January 2013 – A Honey of an Anklet

Wall

You shouldn’t be a prisoner of your own ideas. Everyone gets into their own box and enunciates principles, if only in their own mind—you have your own constraints and your own structure that you think you’re following, and then you realize that what you’re saying is “I can do this, but I can’t do that.” And then at some point you say, “Well, why not?” and the answer is “Because I told myself I couldn’t.” If you keep telling yourself, “You can,” then you are liberated. If you’re totally constrained, all that’s left for you to do is break the mold. “Every wall is a door.”

—Sol LeWitt, BOMB Magazine, Fall 2003

Not me

Happy birthday, Ernie.

Leta claims that, in our relationship, she is Ernie and I am Bert. I fail to see the resemblance.

One of my favorite routines: chair sharing.

Saturday we visited sites in Arlington and Fairfax Counties looking for owls. The screech owls were a no-show at Rock Spring Park, a charming sliver of open space in North Arlington. We heard at least two Barred Owls (Strix varia) in Huntley Meadows Park; in the valley of Donaldson Run, we got good looks at a bird roosting in the crook of a sycamore— a spot that trip leader Leon Nawojchik had staked out. Leon says that Barred Owls will use nest boxes, boxes much larger than the ones we use for ducks. “About the size of a dorm room refrigerator” was the way he described it.

Two groups

Charles Isherwood reports that Moose Murders, Arthur Bicknell’s iconic Broadway flop of 1983, equally iconically reviewed by Frank Rich, is returning to New York. The preview performance is 29 January, at the off off Broadway Connelly Theater.

But Mali might present a problem

An unexpected favorable side effect of South Sudan’s separation from Sudan: the potential eradication of Guinea worm disease.

ᔥ Margaret Atwood ᔥ Chuck Wendig

Silver Line progress report: 28

Karen Goff recaps the quarterly progress report for Silver Line construction, as presented by Pat Nowakowski. The contractor completion date for Phase 1 is set for 29 August, with the work at the West Falls Church yards to finish on 20 December. The new 8000-series rail cars will not start arriving until 2014; service will begin with the existing rolling stock.

The contract for Phase 2 is expected to be awarded this May.

On deck: 10

Now that I’m not commuting downtown, the backlog is building. The read-me shelf has spilled over onto one of the DVD shelves.

Hmm. I see a lot of these titles are still on the shelf from last time.

Squeegees

Erik Piepenburg and photographer Sara Krulwich walk us through a theatrical blood effect.

Tristan Raines’s costumes, many of which are extensively bloodied in the show, will be thoroughly washed, a process [special-effects designer Waldo] Warshaw says is both “a science and art.” “With any show that involves blood there is a lot of respect that goes into the people who clean up,” he said.

Working for scale

John Markoff posts an interesting item about evaluating the success of MOOCs. (Aside: tell me again what the difference is bewteen an MOOC and distance learning?) There’s been a lot of chatter about the fraction of students registered for a course that actually complete all of ites requirements—numbers like 10% are being kicked around.

Markoff emphasizes the point that 10% of a class of 100,000 is nevertheless more than 100% of a class of 500 in a conventional freshman lecture course. And, as one of the panelists at the Frontiers in Education conference in October pointed out, there’s a lot of uncertainty about how many of that hypothetical 100,000 are serious registrants. When the course is free and there’s no cost to dropping out, a lot of students will sign up on a whim. Some registrants are even other instructors, checking out how their colleague handles this new environment.

Leta has participated in two classes offered by Coursera in the past year and has been very pleased with the results. Meanwhile, I’ve been fairly busy with traditionally structured classes:

Short-term training in proprietary software technology. Three days of slideware and coding exercises — what Andy Hunt calls sheep-dip training. Moderate value for the money: I did refer to the class workbook a couple of weeks ago for some code samples. Having the instructor on hard was useful when I got stuck.
Foreign language instruction from Fairfax County Public Schools. Classroom time with a native speaker, a workbook for writing exercises, and a DVD with lots of listening drills. Good value for the money.
The Natural History Field Studies program from Audubon Naturalist Society and Graduate School USA. Each course is different, but it’s usually a blend of reading, lecture, writing, giving presentations to the class—and field trips. Moderate to excellent value for the money, depending on a couple of factors, but every field trip has been worth it. Some of the courses are reviewed by an accrediting agency: these have been the most challenging and the most valuable.

Markoff considers Duolingo, a web site for language instruction that doesn’t precisely fit the MOOC model, but it is operating at that scale, with roughly a million users. I could see myself giving it a try.

I need seven credits to finish my NHFS certificate. I think MOOCs have a ways to go before they can capture the five-senses experience of a cordgrass salt marsh.

MOOCs are scaling up the evaluation of students by problem sets and short writing assignments. I wonder how they can deal with evaluating spoken contributions: speaking a foreign language, giving book reports and oral presentations.

Some links: 63

Rick Wright shares a handy trick for searching the Biodiversity Heritage Library by taxon.

That Austin America

As I was looking for pics of Mom, I found pictures of the Austin America (the one that I crunched). Something in the chronology is wrong here: the date on the edge of the print says 1970, but I would have been only 14 then. Did we really shoot pictures of me behind the wheel when I wasn’t legal? Also, I’m not sure when it was that we lived in the house on Roy Avenue, which you can see in the background. Was it 1970 or 1972? I remember hanging out in the semi-finished attic, reading David Copperfield for class, so maybe it was 1970.

Pics of Mom

I’ve been going through her old scrapbooks looking for interesting images of my mother. Her treatment of her prints was far from archival, so there’s a lot of noise in the scanned images.

The tasteful sepia-toned photo was likely made for her high school yearbook. The soft gradient effect as the folds of her blouse shade into the background is something we haven’t seen for decades.