going up, just not as fast as it had been. It is starting to turn over, but it doesn't look like it has turned over. It will go up a lot more when people re-enter the work force once they see jobs appear.

But the good news from this end is that I have finally seen an actual stimulus-funded construction project putting people to work. (I saw a lot more in another state, one that must have had a lot of projects ready to go, while traveling recently.) It just got started, so the stimulus effects are running about 8 months behind the starting point for that program.

Time will tell if it is enough.

As to which prediction curve applies, well, that would require correcting them so they follow the Q1 2009 data point rather than the optimistic estimate used back in late December of 2008.

[*]
The green and pink lines were described in detail elsewhere in the "Predictions" section.

The green line is a straight-line extrapolation (zero curvature) based on Q3 2008 and Q4 2008. It shows that the original blue predictions of the transition team assumed a recovery was already in progress by Q1 2009.

The pink lines are a pair of extrapolations from the actual Q1 2009 data point and the Q4 2008 point. The lower line is a straight line extrapolation (zero curvature), while the higher one assumes a continuation of the acceleration of job loss (positive curvature) that took place in the previous quarters of 2008.

Genius!

2009-09-23T08:26:00.002-04:00

Tagging this as "music" is a bit of a stretch, but ...

... this morning the folks on Squawk Box on MSNBC used a mashup of the now legendary Animal Orchesra with "We're All Water" by the Plastic Ono Band to lead in their "stocks to watch" segment at 7:55 AM today.

It was done so the Animal Orchestra clip led into Yoko Ono screaming. This was genius, because it was quite clear that a trio of beluga whales accompanied by a pair of walruses playing horns was more melodious than Yoko's truly avant-garde sound.

Equinox

2009-09-22T20:59:00.002-04:00

Today is the Autumnal (fall) Equinox, one of two days when you can tell for sure if a street you drive in the morning or evening runs due East or West! The sun is aligned with the equator today, so it truly rises in the East and sets in the West. From now on the sun will be heading south for the winter.

The equinox also has another little appreciated property: it marks the end of the day at the North pole and the dawn of a new (year-long) day at the south pole. The sun only rises and sets once a year at the poles.

It is also a day when it is easy to tell just how far off your current time (daylight savings here) is off from local "sun" time. The day is exactly 12 hours long, so sunrise and sunset should be at 6 AM and 6 PM (plus or minus some minor corrections because the Earth's orbit is elliptical rather than circular, causing the sun to appear to run fast or slow at various times of the year). If they aren't (and ours isn't even close), you can see how far your daylight has been shifted by the offset of most time zones plus daylight "savings" time.

In other news, today was also the first time I heard a Christmas Tune in a TV ad. The offender was Royal Caribbean. Definitely a sign of hard times if they are pushing holiday tours right now. On the other hand, I have seen two major signs of commercial improvement: the return of catalogs in the mail (although none of them are of the Christmas or Holiday variety), and the return of multiple pages of ads between the cover of The New Yorker and the table of contents. That mag was getting to be as thin as a local newspaper.

Reflections on Eight Years Ago

2009-09-11T19:27:00.001-04:00

Looking back at 11 September 2001.

What stands out in my mind was the first anomaly that hinted that something was going on. We had not had the TV on, so I had no idea anything had happened as I headed into campus just before 9 (between the two attacks on the World Trade Center). As usual, I turned on the computer ... but it simply would not boot up properly. It was taking forever to load various shared applications off of a network server. Forever, meaning something like 15 minutes to do something that normally took less than 1 minute.

Was something wrong with the network? Yeah, people all over campus (and one just down the hall) were hammering it trying to get an update from CNN, or other news sites. When I saw what an office neighbor was trying to understand better, I also went to CNN once my machine was up.

Futility.

Just before I had to leave to teach my 10:00 class, I got lucky. I killed a page load to shortcut its failed attempts to load all the advertising crap from akamai, and managed to 2nd click to just load a single news image. Its name actually said all I needed to know: "second plane". You know what it showed.

We were under attack.

So I went and taught my morning class, which was probably a lecture about electrostatic potentials and fields. I don't recall anything about that part of the day, except that most of the students had no idea that anything had happened. (And the studies of 9-11 indicate the government was in a similar state at 10 AM.) When I got back to my office, it was clear we were likely at war. In truth, of course, we had been at war with Al Qaeda for almost a decade but only Al Qaeda was taking it seriously until that day.

The indecision on campus was amazing to see. Are classes cancelled? No. OK. And it was soon time to teach my afternoon class on classical mechanics. That was the hardest class I ever taught. But before getting down to doing physics, I told the class what was on my mind:

That I had a much better idea of how my parents felt when they learned about Pearl Harbor.

And I told them that saying that made me wonder if we would learn the same things about this attack that we now knew about Pearl Harbor -- that we had plenty of evidence that it was coming, and missing it was a failure of intelligence rather than of Intelligence. (I knew all of the details of our code breaking and what had been done with it in late 1942, how our code breakers knew the Japanese were breaking off negotiations before their diplomats did, but that information was so secret that the military could not be told about imminent war and be put on alert.)

Wow, did that turn out to be insightful! But it was just a good guess based on the odds that we had too much excellent data to be able recognize a totally novel method of attack as a real possibility. Novel military tactics have a long history of working really well the first time.

By the time that class was over, it was announced that the rest of that day's classes were canceled. No labs that afternoon. Time to adjust schedules and make it work for the rest of the semester. (One of several cases that tell me I could figure out how to accommodate the disruption of H1N1 if it only led to the closing of campus for a week.) But we were back to normal only in the most limited sense.

The class that started the first semester of physics that Fall of 2001 was different from any of the others I have had. It took quite a while for them to get back in focus, and quite a few lost focus and quit. But the ones that stuck it out were serious about being ready to win that fight as engineers. That was a hard working bunch of students that year.

400

2009-09-07T15:14:00.003-04:00

Ah, that was a nice vacation, getting recharged for the fall while limiting myself to commentary on other blogs. Now it is time to post this, my 400th article, before getting back to some old and new topics.

What I thought I should do is post links to some "feature" articles from the past that I think are fairly timeless in their relevance to the business and pleasure of teaching science (in my case physics) at the college level. Although I might be at a mere CC, the calculus-based physics class I teach to future engineering majors -- with a few physics majors and others wandering in at times -- is the same as it is anywhere except for some elite programs. (I use the level of the class at the top-quartile R1 where I grew up as my reference point, and that seems more than enough for the kids that transfer to Wannabe Flagship.) So here goes ...

