Second Blogiversary

It has been two years now since I got this thing started on the eve of Pi Day.

What better way to celebrate than with a story from the BBC (complete with video) about flossing monkeys in Thailand teaching their infants how to floss! If only my mother had been nearly as successful as these. For me, it was never "monkee see, monkee do"....


And below the fold, how about the charming presence of Emmy, the Queen of Niskayuna, on facebook to help promote her role in Chad's pop-science book about Quantum Mechanics? Having vastly enjoyed the stories on his blog (see this collection for a sample), I eagerly await the appearance of that book - and hope to see his book tour visit to the Colbert Report.

Or an argument (not unfamiliar if you have heard any talks about "Brain-Based Education") whether the internet has, or has not, created a stupid generation? I take the Negative side on that debate. When professors see uncritical use of citations (or not) from the tubes of the internets in student work, they forget that they used to see uncritical use of periodicals of questionable repute and cribbing from print sources in the past. One generation was cured of that the same way this one can be, by actual instruction in critical analysis. In some ways it should be easier today: there was nothing like Google or Turnitin to identify the use of copied works.

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Advice for a New Professor

Rather late for someone starting work about seven months ago (woo hoo, only two more months to go!), but IHE has a nice article today titled I'm a Professor. Now What? with advice for the new college teacher fresh out of grad school.

The premise that someone will enter a teaching job without anything more than a PhD is rather a stretch, since most people who fit that description are at an R1 that should emphasize research over teaching during the first year (as described in a recent article by FSP), but the advice is mostly solid.

Relax and be yourself is probably the best one, along with the KISS approach outlined as "black and white". However, that begs the question of the actual objectives of the class. You have to have clear objectives that guide everything from the book you select (if you have that option) to the material you emphasize to the format and coverage of your exams. Temper that with the expectation that they might truly retain (long term) only 10% of what they get right on a test so you choose your battles carefully.

What I dislike is the failure to emphasize the use of a single local mentor on a regular basis, not just when setting up the syllabus. It is not a sign of weakness if you ask for guidance. I've seen the arrogant opposite, and it isn't pretty. It is much more than "don't reinvent the wheel" if you really haven't taught before. I was well prepared by my undergrad department, and got eased in by doing recitations where you see all of the difficulties that require a solution in lecture and problem sessions. I can't imagine where I would be if I was teaching a major class without that preparation and experience.

What seemed missing was to look at your own notes from the class you took as an undergrad - but to tailor it to the institution you are teaching at now. Your own teachers might have had some good ideas about what was important, and you now have the background from grad school to add your own views to that frame.

Finally, I really like the US Army lesson plan format linked at the end of the article, as a warning. Something tells me we will be doing that for all of our classes before SACS et al get done with their emphasis on detailed learning objectives. I just wonder about the value of having over 140 of those pages archived somewhere for a class like mine when the thing that works the best on a given day wasn't even on my own outline of what I planned to do.

Updated April 2009:

There was a really good article about the transition from post-doc to professor from Professor in Training that deserves a link here as well as in one of my older articles. I gather that Prof in Training is wrapping up the first year of research AND teaching. Quite the perspective. Even though that is ancient history to me, I agree that there is a lot you don't know as a post doc, and even as a research professor on someone else's grant. For other links and comments, go to a more detailed article in my blog.

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Comment semi-Moderation

Hat tip to Dr. Crazy for this one.

I've had a few contemporaneous 'spam' comments show up on the blog, and tolerated them by mocking them in my reply. However, I have recently noticed them show up in older articles, particularly ones that get linked in a comment on another blog. One was particularly lame, to borrow Dr. Crazy's term, simply a list of words that were linked to various places.

So I am enabling comment moderation for articles that are more than 10 days old. That should cover it, with little pain for me. Moderation will be light, but might not always be promptly carried out.

The way you make this change is simple. You just go to the "Settings" tab, click on "Comments", and select the middle option to moderate comments posted more than N days after the article appears.

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Math with Manipulatives

Another hat tip to Sherman Dorn for his comments about the "Springboard" math (and language arts, aka English) curriculum in his county school system based on an article in the local paper about it.

[By the way, when did they invent "language arts" anyway? Do they read poetry in the original Russian or plays in the original Greek? Aren't all of the classes based on English translations when they deal with foreign authors? It's English, folks, and your students need to be able to read and write it so they can deal with my lab class and know enough about literature to survive college classes in composition and the humanities.]

Based solely on the article, which spent most of its column inches criticizing the content of the HS literature courses (when it wasn't shocking me with the huge difference between their curriculum and mine as noted in a footnote), I think I came away with a misleading view of what they are doing on the math side. I find the example Sherman ridiculed to be potentially very effective in the hands of a competent teacher because its purpose was not what the journalist thought it was. Details are below the fold.

The article introduced the math content as follows

In math classes, just four SpringBoard lessons are required each year. Among them is an Algebra I SpringBoard lesson that starts with students arranging baby marshmallows and spaghetti on blue paper to discover different ways to multiply binomials.

Seventh- and eighth-graders in Jennifer Apgar's Algebra I honors class at Ferrell Middle Magnet School in Tampa couldn't wait to dig into their bags of marshmallows in January and were relieved to find extras for eating.

The marshmallows represent office computers; spaghetti separates sections of the office.

"I'm kinesthetic – I like to use my hands," said Giana Moore, 12. She said she prefers such hands-on activities to doing math problems on the computer. The seven computers lining one wall in her class are rarely used, she said.

Well, at least I know where the student mentioned in my previous article picked up on that Learning Style terminology! In Middle School? (Little does this girl know that this is actually a visual learning tool. Your hands are only used to arrange them. Kinesthetic learning would be actually connecting computers into a network, getting your muscles to learn how to pull cable and plug in the connectors.)

This description from the newspaper article sounded a lot like the "discovery" (aka look-say or guessing) way of not teaching math that has been used in some elementary math curricula. The sort of curriculum that produces students who cannot divide or work with fractions when they get to college. What changed my mind was seeing a video showing what it really is, in action, albeit in the hands of an experienced and clearly skilled teacher. That video is part of an article from a Tampa Bay Online story from February 2009 that turned up high on a Google search for the term. The video probably resulted from the same dog-and-pony show, since it featured the same teacher at the same middle school in Tampa (clearly filmed on January 15). It just took another month to get the print version of the story out.

Several things were immediately clear.

The marshmallows were not being used to discover equivalent ways of multiplying binomials, they were being used to represent computers in a cube farm that was described in a rather long and detailed story problem (correction, they are now called Word Problems because story problems are even scarier than nuclear power) that you can see on the screen at the start of the video. [Side comment: I love how up-to-date the problem is, dealing with physically networking computers. The simplest answer to this problem is to go wireless!] That problem would be way over the heads of most college students I encounter, who act as if they had never had to analyze a word problem. My colleagues at Wannabe Flagship say the same thing, and my guess is this results from it not being on the local HS exit exam. From what I can see, the trend in "college" algebra has also been to avoid word problems as much as possible unless they fall in a very narrow class so only one 'type' shows up on an exam and can be solved out of habit rather than by analysis. (They spend the time gained from dropping this topic to teach students how to graph functions on their calculator.)

Anyway, back to the main point:
The video makes it immediately clear to me that the marshmallows are not being used for what the reporter says, but rather to help visualize the geometrical situation that has been described in words in the problem. Even better, the developers of this module recognize that there might be a vocabulary issue with the word problem and make that part of the analysis explicit. As the teacher puts it, "A lot of good practices are in Springboard". Looks that way to me. The 'manipulative' (which has the advantage of being edible) is there to illustrate why the equations work out the way they do. I really like the emphasis on collaborative learning, which is a great way for students to work on problem solving by articulating their strategies.

