Out of my hat

Forgive me, but I’m going to complain about students for a bit.

So it’s my usual practise in lower-division courses to put together a sample test a couple of classes before I give an actual test. On reflection, this is perhaps not the best idea; I do it in part because of the somewhat peculiar instution of the Exam Bank at my alma mater, where students can borrow and photocopy several years’ worth of past exams. We don’t have that here, and so I wanted to give my students some idea what to expect in terms of testing style.

The problem that I’m running into is that students — at least, students here, or rather my students here — seem to be a uniquely literal-minded bunch. They don’t generalise correctly; they seem to assume that if I give a word problem involving airplanes and the Pythagorean Theorem on the sample test, then I’ll do the same on the actual test, changing only the numbers to protect the innocent. Then when the real test rolls around, it’s something about streetlamps and similar triangles and no one knows anything about similar triangles so they all write the Pythagorean formula on the page and then go off and die somewhere. Messily. With numbers scattered arbitrarily around the page.

My other concern is that… well, so the day before the test is typically a review day unless I’m horribly, horribly behind in the course material. The review generally ends up being answering questions about the sample test, and quite frequently becomes just going through the entire sample test question by question. And while that’s not ideal, I’m fine with that…

…until I start getting e-mails from students saying things like, could you please send me the answers to the sample test. Frequently, these are coming from students who were in class when we went through the sample test. So I don’t know what’s going on here. It could be just an inability to take coherent notes, but in my day people with that issue — i.e. me — would just suck it up, listen extra hard, and make sure to have a roommate or other close friend with excellent note-taking skills in the same class. So for my money, I think what I’m seeing is indolence raised to the level of high crimes.

One of the perils of staying on campus late — at least, if you’re like me and prefer to keep your door open to remind yourself that there’s a world outside your windowless little cell — is that confused students will sometimes wander in and hope that you know what they’re talking about.

In this particular case, it turns out that I did know what they were talking about; the one student who came in was taking a class that I taught this past Spring, and thus I’m reasonably fresh on the finer points of double integration. He then wandered off again, only to return a few minutes later with one of his colleagues in tow.

I’m thinking that I should leave campus now for the night, since otherwise my doorway might be too jammed with calculus students for me to escape safely.

On NPR today on my way back from lunch, there was a discussion of the FDA and user fees. Apaprently, this is a system under which part of the cost for testing and certifying drugs is borne by the drug companies themselves. They had a former editor of the New England Journal of Medecine on the show, and he commented that this was in the way of a conflict of interest and should be abolished, since companies that are being regulated shouldn’t have any sort of financial control over the regulator. The FDA, he said, should be funded solely using public money.

As I understand it, the Big Pharma companies all receive significant subsidies from the government. So why shouldn’t it be the case that the pharmaceutical companies get cut out of the equation: the government cuts subsidies to the drug companies and uses it to fund the FDA directly?

Or am I missing something?

OK, so I don’t know about all my Faithful Readers, but I’m feeling pretty damn crappy today. And I’m pretty sure it’s not just the lingering fever.

So what have we learned in the past twenty-four hours? We’ve learned that a majority — a majority — of Americans are OK with torture. They’re OK with secret police. They’re OK with recklessness on the grand scale, both in foreign policy and government spending. And they’re OK with letting the rest of the world know that they stand behind an administration that supports these things.

So what now? That ever-present conservative buzzword: accountability. The Emperor now has a clear majority in the House, and a clear majority in the Senate… not to mention a clean claim on the office this time, although admittedly lacking such has never stopped him before. And so, whatever happens now, there is not — there can not be — anyone else to pawn the blame off on. Where does the buck stop again, Mr. Truman?

As for myself? I want to go home.

This weekend’s being spent at DANGER, a sort of but not really impromptu meeting of mathematicians in Tennessee. (DANGER stands for something, but damned if I can remember what anymore.) I suppose you could technically say that this is the third year that something like this has happened in the autumn; last year we called it the Nashville Project, and the year before it wasn’t called anything in particular.