Freshman Orientation where I argue for telling new college students some of the huge differences between high school and college. Some of these include the fact that teachers had to pass you in high school, so you were never taught at "your level". Teaching was directed at the bottom 20% that the principal insisted pass the class and the NCLB exit exam.

I didn't mention telling them that they had been lied to when they were told that they were graduating with a high school knowledge of math, a detail touched on in an article about math remediation, but I should have. I actually jumped for joy when Arne Duncan said this weekend (midway down page 6 of the pdf transcript from Sunday, Sept. 6) that "In too many places I think, Bob, we are, honestly, we're lying to children. ... If a child hears they're quote-unquote 'meeting the state standard', that child, that parent, the logical assumption is, they're going to be on track to be successful. But in way too many places around the country ... they are totally inadequately prepared to be successful in higher education. That has to change. We have to stop lying to children." Too bad that did not make the talking-points sound-bite list for newspaper headlines. It got swamped by "The Hinny" (H1N1) and people who don't want other folk's children to be told to study hard, or don't want their own kids to see that the President is Black.

Replace "prerequisite" with "basic", arguing for using a term that freshmen might understand. This followed a nice discussion of some alternatives. I've been trying this, here and there, and I like the results so far. I think it helps to tell a kid that trig is a "basic skill". Now I am waiting for an answer to the question about what basic math errors should be punished unmercifully in pre-calc.

Critical Reading That article is actually toward the end of my comments, but it links back to earlier ones. I continue to experiment with this skill and ways of teaching it (borrowed from the way Dr. Crazy does it in an English literature class) in conjunction with solving physics problems. Reading and readable textbooks were at the top of the list of some comments about college readiness from the viewpoint of someone teaching physics to future engineers.

Jobs, starting from a supply and demand history for physics, this series ends up looking at what it takes to get and keep an academic job. That link is to the lead article in an irregular series that all end up filed under the jobs label. That lead article and the graph is due for an update with more recent data about PhD production, as are some of the others. (The AIP updates its information on this subject annually.) I want to emphasize, for those who read this far, that the advice in Part 5 applies to any job search at a community college. The differences between subject areas is minor compared to research job hunts.

I'll also link to this article (because it points to a nice series by Unbalanced Reaction about taking a Visiting position) and this one (because it points to a great blog by Dr. Crazy about teaching intensive jobs from the 4-year regional university viewpoint).

Retention of learning and of students is probably a focus for the coming year or two. Outcomes assessment is clearly going to be more important in the near future, so we should think hard about what measures our actual goal. Is it the passing rate this year or the passing rate in the next class?

There is probably more I should mention, but that will do for post number 400. OK, maybe I should stick this here at the end:

Community! is starting in less that two weeks. Okay, that is not exactly a rocket science article, and blogging about it probably guarantees that it will turn out to be stereotypical junk, but that "start your life over" bit at the end gives it promise. At minimum, we can use it to laugh at ourselves and how others view us and our students as the week winds down with another episode of "30 Rock".

Ageing Gracefully

2009-08-08T17:36:00.003-04:00

Dr. Crazy recently blogged about her impending birthday, so it is worth noting an interesting article about a study that shows that people get happier as they age.

The main lesson was summed up as follows:

They found older adults generally make the best of the time they have left and have learned to avoid situations that make them feel sad or stressed.

Now there is a good principle to hold in mind as we start a new semester! It also seems to summarize my parent's approach to a long and happy retirement. Some of it certainly results from living through the death of many old and dear friends and family. The start is to spend your time like the valuable capital it is. Don't let someone else spend it for you.

So .... is there someone out there whose goal in life is to annoy you until he gets what he wants (often an unearned grade)? Refuse to play the game. Demanding e-mail? Answer it on a set schedule - your schedule. We can choose to enjoy what we do and make 09-10 a good school year.

I'm ready. Literally and figuratively. I even have my first-week concept picked out, evolved from the old "critical reading" discussions, to see if I can repair the weak foundations they have with setting up problems (starting with reading them, before they show up as problems with actual physics problems. Should be fun for everyone.

The Stimulus is Working

2009-08-05T09:52:00.002-04:00

If all politics is local, so is much of economics. This picture is worth 1000 words.

Thanks to the $8,000 first-time buyer tax credit, the house across the street has sold after being vacant for more than a year. Better yet, the house next to it has also sold after also sitting vacant for more than a year. Both were sold to young, first-time home buyers who could use help with a downpayment but could move quickly because they did not have to sell a house to make the move.

Even better, my parents home finally sold after being empty for about 18 months. It also was bought by a first-time buyer. Like the two cases on our street, the seller cut the price significantly to get rid of the property, having long since moved to another place with its own expenses, so this does not signify any recovery in the price part of the market - but it has meant work for roofers, maintenance people, surveyors, and actual real income for realtors.

Along with one other sale about a block away, all of the properties up for sale in our immediate neighborhood are "gone" - and none of them were converted to rentals. That last part is a double bonus of the stimulus plan. With prices down, people with cash can pick up potential rental properties at a song. (One house on my drive to work went from "sold" to "for rent" in one day, but it is closer to the colleges.) This plan puts an owner in the house, which is a big plus for everyone around us.

So this part of the stimulus bill is working well. The only difference between it and the "cash for clunkers" program is that it isn't using appropriated dollars so there is nothing for the Republicans to complain about yet. It remains to be seen if they will complain about having to subsidize a TAX CUT for new homebuyers in the same way they criticize a rebate for people replacing a 14 mpg truck (SUV) with a 28 mpg car that will cut each individual's demand for foreign oil in half!

Any bets?

A View of America

2009-08-02T13:42:00.003-04:00

There was a very interesting column from BBC World News today. Their American Correspondent is ending an 8-year stay in this country, and writes his thoughts about America, from how we approach buying a home to a rural road in South Carolina to his view that our "anyone can get ahead" worldview is closely tied to our "carelessness" (i.e. lack of a Nanny State). Liberty is, after all, necessary for someone from the lower classes to move into the upper classes even if it also lets parents refuse to treat their child's disease.

I thought the one thing he missed was that the sub-prime mortgage crisis only brought down the rest of the world's economies because they were as greedy as we were (the exception being China, who only buys government paper), and that the housing bubble was not much different from other scams that helped create this country, including ones that brought the first settlers here.