I see this as the math equivalent of theory and experiment in physics. We set up a problem, we solve the problem, and then we see what happens when we measure the unknown in an experiment. Incorrect approaches are exposed by the harsh light of reality. You see an example of that in the comment of one student in the video story. I can see why the math faculty have had little trouble adopting this system. In addition to changing only a fraction of their curriculum because they added selected modules to supplement their existing approach (no doubt tailored to their HS exit exam), it does what experienced teachers already do. The upside is that it helps inexperienced teachers by giving them an entire exercise with printed worksheets to guide students through this process.

The unanswered question is whether they can transfer this skill to wholly new problems. If it is just one exercise with no reinforcement, it will be lost quickly. Experienced problem solving requires more time and additional coaching. (Do they still do "coin problems"? Those can be tested with play money.) Can they use everyday objects like marshmallows to model some other problem? To identify the marshmallow with a variable like "x"? That would be great. But unlikely except in the best classes.


* Long Footnote:
I really was shocked to see the huge difference between what they described as the "national" curriculum and the college prep curriculum I experienced decades ago. Bro, if you read this, please comment on the sequence your kids followed in HS. We had a 7-9 and 10-12 system that only changed to the middle-school scheme when my 2000 capacity HS went from overcrowded with 3 classes to capacious with 4, so I don't have a clear memory of what we did in 9th grade. I can still remember the trailer where I studied 10th grade American Lit, which was followed by a year called "world" lit that started with Greek plays and ended with British literature, so we got a good mix of plays and poetry that year. Senior year was devoted to a capstone composition class that featured (in my case) a wide range of fairly contemporary short novels and short stories with an existentialist bent, with major focus on learning how to research and write a 10+ page term paper. We read Conrad, Hesse, "Clockwork Orange", etc. No movies, no "iTunes", the modern books-on-tape, but (unlike one class mentioned in the article) we could all read at the 9th grade level or above. Even one kid notable for his lack of intellectual curiosity got connected in this class.

The curriculum described in this article lacks a senior composition class and puts world lit before American lit so they have limited exposure to advanced American English before taking their "high stakes" exit test. If this is a national curriculum, it is no wonder so few students can even write a decent lab report. I think they also struggle with reading problems because they appear to have never heard of the critical reading exercise of writing a pre'cis (a short summary of a text that contains only facts, no opinions) that was common in our curriculum.

The comments on this article were also interesting. The usual suspects show up attacking "government" schools, but I have seen little evidence in our area of a major difference between non-selective private schools and the public schools. They also place into 5th grade math. The public doesn't know how they measure up because they don't have to take the state exit exam to graduate from HS, so everyone assumes they are doing a good job.

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Learning Styles

A month or so ago, Becky Hirta blogged that "Learning styles are the academic version of horoscopes." (When I shared that with some colleagues, one immediately planned to develop an "astrological inventory" to give his students to be sure their failure can't be blamed on a conflict between their respective astrological charts. I think he was joking.)

Anyway, with a hat tip to Sherman Dorn who linked to a blog from the Dallas Independent School District (back in August of 2008) that contained the video below, here is the confirmation for what many of us have always suspected:


This is from Professor Daniel Willingham, at the University of Virginia in the Dept of Psychology. His closing remark that "Good Teaching is Good Teaching" really does say it all. Well, not all ...

My example was a student last year who came up to me at the end of class (early in the semester) and said something like "I can't learn this the way you teach it, I'm a visual learner". (The topic was net force = mass * acceleration involving several forces acting on an object.) My response was quick and to the point. "That is why I draw free-body diagrams and motion diagrams on the board, and do demonstrations whenever possible." (Motion diagrams illustrate the sequence of events and/or positions as a function of time when doing kinematic problems.) He looked like he had been hit between the eyes with a 2x4. Stunned. Mouth agape. (I am not making that up. You should have seen his face. He must have gotten a lot of mileage out of that one in the past.) And it was true. Visualization is difficult. Turning words into equations requires some picture of what is going on, in your mind if not on paper, and engineering classes push this to the point of requiring the relevant free-body diagram in every problem whether they ask for it or not. You can't get the problem right if you don't have the right picture, and truly complicated problems (not the toy problems we deal with) make that step essential.

Interestingly, he was a good enough student to suddenly realize that the visual part was there - and that it alone will not supply all of the meaning needed to solve a physics problem. With that excuse gone, he buckled down and earned an excellent grade in that class. I haven't heard that complaint from him again, but I do notice that he is now careful to take notes that include the drawings I put on the board.

Reflecting on that story after watching that video was somewhat enlightening. We do all of those things (visual, kinesthetic, verbal) when we solve problems. You can't do it without putting every tool to work in some way. We read the problem. Analyze and pick out key words, translating them into our own vocabulary. (Critical reading.) Construct a picture of what is going on and make a highly stylized drawing, the free-body diagram, that relates what is going on to the algebraic variables and numerical values we were given in the problem. Then we do math. Some might use strengths in one area to help in another, but none can avoid any part of the process.

I think what makes me a good teacher is that I know several ways to bring out each of those steps, making each one of them visible to the students. At that point, the only remaining challenge is to convince them that they need to follow those steps. Somewhere in the past (I am guessing some experience with teachers who could not function without the "teachers manual") they got the idea that there is a magic formula for every problem, and experts know all of those formulas. My biggest job is to convince them that the principles are what matter, and the steps I listed above are the only "magic formula" they need.

Hmmm. I think that will be my theme for the week after Spring Break.

There was something else in that blog by Sherman Dorn, but that needs its own topic. I need to correct my first impression of a new math curriculum now that I see how it fits with what I just wrote up above. That won't get done until Wednesday.

PS -
You might also want to watch a related video from the same professor about "Brain-based Education". Very interesting. It is even more fun to test this by watching a (student produced?) video from a "learner support center" about learning styles ... with the AUDIO OFF! Does this reach non-auditory learners? How can I interact kinesthetically with this video? Why do I have to sit and watch it? One thing that really breaks me up is when the college brings in an outside speaker who gives a LECTURE about how we should not use lectures to convey new material. Right.

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What I am Reading Today

Video and story from the BBC about the remains of Shakespeare's first theater. The thought of a new theater rising on the foundation of one where Romeo and Juliet might have had its premier is really quite remarkable. They also show the portrait recently identified as that of Shakespeare.

Dean Dad's musings about spousal hires and the next group of college leaders. The commentariat jumped on the spousal hire issue, probably because it is an even bigger issue in the current economy. Having seen my share of two-body hires over the years, it has been about 50:50 where hiring the woman was the driving force and I have also seen one instance where the guy was the primary hire and his spouse turned out to be the star. You really can't tell. Maybe the second half, about a possible leadership vacuum, deserved to be left alone. It comes up often, about as often as worries that we won't have enough of X coming down the pipeline. There always seems to be enough of X coming along. As DD seemed to say, if you really do think it is a problem, start grooming the next group of leaders at your own institution.

Reading more of an excellent discussion from last Thursday over at Dean Dad's, where a bunch of random ponderings generated quite the open thread. I put in my dos centavos more than once, but I want to elaborate here.

