Off the Road

After several days of travel, I'm now relaxing.

Relaxing somewhat, that is. I had many thoughts brewing about national-level news, but I'm not in the mood to type them up right now. I suppose I'll put them off until just after the upcoming holiday.

The previous weekend of travel was a little hectic. It seemed that every leg of the trip showed me something that needed to be fixed on my car. The radio antenna (which was broken when I got the car), the muffler, the oil pan (it was frightening to see a puddle of oil 10 inches in diameter under my hood)--all these need some attention.

I have now spent 10-12 hours of labor crawling around under fixing my car, and the most urgent item has been repaired. It has left me wondering where I got the "do-it-yourself" bug for car repairs. I suspect the bug runs in the family. My father is an avid repairman for his own vehicles. Most of the men on both sides of the family are at least fluent in talking about such repair work.

I wonder how many guys have seen the crankshaft on the car they drive?

One Last Time

Several family members have told stories about when my grandfather graduated from seminary in 1950. The school he attended had invited a preacher to speak at commencement. William F. Graham spoke at that graduation ceremony.

These stories were mentioned as I sat with the family and watched videos of Billy Graham from decades past.

No one can tell for sure if his latest crusade is his last. I really don't care to guess. Billy will do what he will do, and he will be judged by One who knows all.

Except Billy isn't depending on his own good deeds; he depends on the grace of Christ.

And I am reminded that all of the media attention in the world does not matter one bit to Billy. He is thinking only of his Lord and Savior.

On the Road Again

Tomorrow I travel. I'm not going to one of my usual destinations, though. I'm going to visit relative tomorrow night, and spend Saturday travelling to a friend's wedding.

And then I spend a week attempting to fix stuff on my car, catch up with a few more friends from home, and spend lots of time with my parents and two youngest siblings. After that, I decide whether to spend a lot of time studying down there, or spend a lot of time studying up here. It's not an easy decision to revoke, as it involves 600 miles of driving (and 24 gallons of gas). However, I'll leave my computer up here, so one major reason to return will be in play.

If I don't update my blog much, that's probably the reason.

Oh, and I'll definitely find time to take my new Ruger to the range, and run a couple of hundred rounds through it. Just to get used to shooting again.

Evidence

Just a few minutes ago, I spotted this piece highlighted by the Cranky Professor. It describes many minority students who graduate high school with high GPA's, and find themselves learning high-school level skills through remedial courses at college.

I will bow to the Professor's judgement in one area--he knows much better than I how many remedial courses are taken by incoming freshmen. He has a much better sense of how much money is spent by college students to learn skills that were part of the standard high-school reportoire in my father's generation.

There is also one way in which I would like to challenge an assumption in the news-article. This is not a problem unique to minority students whose parents have never attended college. I work in the Math department of a Technological University. This is the kind of school that attracts students who aren't afraid of a little study, or a little geekiness. It attracts more males than females, and an incredibly small number of minority students.

In our math classes, we often have examples of students who took an AP Calculus course, and later struggle mightily through 1st-semester Calculus. They know what we could call "cookbook Calculus", which consists of a powerful collection of short-cuts and recipes to use for solving problems. However, the formulas and methods are easy to confuse with each other, and grow rusty easily through lack of use. But these students often have a worse problem--glaring deficiencies in their understanding and use of Algebra.

And the kicker is, if they don't know Algebra, they can't really claim to know Calculus. Because Algebra relates to Calculus the same way that the foundation of the Great Pyramid relates to its summit.

Students who can't understand why the fraction (x+5)(x-5) doesn't simplify to (x+1)/(x-1) will have a hard time telling you why their method of finding the anti-derivative of this function is the correct method. They might know a formula that works in one case, but they don't know why it works. Worse, they can't tell which parts of the formula are specific to that case, and which can be extrapolated to similar cases.