In what is actually a related story, Raul Castro says he is not going to "reform" Cuba into a capitalist country. That's OK, it will become one as soon as the South Florida Cubans get over the fall of THEIR dictator and realize that the fastest way to bring down the Castro system is to let people visit there and spend money. That won't prop up the government, it will destroy it, one iPod at a time.

As Fareed Zakaria puts it in his book on illiberal "democracies", first security, then middle-class incomes, then democracy. China is well on its way down this path, whereas Russia (and the many failed democracies of the post-colonial era of my youth) failed because the people were too poor. That was the most fascinating bit of statistical politics in the entire book. Our isolation of Cuba, originally at the behest of former Batista allies, is keeping the Castro family in power!

Racing Helmets

2009-08-02T12:34:00.004-04:00

The problem is not that of a standard inelastic collision, yet that is the essence of the problem: how to dissipate energy while conserving momentum, and how to reduce the acceleration of the head inside the helmet when the impulse being applied is not under your control. Complicating this is the need to keep the weight of the helmet down so that the helmet itself does not cause injury by increasing the forces on the neck in a crash (the problem that the HANS device helps solve as part of a coordinated systems approach to safety). More on the physics at the bottom of this article.

There is an excellent story on the Formula 1 website about the evolution of racing helmets, driven by the amazing survival of Felipe Massa after being hit in the helmet by a 1 kg spring that came off of Barrichello's car (at a closing speed of about 160 mph), although it doesn't give much credit where it is really due over the history of motorsport. The helmet they show Fangio wearing, which originated for use when playing polo, was similar to the one worn in a key death in the US that started the move toward today's safer helmets.

It was the Sports Car Club of America that was the first to require seat belts in automobile competition (1954), and it was an SCCA member who started the Snell Memorial Foundation in 1957 to provide testing for helmets used for automobile racing after the death of Pete Snell in a racing incident. Their page about the history of the organization and its current activities shows the crash that killed Pete Snell, discusses the physics of a crash, and shows the sort of testing that goes into certifying a helmet. The photo at the very bottom of this page shows a sample drop test of a helmet that tests for the sort of thing that happened to Massa.

The Massa incident was as close as it gets. Getting hit in the head by 1 kg spring at a relative velocity of about 160 mph would be fatal without a helmet even when the spring was deflected by the nose of the car and the bolster on the side of the cockpit. Even the helmet was put to the ultimate test, because the impact point was at the edge of the opening. You can see the effect in the AP photo that accompanies this news article. Higher resolution images of just his helmet and eye injury are available if you search "massa crash" on google images, but I don't recommend doing so.

The Physics

Some things about the collision of an object with a helmet are outside your control. The momentum of the incoming object is a given. The amount of momentum transferred to your head and helmet is somewhat under your control, but mostly depends on things like the angle of impact that you really can't do much about. Bouncing off (elastic collision) makes the momentum transfer worse for your head, so design can help a bit, but physics puts a lower limit on what engineering can do about this part of the problem.

The amount of momentum transferred to the helmet is what is called "impulse". You can reduce injury if the helmet or its lining is soft enough to increase the duration of the collision, thereby reducing the force applied to the head. This is also the job of seat belts and other safety systems, but only a helmet can protect you against the impact of an object or the road itself.

BTW, there isn't much that a helmet can do if something large (like a wheel) hits you at high speed. There are things that will kill you in motorsport. Based on one of Hemingway's rules, that is what makes car racing a sport. (If there is no chance that the animal you are hunting can kill you, he did not consider it a sport.)

The helmet has to provide an artificial skull, to protect your skull. (That means it has to be hard and strong, so it is the job of the lining to dissipate energy.) Even though the impact was right at the edge of the "eye socket", the helmet Massa was wearing did an amazing job. It appears that fragments from the helmet or visor injured his eye, although the damage could also result from a fracture as the helmet hit his head. That is the other thing the helmet has to do: absorb energy and redistribute the forces over the entire head. Massa's helmet just barely managed perform that task. He still had a fractured skull as well as a concussion from the forces that were applied to his head by the helmet.

Apparently he also had a fracture at the base of the skull (what killed Dale Earnhardt), which is supposed to be less likely with a HANS device. His roughly 120 mph impact with the tire barrier should not have produced this, as I understand the designs, so that might also have resulted from an unanticipated motion of the helmet from the spring impact. It also makes me worry about how the emergency people were moving him in the news photo I link to above!

And just to be clear:
Physics is not the entire story. Physics tells you the constraints of the problem. It tells you what physical principles apply and what forces MUST result from those principles under specified conditions. Engineering is the task of choosing materials that will handle those forces and dissipate energy without adding too much weight, so the forces that get to the head are within limits known from the analysis of deaths and injuries from past crashes. More will be learned from this one.

New Course in Literary Criticism

2009-07-30T21:15:00.005-04:00

"The Poetry of Sarah Palin's Tweets"

If you haven't seen it ... check it out. [Sorry for the ad.]

This is seriously good stuff, although it owes a lot to William Shatner channeling the beat era Howl of Allen Ginsburg plus a very careful choice of tweets.

But what fun! What insights could we glean from this poetry?

And could it bring back beat poetry in REAL coffeehouses like I recall from my freshman year in college? Haiku, meet tweet-haiku, limited to 140 characters. A new art form!

PS -
Since the ad I am seeing is for cat owners, I'll counter it with this story about a UK cat that rides a bus.

Birther Hypocrisy

2009-07-30T20:41:00.003-04:00

You can't watch very much of the chattering classes on cable news without seeing the ongoing rants about whether Obama is a "natural born citizen" and eligible to be President. You can see some of the latest here.

My opinion is that they are asking these jive talking politicos the wrong question.

They should be asking these Republicans if they think John McCain is a natural born citizen eligible to be President of the United States.

You see, every Republican member of Congress was at the convention and voted to nominate McCain. If they think it is so important that we know if Obama was born in the US (not to mention all future Presidential candidates), why didn't they press that issue with McCain before nominating him? After all, there is no question at all that Sen. John Sidney McCain III was born in the Panama Canal Zone, not in one of these United States.

If being the son of a United States citizen was sufficient for them to nominate McCain, why isn't it good enough for Obama? That is the followup question for any of these solons.

Or is it possible that they were all part of a bizarre conspiracy to elect McCain, sue to have him immediately declared ineligible, thereby putting Palin in the Presidency? Then Palin gets someone like William Kristol approved by Congress as her VP, and immediately resigns because she is a lame duck. Coup complete.

Nah, that isn't possible. They are just jive talking maroons.