On the question of demographics, the population of our CC has been pretty stable for the past decade. We have the odd feature that the median age (around 21) corresponds to a local minimum in the age histogram! The mean age is several years higher than the median, reflecting a long tail toward the high end. We have always been a "transfer" CC, feeding Wannabe Flagship University down the road ... filling in the empty seats as their students drink their way out of school. We thus get a lot of traditional age students, including ones from outside our service area who are forced to go to our CC because they didn't make the freshman cut. The past year has seen an apparent decrease in the out of town group (staying closer to home because of money issues?) but an increase overall as budgets force a reduction in freshman enrollment at Wannabe Flagship and more top notch students (AP calculus, etc) choose us because we cost less. I have not seen the latest IR numbers for our "unduplicated headcount", but they will be interesting.

On the issue of more men coming to school, and how that impacts the college, I found the suggestion of a need for more support systems quite interesting. Our college is planning for one group, returning military on the GI bill, who will likely need a variety of support systems to adjust to the "real" world. I already see quite a few of those in my physics classes, but most were from Iraq 1 or the early part of Iraq 2. I'm guessing that the Army hasn't let too many out who can put boots on the ground. (The exception being young men like the triple-amp who is taking classes in our building.) We have only limited experience with that cohort, but we have some veteran's groups on campus that provide mentors and a support group. What we don't seem to deal with very well are the unemployed and underemployed young men who were failed by the K-12 school system the first time around. Our support systems seem to work much better with women who return to school, often while being the sole support for their children, than with men who find their way here.

We appear to do particularly badly with high school "graduates" who are barely literate and end up in our developmental ('prep', 'remedial') classes. I fear that most of those classes are organized too much like the structured environment they grew to hate in K-12, and we struggle to get them to use our less-structured learning environments.

Then there is the peripheral, but non-trivial, issue of female professors in mathematics and the sciences. Doctorate or not, they just don't get respect from our fairly conservative male students. They seem to view any woman in the classroom as a "teacher" (and K-12 teachers get no respect) rather than a "professor". They don't respect or trust what they are being taught, acting as if they know more chemistry than someone with a graduate degree in the subject. I wish there was some "academic support system" to help these kids adjust to the real world where experts come in two different genders as well as several different colors and accents. When racism (based on national origin, not color) showed up this semester, I was particularly taken aback. That last kid will be in for quite a shock when he gets to the Wannabe Engineering College and discovers how few professors there speak English as a first language.

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What I am Reading this Weekend

Lots of blog reading and commenting is in store this weekend, now that Spring Break has arrived to let me catch up on my reading rather than doing the grading that needs to be completed a week from Monday.

First, in the academic life territory, we have "Angry Professor" dealing with e-mail from a snowflake that appears unlikely to earn a Gentleman's C. There are a few more where this comes from. A student I deal with as an academic adviser took this approach: "I'm going to stop attending class X to punish the prof for not giving me enough help outside of class to make up for other classes I missed." Punishing whom? Right. Somehow these students appear to be attending a large number of different institutions. Check out this example "Becky Hirta" posted this past week.

I'll put that above the fold. More academic discussion will follow some obligatory physics reading. The very last one is a definite read, by the way.

I found several interesting items from the link lists at Uncertain Principles. I guess I will build them into my own list and comment on them as I have time.

• Exposition on significant figures. "Good Math Bad Math" really comes through on this one. I really like that he "rounds to evens". This is essential to avoid biasing the results of a calculation, but many people have given up in the face of the ubiquitous flawed code in Excel and some calculators. There are also some good comments, but one fails to get the point of sig figs. Erring by having too few digits in the resultant is not nearly as bad as erring by having too many. Unjustified precision is where danger lurks. Thinking you have fewer significant digits leads to conservative (safe) design.
• Michael Faraday. Only the latest in a series of articles by "Skulls in the Stars" (the others are all back linked), this article takes up Faraday's attempt to unify gravity with electricity and magnetism.
• Photons in the Room from "Built on Facts". This is a really nice little example that uses the energy density of an electromagnetic "wave" to estimate the number of photons in a room coming from a particular light source rather than just calculating the number per second leaving the source.
• Going Deeper is another nice blog from Matt, although I am pointing to it here as a substitute for elaborating on my comments posted in that thread. I really like his pedagogy, and added my own suggestion for how to jump from the Balmer formula (not to mention Kirchhoff's rules for optical spectroscopy) past the Bohr model to real quantum mechanics. "Going Deeper" really is the theme of how lots of physics came to be. And not just statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics either. That is what Newton did when he connected gravity on earth to gravity acting on the moon.
• Astroprof's continuing saga about planets ... now featuring part IX!

On the more generic academic side, we have

• Advice to new t-t faculty at a Regional Comprehensive from "Dr. Crazy". This article fills a huge hole in my own jobs series, since I know little about the situation at the typical 4-year university that offers Masters degrees. Teaching intensive, requiring research for promotion without being research intensive, these make up the bulk of the openings in academia. It falls between parts four (tenure standards at an R1) and five (getting a job at a teaching intensive place like a CC). An earlier article giving advice for a new R1 professor by "Gay Prof" gives perspective on the R1 world from the Evergreen side of the fence. Looks like I need to update my "jobs" articles.
• How faculty are mentored at FSP's R1 gets some constructive support. That also needs linking from the "jobs" series as a reminder that how new faculty get brought into the system will change with time.
• The evils of salary compression also got discussed by FSP.
• Rebecca talks about Tennessee and fixing computers in a Q&A. I was glad to see that I am not the only computational expert who knows little about fixing computers because (1) hardware is someone else's problem and (2) Unix is an operating system. But I was particularly taken by the comparison between Illinois and Tennessee. The comments about TN reminded me of the small town of Lake City, just north of Knoxville, where we used to stop when driving I-75. (We discovered the Cracker Barrel there. It is store number 6, IIRC.) The fog in the rolling hills north of there make for a magnificent vista at every turn in the highway that always reminds us of landscape print by an artist with a name something like Shur.
• "The Little Professor" completely nails the entire topic of technology in the classroom. This article is the must read alluded to above. She gives a great take on how different AI forms would function in the classroom of the future.

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BBC Big Read

I was reminded of this when Profgrrrrl recently posted her version of a top 100 book list from an old meme. I blogged my annotated list back in July of last year. She credited the BBC, but her list and mine came from the National Endowment of the Arts. The NEA selected books for the NEA Big Read, a national community reading program, so these are books they consider both important and suitable for a city-wide reading project. In contrast, the BBC list resulted from voting by listeners following their Big Read series in 2003, which makes comparing the lists rather interesting.

I'm going to use the same rules I followed for the other list:
1) Bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you have started but haven’t finished.
3) Place an asterisk * by those you intend to read/finish someday.
4) put a trailing "++" after the books you LOVE.
5) Put a dagger † where you've seen the movie but not read the book.

Like Swans on Tea (who added #5 for the other list), in many cases I've seen the movie (usually an old b/w version that is really faithful to the book) enough times to be as literate about it as those who read the book.

The BBC Top 100 can be found here, if you want your own "clean" list. If you follow the side links, you can see their full list, which goes all the way to number 200. My annotated list is below the fold.

I see my earlier guess, that I've read a lot more of these, was wrong. I'm still around a quarter of them. (I was fooled by the top half of the list, with all of the Potter books. There are quite a few in the second 50 that I have never even heard of.)