The Department of Mathematical Sciences has implemented a fairly-tough placement exam system (administered in a calculator-free environment) to sort out these students from those who have an understanding of Algebra. However, it means that the University has to expend time and energy rehabilitating students who didn't learn what they were supposed to learn in high-school. The students have to pay tuition credits, and instructors have to teach and grade courses. Worse, the credits are earned but can't apply towards most degrees offered by the school.

The worst part is, there are a good deal of very smart students coming to the TechU. Not all of them fit this pattern. But their GPA's in high school do not give a clear indication of how well or poorly they will do at the University.

Put in engineering terms, there is far too much noise and far too little signal in the GPA. It is like a telephone call in which you hear static half of the time, instead of the other person's voice. The high-school grades are almost meaningless.

As one student in the article asked, "why is my report card lying?"

Decisions, decisions, decisions

I recently discovered that it is very likely that I will finish and present my Master's thesis before the end of the 2005 Fall Semester.

In a conversation with the director of the Graduate Committee, I discovered that I have support for exactly one more semester. I also learned that it would be wise to consider several career opportunities, beginning as soon as possible.

In other conversations with an advisor (and an interested friend), I discovered that it is very possible for me to pursue a PhD. In my case, I would have to pass a rigorous qualifying exam that will be administered before the Fall term starts.

At the moment, I am attempting to keep both options open. But since the qualifying exam comes sooner, it should be getting my full attention.

How far is this possible? I do not know. But since the PhD program would be the greater challenge, I feel a greater urge to take it on.

Exercising Constitutional Rights

Today I exercised one of my rights as a citizen. The one that is mentioned in Amendment #2 to the Constitution of the United States.

I purchased a gun. More specifically, a Ruger 22/45 Mk III.

There was less hassle involved than I suspected, once I realized that the State of Michigan required me to fill out an "Application for License to Purchase", and that the application would only be good for 10 days, and that I had to bring the weapon in for a safety inspection.

It is much easier for the police to weed out felons and other undesirables by this process.

On the other hand, how many repeat criminals are going to walk into a police station and tell them that they intend to purchase a handgun?

You know, officer, I just wanted to dust off this guy...uh, I mean, I want to do a lot of target shooting. And we gotta worry about those terrorists, ya' know?

Still, I got about an hour's worth of friendly conversation with the Police Sergeant who handled his end of the business. And the Federally Licensed Firearms dealer was also quite friendly.

I'll admit that 0.22LR is not a big caliber...but the ammo is cheap, and Ruger makes a high-quality weapon to practice with.

Besides, there are other guns in the world for me to purchase. This one is a first purchase, not a last purchase.

An Important Man

Today is a day to remember the first important man in my life...

The man who taught me to love reading.

The man who taught me how to fix things--televisions, tape-players, computers...

The man who included me (and my siblings) on the big household projects. I helped him build my first bunk-bed; I also helped with the room in the basement, and many tire-rotations and oil changes on the car.

The man who taught me the power of a rule of law. At first it was his law (enforced with occasional use of a leather belt on my posterior), later it was the laws of the city, state, and nation. In several cases, he followed the law where he knew he could have ignored it safely. I learned likewise from him. It has helped both of us to be better citizens.

All around, Dad was one the big influences for the good in my early life.

Thanks, Dad.

Insanity and Enablers

Just saw a good article by Dr. Sanity. His article gives a short description of the problems dealing with certain kinds of insanity--the kind that causes a person to cry for help by committing suicidal acts.

It is a very clear analysis of the feeding/enabling mechanisms behind international terrorism. It also reminds me very much of the Theory and Practice of Terrorism as published by Steven denBeste.

The good doctor gives us an up-close look at the psychology involved. A terror attack doesn't do much good if the only people who know about it are the people who live in Jerusalem (Or Baghdad). It doesn't gain any notoriety for the cause, it does little to convince governments (and voters) that the terrorists are dangerous--or that their cause is defensible.

But if a car-bomb gets front-line coverage on CNN or Fox, the terrorists have won a major victory. People know that they are willing to strike to pursue their goals. People in their own country, and people in any other country that is connected with their national politics.