Reason for a Liberal Arts Education

2009-07-30T19:16:00.002-04:00

The news yesterday contained a horrifying story about how the US military leveled part of the ancient Babylon archaeological site. They apparently bulldozed mounds that were what remained of parts of guest palace of King Nebuchadnezzar's, damaged pottery that had cuneiform writing on it along with other items that date back over 2500 years, and carried on activities that damaged the reproduction of the Ishtar Gate at that site.

I am embarrassed that they did not know better, as one would expect from any decent humanities course or bible study in church school, but there is a precedent from World War II:

Kyoto.

Every time I happen to hear a story about Kyoto that mentions how it managed to survive the war, I wish they would tell the whole story. The people planning the bombing of Japan had no idea of its religious or historic significance, let alone the beauty of the temples that fill the city. The only reason it was not firebombed was that it had been put at the TOP of the list of places to use the first atom bomb! Hiroshima was number 2.

You see, in order to be sure we could see the effects of the bomb, we wanted to use the A bomb on a pristine city. The people in Hiroshima and several other cities were sure they had said a special prayer to have been spared the bombings, whereas the reality was they were in the cross hairs of something far worse than about 400 planes carrying explosives and incendiaries sufficient to burn tens of square miles.

But it happened that Secretary of War Stimson knew Kyoto well, and fought hard to get it off the list and to keep Gen. Lemay from bombing it with conventional weapons during the rest of the war. You can read the details in "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes. Either Groves and others were ignorant of its cultural value to the world, or they wanted to destroy it for that very reason.

One would have hoped that today's generals would know something about Babylon's history and the nature of archaeological sites, if only because this city had an important role in the Bible, but apparently not. I'd hope that humanities teachers everywhere can draw on this as a teachable moment in their classes.

Followup on Gates and the Cops

2009-07-29T20:02:00.004-04:00

Late last week, I posted my thoughts about the Gates Arrest based on the content of the police report.

Since then, we have heard the actual content of the 911 call (or, at least, significant parts that the media consider relevant, but the transcript is available from a local paper) and it raises new questions about the approach taken by the Cambridge police, both the arresting officer and the dispatcher. Indeed, when you read the transcript, it sounds like the dispatcher was doing some profiling when asking "And what do the suitcases have to do with anything?". Not even listening, it would seem, as that got turned into "backpacks" by the time the cop reported it back to us.

So, what do I think now?

First, just because the caller says she was careful about giving the race of the two men does not mean race played no role in the call since she was not the initial witness. It was another woman who had been watching what took place. However, it is clear from the call that she never even saw one of the men - probably Gates, unless she thought Prof. Gates looked Hispanic - so his race was never an issue for her. Certainly it answers my question about what she "said", because she never said what the arresting officer claimed she told him.

The important thing now is that her statements make it very clear that the story in the police report, that she told the cop that she "observed what appeared to be two black males with backpacks on the porch", was, shall we say, quite wide of the truth. She doesn't have to answer for that, but it was fun to read how the Cambridge Police Commissioner acknowledged that the police report contains a reference to race, but said the report is merely a summary of events. Wow, can you imagine a defense attorney using that to impeach the information in any report filed by that officer in the future?

But second, why was the elderly neighbor woman concerned? That was part of my earlier question, as she was the original witness, and it remains unanswered. Was she concerned because she saw dark skinned men pushing on the door? Would she have been concerned if it had been a 60 year old white man doing it with the assistance of a white Limo driver?

However, there is no question in my mind that I would want one of my neighbors to call the police if they saw something like that happening, but I think my actual neighbors (including ones who walk this area regularly) know what I look like! Similarly, I think they know that a black family lives next door and would never question a black person going into that house. (That might make my neighbors less well protected from black-on-black crime, just as it makes folks in the wealthy all-white suburbs less protected against their neighbor's kids robbing them.)

Third, there are now serious questions about the part of the police report related to the cause for the arrest. We have heard the transmissions from inside the house, and there was no indication at all that Prof. Gates was yelling loudly enough to interfere with communication. Quite the opposite. The premise given to get him out of the house was just that, a premise, based on what the police department released about the call.

Finally, the caller was pretty clear about the most likely possibility that the men lived in the house (said so more than once) and were just forcing a stuck door and that she was just calling to be on the safe side. The dispatcher made the suitcases sound ominous rather than an indication of a likely non-emergency situation, as intended by the caller.

That is something for everyone to remember: the officer responding to a request will likely be totally unaware of what was said to the 911 operator, either because it got filtered by the operator or was only partially heard while finding the way to the address in question. Assume the cop has incomplete or inaccurate information, and explain all details as if it was the first time.

So, to give a one-line answer to the question about whether an apology is in order, I think the cop owes her and the rest of us an apology.

Note added:
Forgot to include a link to this interesting analysis, which matches my view that this was about Power more than race, although I still think he was arrested for being "uppity" based on the officer's own description of his shock at not being treated as the Master and his stated concern about being shown up in front of his fellow officers.

Three Weeks and (not) Counting

2009-07-29T14:31:00.002-04:00

Posting a comment over at Dean Dad's blog reminded me that we are just a few days away from the 3-week countdown to the academic equivalent of "pitchers and catchers report".

In the past, I might have said that it was time to get to work, but I now plan ahead. However, as mentioned in an earlier blog about how I now approach a new year (particularly in the comments), I can be susceptible to using the extra time to create more work for myself. With too much time to do the job, there is a tendency to polish the brass like I was a lowly seaman in the Navy. So this year I have to thank a post by Dr. Crazy where she mentioned setting a false deadline of July 30, as if that was the actual start of the semester.

Great idea. Apart from one detail (a possible course assignment that would alter the office hours that I always put in my syllabus), I will have all of my syllabi "printer ready" by then. That will give me some free time to take a mini-vacation and also thing about some bigger issues, ones mentioned in an article last year. I might also think about the workload issue mentioned more recently by Dr. Crazy as she finished of her third (of four) syllabi, but it is easy to edit by subtraction.

Oh, yes, lets not forget to mention the one sign that the semester is approaching: U-Haul trucks at the student apartment complexes.

The invasion is near!

Gates and the Cops

2009-07-24T20:52:00.002-04:00

As a (now aging and balding) "long hair" who has spent many years on and around the cloistered ivy covered halls of academe, I can understand Gates' attitude. After all, they give him a hard time but an earlier break-in of his house remains unsolved. And if I can understand it, it must be doubled and squared if you are black -- where having a "tumultuous" attitude (college-educated cop speak) was really being perceived as having an "uppity" attitude (a word that would be auto-replaced by the police report word processor). As the commentariot has put it, what would Henry Kissinger have done if ordered out of his house by a cop? Would Kissinger have asked "Do you know who I am?", called the Police Chief, and gone ballistic if arrested for being angry at being insulted in his own "castle"?