1. † The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
2. † Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams +
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee ++
7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
9. † The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller ++
12. † Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
13. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
14. † Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
15. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
16. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
17. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
18. † Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
19. † Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
20. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
21. † Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
22. Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone, JK Rowling
23. Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling
24. Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling
25. † The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
26. Tess Of The D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
27. Middlemarch, George Eliot
28. A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
29. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck +
30. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll ++
31. The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
32. One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
33. The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
34. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
35. † Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
36. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
37. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
38. Persuasion, Jane Austen
39. † Dune, Frank Herbert
40. Emma, Jane Austen
41. Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
42. Watership Down, Richard Adams
43. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
44. *† The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
45. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
46. Animal Farm, George Orwell
47. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
48. Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
49. Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
50. The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher
51. † The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
52. * Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
53. The Stand, Stephen King
54. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
55. † A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
56. The BFG, Roald Dahl
57. Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
58. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
59. Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
60. Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
61. Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
62. † Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden
63. A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
64. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
65. Mort, Terry Pratchett
66. The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
67. The Magus, John Fowles
68. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
69. Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
70. Lord Of The Flies, William Golding
71. Perfume, Patrick Süskind
72. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
73. Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
74. Matilda, Roald Dahl
75. † Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding
76. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
77. The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
78. Ulysses, James Joyce
79. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
80. Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
81. The Twits, Roald Dahl
82. I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
83. Holes, Louis Sachar
84. Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
85. The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
86. Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
87. * Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
88. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
89. Magician, Raymond E Feist
90. On The Road, Jack Kerouac
91. † The Godfather, Mario Puzo
92. The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
93. The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
94. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
95. Katherine, Anya Seton
96. Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer
97. Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
98. Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson
99. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
100. Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

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Dr. Crazy nails it ...

I really love teaching undergraduates hard stuff.

That is what I love about my job.

There are some really challenging subjects in the physics course I teach, ones that challenged me when I first encountered them. Ideas that blend math and science, often math they have not learned yet, or are also encountering for the first time. Its great to see students "get it", especially when it seems like the entire class gets it.

The entertaining part is that my students may never know that the really sweet explanation I gave them of a trick for remembering a particularly nasty equation (the Biot-Savart Law, for any physicists reading this) was something I figured out for the very first time this semester! It probably came across to them as a detail that was just as practiced as something I have explained the same way every one of the dozens of times I have taught this course, if I did it well.

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Book Titles

There is nothing quite like a good title. That was proved by "Baboon book makes award shortlist" in the BBC news feed today. The book in question, "Baboon Metaphysics", appears even more irresistible than the news story.

So I can't resist making an early nomination for next year: "Bunnies Made of Cheese: Quantum Physics for Dogs" by Chad Orzel, due out in the fall, although the latest draft table of contents suggests that the final title will lack that potentially Diagram Prize-winning first clause. But I suppose that is par for the course in a field where textbook titles are as creative as "Physics".

But who knows, just "Quantum Physics for Dogs" might be enough, and should certainly be enough to get Chad on the Colbert Show to get a bump for his book sales.

For a sample of Chad's work, check out slides from a recent talk drawn from the book, or the many blog entries on the general subject of explaining physics to his dog, Emmy, some of which were the genesis for the book.

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Happy Birthday ...

to Abraham Lincoln (200) and ... my paternal grandmother. As an immigrant, she was always quite impressed that the United States had a national holiday on her birthday.

Now, of course, two holidays (Lincoln's birthday and Washington's birthday) have been combined into President's Day to free up a holiday for MLK in January.

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How you can tell that ...

... retired NASCAR drivers aren't exactly rocket scientists.

After blaming a full moon for the crazy events in tonight's Shootout at Daytona (which proved to be a really good race), Darrell Waltrip said "I sure hope there isn't a full moon next Sunday!" (for the Daytona 500).

(Howling laughter is heard through the Pion household.)

No, you don't have to worry about that, Darrell. In fact, I'd say there is a pretty good chance that there will be a half-moon that day.

Just as I am pretty sure that there will be lots of comments this Sunday (during qualifying) evincing surprise that the second lap of a qualifying run is faster than the first lap ... on a track where the drag-limited top speed of a "restrictor plate" race ensures that the cars take more than two laps to reach maximum speed.

When your car approaches its top speed asymptotically, you have to be a really bad driver to keep from going faster on that second lap.

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Female Mathematicians during WW II

Check out this 8 minute trailer for an up-coming movie "Top Secret Rosies", where "Math may be the most secret weapon of all". (Hat tip to Sherman Dorn.)

I'd take a bit of an exception to the claim in the intro that this is an untold story, since there wasn't a single thing in it that I didn't already know from histories of the projects those women worked on (or the history taught in conjunction with learning "numerical analysis"), but it is great that it has been assembled into a coherent story with a central focus on the role of mathematicians, mostly female, in winning World War II.

I hope that people who see this movie do not interpret the presence of electromechanical "adding" machines as an indication of mindless labor. That was not the case then, any more than the essential skill of entering the correct numbers into a calculator or computer program is simply clerical labor today. It still takes a person who knows what they are doing to put the right numbers in the machine and verify that the numbers that come out are not wrong.

What people today don't realize is that digital computers with the capability of doing sophisticated engineering (or physics) calculations were too expensive for a small or mid-size company until relatively recently, and you didn't have time (and could not afford the risk) to explain the task to a low-paid clerk. Your engineering license hung on those numbers being right, just as lives depended on whether a 155mm Howitzer shell landed on the enemy rather than your own troops during WW II. This was a job for experts.

One place my dad worked had a "programmable" desktop calculator, where the key sequences could be stored on a magnetic card in much the way that a program is written on a TI-83. This was in the late 1960s, when that device cost thousands of dollars, and it was operated by the engineers. A company he joined in 1969 had an in-house computer for payroll and billing, but only a few engineering tasks were done on it. Everything else was done with an electromechanical calculator like you see in this movie clip, plus lots of log and trig tables. One of the engineers bought one of the first HP-35 calculators (at a price that would be several thousand dollars today), explaining that it saved the cost of the books of log tables that he wore out every year. Highly efficient algorithms for computation were really important when you were doing it essentially by hand.

Even before the war, many women worked as mathematicians or computers who applied mathematics to engineering or physics problems. Many engineers and physicists also did this work. That is what Feynman and Teller and others did at Los Alamos, working side by side with women like the ones in this movie. Although one woman mentioned her background with business calculations on an adding machine, the complexity of the work often required someone who knew what was being done, someone who could spot a computational error because s/he knew the math or physics behind the correct answer.

[Perhaps it was inevitable that histories in the 1950s would put the focus on the men (much in the way Feynman put the focus on himself) and that female mathematicians would be expected to go back to "women's work" after the war. What is disturbing is the degree to which young women still have to fight stereotypes imposed by their fellow students. One great thing at our CC is that we have a number of highly capable women teaching mathematics, and they have served as role models for young women who never realized they could have a technical career.]

The mathematical problem being solved by the women mentioned in this clip was the solution of sophisticated equations for the flight of a bomb or shell, such as the shell fired by a 6" gun or 16" cannon. Models of the many forces acting on an object, most never even mentioned in an intro physics textbook, were used to predict where the object would land if released at some specific angle, velocity, and altitude. The models were verified against experiments done with the actual, specific ballistic projectile, and then used to construct extensive tables that filled in all the gaps between the experimental results they had available. Gunners could reverse the process, looking up the firing angle needed to get a particular shell to land at a particular distance away for given cross winds, etc.

The ENIAC, actually the second electronic computer built rather than the first as stated in the film clip, was built to replace the labor of a room full of people working with calculators. Naturally, the people (women mathematicians) who had organized the work on the hand calculations were tapped to do the same for the new machine. This was not an uncommon occupation. One of the first computer programmers I knew was a woman who wrote code used for accelerator design in the 1950s. She was old enough to have done war work, but I don't know if she did.

But she (like the women featured in this movie) would not be the only person who might have done hugely significant work during WW II without anyone knowing what they did. Until the classification rules were lifted in the mid 1990s, all I knew was that my thesis advisor had "given orders to Admirals" during WW II. It turns out that he worked at Bletchley Park, breaking German codes, and knew John von Neumann, among others. Another person I knew had been in the plane that followed the Enola Gay to Hiroshima, taking pictures of the effects of the bomb. I didn't know that until I read his obituary.

