What I Learned Today

Distance learning has great potential to reach a wide array of students, or just to cut down on commuting. Four years ago, I took a class on remote sensing through USC’s Distance Education Network as part of my Master’s degree work in geology. While I was delighted to not have to drive down into L.A. that semester, and I enjoyed being able to eat dinner or knit while viewing the lectures, I did feel that the experience lacked something — real-time engagement with the professor and other students.

But technology and pedagogy have been adapting and improving over time. I recently watched a recording of an open house for the San Jose State University’s School of Library and Information Science. Their entire program is offered through distance learning, even for local students; there are no physical classrooms. As a result, if the Open House is any sample, the professors have developed excellent ways to conduct an online class meeting that involves and engages students beyond passively listening to a lecture. Contrary to my initial reservations, I came away impressed by the use of technology and the clear commitment to a quality experience. There were interactive quizzes, discussion of the results, and a live chat window. I think I was most impressed by the presenter’s comfort with the online environment; she noticed and responded to every comment made in the chat window, seamlessly blending those topics into the flow of her presentation.

SJSU’s program involves ~2500 students (again, all online), with a 25-30 student enrollment limit in each class (interesting given that it’s offered online!). The required introductory course has a peer mentoring component. Students have the option of getting course credit for in-person internships with their local libraries. At the culmination of the degree, students can choose to assemble an ePortfolio demonstrating 15 core competencies or a research thesis. Recent theses cover a fascinating range of topics, including:

• The impact of Hurricane Katrina on Gulf Coast libraries and their disaster planning
• Historical archaeologists’ utilization of archives: an exploratory study
• The rise of Mormon cultural history and the changing status of the archive
• Libraries in American German prisoner of war camps during World War II

The course offerings broadly address issues of how to organize, catalog, access, and share information. There are classes on how “interview” patrons (to zero in on what they’re really looking for), the library’s role in intellectual freedom, archives and preservation, and the history of books and libraries.

I noticed a few interesting differences in word use from what I’m used to. “Research”, in the library context, refers to the process of looking up a desired piece of information, rather than developing new algorithms and conducting experiments. “Implementation” means to install or put something in place, not to write code.

Here stands revealed another world of new ideas and information to learn. And with distance learning, it’s made super easy! Hmm…

I finally did it: walked into a Verizon store and picked out a smart phone. I’d been dragging my feet for a variety of reasons, ranging from a dislike of the slab-like form factor to just plain laziness. But oh my, was I missing out! Things have changed since my last phone purchase in 2006!

I’m not an impulse buyer. I was just going to see what the latest offerings were. And if or when I did get a smart phone, I vaguely assumed it’d be an iPhone, which is the only one I’ve played with before. But the Verizon employee who met me as I walked in immediately steered me to the Android side of the store. “That’s what we all use,” he confided. And here I’d thought Verizon was over the moon to be offering the iPhone, which is selling so fast that you can’t get it in black anymore online (or at this particular store), only white.

I handled a bunch of these phones and gradually narrowed it down to two that were the least chunky and slippery. I was persuaded that I might as well opt for a 4G phone, since although only 3G is available here in Corvallis, I’ll be moving back to L.A. soon where it seems 4G is all the rage, and 10 times faster. I really liked the Verizon guy who was helping me; he was extremely knowledgable, fielded every single one of my questions, and was up front about what was a useful attribute and what was a buzzword. I later learned that he was the store owner.

I converged on the Pantech Breakout, a phone I otherwise knew nothing about, but it felt the best and since they all had the same OS, form factor apparently was the deciding angle. It was just a bit smaller than the other 4G phones, with a slightly grippy back, and felt better in my hand. The thing has a 1-GHz processor, weighs less than 5 ounces, and has about a billion features I won’t need but came along for the ride (like how it can act as a “hotspot” and relay net access to other devices). I was going to go home and think it over, per usual with large purchases, when I realized that at $50, what exactly was I going to deliberate?

Verizon guy: “I guess you probably don’t want the phone insurance option. After all, you managed to hold onto that phone for FIVE YEARS.”

He threw in a car charger and a screen protector with a nice discount, and I was on my way. A whole new way! I’ve got the future in my pocket!

Here are some of the awesome things I’ve discovered this “phone” can do:

• Voice translation. Like, you speak in English, it turns that into text, translates it into French, and then speaks the French aloud. Your French friend can then do this in reverse and suddenly, you’re communicating across the language barrier. I sat in the Verizon store entranced, having a conversation with myself in two languages, and it WORKED! I imagine you could also use this to learn the foreign language, at least to some initial rudimentary level.
• Voice dictation. You can dictate text messages, emails, search queries, memos, etc. The accuracy of its dictation (relayed to a server, not local to the phone) is startling. I can say “wikipedia oregon trail” and google does the right thing! I can say “post office” when I’m looking at google maps and it pops up pointers at all the right places! The pain of typing texts is gone! (As a bonus, the “swype” method for entering texts on the keyboard is a nice advance in itself, and good for settings in which you don’t want to speak your texts out loud.)
• Yelp. Google docs. Geocaching. Disc golf maps and scoring. My ravelry knitting projects. An exoplanet counter. Angband.
• Amusingly gratuitous: animated desktop wallpaper, such as little flowers that sway and bob when you swipe left or right, or ponds that ripple when you touch them. Amusing for about 30 seconds, then deemed not worth the battery life they require and deactivated.

