We’re in the middle of Fall here and the DC area is really almost at its very best. Here’s a view of the new laboratory wing of the Institute with the glass cube great room concealed behind a carpet of tulip poplar yellows. Roberts Road in the foreground represents the eastern boundary of the campus which extends far to the west of the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study.
A terrific piece by Mary Carole McCauley in the Baltimore Sun, here. For those with a love of both archeology and mathematics.
Money quote:
Thus began a search for buried treasure — in this case, the lost writings of Archimedes of Syracuse, a famed Greek mathematician and inventor who lived in the third century B.C.
Noel and his boss, museum director Gary Vikan, found a 174-page book made of cured goatskin that was ugly beyond belief. The sheaves were singed around the edges, the text and pages were defaced by water stains, and mold had eaten away entire sections.
The Syracuse story began to play out in the Chronicle two weeks ago with Robin Wilson’s piece here. Today, Eric Hoover’s response is here.
As Syracuse is one of our official university peers, I’ve been following this story quite closely.
At question is the leadership style of President Nancy Cantor and her strategy to connect the University more closely with its community. Hoover’s response is specifically aimed at questions regarding the new strategy and I have to say it makes sense: over the long haul, given that the majority of Syracuse’s student body are going to be coming from its region in upstate New York, it makes sense to develop the caliber of those students.
The underlying assumptions are that the “out of state” competition is going to get tougher and that Syracuse wont be in a position to win that competition against other national schools (such as the place where Cantor was provost, Michigan).
Syracuse recently “voluntarily” stepped down from the prestigious AAU. I wonder to what extent there is an inter-relationship between the two stories.
From today’s NY Times, here. Money quote:
the level of radioactive cesium in a patch of dirt just yards from where his 11-year-old son, Koshiro, played baseball was equal to those in some contaminated areas around Chernobyl.
The Center had its third annual complexity in business conference today here in DC and it was excellent. The keynotes were delivered by Felix Reed-Tsochas and Uri Wilensky. The breakout talks that I saw were uniformly excellent.
It’s great to have two excellent complexity centers (including our own) here in the National Capital Area.
From the Chronicle, here. As I mentioned in a recent post, I’m getting geared up to use Facebook for the course I’m teaching next semester. But these two companies collaborating are going to present a real challenge to Blackboard.
From my viewpoint, the key advantage to using Facebook to teach is that there is virtually no learning curve for your undergraduate students and very little for faculty.
But we’ll see….
Computer scientist and father of the C computer language….story here.
From ScienceInsider, the news blurb is here. The report card is from the bipartisan, WMD center. The conclusion is not positive.
I would simply add that in the decade since the anthrax attacks here in the US, the cultural memory has dimmed a bit, with societal anxieties now centered on the economy.
PBS’s Frontline series recently featured The Anthrax Files in collaboration with Propublica and McClatchy. One of my close colleagues and I were discussing the remaining uncertainties about the case yesterday at the Cosmos Club.
Keep calm and carry on, I suppose.
I’m teaching NEUR 327 in the Spring. That’s one of the core neuroscience courses for the undergraduate major, Cellular, Neurophysiological and Pharmacological Neuroscience. I’m inclined to ignore Blackboard and teach using a combination of Facebook and Google tools. I’m also leaning towards minimizing the use of Powerpoint just because of its tendency to make the eyes roll upwards into their sockets.
Quite seriously, the use of Powerpoint for creating slides, is dangerously oversold, at least from the standpoint of pedagogy, as distinct from a research talk. I can’t decide whether it’s the formulaic slide lay-outs or the inane animations that arouse my distaste. Or perhaps it’s the ubiquitous use of images and graphics that are only tangentially related to the subject matter at hand….
As for Blackboard (the pretty much ubiquitous electronic learning platform across many colleges and high schools)…..I find it clunky–especially in comparison to Google’s collaborative tools and what one can do creatively on Facebook.
In the Chronicle, Marc Parry reviews Aping Mankind, Raymond Tallis’ new book on neurotrash, a term which I leave to your imagination….
Unless you want to read the review, which is here.
Discoverers and Discoveries 