Side note:
The first electronic computer ever built, Colossus, was so secret that its mere existence was classified as part of the "Ultra" code breaking work done at Bletchley Park in the UK. It was only after the classification of that project expired that it became known that the ENIAC was not the first programmable computer.

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Physics Teaching and Retention ...

I'm posting this as basically an open thread, triggered by this comment on Dean Dad's blog.

I'll quote the comment below the fold:

My fiance teaches physics full-time at the local CC. He's very concerned about maintaining standards, so students transferring to study engineering at the local mammoth midwestern u (MMU) can hold their own in the cattle pens they call classes there. I teach at MMU, and I know what he does is effective. A student we've both had in common told me that when MMU eng. classes are tough, my fiance's former students get together and use the methods they learned from him to figure out how to understand the difficult topics.

Here's the dilemma he's in right now: how to deal with mixed messages from CC administration emphasizing 1. the importance of student retention (hint hint) 2. bringing this CC to back above average for its size in terms of student math performance. On the whole this CC has a very good reputation in science and eng. prep. Still, I hear from my fiance (a LOT) about his frustration with what he perceives as instructors lowering their standards. It's hard to know how to read this. But if you get a student in your calculus based physics course who doesn't remember how to do derivatives 1 month after taking calc, what's going on? Also, if the physics instructor at a satellite campus of this CC regularly has an A- average in his classes (my fiance's is more like C, and that's in step with chem/bio/otherscience instructors there), how do you respond? This calculus student isn't an isolated case.

There's a lot going on here, but even without identifying all the causes for it, it's important to know. To what extent are standards already shaky here? What are the true priorities?

This CC isn't in immediate trouble, but like everyone else, is looking at major economizing. They're also in the position of getting much less funding from the state than MMU, but charge about 1/2 the tuition MMU does.

Yes, there is a lot here, and some of it has been touched on in past articles that might be filed under "teaching" or "education". Here I will quickly single out two of them for possible future discussion in more detail.

1. Increasing retention (of students) by lowering standards: I am fairly direct when dealing with this. By direct, I mean I have publicly asked the Provost and President what they want. Do they want me to pass students who cannot do the work at the level needed to succeed in engineering school, thereby increasing my "success" rate at the expense of students who will fail after they transfer? Their answer is an emphatic "No" because we measure learning by success after transfer in our internal re-accreditation studies.
2. Not remembering material from a previous class (retention of knowledge): Some of this is to be expected. Fighting it is also something that I actively (and I mean REALLY actively) push. I alluded to this issue in my John Updike article, and so intend to blog about it 'soon'. Our math department is taking it on as well.

By the way, like your husband, I revel in the stories my former students tell about kicking butt at Big Dog U. Their stories are a big part of how I sell item 2 to my current students.

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John Updike

Among the other things to do, such as grade papers and blog about "retention of knowledge" (prompted by Dean Dad) and physics education (prompted by the gatekeeping article by Chad, and others he links to, as well some engineering education videos that an unrelated comment by Alice Pawley led me to), is the need to comment on today's news.

John Updike died today.

And I was somewhere between shocked and dismayed when Katie Couric said something to the effect that most Americans will think of "Witches of Eastwick" when they hear his name. Not me. To me, there is only "Rabbit, Run". (And his many essays in the New Yorker, which will undoubtedly have quite a tribute in the near future.) Rabbit is, indeed, finally At Rest.

It isn't quite like that book changed my life or made me a writer, far from it, but it has spoken to me in many different ways over the past decades. I'll explain.

I first read "Rabbit, Run" in high school, long after it had been published. It was a great story, with a voyeuristic look at the 'cool' life of a rather irresponsible fellow going through a post-high-school early life crisis. It was, like other books assigned in the best class I remember from high school, radically different from anything assigned in any of my previous lit classes. What interested me then was the look at the underside of the Protestant middle class, as that BBC article puts it.

I picked up "Rabbit Redux" in paperback, about a year after it was originally published in hard cover. I was in college at the time. (I can be pretty sure about when I bought it because the bookmark is a punched card loading the APL library.) I didn't like it, and stopped part way through out of boredom.

This did not stop me from buying "Rabbit is Rich" (again in paperback) when it came out a decade later. For some reason, I decided I should attack the trilogy from the start, since it had been so long since I read "Rabbit, Run".

I was stunned. Viewed from adulthood, now older than Rabbit was at the time, "Rabbit, Run" was a completely different book. Completely different. Part of it was my age, and a longer view at the era Rabbit had lived in, but part of it was that I now actually knew Rabbit! I'll leave it at that. That was an eye opener. I then enjoyed "Rabbit Redux", which I now see I could not appreciate because I had nothing to connect with in the book back when I was in college. It was easy to connect to the Rabbit of 1960, not long out of high school, but not so easy for the one approaching middle age.

There was no looking back, then, but in some ways I dreaded reading "Rabbit at Rest". Someone I knew was facing what we would all face - and what my friend faced, may God rest his soul, some years later. I imagine that, today, all of those books will carry additional meaning that I could not appreciate back when I first (or second) read them.

Maybe I'll read them all this summer.

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Ooops

Obama said he was the 44th person to take the oath as President.

Incorrect.

He is the 44th President, but the 43rd person to take the oath of office.

Grover Cleveland served twice as President, in two non-consecutive terms, and the system used to make Bush #43 and Obama #44 counts him twice.

Yes, this is nit picking ... but if I can split the atom I can also split hairs.

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Today and Tomorrow

Today has been an interesting day for reflection, if one can get a quiet moment amongst all of the blather of the talking heads. I was struck the most by some comments by Peggy Noonan (Reagan's main speech writer for you younger folks), who sounded at times like she actually voted for Obama. To paraphrase, she seemed to say that the excitement level in Washington matched that of the conservatives at parties during the 1980 Reagan inaugural, except this time it was regular people in the streets who were happy. Regular people, not just the wealthy power brokers. That does seem to capture the essence of what is happening.

What I want to say is that this is a day I have been waiting for ever since I shook Bobby Kennedy's hand in 1968, and that Obama is turning out to be much more than even RFK might have been. I say this because there is a real difference between a self-made man who had to work to pay off his college loans, and one whose big brother appointed him Attorney General of the U.S. Not in capability, but in symbolism. And not just symbolism, but reality. The reality that hard work and competence once again counts for something in America, like it used to. Or, at least, like the Horatio Alger myth said it used to, and the way it worked for my immigrant family. Yes, I am extremely excited by it.

And I am hoping that I might get a glimpse of a former student, one who came to me from inner city Baltimore via the US Marine Corps and is now an engineer working inside the Beltway, somewhere in those crowds tomorrow - but I will be in class teaching the next ones who want to tread down that path. I am excited, but I won't cancel class precisely because so more students can follow his path from the worst this country has to offer to the kind of success it has to offer.

Some commenter over in a thread about the inauguration over on Chad's blog took exception to my thoughts about the relative importance of hearing a speech live (a speech that will be available in unedited glory on CSPAN the same day and on YouTube forever) versus learning the physics needed to become an engineer or physicist. Do I lack perspective? Hardly. I've seen the ugly face of racism. I've seen the national chain gasoline stations that had a special design down south, a design with a third bathroom for "coloreds", that did not exist up north. I've attended school with black students who lived in their own upscale subdivision because the banks would not lend money to buy a house in a whiter subdivision, this in a state that had no segregated schools or legal limits on where people could live or work.