So far, the mathematical content of the weekend has involved villainous and indiscrete graphs, as well as a conjecture on categorical products. The non-mathematical portions have involved caffeine, alcohol, and the mutual exchange of adjectives. Right now there’s a small child who’s playing with my guitar… not terribly gently, I’m afraid.

My biggest problem with trips south during the fall is that they totally throw off my sense of season. It feels like in the eight hours it took me to get here yesterday, I went back in time by two or three months, and that’s just not right.

Am I the only one who’s moderately disturbed that the U.S. Post Office’s website is at http://www.usps.com/, with http://www.usps.gov/ set up as a redirect?

I mean, sure, there’s been a lot of abuse of .com, .net. and .org domains, with a vague sense of interchangeability between them… but this is the government, right? They’ve got all this lovely namespace that’s set aside only for them; wh do they need the dot-com? Even if there’s a perfectly good reason for it — like, they don’t want someone setting up Pr0n w4r3z there or something — shouldn’t they set that up as the redirect?

Or maybe there’s something I’m missing, and USPS was privatised when I wasn’t looking.

It wasn’t that long ago that I was complaining about how warm it was, it being autumn at all.

The national weather service forecast tells me that the temperature in my vicinity is expected to dip below freezing this coming Monday night.

Rock on.

I’m writing this post on my new office computer, the much-heralded G5 iMac. So far it’s pretty sweet, in that it runs much better than the decrepit Windows PC it’s replacing, and is prettier to boot. It’s a little slow, but that’s probably because I’ve spent much of the last hour continuously downloading things that I’m needing: TeX, X11, TeXshop…

While I’m here, I should also mention my latest online project: Dangling Conversations, a joint weblog with Wendy (And possibly others, depending on who we can convince.) It’s about 90% in place right now; I’m looking to add in some comment facilities, possibly this weekend. (Or maybe not; weekends never seem to be quite as productive as I imagine they might be.) Anyhow, so that’s there for your reading pleasure.

It’s reasonable to ask what’s going to happen to this space, now that I’ve got another blog going. The answer is still up in the air. I’m certainly going to keep the site, but I’m probably going to make it much more project-oriented and keep the chattier aspects of having a personal website on DC. Not sure yet, though. For the moment, Bounded and DC are going to coexist peacefully.

Another weekend of geting little enough done behind me. The seasons here have gotten to that stage where it’s cool enough outside that running the air conditioner at night seems like a waste, yet still enough that opening windows doesn’t really get you anything either.

For those of you who care, my current concern research-wise is looking for a pseudo-algorithm to solve connected domination in grids. I’ve got a bunch of operations (that I’ve named things like Flick, Shuttle, and Twist), and I’m looking to show that if you’re at any random point A, you can use one of these ops to get closer to a specific point B. I’m hoping to avoid writing it out as a formal algorithm, because that seems like it’ll involve extra work.

In other news, my new office computer (G5 iMac) arrives at the end of this week. I’m still waiting on the shop to get my laptop back to me. And I’m getting more and mroe concerned that a virtual majority of the denizens of this country are preparing to do something foolish in five weeks’ time.

One of the perqs of being an academic is that every now and then, textbook publishers send you free texts. Apparently they’ve decided that the best way to get profs to select their books rather than their competitors is to shove the books into the faces of the profs.

I admire this practise for several reasons. Firstly, it means that I get books; I feel that I don’t currently own enough math textbooks. Also, I think it’s reasonably effective as a technique, especially toward the junior members of the profession… like me. I’m frequently unhappy with textbooks that I use in courses, but I continue to use them because that’s what we’ve used here for who knows how long, and I don’t have any handy alternatives handy.

The other benefit as far as I’m concerned comes when the pushy book-buyers come by the department, looking to pick up copies of textbooks and sell them elsewhere. I received a box with three textbooks in it today; if I decide that I’m not really interested in any of them, I can probably get over $100 on resale to one of these guys. Not so shabby, I say.