Steven denBeste gives us a more abstract view of terrorism. The terrorist operates in a field with seven groups to worry about. Those groups can be labelled Our Forces, Our People, Their Forces, Their People, Our Allies, and The World.

In terms of a popular movie series that I have discussed recently, Our Forces would be the soldiers, pilots, etc. of the Rebellion. Our People would include supporters like Senator Leia Organa of Alderaan, and other Alderaanians (and Caamasi, Correllians, Mon Calamari, etc.) who oppose the Empire but don't take up arms. Their People would the civilians of the Empire who like the Emporer's New Order, Their Forces would be the Imperial Navy and Army. Some smugglers (Han Solo noteworthy for a time) were willing to play the role of Allied Forces. Other fringe elements were swallowed up into Their Forces--like bounty hunter Boba Fett. The World were the unconvinced and unaligned people and planets in the Galaxy.

This mapping isn't perfect--by the time we get to the Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Solo is moving from Allied Forces to Our Forces, for example. Leia gets a role as a soldier in SW: Return of the Jedi. The Allied forces don't increase much, and Their People and Our People get almost no notice.

At any rate, the Rebellion had two large problems: one was a military problem (defeating an Empire that had a much larger Navy and better support structure), and the other was convincing The World that the Empire wasn't worth supporting.

Curiously, the Rebels did limit themselves to pure-military targets, taking away most of the "terrorist" luster from their deeds, and making the "freedom-fighter" image easier to hold. And the movies hint that once the Emporer dies, the motivating force of the Empire suffers a mortal blow. Their Forces are defeated or retreat in ignominy, and Their People crawl into dark corners while Our People dance in the streets of Coruscant and shoot off fireworks.

A missing element of the entire movie sequence is the way of getting the messages of Our Forces' victories out to Our People on the various planets of the Galaxy. I highly doubt that Imperial Network News openly published the destruction of the Death Star battle-station. The first few victories (mentioned in the introduction to SW: A New Hope) must have been published through whatever grapevines that the Rebels had access to. Perhaps their computer networks (and holo-net transmissions) would support blog-like publishing. Perhaps rogue news networks, unable to be tracked down by Imperial Communications Commission and their system/planet sub-agencies, sent out the messages. Perhaps carrier pigeons--or would that be carrier mynocks?--were used.

Whatever the case was, the Rebels needed to convince The World that everyone stood to gain from a dismantlement of the Empire. They also needed to convince Their People that the Imperial Navy could never end the acts of terrorism like the blowing up of Death Star's, harrassments of Star Destroyers, and destruction of Imperial Bases.

At any rate, the Rebellion would never have had any success if the INN could ignore them. It also would never have had success if the INN would occasionally note "another attempt to attack the guardians of the New Order was carried out today...". Perhaps they might add a question about how long these rebels could continue playing a war of attrition against better-funded, better-trained Imperial Storm Troopers. Or a question about the insanity behind a small group of X-wing and Y-wing pilots taking on an Imperial Star Destroyer--or a complete Imperial Battle Station. Or they might question how the Mon Calamari could long survive producing Battle Cruisers and Nebulon-class frigates to fight this terrorist war with.

The Rebellion needed a news agency (or some other system that would amplify gossip into near-instantaneous knowledge all over the Galaxy) that would widely publish every attack that they made on the Empire. They needed this news agency to convince The World and Their People that the Empire, for all its money and resources, could never entirely shut up the Rebellion. And that the Rebellion would make trouble for the Empire until the Empire went away.

The same is true about the IRA, the PLO, the various AQ affiliates in Iraq, the burgeoning resistance movement in Iran, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, or the Zimbabweans protesting against Mugabe's murderous policies.

Each of these groups has to have some media pathway that will convince Their People and The World that the status quo in their country has to change. Each also has to convince Our People that their situation is getting attention from the rest of the world.

Some of these groups are trying to increase the democratic (or representative) nature of their governments. Some are trying to kick out an outside Empire's influence. Some are trying to put a dictatorship in place.