A good friend of my wife's was shot dead on the street for having the wrong color skin for that particular street. Or maybe it was for having good friends whose skin color was OK for that street.

No, I don't lack perspective on just how significant this event is in the history of the United States. But the event means nothing unless my students are prepared to carry that banner into the future.

You see, I also don't lack perspective on the difference between the "plantationist" approach of LBJ, giving things to people because you didn't think they could achieve on their own, and the "homesteader" approach that worked for many of the successful immigrant populations in the United States. (I don't see much difference between the concept of Cabrini-Green in Chicago and the approach of a powerful local lawyer who let his household help live rent-free in a shack not suitable for habitation until it fell down, then moved them to another one. I do see a difference between that and being "given" land if you live on it and work it for a number of years, investing your sweat and blood in it.)

Every day I see students who were failed by their schools and by their families and their friends, but have managed to move beyond that and achieve something. Every day I go to "work" with them in mind. I smile when I overhear students complain that some prof is too easy, and is not preparing them for what lies ahead. I wish, somehow, that this word would get back to their brothers and sisters attending a school where social promotion still rules. The message of this administration is not that people are owed a high-rise slum to make up for slavery, but that you are owed the right to work hard and succeed based on the "content of your character". There is a reason some in the black community didn't like his message, and some seeming "conservatives" are taking a different look at his message.

Many people remember the sound bite from the Kennedy inaugural speech, and not the challenge it gave the nation. The idea is perhaps clearest in the short speech he gave at the University of Michigan in October 1960, reflecting what was said in his July acceptance speech: "The New Frontier of which I speak is not a set of promises - it is a set of challenges. It sums up not what I intend to offer the American people, but what I intend to ask of them." (That message got lost when LBJ pushed his plan through Congress.)

I also find it interesting that, in his speech at Michigan, JFK referred to the 1960 election as being as important as the 1933 election had been.

This past election was probably even more important than 1960, but only time will tell. I celebrate it with joy, by teaching my students the basics of mechanics and electricity they will need to reach the same level of success that Obama did, but the same path. The path of hard work, the work needed to prove you are better than anyone you have to compete with.

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Pepsi ...

... re-did their logo to resemble the Obama O?

Sure looks like it, particularly given that they appear to be launching their new ad campaign today (rather than during the Super Bowl) featuring lots of "O" words like HOPE and JOY.

Ah, corporate America, how we have underestimated your ability to snap up any new trend and exploit it for every bit of marketing value it might have.

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Definitely Worth the Drive

It required a fair bit of planning and effort, but this is what we saw this morning:



Yes, we saw Whooping Cranes flying behind an ultralight aircraft to their winter residence, courtesy of Operation Migration. Unforgettable.

Vehicle we saw that traveled the furthest: Washington state. Birders are nuts. Count us among them.

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And so the year begins

Ah the joys of the start of a new semester.

Actually, I can't complain all that much. I had 100% attendance in my Physics 2 class. Seriously. Perfect attendance. Now I have to figure out how to integrate the new kids into the cult that is our learning community. Better yet, our folks in charge of the Physical Plant did not do anything odd to save money and I had nice warm dry air in the classroom when doing electrostatics demos. They worked perfectly. I mean perfectly. I was able to clearly demonstrate that there are two different kinds of charge and that like charges attract and unlike charges repel.

Elsewhere ...

Some rocket scientist used a dry erase marker to write on the Smartboard in one of my classrooms. Hint: those things do not erase when used on a Smartboard instead of a whiteboard. (I should probably try to read what is there to figure out who the guilty party might be.)

And I had a kid enrolled in my Physics 1 class (which requires calculus) whose information sheet said he was taking trig. Yep, right out of Becky Hirta's playbook when teaching the Calculus Circus at a school without any computer pre-req checks. I looked at his transcript and he was taking trig. Turns out that some other rocket scientist, a newly hired "student centered" counselor, pushed past the computer protections and put him in my class because it is required for his major. Close, but no cigar. His major requires PASSING my class, not simply taking it, and you aren't going to pass my class if you haven't already passed trig. In fact, they often don't pass my class if all they managed to do was scrape by with a C in trig.

But I also have students who started on their computer-based homework even before the first class met. I am not worthy, but I try.

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Yesterday's Not-Really-News Historic News

Hat tip to Matt to go look for this.



Overshadowed a bit by all of the economic news, particularly Sen. Obama's plan to put a bigger push behind the economy, and the fact that this result has been pretty clear since about two months ago, this is actually THE moment when Sen. Obama is officially elected and becomes President Elect Obama. And, as Matt emphasized (from what I understand to be the other side of the political aisle), it is indicative of the way power is transferred peacefully in this country.

The calendar this year holds a rather interesting bit of irony: Monday, January 19, is the Martin Luther King Jr Day Holiday. Tuesday, January 20, is Barack Hussein Obama's inauguration day.

And one side comment on the economy, after today's news about unemployment:

We, like many states, continue to struggle with state support of education in the face of this economy. I caught a bit of Cramer on CNBC tonight, and he spoke a bit of truth that the media and politicians have avoided. We are probably in a depression, not a recession. Politicians and the media are probably correct to avoid using that word because, as professional communicators, they probably know that the vast majority of the American people are too poorly educated to have been taught that the term Great Depression was used because it was uniquely different from the depressions that had taken place periodically in United States history. I went to Wikipedia to refresh my memory of the one that followed the Civil War (the Panic of 1873) and also found the Panic of 1837. It is interesting, but not surprising, that banking irresponsibility and speculative bubbles played a role in each of these. The railroad boom in the 1870s sounds a lot like the real estate boom we recently had. One wonders if the Madoff securities scandal of 2008 will rank up there with Jay Gould trying to corner the gold market in 1869.

If you can trust Wikipedia (and, increasing, I find that I can trust it in technical areas where politics does not play too big of a role), the other reason might be that there is no official technical definition of a depression. The prominent mention of the role of deflation (currency devaluation) in a depression should make clear why the Fed has taken such an agressive role in fighting deflation without regard to the risk of future inflation. The balancing act is to "catch" any surge in inflation of the pump priming gets out of hand.

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News from Apple!

This 'news' story was all the rage among the Mac users at work today:

Check out the new MacBook Wheel!

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

It is definitely revolutionary (pun intended).

And definitely LOL funny.

Pay close attention to the captions and the other stories in the crawl.

Now if you want a real laugh, follow this link to a Youtube version and read the comments. There are a lot of gullible people out there ...

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Terror Threat for the New Year

more Icanhascheezburger animals



We have enough trouble with the tree rats without that!

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Happy New Year!

Hope everyone has a Happy New Year!

We will soon be heading out to an annual New Year's Eve party, where our hope is that the host will once again avoid being arrested for putting on an awesome fireworks show at midnight that starts off with the firing of a cannon. Cover your ears!

Should be geeky fun. Word is that there will be a new Wii game featuring mind exercises for the elderly (Brain Academy). Maybe tomorrow I will post a video of a related challenge to your brain's ability to pay attention, but today I will comment on the past year and an observation posted yesterday by Profgrrrl as part of a meme:

38. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2008.

Much of happiness is a choice. Actually, I think I already knew that but saw it many times over in my life and when observing other people. Perhaps more of what I learned this year was to embrace the moment and the situation. And just live.

I could not agree more. I have worked around some unhappy people, veritable nabobs of negativism, and I have worked around happy people. The only difference appears to be that the happy people choose to be happy. It may be personality in some cases, but it is also contagious. Every day at work is a fun day because of the people I work with. I owe them many thanks for making the best job I have ever had into an even better one.