I'll put my experiences and thoughts below the fold.

Certainly Gates should have done the "Yes Massa" thing and thanked the cop for responding to a case of a black man entering his own home, mentioning his past problems with break-ins as a reason he is glad the police show up when called. But there is no law that says you have to be civil to anyone in your own home, and certainly not to an uninvited person who just walks in your door. Unless you are black, it would seem.

I learned enough from being around dumb-ass white kids in middle school and, particularly, in high school that it is not a good idea to act as if you are a lot smarter than they are even if the intelligence contest can be won with my dominant hand in a cast. Thus my way of dealing with cops is to go into "Yes Massa" mode. It has always worked well for me in the few instances it seemed relevant, and I don't have any problem going with it. However, I can imagine why a world-famous Harvard professor (holding a "chair" that makes him special even at Harvard) might not take that approach - and there is certainly nothing in the Constitution that says you have to do that in your own home.

And cops, even ones with a college degree (in a CJ major that is open to literally anyone at the universities that I know about), definitely come from that power-mad category that expects "Yes Massa" in every one of their interactions. That would probably be why the cop was "surprised and confused" by the behavior of a homeowner who was being treated like a common criminal. He certainly wasn't expecting an "uppity" black man, let alone expecting to be charged with racism by a child of the 60s in front of his fellow officers and the general public. He had no choice but to arrest Gates for embarrassing him. And since there is no law against embarrassing a cop, he charging him with being disorderly in the "public" place that was his own living room and, later, front porch.

I remember well an incident late one night when I was almost 30, walking across campus. As I approached a major well-marked cross walk with its "yield to pedestrians" sign, a car blew by me, well over the speed limit. A cop pulled out of a side street to follow that car, and I turned and said "go get him". What did the cop do? He ignored the criminal, and went after the long hair. Yep, next thing I knew, there was a cop car ON THE SIDEWALK following me. He must have made a U turn rather than follow the (likely intoxicated) speeder who had also failed to yield. God knows what he thought, but he wasn't expecting a Staff ID card (when he illegally asked for ID) or my question about why he had ignored the person who had threatened my safety. He just wanted to be a dick. I suppose I'm lucky he didn't charge me with "orderly conduct", but that "Yes Massa" act did the trick.

But the way this long-hair was treated almost three decades ago is certainly not how middle aged (Gates is a few years older than I am) balding faculty expect to be treated by the campus-area police.

On my minor (but not at all small) campus, I am known on sight by the campus police officers as well as the un-armed security personnel. I would imagine that Gates is also well known to the cops that patrol Harvard Yard, even if it is a much bigger place. After all, he has been there almost 20 years and is in a "named" chair. He has even had a PBS TV series, not that cops watch that sort of TV. My expectation is that the cops who patrol our campus (and Gates apparently lives in a Harvard-owned house) know who the faculty are and we get treated with respect. Well, at least this white one does. I don't know about the much younger black professor who is built like a power forward.

As for racism, one wonders why no one in the media has talked to the "neighbor" who called the police about a Limo driver helping a middle aged man open his front door. She was, indeed, viewing Gates as being guilty of being a "black man in America". The cop simply picked up the ball and ran with it. Her story seems inconsistent, since the 911 call referred to two people but she only mentions one in the police report to the second officer. Is that because she eventually realized it was a Limo driver who had left? She was there the whole time, but never gave any info about the car these "criminals" had used, or that the Limo driver had (apparently) left, to the police officer who responded? Her failure to tell the cop where the second man had gone is a missing part of the story. And would she have even called the cops if it had been a 59 year old white man opening the door? She is the one who needs to lawyer up, not the cop.

Note: Here is one copy of the police report of the many that are available.

Old TVs, new Spot, Old Rocket, and Moon Pictures

2009-07-21T21:15:00.006-04:00

Inspired by a comment from The Thomas, here is an article about the a working 1936 TV in the UK. Let that be a challenge to you! I was amused by the fact that it only had one channel because there was only a single (state owned) station in the entire UK, so it needs two converters to get over-the-air transmissions, and by the comments from the grandson of John Logie Baird (UK television inventor). I knew him from an old book (something about "electrons go to work") in my collection.

The article also has an extensive comments section, where various people posted the ancient things they have that still work. Reminds me of the refrigerator my parents have in the old house, which I think is older than I am.

Other news of note includes a new "spot" on Jupiter (possibly from an impact, but a "dark mark" could come from a Death Eater attack), and some older followup stories about Apollo:

Restoring the Saturn V in Houston, which is made up of parts of two rockets built for canceled moon missions (first stage of #514, whose other two stages are at Kennedy Space Center, the second stage of #515, and the third stage of #513, which Wiki says was surplus when #513 became the Skylab booster).
News story about the LRO pictures of the Apollo landing sites that I wrote about in a previous blog.
Link to the NASA page with the LRO pictures, which includes links to the full-size images like the one Astroprof posted. I can't get over how close Apollo 16 was to the edge of a crater!

The NASA article gives important details on the resolution per pixel (about four feet) and how the long shadow (due to a low sun angle) makes it easier to spot the lander. Imagine what we will see when the resolution improves by more than a factor of 2 after they circularize the LRO orbit later this year!

Man on the Moon

2009-07-20T23:11:00.004-04:00

We can pretend I was live-blogging this one (40 years ago), but I am sure the posting time for this picture is about 5 or 10 minutes too early.

Armstrong stepped off the Lem around 11 PM EDT on 20 July 1969 (Wiki says he stepped on the moon at 10:56 pm EDT), and we were watching it live on TV, on CBS. I'm pretty sure it was our old Motorola Quasar b/w television (right Bro?). Aldrin followed about 15 minutes later, after Armstrong had picked up a quick rock sample, and then the TV camera was moved to a tripod where it would view the landing area.

At some point I set up my dad's old Ricoh SLR on a tripod and, guessing at the exposure, took one picture on color slide film to record this moment of history - with both astronauts on the moon with the LM. This is that image:

Special thanks to my brother for borrowing the slide from my parents and scanning it for me so I could include it here today. (He says the picture itself is much better than this indicates, and suspects his scanner's bulb is fading. Apparently you can also see the TV tuner, etc in the original slide.) Maybe I'll get a chance to try it on my own scanner one of these months.

