Author: David Gorsline

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.

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.

That Austin America

smaller than the ImpalaAs 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.

happy gradThe 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.

merry ChristmasThis was her last Christmas on her own before she was married. The sky’s the limit.

maybe in CaliforniaThis one is from 1983, with her father and sister-in-law. I’m not sure where it was taken; the background looks North Carolina-ish.

Looking to trade one of these

WATCH assignments for 2013 are out. I am scheduled for:

  • Shipwrecked, Margulies
  • Moon over Buffalo, Ludwig
  • A Streetcar Named Desire, Williams
  • Update: Cats, Webber and Eliot 9 to 5: The Musical, Parton and Resnick
  • Camelot, Lerner and Loewe
  • The Who’s Tommy, Townshend and McAnuff
  • Time Stands Still, Margulies
  • My Fair Lady, Lerner and Loewe and sort-of Shaw

and two TBDs.

Family albums

I’ve been trying to bring a little order to the scattered family history notes and photo albums that my mother had pulled together. She had done some good work, assembling scrapbooks with clippings and ephemera (she has my grandfather’s draft card and her own press passes) and neatly typewriting captions for the images. Unfortunately, more recently, she started reworking some of her materials, generally not for the better. Sometimes I trust her research on how this Boyer was related to that one, and sometimes I recognize her newer handwriting and discount those notes.

Friends and WilliamsesThis photo, which I can date on internal evidence to about 1918, of her mother’s side of the family, is fairly sound. In that year, my grandmother Bessie Williams (second from the left) was 14. I don’t know whether cousin Vernon Friend (in doughboy uniform) was about to deploy to Europe or whether he had returned for this picture. Mom’s notes say that he married a Lula, and that’s all I know about him. The smallest child, in the low-maintenance pinafore, is great uncle Wilson. Great2 grandfather John Childers Friend, with the impressive beard, is first on the left.

some SullenbergersEven more valuable is this image from about 1909 of my maternal grandfather’s family. The Sullenbergers were somewhat camera shy, and didn’t get together for family reunions the way the Williamses did. Grandpa was born in the Josie Hill neighborhood of Piqua, so perhaps the unpainted house behind them was located there. The patriarch is Phillip Henry Sheridan Sullenberger, born in 1865 and no doubt named for the Civil War general who grew up in Somerset, Ohio and commanded cavalry in the Army of the Potomac. I’m glad that I inherited Phillip’s nose rather than his male pattern baldness. The other adults are Phillip’s wife, Clara Bagley Sullenberger (at right) and Phillip’s mother Mary (we don’t have a maiden name for her). My grandfather is the towheaded lad between his father and mother; maybe he’s scowling because of the cigar that Phillip has taken out his mouth long enough to pose for the photographer.

The year in review, 2012

Posts were a bit sparser this year.

The first sentence (more or less) of the first post of each month from this blog:

  • 1 January: Skunk Cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus) is emerging from the wet spots along the Glade in Reston.
  • 4 February: I’ve been intending to do a more thorough job of documenting the various bus stop signs around the area from the numerous jurisdictions and authorities.
  • 4 March: Both of the new boxes that we mounted in mid-February are home to clutches of Hooded Merganser eggs.
  • 1 April: I do expect that this will be the only series of posts with three colons in the title.
  • 1 May: Genie Baskir gives the thumbs-up for August: Osage County at ShowBizRadio.
  • 7 June: What is this? we ask ourselves ten minutes into Mr. Burns, a post-electric play.
  • 4 July: Hey, Leta, you’re on the TV!
  • 6 August: “Above all, the student should cultivate the scientific attitude of mind, and he should never believe in his infallibility.”
  • 3 September: Kathleen Akerley premieres another of her enjoyable head-scratchers.
  • 3 October: Almost ideal weather conditions (Friday’s passing cold front with storms, Saturday’s northwest winds) set up a great weekend birding in Cape May with a group led by Mark Garland.
  • 6 November: Leta and I took a quick road trip to Ohio last week.
  • 1 December: Sonja Ahlers <3 Heart.

The year in review, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, and 2007.

My year in hikes and field trips, 2012

The trips were fairly close to home this year, but I checked Dolly Sods off my bucket list.

Lots of activity at Huntley Meadows Park this year, mounting, pulling, and planting.

2011’s list. 2010’s list. 2009’s list. 2008’s list.

Good causes, one and all

These are the organizations and projects to which I gave coin (generally tax-deductible), property, and/or effort in 2012. Please join me in supporting their work.