Finally, below the fold, a video about one of the people we lost this year, and some comments about ones that I lost.

I lost an uncle who had lived a long and successful life, but the loss was particularly touching because he was the very special older brother to my Mom.

And I lost a colleague who "died in harness". He never got to give a 'last lecture' like you see discussed below, but he was a solid, very committed teacher who lived every day to the fullest. I'm sure he was gloriously happy right up to the last seconds of his life.

I only knew about Randy Pausch because of his "instant celebrity", but I wish I had known him in real life:



I know several people who have died of pancreatic cancer. It appears to be the least treatable fatal disease out there. The numbers are not as high as other diseases, but it seems to get little attention given how dangerous it is and the way it seems to strike people in the prime of life. Is it increasing (as seems to be the case since I never heard about it all until recently)? Why?

But regardless of the answer to those questions, my answer is that we should all live our lives so we can face the end the way he did - with dignity.

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Charlie Brown would be proud

So I put off buying a tree until Saturday. That made shopping really easy (and cheap) since I only had to sort through about a dozen trees (only a few of which were the species I wanted) to pick the "best" one.


You should have seen it before it was decorated. The reason for the "hole" without many lights or decorations near the middle is that there aren't any branches there! However, I have added a few more ornaments in that area since that photo was taken and made the flaw particularly obvious. (At that time, I'd only opened the box containing the key ones that make the tree special.) But who cares?

The tree, imperfect as it is, serves its purpose - which is to connect pagan Solstice worship to Christianity and the modern era by ending up in a brush pile for the yard critters to use for shelter - while serving as centerpiece for family traditions.

One of those traditions is this ornament

which my Grandparents once owned. Might have even been on their first tree. I wish I knew when they got it, but it is over 80 years old. One whose age I do know, because it was a gift on my very first Christmas from a Great Aunt, is down at the center bottom (where it is always hung). Another decoration only showed up recently

although I made it (rather badly, with a coping saw) quite a few decades ago. Even the paint job is totally lame, but my parents saved it anyway - and packed it up as a "present" when they cleaned out their house to move to a wonderful retirement community. Those are supposed to be reindeer in front.

Another tradition is using the old incandescent lights that my wife had (from her parents) when we got married. The beads, seen in one photo, are also from her side of the family. It is a "blended" tree, just as our marriage blends our two personalities. I hope my niece, newly engaged this holiday season, has as much fun developing a set of traditions with her husband as we have had with ours. The starting point for us was the star on top, which my wife made for our very first tree. That makes it the most special ornament of all of them.

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Christmas Eve in 1968.

This is the 40th anniversary of Apollo 8 putting men in orbit around the moon for the first time - and sending back images of Earthrise.

I suppose everyone has seen the color photo they took, but today's BBC article about the event includes the FIRST photograph taken of Earthrise by humans:

My version has been cropped from the 2411x2448 original available from NASA on the flight journal page describing this observation. The picture is in black and white because that is the film they had in the camera at the time, and is oriented the way NASA says Bill Anders said it looked to him from orbit. They were taking geology-oriented images of the moon, where color was not relevant. The iconic color photo was taken shortly after. A transcript of the hunt for color film and large versions of the two color photos are also on that NASA web page.


The BBC article also includes a low-def version of an HD video of Earthrise shot recently by a Japanese satellite and the first photo of the earth taken from lunar orbit.

Finally, one thing that is forever memorable: Live TV from the moon. The actual broadcast was a boring black and white image. What you might have seen later is that audio synced with the color film that was shot from orbit (see this video, for example) but only seen after they returned to earth.

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Christmas Eve

I've got some catching up to do, with a few articles back in the queue, but first:

What would Christmas be without NORAD tracking Santa?

The "live cam" coverage of Santa's visits around the globe has already started. Go to http://www.noradsanta.org/en/video.html to see all of them via YouTube. Noradsanta.org also includes ways to follow him on Google Earth. According to a BBC article today, they also have a live twitter feed (@noradsanta) so kids know when to expect his visit.

For any film buffs out there, I also stumbled on this clip from an 1898 film called "Santa Claus". The special effects are impressive, but it is also interesting to see Santa portrayed before the Coca Cola version provided a common version for American culture. Even as Snopes debunks this story, they confirm it. Their text from 1927 (four years before the Coke ad appeared) clearly says the standard Santa wore a hood. Notice the hoodie on Santa in that 1898 film? But the Santa in the first Coke ads wore a hat and all Santas wear a hat today. (Read the Coca Cola company version of this history here.)

In other news, a priest is in trouble in Italy for telling children that Santa is not real. What was that guy thinking? Well, he said what he was thinking: that kids should only believe that Jesus is real. Odd way to treat a patron Saint of the Church, but he clearly does not appreciate the role of mythology in human culture. (I once heard a fascinating sermon drawing a parallel between the two, concerning belief in the unseen based on hearsay evidence that might be centuries old.) Of course, plenty of evangelical churches try to do away with the mythology of Halloween (the eve of All Saints Day), so maybe they will take on the commercial mythology of Santa next. Not. Santa serves too many purposes to do that.

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Shared Sacrifice

Triggered by comments posted by Dean Dad (at a CC of unknown size) about a discussion between Tenured Radical (at "Zenith", aka Wesleyan, a SLAC) and Dr. Crazy (at a 4-year regional state university) concerning faculty involvement in budget cuts at their institution. [See also a followup article from Dr. Crazy and the links she includes to comments from others, particularly these two.] Rather than hijack any of those threads, I figured I'd write my own thoughts here. [Note: Although drafted soon after reading those articles, this isn't actually being posted until late on Christmas Eve. Too much time preparing for my overload next semester and doing all of the errands and such that cannot be done during an overly busy semester, not to mention getting ready for Christmas.]

This issue is nothing new to us at Ishkabibble CC, where budget issues have been dealt with rather unevenly. At times the process appeared very open, at times it appeared dictatorial. The truth is that we were probably never actually involved in making any of the key decisions; the difference was the degree to which the options under discussion were communicated to and discussed with the faculty prior to the decision being made. I'll give the context here followed by my comments.

Our situation is not unlike those described in those two blogs. We have not had a salary increase. We have been told (not asked) to carry a significant extra load compared to the past, much as Dr. Crazy put it in her item 4:

Course releases seem to have gone the way of the dodo, for in these tough fiscal times we should find a way to do all of the extra things on top of everything else. Sleep be damned!

However, our college has "eaten" the health cost increases (her item #3), which do not require contributions from our salaries. Further, all layoffs, so far, have been of vacant positions. Since "vacant positions" includes faculty lines previously held by some of our best teaching faculty, there have been more adjuncts teaching than in the past and they do not replace what has been lost. (We are in a location where it is hard to hire good adjuncts because of our salary structure compared to that at nearby Wannabe Flagship.)

My first comment about what Tenured Radical wrote is that I personally have no resentment over my flat salary, although I do find it irritating that "shared sacrifice" does not include the President's performance bonus or his non-salary benefits like a housing and car allowance. Seriously. He makes more than anyone and he needs help with his house payment? If summer teaching requests are any measure, and I think they are a great measure, our new faculty desperately need help with their house payments. I think they are getting screwed. I resent hearing people complain who are making 25 or 30 grand more than those faculty.

A major issue for us is that the starting salary for new faculty has not been adjusted for several years. Combined with no pay raise this year (but good ones in the past few years), there has been a sort of anti-compression going on. We don't have special promotion pay raises, and, personally, I think the long-term promise of tenure is a significant pay raise. We have been treated really well in the recent past, but those increases don't help the new faculty. Of course, those people might have trouble because they don't watch Suze Orman (we are huge fans) and have never lived through a recession before. Maybe they were not as conservative as we were when we bought our house and have a huge student loan, credit card, and automobile debt. Not many people live on cash the way we do.