Their methods and goals are different. Some go for popular protest. Some go for direct attack on any civilian or military target that will get them on the news. Some appear to have almost no voice in the international media. Others get the nightly news with every event that they stage.

All need (or needed) a media stage to have any hope of success.

There's more to life than school-work

...and computers.

Anyway, while my computer is happily chewing away on another compile/install, I try to think of all the novels I have read in the past month.

I have developed a habit of reading such books during the summer semester, when I have less overhead of regular class-work to worry about.

I found a new novel by Timothy Zahn, a favorite author of mine. This time around, Zahn writes sci-fi set in modern New York City, with a race of aliens who are...maybe not foreigners on planet Earth.

Title: The Green And the Gray.

Plot Elements: murder, kidnapping, ancient wars, family honor, courageous individuals, and a dash of marriage difficulty between a perfectly ordinary husbad and wife.

Characters: The couple who become the center of the stories action go through some good character development. To understand the story properly, the reader has to become acquainted with two distinct alien cultures involved. The story manages to introduce these oddities to the reader by introducing them to the central characters through the twists and turns of the first half of the book.

Re-read probability: It might be a year or so before I think about it again. It made a gripping one-time read, and had some surprising twists and turns. But the central story, once fleshed out, is surprisingly simple.

Another book I read is I, Robot by Isaac Asimov. For those who saw the movie, there two things in common between the book and the movie. Both involve robots, and both talk about the 3 Laws of Robotics.

However, Asimov didn't write something that is easy to call a novel. Its structure is a collection of short stories, told by a scientist who has worked for US Robotics, inc., for all of her life. The recipient of the stories is a news-person. The stories help trace the development of robotics over a period of nearly a century.

Summary as follows:

Title: I, Robot.

Plot Elements: robot idiosyncracies, human inventiveness, clever subterfuge, phobias about robots, more clever subterfuge, and technocracy.

Characters: a distinguished robotic scientists, a couple of really smart field-technicians. Robots that don't follow orders well, robots that follow orders too well, robots that read minds, and people (who might be robots) who have a lot of political savvy. Few of the characters change in a noticeable way, though each generation of robots seems more capable (and dangerous) than the last.

Re-read probability: low but possible. This is a book that makes a person think. It is also a book that depends on the thesis of Artificial Intelligence being achieved very rapidly. The kind of AI that Asimov describes is entirely independant of human intelligence. Given some information, the robot makes decisions based on that information, and acts.

The commentary about what may happen when calculating machines take over a large part of human decision-making is very worthwhile. It is also worth noting that without knowledge of the fundamental Laws of Robotic Thought, predicting what the Machines will do is very hard.

A strange connection happened in my mind while I read the book. In one short story, a robot that is assembled on a space station is being trained to run the station so that humans aren't forced to stay there constantly. The robot reviews the data available to it about robotics and humanity, and comes to the conclusion that it was not created by humans, but by a higher power. This higher power is supposedly connected to the computer that the robot is supposed to interface with. The higher power is pleased when the station runs well, and displeased when the station does not run well.

The two men who train the robot get into a discussion with it about its own origins. Those discussions eventually hit a dead end because the men cannot convince the robot that its fundamental assumptions are wrong. Much like any debate about human origins--most of the disagreement is over the things that one side (or the other) of the debate assumes before they look at the data that is available. Both sides can claim perfect logical consistency of their claims, within the logical realm described by their assumptions.

Teaching, Learning, and Homework

I've spent much of the past week slaving away on a research project. I also spent a lot of time staring at homework.

My position as a Graduate Teaching Assistant doesn't necessarily mean that I've been given a class to teach. During the summer semester, it is a common thing (in the Math Dept.) for a Grad student to be grading homework for two other Grads, both of them teaching Summer classes.

The pace of summer classes--a 14-week semester's worth of material covered in 7 weeks--guarantees a large amount of homework on a daily basis.

So I spend several hours each day looking at homework papers, and wondering how I affect the way the students learn.

