Kathy Sierra on teaching

You really ought to check out Kathy Sierra's blog, "Creating Passionate Users". It is full of interesting nuggets about how to transfer stuff -- concepts, ideas, info, etc. -- from one brain to another brain, through books, courses, seminars, conferernces, whatever. Kathy is one of the authors of the "Head First ..." series of books (published by O'Reilly) that teach concepts in programming and software development using highly informal -- but tremendously attractive -- techniques. Her posts on teaching are informed by her experience with the "Head First" series of books.

Here are the links to Kathy's posts that are relevant to teaching:

• Just-in-time learning as opposed to Just-in-case learning
• Learning is not a push model
• Interaction vs. one-way communication
• Most classroom learning sucks
• Wisdom of the crowds
• Show-don't-tell applied to learning

I am sure you too would agree that she has lots of interesting things to say!

Annals of academic angst

Well, it has been a while since I posted here. Things were very hectic at home, with everyone deciding to fall sick, almost as if on cue, at the same time. However, everyone is back to their normal business, and it feels good to be back.

Today, I provide links to just a couple of posts; while the posts are by academics in liberal arts / humanities, everyone should be able to identify with the deeply felt views expressed by them.

The first one is from Adam Kotsko (probably a budding academic), who is grappling with what he needs to do to pass academic muster in his chosen field of philosophy. Though he likes conversing with great minds (by reading their texts), he seems exasperated by the "need to make these texts into something, turn them toward the goal of producing my own piece of writing so that I will continue to meet the requirements of scholarly productivity which graduate study is socializing into me". He finds himself trying to "figure out some way to squeeze out a paper on Zizek's use of Kierkegaard, so that I can send it off and people will publish it, so that I can write down on a piece of paper that it has been published".

Look at how an experienced academic -- Prof. Bradford DeLong, a Berkeley economist -- poses the same problem. Academia should really be about conversing with great minds and finding a compelling voice for yourself -- all the while having a great deal of fun. Academic pursuit's resemblance to a game whose goal is to build a CV of professional achievements, if it is taken seriously, will only lead to cynicism that makes you feel let down.

Best thing about both these posts is how beautifully they are able to express -- through just, plain words -- the deepest feelings of their authors. I wish I could do that ...

Update: Over at Uncertain Principles, Chad Orzel displays a different type of angst. This time, his musings are about "really important work" vs. "good enough" work, with the former being defined as that worthy of Physical Review Letters (we know what the latter is, don't we? ;-). Thankfully, his inner voice has put him back on track:

[...] every little bit helps. Small papers count almost as much as important ones, when it comes to demonstrating a research track record for a tenure review. By continuing to think big, I'm shooting myself in the foot ...

The big one is here!

Nano-2006, The next edition of the mother of all nano-related conferences, has been announced. It will be held here in our Institute during 21-26 August 2006. The Conference is chaired by two of our colleagues in our Department: Prof. Kamanio Chattopadhyay and Prof. Atul Chokshi.

The previous edition, Nano-2004 (the Seventh International Conference on Nanostructured Materials), was held at Weisbaden in Germany during June 2004. You might want to take a look at its website to get a flavour for this series of conferences.

Let it be noted that, in direct contrast to their subject matter, these conferences tend to be rather Giga in scale ...

The Monty Hall puzzle

An article by Junpei Sekino begins thus:

On one Sunday of September 1990, the following question appeared in the Ask Marilyn column in Parade, a Sunday supplement of local newspapers.

Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors; Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No.1 and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No.3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No.2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice? -Craig F. Whitaker, Columbia, Md.

Now, having read the original version of the Monty Hall puzzle, try to find an answer. Then read various excellent accounts of this puzzle in the article by Junpei Sekino, as well as here, and here. I found all these links in a comment by Enrico Scalas to a post by Tommaso Dorigo over at the Quantum Diaries website, through which you can "follow physicists from around the world as they live the World Year of Physics 2005"

Finally, let me quote Tommaso Dorigo: "...several Professors of Physics got it [the puzzle] wrong when I tried it with them, and one well-known theoretical physicist actually had to run a Monte Carlo simulation in order to become convinced of the solution".

What are colleges good for?

Matthew Yglesias, a Harvard alumnus, has a couple of interesting posts about this subject. Also, take a look at Tim Burke's views in this thoughtful essay.