Shared sacrifice? Only if it is shared. As Tenured Radical put it rather well:

Agreeing to a salary freeze, when it is explained as part of a well-reasoned plan is sticking out your hand and playing your role as a partner in the enterprise.

Quite so, with emphasis on "well-reasoned plan". The strong point of our President has been coming up with a well-reasoned plan, one that has anticipated cuts (thereby reducing their impact) and put most (but not enough) emphasis on the classroom. But the partnership has only gone one way, and at times the decisions were made without any knowledge at all of what goes on in the classroom. None, since the President knows little about the classroom. (To his credit, he has attended my class - and learned something about momentum and safety belts in car crashes as a result - but that is not the same as teaching in one.) They wasted money on new computers for our lab, computers that did not work as well as the ones they replaced! No one, and I mean no one, asked if that was needed.

A major part of the problem at our CC was that a significant round of cuts were worked on during the summer, in near isolation. As near as I can tell, only one faculty member (the chair of the Major Committee that I serve on) was consulted in any way about what they implemented this fall. No one else on the committee, or any of the other advisory panels, was involved at all despite the fact that many of us were on campus teaching during the summer and most of us read e-mail regularly. A previous round of cuts was done in the same way, but had minor effects. I suspect the President interpreted our reaction then as support for his unilateral decisions.

The result of the President's idea for fall has the effect of devaluing our work, the same point Dr. Crazy made in her final comments. This has been a common concern of our faculty. Like her institution, we are at the bottom of the funding barrel and our President does nothing, absolutely nothing, to speak Truth to Power (the legislature) about how little we get from the state for each class of freshman comp (not to mention physics) compared to what they get at Wannabe Flagship - and what our students get (excellence without money) compared to theirs when you consider the SAT scores they start out with. Particularly when you consider that our faculty are more qualified than the adjuncts they use to teach those freshmen. Would that university get those tons of money if they were appropriated for research (which is what they mostly go for at a 1/1 institution with adjuncts teaching the intro classes) rather than instruction? Would they be held to a different account if the legislature actually knew it was not being spent in the classroom?

Side comment:
A friend of a colleague is a professor who lectures to a really large class at Wannabe Flagship. The prof generates over $750,000 for the university each semester in tuition and state "instructional" funds. Talk about profit! Where does it go?

Our President's decisions devalue our work in the classroom. When you simply add extra seats to a room, eliminating aisles so it is impossible to walk around the room and do "active learning" exercises, are you really putting the classroom first? Granted, Wannabe Flagship uses all of that extra money to put even more students in a giant lecture hall and stuff almost as many students as I have in one lecture into their "recitation" section, while dumbing down their physics curriculum to a shocking degree, but that does not make it right. Like Dr. Crazy, I enjoy teaching here because my students work hard to be better than their competition. I've blogged about that before. Many of their decisions seem to reflect an assumption that anyone can do our job, and that we can do it just as well regardless of the number of papers we have to grade. That might be true when you only give multiple choice exams, as some of our faculty do, but our students deserve - and used to get - more than that. I don't bring to this what Dr. Crazy does, but I take it just as seriously.

When we get cut by X%, we lose less money per student than Wannabe Flagship does, but what we lose has a much bigger impact in the classroom - because all of our money goes to the classroom. Our President needs to make that case. I don't think our CC's administration, despite giving it lip service in pursuit of grant money or marketing the college, takes our role in the community as seriously as the faculty do.

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Grades are Done!

Time to celebrate the end of the semester! (See end of blog for one reason.)

A hat tip to Rachel for this video,



not to mention for her inspired way of dealing with a cheater during her chem final, because ... trust me, the instructors would much prefer that the student freak out and fail the exam on her own than have to push through the paperwork in a vain hope that a committee will back them up on the charge of academic dishonesty. There are many places where each Snowflake is held to be precious in its own way.

By the way, I might not be the most eagle-eyed of proctors I have worked with, but furtive looks and (in particular) reaching for ANYTHING anywhere gets my immediate attention. Sounds to me like the proctors did a rather poor job of keeping out of view (watching from a back corner is spectacularly effective) and/or bracketing the room. I always make sure I have an observation point that is close to where the kids like to hide in the back of a room and spend a lot of time there. Much better to be standing still than moving slowly around, particularly if there is a second person who can be moving around.

As for Dr. Pion's semester:

On a more positive note, it looks like EVERY student who went into the final exam with a plausible grade has managed to pass my classes. The exceptions had exam averages around 50% at midterm and way too much optimism about either (A) their chance of improving their performance or (B) the effect of messages about how important this class is to getting into their career of choice.

Sorry, but if some college thinks passing my class is important for a particular major, all the more reason to hold you to a standard where outliers get the failing grade they earned.

Additional time wasting material:

Oh, yes, and if that video is not enough, we have

• The Legend of Hamster Piano and Popcorn (for fans of cute rodents)
• Nora: Practice Makes Purr-fect (for cat fanciers)
• Nora: The Sequel

Nothing says the end of the semester like people applauding a cat playing a piano. Particularly when someone is taking piano lessons on the other piano ... Ah, the miracle of YouTube. These four videos have over 10 million, 4 million, 11 million, and 3 million views, respectively.

Eleven million views of a cat playing a piano? Wonder where Van Cliburn would rank. Answer: none much over 200 thousand views. Sigh.

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Full Moon

The moon has been very bright lately, rivaling a nearby streetlight even when not full. (I could read the labels on our recycling bin by moonlight last week.) I learned one of the reasons today: Tonight's brilliant full moon coincides with the moon's closest approach to the earth in its elliptical orbit around the earth, making it 14% bigger and 30% brighter than usual.

It was definitely time to get out the camera.


Click image for larger view. Details below the fold.

Photo taken with a Nikon D70 using a 70-300 lens at full zoom (300 mm), shot at f5.6 at 1/2000 of a second exposure with sensitivity set to 800 ISO. Only edit was to crop to 500x500 and convert to greyscale, although I did not see any color artifacts (probably because the sensors were not being pushed anywhere near their limit at that exposure).

I can't get over the detail for a photo with a fairly modest lens, particularly the mountains visible along the upper right edge. It took a lot of experiments with the camera set to shutter priority to figure out what appeared to give the best image. The ones shot at 1/8000 didn't have enough brightness in the ejecta, while slower ones brought out the halo (the sky is actually fairly hazy with humidity) while losing all of the detail on the surface.

OK, enough of a diversion. Time to get back to grading exams.

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Space news

Two news stories today:

• Black hole confirmed at center of Milky Way
• Water vapor in vicinity of an extra-solar planet

The first is not really new news, but the second one is interesting. The planet involved is not suitable for life, but the discovery increases the odds that the conditions for life might exist in other solar systems.

Having actual data on this is relevant to estimates made based on the so-called Drake Equation (for details, look here). Most of the values in that estimate were, basically, wild guesses. The most critical one is the chance that a planet can support life. Data on the odds of finding water available are, therefore, interesting to the SETI community.

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Quote of the Day

From the BBC European News Desk ....

"We can still have sex and drugs but in a way that shows the city is in control."

- Deputy Mayor Lodewijk Asscher of Amsterdam

Apparently they were shocked, SHOCKED, to learn that brothels, along with marijuana shops, peep shows, sex shows, mini-supermarkets, phone, and souvenir shops might provide a cover for organized crime and contribute to urban decay.

Rudy Giuliani could have told them that. Even if there were no broken windows.

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