Obsolescence

So I've got a question for you guys. Does anyone out there ever use a phone book? Seriously, when was the last time you used a phone book to look up someone's number, or the address of a restaurant, or find a plumber? It probably wasn't in last five years. Hell, for most of you the last time you used a phone book was when you needed to prop open the door of your apartment building when moving. Which I guess is the one convenience of nobody ever using them, they just get left there to act as rather good door jams.

But with that knowledge, why are the phone books still printed? Is there a fear that without a phone book in your house a muscle bound he-man will tear your laptop in half in place of the classic phone book show of strength? And what ass backwards company is paying to advertise in a phone book? Aren't they out of business by now...I wonder if they're all ads for typewriter companies?

So needless to say that I was rather perplexed to find the second phone book at my front door in the past three weeks. After all, there are five separate wireless networks in range of my apartment, who around here bothers with a phone book, let alone two sets of them. So with all the global warming and saving of the rainforests that needs to happen quickly maybe it's about time that whatever company makes the phone book just let it go. After all, what numbers are in the phone book? I haven't had a land line since 2000 and I can't think of many people that still do have them.

Old laws

So I think it’s about time for me to get back into doing a bit of social/political commentary on here rather than just complaining about how poorly my students are doing. And the topic of choice is going to be the second amendment to the US constitution.

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

I’m sure some of you may be wondering why this is my topic of choice; mainly the reason is that I’ve been hearing about it on the news on my drive to work each morning. A quick summary is that the city of Washington has had a ban on handgun ownership for years now, something which it looks as though it may be reversed by the Supreme Court this year.

Now I could go off on a rant about how owning a gun isn’t going to protect you from anything. Seriously, when was the last time you heard of a civilian protecting themselves with a gun? Yeah, I can’t think of any cases, though I can think of many incidents when armed, and well trained, police officers were killed. Clearly a gun is not a viable form of defense.

What is ridiculous in this whole process is the blind faith that seems to be placed in the constitution. Now, I’m not advocating a complete dismissal of the constitution, I just think that it should be looked at with a more critical eye. After all, some things they did get right, the whole freedom of speech part for one. But others kind of missed the mark, namely the part with coloured people getting ⅗ of a vote. So I don’t think that an argument about gun ownership should be limited to the assumptions and interpretations of two sentences written over 200 years ago. After all, the people that wrote this weren’t anything special, sure Franklin was pretty smart, but in an age of muzzle loadied muskets who could have predicted uzis, grenade launchers or even handguns?

The deification of the writers of the constitution is rather odd to me as a scientist. Sure, we have our heros in science, Newton, Einstein, Hawkins and many others, we respect their work and achievements, but when the time comes for their theories to be retired in the face of new evidence we accept their limitations. I think it’s about time that the limitations of the constitutional authors is accepted.

Test are depressing

So it's been almost a month since I posted anything, oh well. You know the reason by now, I'm busy and boring.

Recently I finished grading the first midterm for the class I'm teaching. It's the second semester teaching the course and I'm learning how to do it a bit more effectively, at least that's what I thought. The midterm average was only 52%. But I'm not really worried about that, I kind of like scaring them on the first midterm, it gets them working harder for the rest of the semester. That being said there are a few things about the comments and answers that I saw that are concerning me.

For one thing, it seems to the students, that my questions are difficult to understand, they can't seem to figure out what I'm asking for. This is something I'm having some issues with. I've been looking over the questions I gave them and I will admit, in some instances I include superfluous information, just to see if they can extract useful information from the question. Other than that the questions I ask of them are succinct and in my opinion clear. So short of actually setting up the equations for the students I really don't know what I can do to help them.

The other thing that just floored me when I was grading the exam was one error that was made by close to 20% of my class. Normally that's not a big deal, I've had questions where most of the class made the same mistake, but those were usually cases of subtleties or particularly challenging questions. The one that this group fucked up was a logic question, you know the kind you are taught to figure out in kindergarden. In specific the students had to determine if a given value fell within the 95% confidence limits of a series of values. Ok, so that probably sounds like gibberish, but they knew what I wanted and were able to do the math properly, finding out that the confidence interval was 10.05 to 10.17. So when it came to answering the question, does 10.00 fall within the confidence interval why did 20% of them say that it did? I'm not dealing with six year olds, these kids actually have the right to vote!

It really is a very sad situation when 20% of a university class cannot answer a basic logic question. So with that in mind I don't think I'm to blame for their failure to understand my questions, clearly the education system has failed them year after year, and now 15 years into the system they still can't deal with the basics. I'm going to do what I can to actually get them to turn on their brains, but I'm obviously swimming against the current in a lot of cases.

*Note the exam sheet posted is not from one of my students, but supposedly from a genius who answered "C" for a true/false exam