More than once, I've run across a situation where I thought all the students had made the same mistake. Then I discovered that the teacher had answered the question in class, and produced a solution that is superficially different. (This disturbed me when I realized that the two answers were equivalent, but I had graded them as if one was wrong and the other was right.)

Is homework worth grading if the students will dutifully copy the instructor's work? In the case I remember best, all students copied the same steps, and several used the same notational oddity that the instructor used. Am I grading their homework, or their copying ability?

I am the kind of grader who will occasionally scribble rhetorical questions on the homework.

I know the instructor told you not to simplify the problem on your calculator. Did that keep you from realizing that the fraction Ln(14)/Ln(1) is division by zero?

When you write f(x)=x^2 =2x while calculating a derivative, do you really mean that x^2=2x? In my experience, these two are only equal when x=2.

Do the students read my notes? Do they think about the questions I ask them? Do they learn from those questions?

Is this something I can do anything about? Or do I just keep on scribbling notes to myself on someone else's homework?

Even though these thoughts swirl through my mind occasionally, I know that I'll go back to the salt mines do more grading over the weekend. And in the next two weeks, until track A of the summer semester closes.

Back In Business

The computer trouble is over, although the computer is not fully functional yet. I'll be installing packages and tweaking setting for the next month or so, probably.

In the meantime, I'm happily blogging from work at TechU. Having ignored a large part of national and international news while my computer was compiling X-windows and OpenOffice, I was surprised by this post over at MyPetJawa. Rusty, the chief blogger at MyPetJawa, usually publishes short rants seasoned with sarcasm (and a trace of vitriol on occasion). But for this piece of news, he wrote a careful historical research, focusing on the published works of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn.

From my own unsuccessful attempt at finishing Gulag Archipelago, I have to agree with Rusty. The Soviet system of Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerey (which was shortened into gulag in common usage) was an incredibly large system of forced-labor-camps.

Solzhenitsyn was a math-instructor in civilian life, and an officer in the Soviet Army during the Second World War. He was brought under suspicion by some unguarded jokes about Comrade Stalin which had been seen in his personal correspondence.

The first five (or was it 10?) chapters of Gulag Archipelago deal with Solzhenitsyn's introduction to the system, and also give an overview of the long history of the system--from the early 1920's to the mid-1970's. Solzhenitsyn talks of dozens of waves of prisoners pulsing through the gulag system. Each wave was composed of hundreds (or thousands, or tens of thousands) of criminals. Some had written the wrong things in their personal letters. Some were members of suspect minorities. Some had actually attempted to resist the Soviet government. Others had run afoul of a decision by their superiors.

At one point, an entire group of engineers and scientists were punished for their inability to produce the expected results. Never mind the real source of their troubles--it could have been a mixture of lazy workers, bad supply-systems, insufficient resources, and impossible demands. But they had failed in their service to The People, and were convicted of being saboteurs or "wreckers" of the Great Plan.

At any rate, comparing any imprisonment of captured combatants in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to the Soviet gulag is a large stretch. As a matter of fact, the two are so different that I cannot understand why someone would confuse the two.

Unless that person already holds it as axiomatic that those imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay have been unjustly imprisoned. Since the proposition is held to be axiomatic, only supporting evidence of this comparison is required--not careful proof.

Leaving the rest of us to wonder why the comparison was ever even considered.

Computer Trouble

I've been spending the last three days wrestling with my computer, after I found out that a bright idea of mine went off badly.

As a little background, I am an avid user of the Gentoo distribution of a GNU/Linux operating system. Gentoo was created by a bunch of hackers who wanted several things.

• A robust system for installing packages based on dependencies
• Ability to customize the installed packages to maximize performance on a particular piece of hardware
  
• A distribution that can be adapted the meet the goals of the end-user with minimal un-necessary installation overhead

Gentoo's "portage" program was inspired by similar software created for the BSD Unix, and it allows an adminstrator to ask for an installation (or update) of a specific software tool. The installation can be done by compiling from downloaded source-code, or by using a pre-compiled binary. Portage also installs all necessary supporting software, based on configuration-settings by the administrator and the dependencies list that it keeps.