You can click on the image for a slightly larger version but, as I say, it is really not of archival quality. I've smoothed and resized the original scan to get rid of various scanning artifacts, which also hides somewhat the rasters of the TV image itself that are in the original.

That was a really memorable day, with the landing on the moon in the afternoon and then a long wait into the evening to see the moon walk. I don't remember staying up past midnight to see the entire 2+ hour effort, but that first hour was simply amazing ... particularly the way they moved in the reduced gravity of the moon.

But perhaps the most amazing thing was that we had live television from the moon, even if it had to be a special "slow scan" system to fit in the available bandwidth. I had grown up with the Space Race, watching launches live on TV in elementary school, so it was easy to take a lot of this for granted. However, my grandfather had grown up before radio, and lived to see live TV from the moon. Never underestimate what the future can hold.

History Channel ... Epic Fail

2009-07-20T21:24:00.003-04:00

They hacked up the CBS broadcast pretty badly, putting very little of the landing coverage in the program, although the "first step" part was fantastic.

Their program "Moonshot" stinks. I'll never watch that turkey again.

In contrast, TCM's showing of "For All Mankind" (1989) is a keeper.

Sadly, they re-edit the audio/video sync of the first step so it matches the point when Neil Armstrong drops down from the ladder to the lander footpad for the SECOND time rather than when he steps off of the pad some 30 seconds later, but most of it puts a premium on real film and video with voice-over commentary - mostly from those involved in the mission.

Few "recreations". The actual astronauts getting dressed, not some actors like in "Moonshot", and certainly no fake dinner at home with the astronaut's parents.

The best part of "For All Mankind" might be the very beginning, where they play ALL of Kennedy's speech about going to the moon. I had no idea he went into such detail about the challenges that project would face.

However, the very best part is the high resolution film looking out during launches from the moon, where you can see the entire landing site (with instruments and tracks on the surface) as they pull away. Ditto for images of the Apollo 11 landing, which were much higher resolution than I have seen before.

Live from 1969

2009-07-19T21:37:00.004-04:00

The History Channel just ran an ad announcing their schedule for Monday, 20 July.

They will run a half-hour program at 8:30 EDT (re-run about three hours later at 8:00 PDT) that is essentially a re-broadcast of the CBS News coverage I watched as a kid.

the actual CBS News/Walter Cronkite coverage of man's first lunar landing. Using minimal editing and leaving the original footage untouched viewers will feel as if they are watching the CBS coverage in July of 1969. While today we know the outcome of Apollo 11's mission it was not a given then. This will become evident watching Walter Cronkite and his colleagues as they watch the historic lunar mission unfold before them.

Afterwards, from 9 to 11, they will run the movie "Moonshot" with the film parts converted to high definition. I can't wait to see that.

Having seen other "as it happened" re-broadcasts (one was of the NBC coverage of the Kennedy assassination that I never saw in real life), this promises to be excellent.

You will also get to see how TV looked back then, and I'll get to see it in color.

(We could not afford a color TV back then. Or, to be more precise, my parents could not afford to save for our college education and have a color TV back then. They made some excellent economic choices.)

Revisiting the Moon Landing

2009-07-19T16:19:00.006-04:00

I've decided not to jump the gun like so many news stories, and hold off on posting my personal photo of the moon walk until roughly the anniversary of when it was taken (about quarter after 11 EDT on the night of 20 July). Today I will just reflect on the events themselves and some articles I feel are worth mentioning.

Looking back, we knew what was going to happen, in detail. Maybe in more detail than you can find in all of the Wiki articles put together, because we had been raised on the space program. We (meaning my brother and I) had read every National Geographic article about moon missions going back to the first high-resolution pictures taken by Ranger 7. And we had read everything in Popular Science, books, Life magazine, you name it.

In addition, there had already been several missions to the moon, and the dangers were clear. We had seen plenty of launch attempts fail in the early days, so we knew every launch was dangerous. We had seen quite a few early moon missions actually miss the moon, so we knew navigation was not a trivial detail. We knew the rocket on the Service Module had to work correctly several times. Once you slowed into orbit around the moon, you were stuck there unless it fired. We knew there was a very narrow window for reentry. You didn't aim for the earth, you aimed at the edge of the earth to just barely catch the atmosphere. Too little and you skipped off into oblivion, too much and you would be crushed by the g forces. And we knew that there was a lot of kinetic energy to burn off by the heat shield, because you were coming in at 25,000 miles per hour.

Worse, we knew that both the descent and, in particular, ascent engines on the LM had to work or you would be stuck on the moon - leaving one man to go home alone. And, unlike the main engine (which was used for mid-course corrections), that ascent engine was never tested. Sure, they had used one on Apollo 10 when the LM had descended to less than 10 miles above the moon, but that was a different spacecraft. You had one shot to get home.

Best of all, it was summer. We knew when it was going to happen and we could watch it all as it happened. It was like riding along with Columbus to the New World. And that is what we did, went along for the ride via television.

One news item out there that I really enjoyed was this Audio slide show from the BBC. The music is from the top songs at that time: "In the year 25-25", "Age of Aquarius", and "Something in the Air". However, the newsman narrating is wrong about just how much chance was involved in the selection of Armstrong for that flight. The only way he would have missed is if an earlier mission had failed in its objectives, and even then one suspects that the crews might have shifted so he was flying the LM with the same skill that he showed flying an X-15.

Another news item of note was this video interview with a self-styled beatnik who programmed the computers on the Apollo mission. I'll bet The Thomas will enjoy this, with its discussion of worrying about every byte of code that had to be squeezed into that box, even more than I did. No bloatware back then!

Videos and pictures:
I suppose everyone has seen the partial set of cleaned up video (BBC version here), but I'll also link in my blog from last year that includes comments about the edits of the audio-video sync (concerning Armstrong's jump down, up, and then down again) in many of the older "first step" versions out there. By the way, the picture I will post on 20 July was taken just a bit after the part shown at the 3:00 mark of the first YouTube video.

For that matter, I think the coolest photo of all isn't on the moon, it is this one of Neil Armstrong doing his best Jack Nicholson impression after returning to the LM after walking on the moon. That look of tired joy, and the twinkle in his eye, says more than his words did.