Google's recruiting technique

In an earlier post, I linked to some posts about a very effective recruiting technique employed by Google. Somehow, I missed this MathWorld post, which has answers to these and other clever and geeky puzzles from Google.

Charming ...

An altogether impure metal

Whatever can be the motivation for academic life? Nietzsche's answer is simply delicious! I found this extended quote -- a passage from Nietzsche's essay, "Schopenhauer as Educator" -- in a post by John Holbo over at Crooked Timber:

It can hardly originate in any supposed 'desire for truth': for how could there exist any desire at all for cold, pure, inconsequential knowledge! What it really is that impels the servants of science is only too obvious to the unprejudiced eye: and it is very advisable to prove and dissect the men of learning themselves for once, since they for their part are quite accustomed to laying bold hands on everything in the world, even the most venerable things, and taking them to pieces. If I am to speak out, I would say this: the man of learning consists of a confused network of very various impulses and stimuli, he is an altogether impure metal. First of all there is a strong and ever more intense curiosity, the search for adventures in the domain of knowlege, the constant stimulation exercised by thte new and rare in contrast to the old and tedious. Then there is a certain drive to dialectical investigation, the huntsman's joy in following the sly fox's path in the realm of thought, so that it is not really truth that is sought but the seeking itself, and the main pleasure consists in the cunning tracking, encircling and correct killing. Now add to this the impulse to contradiction, the personality wanting to be aware of itself and to make itself felt in opposition to all others; the stuggle becomes a pleasure and the goal is personal victory, the struggle for truth being only a pretext. Then, the man of learning is to a great extent also motivated to the discovery of certain 'truths', motivated that is by his subjection to certain ruling persons, castes, opinions, churches, governments: he feels it is to his advantage to bring 'truth' over to their side.

Impure metal, indeed!

Online books in Materials Science?

Note: Originally posted on 24 January 2005.

Towards the end of his Netspeak column in today's Hindu, J. Murali points to the Internet Text Archive, "an excellent web location that hosts links to several free open source textbook digitizing [or] hosting projects that include Project Gutenberg, Children's Library, Million Books Project and Open Source Books". It is probably worth a look.

If you look around on the web, you will find quite a few books whose authors (and in some cases, publishers too) have chosen to offer them for free. Among the publishers, the following are noteworthy:

• Open Book project of O'Reilly, a well known publisher in the fields of programming and software development
• eScholarship program of the California Digital Library, one of the University of California libraries. Some of the books in CDL are open for public; check out this subject list to see if there is anything of interest to you.

Then there are books that live both in shelves and in hard disks. Sure, some of them are quite specialized (with a potential readership of, say, a few hundreds); but, there are a few others which are at the undergraduate or equivalent level in popular subjects (software development!). Examples of the latter include:

• Bruce Eckel: Thinking in C++
• Bruce Eckel: Thinking in Java
• Gerald Jay Sussman and Jack Wisdom: Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics
• Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman and Julie Sussman: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

I am not sure about the others, but I do know that the first two are very popular: they are still in print, you can buy them in shops, and apparently, many people do! In fact, Eckel loves this publishing model, and says, "All of my future books will be electronically published on my site first, and will stay on the site".

There are still a few other books which live almost entirely in the electronic world; for example, The Temple of Quantum Computing is an introductory book that its author has described as quantum computing for dummies.

Is there a good reason why there are not many online books (available either for free or for a reasonably small price) in materials science and engineering? I found two online texts in Chemistry: Dynamic Textbook of Physical Chemistry and Concepts in Chemistry. I listed them in my Thermodynamics course website.

It is entirely possible that there are more such books that are available online, and are useful for students of materials science and engineering. If you know of any, do please send me its URL, and let us start compiling a list here!

Update (25 Jan 2005): The process of building up this list begins here! Here we go:

• Harry Bhadeshia: Bainite in Steels
• Harry Bhadeshia: Worked Examples in the Geometry of Crystals
• Edgar Bain: Alloying Elements in Steel (Harry Bhadeshia has produced this electronic version with permission from ASM International, and hosts it on his website)
• Kaushik Bhattacharya: Theory of Martensitic Microstructure and the Shape-Memory Effect
• John A. Venables: Lecture notes on "Surfaces and Thin Films" (Their near-completeness and organization should make these notes a 'book', and indeed, they form the basis for a dead-tree version from the Cambridge University Press)

If you know more such online texts, bring'em on!