Question for the Linux people in the audience: I have a PC at home (don’t know the exact hardware stats offhand) that’s running WinXP. The machine is old and I have no idea where the install disc for WinXP is. And WinXP is driving me crazy on this machine for a number of reasons, so I’d like to think about switching it to Linux, specifically Ubuntu because it seems well-supported and I’ve had good experiences with Ubuntu. However, if I install Ubuntu and it doesn’t play nice with my PC, I don’t know where the WinXP install disc is and so I won’t be able to go back. And I’d rather not have to set up a dual-boot system; I know how to do that and manage the system, but the PC is for my kids and I want to keep it simple. 

So, is there a way to try out Ubuntu, just to make sure core hardware stuff like wifi works, without wiping stuff out and installing? 

UPDATE: The partitioning tools virusdoc was mentioning are: 

http://qtparted.sourceforge.net/features.en.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ntfsresize

These were getting caught in the spam filter. 

This story out of Norfolk State University has been lighting up the internet in general and the edu-blogosphere in particular. It revolves around Steven Aird, a biologist at Norfolk, who was denied tenure for failing too many students: 

The report from [Dean Sandra DeLoatch] said that Aird met the standards for tenure in service and research, and noted that he took teaching seriously, using his own student evaluations on top of the university’s. The detailed evaluations Aird does for his courses, turned over in summary form for this article, suggest a professor who is seen as a tough grader (too tough by some), but who wins fairly universal praise for his excitement about science, for being willing to meet students after class to help them, and providing extra help.

DeLoatch’s review finds similarly. Of Aird, she wrote, based on student reviews: “He is respectful and fair to students, adhered to the syllabus, demonstrated that he found the material interesting, was available to students outside of class, etc.”

What she faulted him for, entirely, was failing students. The review listed various courses, with remarks such as: “At the end of Spring 2004, 22 students remained in Dr. Aird’s CHM 100 class. One student earned a grade of ‘B’ and all others, approximately 95 percent, earned grades between ‘D’ and ‘F.’” Or: “At the end of Fall 2005, 38 students remained in Dr. Aird’s BIO 100 class. Four students earned a grade of ‘C-’ or better and 34, approximately 89 percent, received D’s and F’s.”

These class records resulted in the reason cited for tenure denial: “the core problem of the overwhelming failure of the vast majority of the students he teaches, especially since the students who enroll in the classes of Dr. Aird’s supporters achieve a greater level of success than Dr. Aird’s students.”

But you really have to go read the whole thing to get the full complexity of the issue. Read especially the comments at the end. This situation has really touched a nerve among higher ed people.

And it’s not hard to see why, either. This story brings up in great clarity a profound conundrum in college teaching: When students fail, whose fault is it? Is it: 

• the students‘ fault, for not working hard enough or putting forth enough effort or so forth? 
• the professor’s fault, for not working hard enough to reach and help his/her students? 
• the university’s fault, for creating a culture of low expectations? (This is Aird’s argument.) 
• the students’ high schools’ fault for not adequately preparing them for college? 
• somebody else’s fault, for example the admissions department for allowing students who are knowingly unprepared for college to enroll, thereby forcing the university to hold lower standards in order to maintain decent retention rates? 

Blogging’s been light lately because of the push to finish spring semester courses. I did so today, turning in my last batch of semester grades. So maybe now I can get back into a regular swing of posting. 

My main role this summer will be that of the stay-at-home dad. Our two girls normally attend preschool and daycare during the week, our 4-year old full-time and our 2-year old part time. This summer, the 4-year old will be going just three days a week and the 2-year old just one day a week. I will have one day a week to myself (see below), but the other four weekdays will be spent either one-on-one with my 2-year old or two-on-one with both of them. It’s a role that I am greatly looking forward to playing. 

I will be “Mr. Mom” during the day, and then I will be teaching not one but two classes in the evenings. I signed up to teach our 8-week summer calculus course on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays from 5:30-7:30; and I am directing an independent study for one of our seniors, the meetings for which will be on Wednesdays 5:30-6:30. (We’ll be working through selections from Edward Bender’s Mathematical Methods in Artificial Intelligence.) 

The girls will remain in their current preschool/daycare schedule until the start of summer classes, so I do get a couple of weeks for my own “vacation” in the interim… which will be spent writing up a paper for the ICTCM proceedings and finishing up a book review for the MAA which I should have submitted back in March. I will also need to work on adapting my 14-week calculus course to an 8-week format, which is harder than it sounds. 