Side remark:
The one thing I would like to see that has never been on any program is a side-by-side comparison of the Saturn launch to the moon and a Space Shuttle launch. The Saturn just crawls off of the pad. Why? The shuttle has a thrust to weight-at-launch ratio of 6.8 to 4.5 (in millions of pounds) while the Apollo rocket had a ratio of 7.6 to 6.7. Apollo didn't get going until it had burned off a lot of fuel from the first stage. A friend who watched them all as a kid was stunned when he saw the first Shuttle launch. It went up like an Estes rocket, and the roll maneuver it did early in flight looked like one of those early rockets just before they blew up.

Cranks and crackpots:
I really enjoyed some of the articles about the silly people who think a friend of mine (who witnessed the launch in person) and even the Soviets (who tracked the mission and congratulated us on kicking their butts in the biggest competition of the entire Cold War) were pathological liars and/or part of a conspiracy to fake the landing. Matt laid out part of the answer to some complaints, but posted a few days before new photos (pointed out by Astroprof) showed up that allow us to see the base of the LM at the Apollo 11 landing site. Even better, the LRO photos also include a cool image of the Apollo 14 site where you can see the disturbed lunar dirt (I was going to write "earth"!) where the astronauts hiked back and forth to set up a science experiment. However, as a BBC article explains, they won't get the resolution down to 50 cm per pixel (twice what is in the images linked above and shown in Astroprof's article) until August. They will eventually orbit even lower, giving sharper images for the reasons Matt explained, but that will be some time next year.

One thing those cranks never deal with is the 3 foot jump needed to get up on the ladder to get back in the LM. If you were faking it you would have steps all the way down. No one, not even a basketball star, could do a 36" vertical jump with all of that equipment on in full gravity, but it is easy in 1/6 gravity. And why the big gap? The legs on the LM were collapsible, to take up the impact when they shut off the engine and dropped the last meter or two to the moon. The ladder could not go all the way down; it had to allow for the possible compression of the lander legs.

PS - Every news feed has their version of this info, but CBS deserves mention because their video archives helped make up for the landing videos that NASA destroyed or simply lost. I like the BBC versions because they seem to provide better bandwidth, particularly for video.

UPDATED:
Here is today's story about Pres Obama honoring the Apollo 11 astronauts. The sidebar has a number of additional new stories related to the 40th anniversary of the landing.

Uncle Walter is Dead

2009-07-17T21:32:00.005-04:00

What an irony, Walter Cronkite dying in the middle of the celebration of the 40th anniversary of man's first trip to the surface of the moon - because our journey into space seemed to be his personal mission.

Those of you who are too young to remember his era can't appreciate how central he was to broadcast news in the late 60s and early 70s. No one today matches his combination of reporting skill and accuracy and straight speaking. It is not an exaggeration to say that we viewed him as "Uncle Walter". I certainly did.

I remember him most for three things:

A program series "The Twentieth Century" that he hosted and narrated. (The title was a bit ambitous, since it ended in 1966 and really only covered about 1/3 of the century - the part where we had newsreel footage.) It was like The History Channel, only without the alien psychics in Bermuda triangle shorts touching a Tesla coil on an ice road. I learned a tremendous amount of history from that program.

Coverage of the entire NASA program. Because CBS was the dominant station (meaning the only one with a good signal) in town for years, they were what we watched in the elementary school gym when launches were broadcast live. He made sure he knew what was going on, and explained it to us as he understood it. That made him both the consummate reporter and a great model for teaching.

I hadn't thought of that until just now. He taught us the news. And what I just wrote is how I approach teaching: articulating what I needed to know or see to understand something.

Speaking out on the facts that argued for ending our involvement in Vietnam. With opinion so rampant on cable "news" channels today (to the point where CNN stopped doing news at all and put it all on Headline News, only to interrupt that with hours of non-factual blather so you often don't find any news there either) it may be hard for any of you to imagine the impact on the nation when an objective newsman stated that we needed to get out of Vietnam. Sadly, more than half of the troops killed in Vietnam died after that point in time.

But I will also remember him for speaking at commencement, even though no one remembers what anyone says at graduation. And I will never, NEVER, forget the way he covered the assassination of JFK and the subsequent funeral. Partly because he not only knew what to say, but when to shut up. He was willing to let the images speak for themselves, not like the idiots who talked over a person singing their heart out - literally - at the Michael Jackson funeral, or put their logos and "crawl" over part of the content they were trying to show.

Cronkite could watch the funeral or a rocket launch or the moon landing and moon walk with us, without narrating it like it was a prize fight. That will be missed most of all.

Postscript:
CBS Coverage of Cronkite's Death

Commies better for Business?

2009-07-16T18:21:00.002-04:00

The chinese economy is just rolling along (sample story), growing at +8% rather than slumping at -1% like in the US. That is despite a 20% drop in exports!

What is the difference?

Twice as much stimulus, relative to our respective GDPs.

Those crazy communists dumped 0.58 T$ into a 4.4 T$ economy. That is 13% of their GDP (IMF value).

Held back by the nay-saying Hoover wing of the Republican Party, the US has put just 0.96 T$ into our 14 T$ economy. (Made up of 168 G$ under Bush and 789 G$ under Obama.) That is just 7% of our GDP, less if you look at what we have spent.

So which system puts more national resources behind business? Clearly not ours.

There are other differences, of course. We were spending like drunken, coke snorting former Air National Guardsmen when our economy was good, so we lacked the resources to ramp up spending when the economy was bad. Perhaps more importantly, we chose to sift our stimulus money through state legislatures rather than spending it directly by the federal government like those commies do. This, along with time needed to get bids, slows down our system so much that we probably won't even spend half of it this year. So our stimulus might be only 1/5 of what China did.

The good news is that the budget deficit won't be what it is projected to be until we actually spend that money.

New Element Named Cp

2009-07-16T13:06:00.004-04:00

It is semi-official:

Now that the existence of element 112 has been certified, the discoverers have given their recommendation that it be named "copernicium", Cp, in honor of Nicolaus Copernicus.

Interesting choice.

This breaks a long string of names for trans-plutonium elements that reflect either the location of the discovery (Am, Bk, Cf, Db, Hs, Ds) or key people in the early history of nuclear physics and nuclear chemistry (Cm, Es, Fm, Lr, Rf, Sg, Bh, Mt, Rg). Until now, the exceptions were Md (101) and No (102).

I am stuck on the pronunciation. Will it be

1. koh-per-NEE-cee-em (similar to other names)

or

2. koh-PER-ni-CEE-em (to preserve some similarity to the name)

???

