Chad's spot for various thoughts, musings, poetry, ideas and whatnot

Sunday, December 16, 2007

As you may have seen, the Director's Cut of Blade Runner is coming out soon and watching the ads got me thinking. I want to create two sets of DVDs, both of which would have as part of the set Blade Runner. One set would be a man vs. machine themed set. On one end might be the Terminator movies and the Matrix Trilogy would be on the other end. In the middle might be Blade Runner and I, Robot. The other set would be a sort of Dark Visions of the Future sort of thing with Soylent Green, Blade Runner and that sort of thing. I'm looking for suggestions for either of these two series. If you know of anything, leave me a comment. I'm looking for mostly mainstream American movies but I'll consider looking into getting good foreign films or Anime films.

Thanks for your help.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Friday, December 14, 2007

The Mitchell Report is out. I was amazed during the run up to it's release that most of the major media outlets were poo-pooing the report saying that it wouldn't name any real names, that it would amount to a slap on the wrist, that it wouldn't make any real recommendations, etc., etc., etc.

Well.

It looks like the former senator, with a little help from federal prosecutors and good fortune, wrecked the image of baseball in a way that is so definitive that even the "bury-my-head-in-the-sand" deniers have had to take notice. He laid the blame on everyone and was specific about it; players, clubhouse personnel, management, the players union, you name it. He exposed the culture of doping and cheating. He made tough recommendations that really sounded good coming from a guy who is known to love the game as to how to clean the sport up.

I have to wonder though if he didn't learn just a little bit from how badly cycling has handled it's doping problem. Would the report have been as strong in terms of laying out blame and recommending recourse had we not had to watch cycling try to slowly kill itself over the last 20 years? If you look at it, the problems are basically the same with the exception of EPO. There's an organized sort of underground network of distributors and enablers (Belgian mafia anyone???). The athletes are all vigorously denying involvement by saying they've never tested positive. The owners/sponsors are acting like victims when it's known that they supplied both the pressure to perform and the financial resources to obtain the products. Even the fans share some blame by expecting virtuosio performances and near athletic invincibility on a regular basis.

Baseball is corrupt. Just like cycling is. Just like American football and European futbol (the latest cycling scandal also found evidence on over 100 soccer players in Europe but that information has been repressed for the sake of national interest...their time is coming). Big money sports whether it be the fake amateur levels like college football and the Olympics or the professional leagues like the NFL, the NBA and MLB on this side of the pond and World Cup soccer and basketball as well as international cycling are rotten to the very core.

In my mind, however, only cycling is trying to find a way out of the morass. Of all the big money sports, only cycling has unannounced blood testing and mandatory two-year suspensions. Donald Fehr in his press conference yesterday basically said that the MLB Players Union would fight any attempt at blood testing. His COO routinely let players know when they were going to be tested. The NFL bans players for only a month for a performance enhancing substance positive test and the team forfeits nothing. Some teams in cycling have been so visionary as to see that even this sort of program will not stop the cheaters and the pressures to cheat. Slipstream, CSC and High Road (formerly T-Mobile) have all gone to a stronger system designed to catch abnormalities in blood and urine markers over the course of the entire year with regular testing. This serves to insulate the riders from pressure and lab error. The Grand Tours are going to require "blood passports" of all riders. No one, and I mean no one, is doing as much as cycling is to deal with doping. I don't know if it will work but I do think that several teams are on the right track.

Now if the other leagues will follow suit with allowing blood testing by outside independent agencies, requiring long-term blood marker tracking and having harsh penalties for cheaters and the teams that enable them then maybe we'll get somewhere.

For now, I hope that baseball gets the crap knocked out of it in the court of public opinion. That's the only thing that'll get the culture to change. It's the only thing that is forcing cycling out of the darkness. However, if baseball is going to be following cycling's lead, it'll take another huge scandal about ten years from now and the loss of some major network broadcasting contracts (leaving MLB on VS maybe???) to really force some change.

Thanks for Reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Friday, December 07, 2007

Here at Gordon we're in finals week and I've given and graded my final exams for my two introductory physics classes. One of the big things that a lot of people don't realize about education is how important it is to assess every aspect of you students' learning but also how hard it can be to do. When I took physics as an undergrad, the emphasis was on assessing whether a student could solve a variety of problems with the assumption that to solve those problems a student had to have a good grasp of the conceptual material the the problem was related to. In the twenty or so years between my first physics class and now, that has been found to be a woefully inaccurate assumption. Work by Hestenes at Arizona State, Mazur at Harvard and Hake at Indiana have shown that just because a student can solve a problem, it doesn't mean the student knows much about the physics. In fact, in the physics courses that cater to the pre-med and other allied health students what a problem solving exam might show is only that the student is able to pattern match the test questions to previously worked examples. I know that when I taught these courses at the University of Florida as a graduate student, it was pretty apparent that the pre-med students focused on memorizing solutions and didn't have much conceptual understanding.

