Mom scientists in the news

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?

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Don't believe what the press is telling you!

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.

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Measuring "pi"

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.

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From ridiculous to sublime

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.

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Beware the Ides of March!

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

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

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Reaction Time

"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.

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Unacceptable humor?

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.

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Forcing the horse to drink

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.

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Teaching Majors

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.

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Winter prep time

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.

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Productivity

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.

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Students helping students

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?

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Dot Physics gets Power wrong

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.

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News Flash!

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.

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Assessment

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.

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Future engineers at Auburn!

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.

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More on class prep

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.

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Preparing for class

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.

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Three Un-related Topics

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.

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English?

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.

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