Climate Change in Hell ... and more

2009-07-16T10:05:00.003-04:00

Here are some great articles from The New Yorker for your entertainment.

Shouts and Murmurs takes a look at a symposium about Climate Change in Hell that was (allegedly) hosted by Former VP Al Gore

This is a short, fun article. It is an amusing twist on the usual physics problem concerning the temperature of Hell (as in, is Heaven hotter than Hell) and the on-going Big Science of Global Warming that manages to skewer a number of suspects. For example, why does Sony have a Portal to Hell in one of its sub-basements?

Hitting closer to home,

XXL, which looks at books about possible explanations for the rapid growth of obesity in the US.

Favorite factoid about consequences of changes in the past few decades: "It has been estimated that Americans’ extra bulk costs the airlines a quarter of a billion dollars’ worth of jet fuel annually." I personally thought the problem was a result of the SUV (like goldfish in a bigger bowl, people grew to the size of their vehicle), but the author seems to argue that the vehicles were needed to carry our supersized fries.

By the way, at my CC we are starting to have problems fitting students into the standard desks in our standard classrooms. Anyone else have this problem? We might have to cut class sizes just to make the aisles big enough for students to navigate their seats to their seats.

A movie review of Bruno by Anthony Lane

The review might be funnier than the movie. Not that I would know, since I won't bother until the DVD comes out, so to speak. It can't possibly compare to Zoolander.

Harry Potter

2009-07-15T21:41:00.004-04:00

No, I haven't gone to see it yet, although I can't wait.

The reason for this blog entry is to point to two brilliant analyses of the book series (not this particular film, although book 6 is where you begin to see what has been going on all along). Both are thick with spoilers for anyone who has not read the entire series, so the links and comments go below the fold.

These articles are not, by the way, the sort of fawning nonsense you see in the popular press. Muggle Children, consider yourself warned.

Matt on Harry Potter and the Tremendous [Screw Up] pointing out the obvious - every bad thing that happens is Dumbledore's fault
Penny on Harry Potter and the Fascist Ubermensch on class as portrayed in the books

I think the second article goes a bit overboard by taking the control of the Muggle PM as more than a conceit needed to explain how this entire world - and its wars - can remain invisible, but the books do take a rather deterministic view of the world.

The only thing missing from the second article seems to be any notice that the Goblins can be seen as a particularly racist caricature of hook-nosed Jewish Bankers. Or maybe it was in there, but was just left unsaid.

Where I disagree with the second analysis (and agree with the first) is that the books are not about a Chosen One, a "christ figure" come to save the wizarding world, even if he gets Resurrected to finish the job. That is the way it is cast when you start in book 1, and the way you might read it superficially, but the reality is that it takes collaboration among many individuals - each with their own special skills and weaknesses - to win the final fight.

Sweet Tweets

2009-07-14T14:08:00.003-04:00

From PhD Comics today:

Great Tweets of Science

But where was one for Schroedinger or Bohr?

Basic Research Proves the Obvious

2009-07-13T13:53:00.004-04:00

According to a study reported by the BBC, cats 'exploit' humans by purring:

Cat owners may have suspected as much, but it seems our feline friends have found a way to manipulate us humans.

Researchers at the University of Sussex have discovered that cats use a "soliciting purr" to overpower their owners and garner attention and food.

Unlike regular purring, this sound incorporates a "cry", with a similar frequency to a human baby's.

The team said cats have "tapped into" a human bias - producing a sound that humans find very difficult to ignore.

(Follow the link above to see video evidence of this, as if we needed any!) Look below the fold for LOLcat evidence of this phenomenon from a photo posted late last week:

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Slow Progress on the Economy

2009-07-09T12:43:00.003-04:00

This morning's news concerning new jobless claims, where the number dropped below 600,000 for the first time since the last week of January (2/5/2009 release), seems to have been ignored by the markets. Oddly, "investors" did not buy into what looks like a nascent recovery, choosing to buy 3% T bills instead.

Now it is true that the moving average is still above that 600,000 level. However, the moving average now has a sustained (slightly) negative slope -- sustained since the middle of March (when the stimulus bill was passed). I expect we will still see a lot of new jobless claims even as some stimulus projects get started (highway projects in our state are just going out to bid) because the hiring will not be in the areas where layoffs are still likely to happen.

Continuing unemployment claims went up modestly. Also not surprising, because the stimulus package - which Congress put mostly in the hands of the states - won't really get rolling at creating new jobs until next month. However, that does bode well for a modest increase in the unemployment rate in July. That will probably be when we will see a market rally.

But what is going on? Are people putting new IRA or 401(k) money into fixed return investments? I'm at an age where a big chunk of mine goes that way, but I would not ignore equities at a point that might be a market bottom, particularly when there is a good chance of inflation a few years in the future. Those 10-year 3% T bills will be worthless then.

Blogging about some blogs

2009-07-08T20:47:00.005-04:00

Some classics out there today:

Matt writes about clouds and the "chemtrail" conspiracy theories. Worth visiting just to see the photo of a fighter just about at Mach 1. BTW, Matt is correct about the second photo. It is from Castle Bravo, the largest yield device (at 15 megatons) ever tested by the US.

Amusing, but he needs to get more up to date. Check out this about sighting Michael Jackson's ghost in a CNN clip shown on Larry King.

Thanks to a commenter on FSP's blog about hating the iPhone for that last one. That was also where I found a link to another great article:

Is Google Making Us Stupid from the July issue of The Atlantic. Read it, and see if you start skimming before you get to the paragraph where the author quotes a blogger about the number of paragraphs he can read before he starts skimming.

For the record, I didn't start skimming until I read that prompt, but my attention span for scientific articles was never so great that I didn't usually follow the Feynman approach of reading the introduction and then jumping to the conclusion to see if they got the right answer. Unless it really mattered, and then it took days or a week to read the paper closely.

On that subject, Chad has a great "research blogging" article about entanglement and a hysterical article about a really bad press release title related to string "theory". I suspect that "possible relevance of mathematical tools developed for string theory to an entirely different problem" would not have gotten quite as much attention.

Also, some really good comics in the last few days. PhD comics on whether your research project is impossible (following up on a series about a student being sent on a wild goose chase) and xkcd on the 2038 bug in Unix (when the time counter runs out of seconds in 32 bits).

PS -
Like his fellow former sportscaster, Sarah Palin, Keith Olberman doesn't seem to know much science. Tonight on "worst persons" he said something implying that you use carbon dating to determine the age of uranium. Not even close. I wonder how many people noticed ...