Even though the number of options involved at every level of this process is huge, portage is built (and documented) in such a way as to make this process easy for anyone with a vague familiarity with Linux/Unix systems.

It turns out that my last installation of Linux (which could have run happily for years, using portage to keep it up to date) was using kernel series 2.4. There's nothing bad about that--the Linux kernel is a pretty stable thing, and the 2.4 series has been well-maintained. Over the past few years, I've used kernels 2.4.18-2.4.30. None of them had given me trouble.

But in the middle of last December, kernel number 2.6.0 was released. Much like series 2.4 did for kernel series 2.2, the 2.6 kernels introduced a new way of dealing with many of the technological advancements of the past few years. After finally finding time to read up on the advances, changes, and improvements between kernel 2.4.30 and 2.6.0, I realized that the kernel tree was at 2.6.12. And I figured it was time for me to try it out.

Crossing my fingers, I tried to follow the instructions posted here. Uncrossing my fingers so that I could type more easily, I followed them fairly closely.

And I ran into an unexpected bit of trouble, in an unexpected location. For some reason, every time I tried to start the GUI part of the system (that cool program that gives me a desktop, mouse icon, menus, and windows to work with), it errored out. And my wireless-driver wouldn't start either, and my first few attempts to use portage to reverse the install process didn't produce any results.

So I decided it was time to re-install Gentoo Linux. And on the third day of continuous compilation/installation of packages, I finally have most of the big installs finished. (x.org windowing system, Gnome desktop).

There's one big downside to Gentoo, and that is that it takes forever to finish compiling everything that I want to install.

There's an upside--even before I install, while I'm still working off of the install disk, I have a powerful shell environment to work with, complete with an editor and compiler. So, when I needed to work on a program for my research, I had two options. I could remote-login to the TechU computers while the installation was running in the background, and work there. Or I could work with the same project on my local machine, while the installation was running in the background.

I really like the power and versatility of an install-environment like that. I was even browsing the World Wide Web when I was bored. Granted, I was limited to a text-only browser. But that's better than nothing.

More grading...

Sometimes, students just don't understand what they read. Worse, when they work in groups together, the misunderstandings reinforce each other, producing astounding results.

That's the best explanation I have for some material I graded this morning.

I saw a "half-life" problem which had been done by groups of students in a pre-Calc class. The material in question had a half-life of 1.3 billion years. (That's 1,300,000,000 years for the numerically-inexperienced.)

The question then asks how much is left of 10 grams of the material after 100 years of such decay.

One group of students came up with an absurdly small answer: 9.6 x 10^-26 grams.

(EDIT: superscript tags in HTML failed... that's 10 to the power of -26, or 10 multiplied by a billionth of a billionth of a billionth. )

How did they think that a substance that decays by a factor of half every 1.3 billions years can almost entirely disappear in 100 years?

Or do they not realize what the question asked?

I wonder what this would do to Calc textbooks?

From the "legislation in total disconnect with reality department", we have strange news from California. (Hat tip: Cap'n Ed.)

It seems that lawmakers in Sacramento have voted to limit the size of textbooks purchased by school districts to a maximum of 200 pages. No news yet on whether textbook manufacturers are suddenly printing multiple volumes sized at 199 pages per volume...

Here in the world of University level studies, Calc students regularly see textbooks approaching 1000 pages. Of course, most such texts are good for at least 3 semesters of study. But still, we can't measure a textbook's usefulness by page count.

On the other hand, when I purchased my first Calc textbook, I thought it was part of the University P.E. program. You are required to carry this textbook in your backpack up and down three flights of stairs twice a day...

There are several reasons I can think of for schools to limit size of textbooks. A set of books which is causing back-problems among elementary students is one such problem. Another is a set of books chosen by "publisher incentive" to various teachers and principals. Should parents and school-board members of particular school districts be most capable of making that decision?

At any rate, I am amazed at the things that legislators spend time on.