| Post-Potter reading |
[26 Jul 2007|10:01pm] |
Well, it's about time for another of my twice-yearly posts to this thing, this time provoked by Harry Potter. (I've only read the first one, but I'd have to live under a much larger rock to avoid noticing the finale.) Anyway, in the wake of the apotterlypse I saw a LJ game going around for recommending further reading material, and my regular library binges make me want to chime in.
( Reading list! )
|
|
| I could talk about differential equations, but who'd read that? |
[17 Feb 2007|09:59pm] |
There's been a bit of a stir on the AASWOMEN mailing list recently, because someone brought up the cover of the latest Edmund Optics catalog. A few people even wrote to the company to complain, and one of them passed along the letter he received in response:
"Hi [name],
Thank you for your feedback regarding the EO catalog and our recent cover. No need to be embarrassed for the many female science students coming along. Rather, encourage them to celebrate that another smart, young, and attractive female has joined the ranks of women in a technical field, which breaks the pattern of discrimination you describe. You see, the woman featured on the cover is a six-year employee of Edmund and our Trade Show Manager and Spokesperson. Over the years we've received numerous positive comments and she has proven herself to possess the needed technical and social ability to successfully coordinate our tradeshows that showcase our products.
The recent cover photo emphasized a new product launch by Edmund. Our Trade Show Manager coordinated the showcase of these products at Photonics West last month. Had you happened by our booth for a visit, you would have had the opportunity to meet and speak with her about our Kinematic mounts as well as receive additional technical information from two other smart, young, and attractive, female optical engineers present at the time. ..."
Hey, she's an employee, that changes everything. No, really! I think it's great that when I finish my PhD (God willing and the creek don't rise), I can look forward to a career as a booth babe.
A little parity goes a long way, though. I have a vision of the next catalog cover--it features a handsome young man, maybe in chinos or a nice pair of jeans, barefoot, shirt halfway unbuttoned, an alluring gleam in his eye. Maybe a caption like "Well Oiled Mounts." I'm sure that wouldn't make anyone uncomfortable, right?
|
|
| Geek recommendations |
[05 Jan 2007|11:18pm] |
It's good to be a first-year student again, because I wasted prodigious amounts of time over break and I don't even have to feel guilty about it. I discovered not one, but two mad science webcomics, the great Narbonic and A Miracle of Science. Sadly, both of them are ending, but happily, there are years of good archives with actual complete stories. I highly recommend both, if (like me) you enjoy science fiction webcomics but live under such a large Internet rock that you hadn't heard of them.
Mostly, though, I'm writing to push The Pleasures of Counting--I've been blabbing to everyone offline about it, so I might as well plug it here. Despite being the absolutely dorkiest book I've ever read in public, including my D&D stuff, it's actually a really neat set of stories about applications of mathematics and statistics. It starts with the London cholera epidemic and goes through various other topics from the work of mathematicians in U-boat warfare and cryptography to a really elegant scaling argument for why some things about animals' metabolisms work the way they do. There are exercises sprinkled throughout the text (though I've skipped them without causing any problem), and the author is really Cambridge, but if neither of those bug you then it's a neat read.
|
|
| It's not discrimination, it's historical |
[22 Dec 2006|10:24am] |
So there's this thread on ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) roleplayers where a woman is asking for advice about dealing with sexism in the Dungeons and Dragons game she plays. Along with some interesting discussion and good advice about talking to the gamemaster, I noticed variants of a couple of the Great Excuses for Sexism in Gaming:
- It happens to men too
- It's appropriate for the setting
Maybe later, if I think my brain is up to the bleeding, I'll go dig up one of the many RPGnet threads about gender issues in a game and find Great Excuses 3 through n. Right now, I'm thinking about #2, where objecting to sexism in any vaguely historical setting is unreasonable because "that's the way it really was." I say vaguely because the connection to history can be very loose. For example, in the above-mentioned discussion, the setting of the game was "inspired by the Roman Empire although with some significant differences," and the poster mentioned that soon the group would be heading into the Underdark--which, unless the Underdark has changed a lot in later editions of D&D, is straight-up fantasy. (She also mentioned that the change would be nice because of the "strong powerful women" in the Underdark, but for this post I've decided to avoid the yawning conversational abyss posed by the evil black matriarchy of elves she's talking about.) So, basically, if your fantasy setting sat on a shelf next to a 7th-grade history textbook at some point in its life, it's historical enough that traditional gender roles "should" be in place.
( My thoughts )
|
|
| Open letter concerning the New Mutants |
[17 Dec 2006|09:38pm] |
I'm writing this for a certain person who shall remain nameless, but whose name begins with ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) noisycricket. I'm pissed, dude.
