As I tweeted, this week we got rid of these:
And replaced them with these:
The new ones are pretty, with melodious chimes and flashing lights:
The silent sentinels of our laundry room that hang on the wall above the machines seem to approve:
Archive for the ‘Tech’ Category
Out With The Old
Saturday, October 2nd, 2010Class
Thursday, September 16th, 2010The semester is three weeks old now and I haven’t mentioned what I’m doing here on the blog.
The course I’m teaching is an introductory physics course, and this semester I have about 135 students. In addition I am managing the ‘discussion groups’ (Australians: think ‘tutor groups’) for all students enrolled in the intro course, about 380 in total. There are nine discussion groups, and I’m teaching one of them as well.
So far I have found things to be quite busy, perhaps busier than ever before. Having such a large class naturally translates to many more students needing of my time.
I decided to go with two innovations this semester: online homework and clickers.
Online homework is a natural evolution of teaching, and it’s exactly as it sounds. The students visit a website where they are presented with the questions and must input the answers. An advantage of the system is the values are different for each student (so they can’t just enter their friends answers) and they get instant feedback. It is very customizable, eliminates the problem of how to grade 380 homeworks a week and I’m liking it a lot so far.
This is a clicker:
It is an wireless electronic voting device. In addition to the on/off button, there are 5 voting buttons (A through E) that the user can push to make a vote. A base station collects and tabulates the votes. I have the base station, and as part of the decision to use clickers I need to structure my lectures around them. This means putting questions to the class periodically (my goal is a minimum of four per lecture) so they can vote on them.
Sometimes they are just for information (“Have you registered the homework yet?”), sometimes they are conceptual questions (“Does a coin flipped coin fall faster going up or going down?”) and sometimes I put actual problems on the screen and give the students a few minutes to work them out and choose their answer.
Clickers give the students a way to anonymously test themselves during the lectures, which is important. It makes them think about the material more than they would in a passive class environment, especially since they know the next slide may be testing them. But I have found the best use of the clicker is to give a question and then wait a while before revealing the answer, or perhaps give a question for them to guess before revealing the information required to calculate the result.
For instance, yesterday I gave this question (click to enlarge):
Everyone (including myself) were astounded to see the voting results. Of the 108 votes registered, exactly 54 said True and 54 said False. 50% each way precisely! This is an ideal result in my opinion, because everyone wants to know the answer much more than had the voting gone (say), 90%/10%.
I made them wait a bit, for the next slide was an informational (ie. beyond the scope of the course) on air resistance, followed by this slide:
So the answer is False.
The last statement though. Previously in the class I had given a problem about firing bullets up into the air (99% of the examples I use in class I make up myself) and the velocity at which they return to Earth. Even considering the effects of air resistance bullets can be lethal upon their return. This may seem unlikely, but in researching the facts I discovered that a 1992 report revealed that the city of LA averaged 1.8 deaths per year between 1985 and 1992 due to bullets falling from the sky. The deaths were clustered around January 1 and July 4, times at which overexcited revelers may find it amusing to put their guns up and fire.
In addition to my classwork I am also striving to get other obligations complete. The other day I completed a paper to be printed in the proceedings of the 2010 SPIE conference (topic: “Modeling complex x-ray optical systems”) as well as a poster for a symposium this Friday at school. I’m also giving a seminar next Tuesday on the same topic, and soon plan to return my attentions to writing my PhD dissertation.
Wish me luck!
Here’s A Bear For Florence
Sunday, August 29th, 2010Oops! I forgot to include the following shot in my writeup of the Altamont Fair:
Cute as it is, I bet it would have made me sick 🙂
Blast From The Past
Wednesday, August 18th, 2010Back to 2001, Easter Sunday to be precise. Together with two factions of the Friedland clan, we were launching model rockets in a Fairport park.
The rockets are bought unassembled, so we’d put them together and painted them prior to the day. As you can see we had a box full of engines and wadding and fuses (for the launch circuit) all sorts of bits and pieces to get them going. The launch pad is also a separate purchase.
That’s a lucky shot above. The rockets take off very quickly and – depending on the size and engine used – can go high enough they are difficult to see. Then, assuming everything goes according to plan, they deploy a parachute and float gently to earth ready to be reused.
(There’s so much fail in that picture…)
If it is windy, the rocket can travel a surprising distance before reaching the ground. My photos from this day show we had 4 rockets in total, and I recall we lost two of them because they’d blown far away behind some trees.
Here’s some video of two of our launches:
To that, I can only say “Oh man!” 🙂
Bonus shot of young Jordan (I hope she’s reading this!) right now:
Not three meters from where I’m sitting is an unassembled rocket and some engines. All I’d need is a launch pad…
The ‘Dragonfly Drones’ of 2007
Thursday, July 8th, 2010In June 2007, a freelance photographer named Steven took the following photograph as he was walking in the woods of Big Basin, California.:
Over the next month, people in other parts of California photographed similar objects (and posted them anonymously), and the following are just an example of the images recorded:
The UFO community went crazy. These were the first high quality, high resolution photographs of UFOs ever captured. Furthermore there were a lot of them, taken by many different people in many different locations. They were quizkly dubbed the ‘dragonfly’ or ‘drone’ UFOs.
Later that month, an individual using the pseudonym ‘Isaac’ went public with an explanation of what these craft were. He claimed that during the 1980s he worked for a beyond top secret government organization on a program named CARET, the goal of which was to reverse engineer extraterrestrial technology. These UFOs were, he said, products of such research.
All of his claims are still readable on his website. Be sure to click on the photos and scans he provides.
There is something remarkable going on here, and looking back at it from three years hence (I only found out about this yesterday) makes it even more strange.
It’s all fake, of course. Within weeks countless experts had exposed the images as the product of 3D modelling software Maya and illustration software Photoshop. The ‘drones’ were 3D models composited onto real images. Isaac’s images were not fake in that they seemed to be actual scans. However it is certain the documentation that had been scanned itself was fake. The quality of the fakes is extremely high – obviously someone (or some group) put a great deal of work into this.
What makes this story quite unusual is that no one has ever come forward and revealed it was their work.
There have been many stories, the most intriguing of which was it was a professional viral marketing campaign (for what?). But it’s all speculation, and the fact remains that to this day – over three years later – it is unknown who created the images and why.