Between potty-training by day and derivative-training by night, I don’t expect to have tons of free time to spend on projects like I did last summer, when the girls went full-time five days a week to daycare while I whiled my days away as a gentleman of leisure read and studied for the Reconnect 2007 workshop. Actually, it was about three weeks into that summer break that I decided I would much rather have the girls at home with me than sit around surfing the internet and pretending to learn about machine learning. The bulk of the “projects” that I have for summer involve reading, and you’ll hear more about what I am working through as it happens. (Don’t want to be too ambitious at this point and lay out a reading list.)  

For the moment, though, it’s nice not to have the pressure of prepping for the next day’s classes and keeping up with the grading stream. 

I’m a little surprised you don’t hear about this sort of thing happening more often: 

A Roncalli High School administrator is asking a judge to force the Internet site Facebook to identify the pranksters who hijacked his identity for a phony Webpage.

Tim Puntarelli, Roncalli [High School]’s dean of students, and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese is suing Facebook and the anonymous creators of the false Webpage the suit claims contained false, embarrassing, and defaming information about Puntarelli and Roncalli High School.

The page creators used the Facebook page to pose as Puntarelli and send emails to Roncalli students, according to the lawsuit filed Thursday in Marion Superior Court.

Facebook officials removed the page when they were notified of the site on April 18, but refused to disclose the identity of the creators without a court order, according to the lawsuit.

Puntarelli and the Archdiocese are asking a judge to order Facebook to identify the creators of the page. The suit indicates they want the pranksters to pay triple the attorney fees and court costs.

I’m also somewhat surprised that Facebook is so reluctant to hand over the identity of the kids (presumably kids, at least) who set up this phony web page when they freely admit that the page is phony and the administrator’s identity was hijacked. Why should you need a court order for this? 

Dana Huff tagged me with a meme, and that’s a lot more fun than closing out a semester and prepping for finals, so I’ll play along. Here are the rules: 

1. The rules of the game get posted at the beginning.
2. Each player answers the questions about themselves.
3. At the end of the post, the player then tags 5-6 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read the player’s blog.
4. Let the person who tagged you know when you’ve posted your answer.

Asking the following question may make me less of a mathematician in some people’s eyes, and I’m fine with that, but: How do you explain the meaning of the differential dx inside an integral? And more importantly, how do you treat the dx in an integral so that, when you get to u-substitutions, all the substituting with du and dx and so on means more than just a mindless crunching of symbols? 

Here’s how Stewart’s Calculus does it: 

• In the section introducing the definite integral and its notation, it says: “The symbol dx has no official meaning by itself; is all one symbol.” (What kind of statement is that? If dx has “no official meaning”, then why is it there at all?) 
• In the section on Indefinite Integrals and the Net Change Theorem, there is a note — almost an afterthought — on units at the very end, where there is an implied connection between in the Riemann sum and dt in the integral, in the context of determining the units of an integral. But no explicit connection, such as “dx is the limit of as n increases without bound” or something like that. 
• Then we get to the section on u-substitution, which opens with considering the calculation of (labelled as (1) in the book). We get this, er, explanation: 

Suppose that we let u be the quantity under the root sign in (1),  . Then the differential of u is du = 2x dx. Notice that if the dx in the notation for an integral were to be interpreted as a differential, then the differential 2x dx would occur in  (1), and, so, formally, without justifying our calculation, we could write …

So, according to Stewart, dx has “no official meaning”. But if we were to interpret dx as a differential — he makes it sound like we have a choice! — then using purely formal calculations which we will not stoop to justify, we could write the du in terms of dx. That is, integrals contain these meaningless symbols which, although they have no meaning, we must give them some meaning — and in one particular way — or else we can’t solve the integral using these purely formal and highly subjunctive symbolic manipulations that end up getting the right answer. 

Er, right. 

To be fair, my usual way of handling things isn’t much better. I start by reminding students of the Leibniz notation for differentiation, i.e. the derivative of y with respect to x is dy/dx. Then I say that, although that notation is not really a fraction, it comes from a fraction — and that much is true, since dy/dx is the limit of as the interval length goes to 0 — and so we can treat it like a fraction in the sense that, say, if then and so, “multiplying by dx”, we get . But that’s not much less hand-wavy than Stewart. 

Can somebody offer up an explanation of the manipulation of dx that makes sense to a freshman, works, and has the added benefit of actually being true? 