At the store’s recommendation, I attended their “smart phone training session” which took place the next day. It was me and six octogenarians. Another Verizon employee led the class. He began with a glowing paean to all things google, which concluded with “It’s okay to share all of your data with google, because their motto is ‘do no evil.'” I did get more familiar with the OS and was able to ask some questions. So far, so good.

Any favorite Android apps you’d like to suggest?

Morse Code is made of dots and dashes (or dits and dahs), which until today I thought of as a flat lookup table. And then I discovered this awesome chart:

Of COURSE! I knew that it was designed so fewer dits/dahs were needed to encode common letters like E and T, but I had never seen it laid out like this.

This chart is meant as a learning aid; rather than trying to memorize Morse code in a flat table form, you can follow the tree while you’re listening to Morse code coming in. Go left for dah, right for dit. It’s beautiful! You can try it now by going to the site linked above and listening to their sample codes. Listening to the alphabet and tracing it through the tree is a magical experience.

With practice, I imagine you start seeing the chart in your head, and then later you’ve got the letters memorized and no longer need it.

I love discovering clever aids to learning, and new ways to organize information that illuminate it in truly useful ways.

As kids, I think the first encounter most of us have with the idea of an “engineer” is “the person who drives the train”. By the time I started my undergraduate studies, however, I knew that the College of Engineering wasn’t just about driving trains. But I always wondered how a purely functional role could have the same name as what I now saw as an engineer: someone with a very active role in design and problem-solving. Or as wikipedia puts it, “An engineer is a professional practitioner of engineering, concerned with applying scientific knowledge, mathematics and ingenuity to develop solutions for technical problems.”

Recently I picked up some books at the library on steam locomotives and other fascinating train topics. And suddenly, I realized why the train-driver could also lay claim to the title of engineer. Historically, at least, the railroad engineer did not just drive the train. He (these were generally men) also had to be a top-notch engineer, familiar with all of the inner workings of his engine, as he was continually required to maintain, lubricate, tend to, and sometimes even repair the engine. One book noted that the “iron horse” was just as temperamental and required as much attention and grooming as the organic horse it had replaced.

Today, it seems we have a very different view of machines and their users or operators. Most of us who drive cars do not expect to have intimate knowledge of how they work; instead, we hire car mechanics to deal with the details and fix problems. No doubt today’s train engineers are also much more removed from their engines than those of the 1800’s. Computers likewise (or our attitudes about them) have evolved as well, so that users need not understand operating systems and file systems and network protocols, disk scheduling and memory allocation and pipelining, kernels and shells and scripts. Instead, one can hire an IT expert to maintain the machine and fix it when it breaks.

Is this trend a result of the growing sophistication and complexity of these machines, or a shift in our social attitudes towards the desirability of being involved in details? Or both? If it’s an evolution in the machine, are there other machines out there in their infancy and still requiring that the engine be a part of the engineer?

I can see the allure of both the low and high levels on this abstraction spectrum, for computers. I personally enjoy tinkering with the configuration of my computers and knowing what’s going on under the hood, even up to spending hours buried in an ancient Linux machine to get a wireless card working—but sometimes that loses its appeal when I just want things to work. And in truth, when the machine is reliable enough that I don’t need to be checking and tinkering constantly (as with my Mac), I’ve found that I stop doing it. Yet I still feel a tug of curiosity about other machines as well—I’d love to take a basic automotive mechanics course, and learn more about how trains work, and I’m fascinated by pulleys and linkages and astoundingly clever machines of all kinds. But then, I’m an engineer by inclination—or perhaps, I have a wish to be (in a friend’s charming coinage) an “engine-er”: someone who knows and tends and cultivates the engine, akin to a farm-er or a sail-or.

In reading “The How and Why of Mechanical Movements,” I’ve gone from levers to linkages to wheels to pulleys to screws, plus a really fascinating discussion of friction and its use in machines. One of the cleverest devices I’ve seen so far is the differential pulley or differential hoist, used in auto repair shops and factories to allow humans to lift very heavy loads (like car engines).

The differential pulley is composed of two pulleys with different diameters mounted on the same axle. The rope (or chain, with toothed pulleys, to prevent slippage) is looped in opposite directions over the two pulleys, with the weight to be lifted suspend from one downward loop. If you pull on the other (unloaded) loop hanging down, relative to the larger-diameter pulley, then for each meter of rope/chain it releases, the smaller pulley must take up fractionally more rope/chain, yielding a net lift for the suspended weight. The diameter difference means that you had to pull more rope/chain than the distance the weight was lifted, yielding a mechanical advantage (i.e., you don’t have to pull as hard, you just have to do it for longer). This is difficult to explain in words, and much easier to grasp from a diagram; click the image at right to enlarge it. (I personally found the differential windlass, which was a precursor to the differential hoist, a useful aid in understanding the latter.) At first it seems counter-intuitive that the weight should hang suspended without pulling the second loop tight as well, until you observe that the key is that the two pulleys share the same axle and are wound in different directions. Thus the weight pulls equally on both sides of the axle and it does not turn, until an additional force (your hand) upsets that balance. (All drawings are from A First Course in Physics, by Robert Andrews Millikan and Henry Gordon Gale (Ginn and Company, 1906), as cited in Donald Simanek’s lecture on simple machines.)

If it wasn’t obvious, I’m really enjoying this book (and learning a lot). The current chapter just covered automobile clutches and brakes and several different kinds of bearings. The next chapter moves on to gears and transmissions (actual automobile transmissions, manual and automatic). Given its richness and re-read value, I’m likely to want to keep this one much longer than the library permits. Amazon to the rescue!