For that reason, not long after I started teaching as a career I began to test my students' conceptual understanding. Not only do I test the final understanding but I test the students' "previous knowledge state"; which is a fancy way of saying how much to they know walking in the door about the conceptual framework of Newtonian physics. A lot of really, really good research has been done on this by groups at the University of Washington, Dickinson College, Tufts University and the University of Oregon. (There are many others who are doing good work as well.) What they have shown is that students come into a physics class with a very robust picture of how the physical world works that is almost entirely wrong (Aristotelian actually). A lot of my class is built around getting the students to change how they think about the world as well as teaching them a structured problem-solving methodology.

All of this is to get the point that my physics students did great this semester. One why to measure performance is to compare how a student does on an assessment instrument (in my case a conceptual test) that is given both at the beginning and at the end of the class. The most common way to analyze the data is to calculate a "gain value" by looking at how much their score on the exam improved divided by the maximum it could have improved. Hake's research at Indiana of over 10,000 students showed that students taught in a standard lecture/lab format course had average learning gains of around 22% (how much did you pay for that course?). His data showed that students who were taught in some form of non-traditional format that emphasized interactive engagement in some way had average learning gains of around 60%. Interestingly enough, hake's research showed that there seemed to be a ceiling for the gain scores of about 70-72%.

Well, my engineering physics course (calculus-based introductory physics) showed an average learning gain of 79% and my allied health related course (algebra-based intro physics) had learning gains of 67%. Needless to say, I am really, really pleased with these numbers. Additionally, all but one of the students who started the calc-based course finished and two-thirds of the algebra-based students finished; both numbers being well above the national average much less the average for two-year colleges. I feel really good about the numbers and the classes.

I really can't take too much credit for the success as I'm using curricula developed by folks a hell of a lot smarter than me and I have had outstanding, hardworking, deeply engaged students this semester. For the methods I use to work, the students not only have to buy into the unconventional methods I use but they also have to put a lot of energy into the methods as they are pretty time intensive. Not all students do that but these ones sure did. I can certainly go into the Christmas break with a good feeling of a job well done by all involved.

Thanks for reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Sunday, December 02, 2007

Well, December is upon us and in cycling terms that means it's time to move from 10-12 hour training weeks and the like to something more serious. So far, pretty much everything has been base miles and adaptation workouts in the gym. With the exception of the weekly "pain train" rides, my ride intensities have been very much in the base mile zone. I rode a pedestrian 1000 miles with almost no real intensity. The progression has been good though. As I've written before, I feel like I've got some power on the flats. At yesterday's 77 mile ride I really felt like I had what I wanted for the rotating double paceline intervals we did being able to help sustain the 27-29 mph pace. It was really cool to be rotating through with five other guys at that speed. Once we got to the big climbs, I got popped off the back and sat up as I didn't have the climbing power I needed to hang on. What that means is that I need to lose about 10 lbs and develop a little more leg strength and I think I'll be able to hang with the strongest of the non-Cat I/II riders.

So, there are a couple a changes to the training. First, I move to actual strength training in the gym. This is going to suck because it means that I get to be sore for the next two weeks. The second thing is to start to really put in some solid intervals efforts on the TT bike. Finally, my training times have got to increase by 10% per week until I'm at about 20 hours per week. Fortunately, finals week is here and I should be able to get a goodly amount of training time into my schedule. I have to head out to Salt Lake for the holidays but I think I can get a bunch of training in out there with a gym that's right up the road from my Dad's place. The nice thing is that there will be a little altitude training involved there as I'll be at about 5000 ft. That'll really help my January training quite a bit. The only problem is that there won't be any group rides but maybe I can get a good hard hour in every couple of days with some spin training.

Finally, my last goal (beyond the obvious ones) for this month is to return to a disciplined reading routine. I'd like to do at least an hour a day each day. I have about 10 books I'd really like to get read by the end of the year ranging from a book on spiritual theology and a discussion of the 24-7 prayer movement to a biography of Thomas Young and the "Darwin on Trial" book that a colleague wants me to read and give an opinion on. Add to that the new lectures on Ben Franklin and by N.T. Wright I've recently downloaded from iTunesU and I have a lot of intellectual work to do. Fortunately it'll be mentally stimulating, spiritually challenging and, occasionally, emotionally nurturing. It's not that the work I do at the College isn't many of those things but it's also a lot more draining. The reading and considering the ideas of others allows me to rest while remaining active and keeping my thinking fresh.

Well, with all that I have on my plate, I'd better get to it.

Thanks for reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |