Education: System is out of Sync

Sir Ken Robinson touched on a number of points that I think are important in terms of revolutionizing education. One is that the current education paradigm was conceived in a different age. In his talk about changing education paradigms, he shows a chart of instances of prescriptions given for ADHD by state in the United States. According to the chart, you are more likely to have ADHD the farther East you live.

At the same time this "medical fashion" is taking shape and spreading, kids are growing up in the "information age". They have had cell phones, the internets, youtube, social media, netflix, cable tv packages, video games and a million other interactive, personally significant sources of information and we expect them to sit still and in silence while a teacher tries to lecture them abstract, intangible subjects.

Our kids are living in an age that no one could fathom even 10 years ago, yet we are still trying to teach them in the same manner as our grandparents and their grandparents were taught. The system of eduction was conceived during the industrial revolution to meet the demands of growing job markets. It came to be in a time when a people rarely travelled more than 20 miles from home their life times; when  if you wanted to talk with some one, you had to find them or write them a letter; when the closest thing to avoiding reality was reading a book or the newspaper.

People were use to long conversations and taking time to be entertained. They had to be patient because nothing was immediate. There was no central source of information available to everyone everywhere all the time, so people had to swap books, stories, and gossip, and if information had to reach the masses, the masses had to find a central location to be reached.

Now, the wealth of the world's information is in each kids pockets and at their fingertips at every moment of the day. If they want to know something, kill time, organize a get together, find a location, go out to eat, or anything else, they just pull out their phones. Furthermore, they do not have to spend an hour getting lectured. They can find a reliable source of information and get a succinct description or watch an informational video/tutorial.

Today, we are using the "technologies" (really, the methodologies) of past ages and penalizing kids for not conforming to it while outside of the classroom, students live in a different culture.

IDL

Up until recently, pretty much all of my programming experience has been in IDL. I decided to finally buckle down and learn how to do things that I always use other people's routines for. In doing so, I realized how stupid IDL can be. I wound up fighting more against the language than against my own stupid programming skills.

Take, for instance, the TV and TVSCL commands. They take an image and plot them on the display. If you want to put them within a plot window, however, you cannot just use the same position vector that you used to make the plot axes because the bottom and left axes are drawn within the plot window. You have to reduce the size of the image by 1 pixel in each dimension and offset it up and to the right by one pixel.

Ok, so fine. I can do that... But then I want to save the image to PostScript. You would think that, everything having turned out well on the display, that it would look good saved to a file, right? Wrong. The image still covers the axes and I have yet to figure out how to fix it myself. So now I am using Coyote Graphics, which is pretty much the awesomest thing to happen to IDL, and the best resource anyone can ever get. The guy who runs the company, David Fanning, also has a Google group where he and others answer IDL questions.

But then I asked myself, What the h-e-double-hockey-sticks is a PostScript file anyway? Turns out it is an archaic printing language that helped computers output to printers. PDF is its modern replacement. I never really used PS to begin with. I just saved as .ps as an intermediate step before saving it as a .pdf, .jpg, .tiff. .png, etc. Now I know about the X buffer and TVRD. Things are going to change. Big time.

But that gets me back to my original rant. IDL should just work. I should not have to worry about scalable pixel sizes, make separate contingencies for the device I am using, which operating system I have, which decomposed state I am in, etc. IDL should know these things and just do what I want it to do.

After the aforementioned instance of recently, I started using Python. Nuff said.

Changing Education

One of the reasons I started this blog is that I feel education needs to be changed. This not a new unique sentiment that few others share. I hear about it all the time. One person who feels this way is Sir Ken Robinson [1], [2], [3], an international advisor on education in the arts. He says that change is not enough. We do not need the system to evolve. If the foundation and fundamentals of the system are broken, then the evolved system will still be fundamentally broken. What we need is a revolution.

The problem is that despite all of the people that are passionate about educational reform, very little is taking place, especially at the college and post-graduate levels. The change within the sciences is even slower because a scientist wants to see scientific results that one set of educational methodologies is better than another. It is sort of a Catch-22. Where is the scientific method here?

So, my plan is to highlight education programs that are doing something new, reaching out to a larger audience, concerned with social and global issues, etc., as well as platforms for education, creative and new ideas, and outreach programs -- because education should not only be better, it should be available at a high quality to everyone, regardless of geographic, economic, and demographic factors.

Just as a start, I already partially introduced TED.com and their "ideas worth spreading" with the Sir Robinson videos above. TED is a conference that tries to feature people with great ideas and inventions. They oublish new videos weekly on their website.

Additionally, there is the Studio School, a new type of school for 14-19 year olds in England that turns the classroom into a hands-on environment in an attempt to bridge the gap between classroom skills and workplace skills.

Recap

After a grueling month of incessant grading, I finally made it through the semester. Here is a list of things that I learned:

1. A firm late policy is necessary for all assignments.
2. Assignments submitted via email should be penalized slightly to discourage it
3. Plagiarism and copying should not be tolerated and the school's plagiarism policies should be included in the syllabus.
4. Make-up style assignments should be work for the students, not for me.
5. My grading style was too kind to lab reports that adhered to the required format but poorly analyzed the data.
6. The rubric I made was too detailed and its function was lost in its length.

