College Education by Podcast?

Newsweek has an article, Professor in Your Pocket, about lectures being made available as MP3s for students at several large universities. Audio recordings have replaced actual human-led courses!

Looks like Boise State is trying something similar:

The University’s recent move to push hybrid-formatted classes is degrading the level of education I receive at Boise State University.

Hmmm. It would be a lot cheaper to just tell students what to read and they could learn everything from selected book(s).

Tags: Education, Podcasts

Favorite Christian Podcasts

Most work day mornings I download and listen to one or both of these podcasts:

• Living Way -- Jack Hayford
• Grace to You -- John MacArthur

Both Jack Hayford and John MacArthur consistently deliver interesting and thought provoking messages. I recommend both of them highly!

Tags: Podcasts

More Thanksgiving

I spent part of the afternoon at my sister-in-law's for another Thanksgiving lunch. She, like my wife, is also a very good cook! We had pork (and other good food) which reminds me of this image that I found somewhere along the way:

This Week's Acquisitions

• Common Errors in English Usage
• Program Smarter, Not Harder: Get Mission-Critical Projects Right the First Time
• Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age
• Hal's Legacy: 2001's Computer As Dream and Reality

This entry is partially inspired by: The Little Professor, one of the other blogs I read, from time to time, has a nearly weekly post of her week's acquisitions. For those that are inclined towards more serious literature, you may enjoy her posts or find some of the links on her blog useful. The Little Professor clearly is a true bibliophile.

Tags: Books

String Theory/Modern Education

In Paul Boutin's review of Hiding in the Mirror: The Mysterious Allure of Extra Dimensions, from Plato to String Theory and Beyond, he writes

Lawrence Krauss, a professor of physics and astronomy at Case Western Reserve University, has a reputation for shooting down pseudoscience. He opposed the teaching of intelligent design on The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer. He penned an essay for the New York Times that dissed President Bush's proposal for a manned Mars mission. Yet in his latest book, Hiding in the Mirror, Krauss turns on his own—by taking on string theory, the leading edge of theoretical physics. Krauss is probably right that string theory is a threat to science, but his book proves he's too late to stop it.

see the Theory of Anything? for the rest of the review.

It sounds like a book I would enjoy reading!

Paul also has a link in his blog to a String Theory talk with slides given by Edward Witten, professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. Looks like I'll have to put RealPlayer back on my machine to listen to this talk. Some good news---the slides do not use PowerPoint, they are handwritten!

Speaking of talks (lectures), one of Paul's blog entries from about a week ago pointed to another article on Slate entitled The Rules of Distraction. This article was written by a former Slate intern and accurately describes what I have seen in the classroom many times. The plus side of this is that you can have students look things up for you when needed---that seems to wake some of them up a bit.

The Rules of Distraction is one in a series of articles about modern college education. See Slate Goes to College for the complete list of articles.

Tags: Books, Physics, Education

A Happy Thanksgiving

I have much to be thankful for this year, as in years past, but this one is special. This is our Fifth anniversary! I remember that day, as if it were yesterday. It was the day after Thanksgiving, so we have have a running joke that our anniversary falls on the day after Thanksgiving. The funny thing is that I really don't remember Thanksgiving five years ago.

This year is pretty special:

• My middle stepson's wife is expecting. Needless to say, they and my wife are very excited.
• My youngest stepson's fiance is returning from South America on Saturday (the long flight back begins some time today). He is very excited, to say the least. They will be getting married on the same day as my parents 50th anniversary (God willing!), early next year.
• Our parents will be joining us for the traditional dinner.
• It's our anniversary!

Happy Thanksgiving to all and a very special thanks to my wife!

How to Design Class Hierarchies

Matthias Felleisen gave a talk on How to Design Class Hierarchies. Dr. Felleisen is one of the PLT Scheme/Dr Scheme developers and one of the authors of How to Design Programs. It's a very nice 95 slide presentation describing the use of teaching FP (functional programming) in the first year. This is something a number of us have wanted to try. Maybe this presentation will help some of those that are reluctant. For more programming language news, see the Lambda the Ultimate weblog (one of my favorite programming language news sites).

Tags: OOP, Scheme, Software Design

Email Subject lines

I just finished checking my email and looked in the Junk folder and found messages with the following subjects:

• Business offers


• failure notice


• E-news from Citizens Against Government


• Notification of Limited Account Access


• School Computer Insurance


• Virus Laden


• Returned mail


• Undeliverable mail


• Sex


• Big Secret


• Cialis for you


• High quality and the lowest Price Guranteed rapturous (2)

I'm disappointed! No offers of millions of dollars from some poor Christian woman whose husband/father was killed or died in prison in a country run by an evil dictator. Some people fall for these lines, but when I've responded to them I've never gotten a reply.

The joys of email! No wonder people hate email so much....

iPod Sketch on SNL

Daring Fireball has a link to a video of a SNL (Saturday Night Live) sketch of Steve Jobs introducing new iPods. The sketch is very well done---the actor captures Steve's speaking style perfectly.

Since iPods are the perfect holiday gift, how many more of them will we be seeing on campus after Christmas (oops, Winter) break? I'll be waiting a little while longer, at least until after Macworld San Francisco in January. Why? Apple announces new hardware, price reductions, etc., at this show (and at the annual Developer's conference).

One more thing! Microsoft releases their new game machine---the Xbox 360---today. The web buzz has been underwhelming.

Dystopian Futures

I saw an interesting entry on Dystopian SciFi books on Boing Boing a little earlier. It is especially interesting to see the original PKD cover for The Man in the High Castle in light of all the Political Correctness today....


Not sure about the meaning of Dystopia? Seems that some are still living this way!

Reading, Writing, and Outlining

Since Hurricane Katrina struck, I haven't watched nearly as much TV. Why? It was clearly obvious that the news really wasn't changing and the other shows were pretty empty. So, instead of watching TV, I have done a fair amount of reading. I will write more on that later.

Yesterday I saw an article that reminded me of my reading habit when it started with the line:

"Read as much as you can. Read and write, speak and listen." Lessons Learned

Another paragraph suggests that you outline before you write. Anyone that has taken a English class has heard this advice, but many choose to ignore it. One of the reasons that people may not outline is that the outlining process appears to be work not directly involved in the final product (paper, code, etc.).

I do a lot of outlining and use/have used a number of tools on my Macs to help me:

• Hog Bay Notebook
  
• OmniOutliner
  
• LEO
  

Hog Bay Notebook is my current favorite for a number of reasons. The number one reason is that I can generate a LaTeX document from the outline structure using AppleScript (see AppleScript Source Book for some useful examples).

Need an outliner? Check them out. LEO is cross platform for the Mac-challenged.

YALog( @"Begin" );

Why YALog( @"Boring" ); ?

Translation: Write "Boring" in the log file.

Inspiration: A long time ago, in a far away (from here) place, I wrote some debugging functions named DBLog(). DBLog is short for Debug and Log. Other programmers have written similar code in their careers.... NSLog() is the name of the function that Apple (NeXT) has implemented for doing this in Cocoa (their Objective-C-based development environment). The name is also a play on yacc, Yet Another Compiler Compiler, a Unix tool. Combining these ideas, the fact that many blogs are boring to others, and how some have described my life, we get: YALog( @"Boring" );