So yes, I did actually go see a doctor this afternoon to see if my blurry-vision incident might be something serious. It wasn’t a TIA or a stroke, because apparently a TIA lasts for 30 minutes or so and includes all the symptoms of a stroke — slurred speech, immobility on one side of the body, and so on. This only lasted a few seconds and was just blurry vision. In fact nobody knows what might have caused that to happen; possibly a small blood clot or just a muscle spasm in my eye. 

But I just wanted everyone to know I did get it checked out. Especially virusdoc, whose comment got me to Google “TIA” which then put the fear of God into me and then got me to the ER — where I ended up in room 14, although I was really hoping for room 16 just to make the whole powers-of-2 thing complete. 

Driving in to work this morning, I suddenly felt my vision go blurry to the point where I literally couldn’t see anything. Fortunately, I was able to pull off the road into the parking lot of a small office building before causing an accident. After I stopped and waited for the blurriness to subside, the first thing I saw was the mailbox for the office building, which had a street number of: 2048. Rather than wonder what the crap was wrong with my eyesight, or frantically try to decide whether to go see a doctor on the spot, instead the first thing I thought was hey: That’s . 

Then, after making it to work with no more blurry vision attacks, I walked up to my office — the same office I have been entering and exiting since summer 2001 — and looked at the office number and saw it: room 128. Of course, I’ve never had a problem remembering my office number But for the first time in seven years, I noticed, hey: that’s . 

So, maybe the blurry vision attack was me suddenly gaining the superhero power of being able to recognize powers of 2 with lightning quickness. If so, I somehow don’t see the Justice League of America saving me a seat anytime soon. 

Finally, a professional sociologist has done some actual research on the concept of the digital native. Her view is a little more measured than others‘. From this interview: 

Q. Why do people think young people are so Web-wise?

A. I think the assumption is that if it was available from a young age for them, then they can use it better. Also, the people who tend to comment about technology use tend to be either academics or journalists or techies, and these three groups tend to understand some of these new developments better than the average person. Ask your average 18-year-old: Does he know what RSS means? And he won’t.

The importance of having empirical findings about digital literacy among young people — as opposed to anecdotes and assumptions that tend to affirm what we want to believe — is that the more we assume, the less we teach. As Prof. Hargittai puts it: 

Q. Are there implications for workplace readiness?

A. There are positive outcomes for those who know how to work and employ tech information, and those who lack information will confront a different situation. In terms of a link with demographic differences, those people who seem to be more savvy are the ones who tend to be in more-privileged positions. There will be an increase in social inequality if this divergence continues this way.

I’m not a fan of the concept of “privilege”, but it’s plain to see that some demographics have better access to technology than others. And it’s all fun to suppose that students these days are technologically literate and then craft way-cool tech-centered curricula around that assumption. But the problem is that the students who are not technologically savvy — whom Prof. Hargittai identifies as “Women, students of Hispanic origin, African-American students, and students whose parents have lower levels of education”, which is to say, an awfully big percentage of the people we teach — end up getting left behind while we have our fun. 

Seems like it’s been ages since we’ve heard of crazed left-wing university students throwing pies at speakers, so I’m almost nostalgic about this:

Brown University is condemning the actions of two people — at least one of whom is a student — who threw a pie-like substance Tuesday night at Thomas Friedman, a columnist for The New York Times who was speaking on the campus. Friedman took a few minutes to clean himself up, but continued his talk. Michael Chapman, vice president for public affairs and university relations, issued a statement in which he said: “Freedom of speech is prized on a university campus. While Brown students are encouraged to express their opinions on any subject and in a variety of forums, the university does not tolerate such assaults against a speaker or disrupting the right of others to hear a speaker’s perspectives.” The statement said that one of those involved was apprehended and identified as a student. “The university will review this incident through its non-academic disciplinary system to determine the appropriate response.”

This is the same Thomas Friedman, by the way, who wrote The World is Flat, the seminal work for much of today’s edublogging. More: 

The Providence Journal reported that the incident involved paper plates with shamrock-colored whipped cream. After they were thrown at Friedman, one of those protesting threw in the air leaflets that criticized Friedman, saying: “Thomas Friedman deserves a pie in the face because of his sickeningly cheery applause for free market capitalism’s conquest of the planet, for telling the world that the free market and techno fixes can save us from climate change. From carbon trading to biofuels, these distractions are dangerous in and of themselves, while encouraging inaction with respect to the true problems at hand.”

These morons have just enough intellect and courage to hit somebody in the face with a pie and then run away, trailing badly-written quasi-philosophical leaflets in their wake; but not enough to actually write real books and give public lectures about the issues. Here’s hoping Brown acts with some toughness on this.