( To think I trusted you )
|
|
| The Antikythera Mechanism |
[13 Jun 2006|02:56pm] |
|
In the "history is better for gaming than most gaming books could ever hope to be" department, right now some folks are using a prototype x-ray scanning widget to read Greek text on the inside of the world's oldest astronomy computer. Man, I hope someday my 2000-year-old excavated stuff gets a name as cool as "the Antikythera Mechanism."
|
|
| Apropos of nothing |
[19 Dec 2005|08:59pm] |
While it's wonderful that physics education research finally has its own journal, the abbreviation "Phys. Rev. ST Phys. Educ. Res." is one that only a mother could love.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled finals week.
|
|
| Conceptual change and scientific revolutions |
[10 Dec 2005|11:13am] |
Back in this post, I mentioned a Posner et al. article about one model for conceptual change, based on Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions stuff. In order to change from an old idea to a new one, so the story goes, students must see the new idea as plausible, intelligible, and more fruitful than the old one. (There has been lots of discussion and development since that paper, but I think that's still the meat of the theory.) I've always been a little bothered that, although modeling conceptual change after Kuhn's scientific revolutions, there was no analog for the process of old scientists dying out, which is eventually necessary for the new paradigm to take hold.
I think of that every time I read something related to CCT, and then I immediately wonder if I'm just being overly picky in a "look at me, I've read Kuhn" sort of way. It's an analogy, after all, not a one-to-one correspondence. The last time it happened, though, I finally thought of something that might make a difference. Kuhn's paradigm shifts are social processes--indeed, I think one of the main messages of Structure of Scientific Revolutions is that the social aspect is central to science, and often overlooked in the attempt to paint scientific history as the flawless advance of some pure spirit of truth. But in the CCT papers I've read, at least, conceptual change is modeled as an individual and largely internal process.
So, I think there might be a real flaw in the analogy, because CCT attempts to model an individual process using a very social one. I guess I need to buckle down and find some of the situated cognition literature, because more and more I'm seeing it as a gaping hole in my reading list.
|
|
| Astronomy/history funny |
[02 Dec 2005|10:07pm] |
Lately there's been some talk on the HASTRO list about the Crab supernova, and whether various cultural relics actually point to observations of the supernova in 1054, or are just wishful thinking on the part of historians. One of the messages talked about the excuses made by medievalists for the lack of European observations, and some of them are really freaking funny (in a nerdy way):
- Aristotelean "immutable celestial sphere" blinders kept European astronomers from noticing. (But in 1054, Aristotle hadn't really gotten back to Europe, and anyway they noticed lots of other changes in the sky.)
- Europe was covered in volcanic haze from Iceland! (Said volcano somehow avoided leaving any fossil traces, and was likewise effaced from the Icelandic Sagas and other records.)
- Europe was just cloudy. For a year. (I think this one speaks for itself.)
Really, is it that hard to admit that the Chinese were just paying better attention?
|
|
| Play Aids |
[18 Jun 2005|12:13pm] |
|
The player of the hard-boiled ex-cop brick in the Gotham Independent Contractors game is neither an ex-cop nor especially hard-boiled. I've made up a "WWBWD" (What Would Bud White Do) sign to hold up when he looks lost. So far, it's working pretty well.
|
|
| Educational psychology readings |
[14 Jun 2005|10:36pm] |
Way back when, I promised lordsmerf I'd give him more recommendations on education research reading from my ed psych class. Better late than never, right?
The big overview paper was written by Redish in the Proceedings of the Varenna Summer School, preprint available here. He outlines a theoretical framework that covers practically everything we read for the entire semester--resources vs. misconceptions, covert and overt messages sent by classroom structure and teaching style, and a bunch more.
Slightly more digestible (I thought) is Posner et al. article on conceptual change (Science Education vol. 66, issue 2, p. 211, 1982). They base their model on Kuhn's scientific revolutions, and work with the idea of a revolution in individual students' thinking to bring about deep-seated conceptual changes.
Several years later, diSessa and Sherin noted that a whole bunch of people were talking about conceptual change without exactly pinning down what a concept is, so they come up with coordination classes as a possible answer. This one is dense, but I really enjoyed it. Hard to find, though (International Journal of Science Education vol. 20, issue 10, p. 1155, 1998).
David Hammer has an article (available here) that I enjoy for somewhat the same reason as Scherr's special relativity paper--he looks at a classroom segment several different perspectives available to a teacher.
Finally, we read two things on dialog structure and how it interfaces with teaching science that really grabbed my interest. The first was the first chapter of a book by Jay Lemke called Talking Science, about semantic patterns and classroom power structures. The second is a chapter from a Ph. D. dissertation by Tuminaro, available here. In chapter 5, he talks about epistemic games and frames--roughly, the "games" that students play to solve physics problems, and the greater contexts and/or states of mind that lead to the choice of a particular game.
There were others, but I think those were the highlights for me.
|
|
| "I'm doing my research on gaming" |
[08 May 2005|10:15am] |
Every once in a while, someone will pop up on a message board I read, say that they're doing academic research on RPGs, and post some list of interesting poll questions. I always had a bit of a hard time taking these posts seriously--real research about RPGs? Surely not. I mean, I think it would be great, but how many people want to do it and can get funding for it? So I've been skeptical.
Today, I realized something else that bothers me. None of these researchers that I've seen ever present something even remotely resembling an informed consent agreement. It's just "Hi, I have some questions, I won't mention whether or in what context I might use your responses, how to contact me, an assessment of possible risks and benefits, or anything like that." Which maybe just means that the only posts I've seen are preliminary investigations, and the recruitment of actual research subjects happens through some secret, underground channel. Yeah, that must be it.
|
|
| Eeeee! |
[28 Apr 2005|08:23pm] |
"Your AAS 206th Meeting (late papers) abstract, "Student
Understanding of Time in an Introductory Astronomy Laboratory,"
whose running identification number is 455 has been scheduled in
a Poster Session on Monday, 9:20am-6:30pm"
Eeeeee!
Ahem. I'm pretty sure that none of the two or three people who might glance at this journal will be anywhere near Minneapolis at the end of May, but it looks like I will be. I'm all tingly.
|
|
|
[12 Apr 2005|10:53pm] |
We did character creation for the Gotham Independent Contractors M&M game this week, and it was great. Everyone was familiar with the source material and came up with appropriate ideas. We talked about how our characters' backgrounds might fit together, and people offered suggestions and generally discussed. It was so weird not having to second-guess what the other players were saying, or wonder if they really understood what they said they wanted to do. I could get used to it.
I'm pretty happy with my character, although I'm still looking for a better name than "mini-Azrael." Anyway, she has ties to the Order of St. Dumas, so I decided that something about the Templars should be my next non-school read (and Holy Blood, Holy Grail was fun, so I wanted to read more anyway). On my way off campus today, I stopped at the library and picked up one of the few books about the Crusades they had that listed "Templars" as a subject keyword. Sort of a random draw.
Highlights include contrasting the "tall, lean, blue-eyed, and straight-limbed" European folk with "squat, heavy, bow-legged, black and for the most part pockmarked" people. As a bonus, we have Islam the "new faith, clumsily thrown together from several other ones" by "that illiterate camel-driver of the East" versus the "clean, thin, white silver thread"--the "soft whisper of hope" of Christianity.
I got to page 8 before deciding to return it. On advice from the resident history lover, I'll be trying Durant's "Age of Faith" tomorrow.
|
|
| Refining intuitions in non-intuitive subjects |
[26 Mar 2005|07:49pm] |
A lot of physics education research used to be based on the idea that students have stable, coherent misconceptions. To increase the odds of successful instruction, so the theory goes, you have to explicitly confront and dismantle these misconceptions before they can be replaced with the correct science. Then another camp became popular that says that student ideas aren't stable and coherent misconceptions, but rather a collection of fine-grained, context-dependent "resources" that get pieced together to form the student's answer for any given situation. These resources aren't inherently right or wrong, but they can be activated in more or less appropriate places. In this view, successful teaching depends on leading students to activate the appropriate resources for the correct solution of a problem. So, if a big truck smashes into a small car, it's inappropriate to think that the truck exerts more force on the car because it's heavier, but it's true that the truck has more momentum for that reason.
The process of encouraging resources to be activated in the right places is sometimes called "refining intuitions." In the papers I've read so far, I'm often unclear on how exactly one is supposed to encourage the appropriate resoures for a given topic. Still, the general idea behind the refining intuitions approach--that students have useful stuff in their head, so we should work with that rather than just trying to replace it wholesale--is an appealing one.
Fast forward to cosmology class the other day, where we were talking about proper distance as a function of t_e, what we see from galaxies receding faster than the speed of light, the cosmic neutrino background, and stuff like that. While I was scribbling notes, part of my brain was wondering how the hell to "refine intuitions" in subject areas where much of the material seems counter-intuitive. Part of me thinks it can't be done. On the other hand, Rachel Scherr makes a good argument for a couple of useful intuitions cropping up in work she did with special relativity instruction, which is in the same neighborhood of "what the fuck?" from a student's point of view. (It was from mine, anyway. One of the humbling things about reading PER papers is discovering places where I'd give the same wrong answers as the quoted students.)
Anyway, after class I ran upstairs to pester my ed psych professor about it, and he agreed that there are areas where the refining intuitions approach doesn't work as well. In mechanics classes, for example, things are pretty grounded in "reality." When you drift into E&M, on the other hand, things much harder to visualize and are taught differently. (Even in completely traditional lectures, as far from PER influence as you can get, there's still a noticable change.) So, what does that leave for non-intuitive subjects? The misconceptions approach, standard lectures, or nothing? I don't know, but now I'm looking for it. Further updates in ten years, maybe.
|
|
| Hello |
[09 Mar 2005|10:58pm] |
|
Nothing much to see here; I just made a journal because I was tired of not having my own friends page for the journals I read.
|
|