So, students, you have just made your lives worse. Hrm hrm hrm hrm ha ha ha haaa

Metas

Diana was telling me about a meeting given by the GM of her hotel to her and the rest of the employees. At the end of the meeting he asked who among them keeps a list of goals and objectives. Diana was the only one to raise her hand. When asked, she said that at the beginning of the year she writes down her goals for the year to come on the first page of her agenda. As the year progresses, she occasionally checks her list and, come mid-year, she does a complete evaluation of the list, making changes in her schedule and her life so that she can achieve what remains incomplete.

This really impressed me. Before, I would have thought it was good for her, but not really for me. In the last year or two, however, I have learned more about myself and what I am driven by, and I want to pursue what drives me. What's more, I want to pursue and succeed at what have become my passions.

But that is not all. She told me she does the same thing with her personal goals, but that she keeps those in a separate place. When she came back from her room, she layed her notebook open in front of me and started paging through the last two years that we have been together. She read aloud, "Be with Matt", "Send more messages to Matt", and several other goals related to how she could change herself to make me happy and to make our relationship stronger. I was more than impressed. I was affected.

It was one of those moments that changes a person. Here she is, one of the best, nicest, most caring people I have ever met in my life, selflessly changing the way she is to make the relationship that we have better. Not only that, but as I listened, I noticed a check in her voice. As my eyes followed her words along the page, I realized that she had successfully done everything that she could think of to make my (our) life happy.

At that moment, I felt more than just love. I felt a desire to make her feel the same way. Affected. Loved. Astonished. New. I wanted to change myself to make her happy and I wanted to be with her to support her and help her fulfill the rest of her goals.

So, I planned on making my own list of goals the next day after I finished teaching. The whole day I thought about my dreams and aspirations, excited about the permanent reminder I would have to provide me with ambition and motivation to do great things -- about having a simbol of the greatness and love that was shared with me the day before -- about carrying around in my pocket the power, strength, will, and vision that had given dominance to my stride and fire to my soul.

But classes went long and I grew tired and distracted. I went to bed without picking up a pad and pencil. Soon, my list became another goal to be accomplished some other day. Another thought to be pushed aside or forgotten -- a memory to smile at in a moment of reflection or a window to a time of what could be if I had the time to make it.

That is the danger that we all face, isn't it? It is the reason for the list. The list serves as a token against complacency and procrastination. It is a focal point to keep our attention on what is important, to remind us of the things that are bigger than our daily lives. It keeps us honest and gives us a reference to not only where, but to who we want to be.

And having a list of positive things to constantly be reminded of only leads to more positivity. Sure, I feel great pursuing my list, but I feel even greater helping some one else fulfill theirs. It is one thing to be great and a-whole-nother thing to share it and make great the world around you.

So, in the name of greatness, here are some of my goals for the rest of this year, in no particular order. I hope I have inspired you to write your own.

• Create my "Potentials and Fields" class and make an effort to put it on YouTube
• Contribute at least twice a month to Casual Science
• Gather parts for the Watch-a-Doodle (a.k.a. Wetch-a-Sketch)
• Do not let work keep me too busy nor play keep me too idle.

And lastly (for this blog, anyway), but certainly not leastly,

• Help Diana fulfill the rest of her goals.

Khan Academy

Through my frequent readings of Saturday Morning Breakast Cereal, I came across a link to the Khan Academy and watched their featured video. It is of Salman Khan, the founder and sole teacher of the Khan Academy, speaking about his youtube school at a TED convention.

Khan was a hedge fund analyst at a brokerage firm when he started making youtube videos to help tutor his little cousins. After receiving numerous positive emails and comments from his family, friends, strangers, and teachers, he quit his job and decided to found the Khan Academy.

There are over 2,100 educational videos on the site (mostly pre-/highschool level), all made by Khan. Each video is 10-15 minutes long and consists of Kahn's voice explaining a topic while the video shows Khan's notes appearing on a computer-based blackboard (via SmoothDraw).

Additionally, there is a fantastic organization and homework scheme created by the software crew. All of the videos are thrown into an intricate flowchart that creates a smooth learning path through and across subjects. You can start at the beginning and be guided through harder and harder topics. Each topic requires 10 consecutive correct answers before permitting you to move on.

The program allows teachers to get a microscopic view of what their students are spending their time on and having troubles with. A teacher can see where, when, and how long/often students pause or replay a video, which types of problems they get stuck on, how long the spend on each question, and where holes in their knowledge base are. With all of this information being made available, teachers are able to assign lectures for homework and do homework during lecture, thereby increasing student-teacher and student-student interaction.

Furthermore, the student progress can be tracked through each class and grade, providing a great tool for evaluating of the quality of student being generated by the school system and of the school system and teaching staff itself.

The most amazing thing was seeing how the self-paced learning was going for each individual student and how, after progress flatlined for a period of time, their learning curve suddenly rose sharply upon the mastery of a difficult topic and continued to climb quickly and steadily.

Fin.

(To get a proper, resolving conclusion, you will have to check out the site and see it for yourself.)

Hard work pays off

Currently, I am teaching six physics labs of 15 students, each of whom write a weekly lab report that I have to grade. That makes 90 lab reports, or roughly 650 pages to read and make comments on. Often, the reports need alot of improvement and my comments are ample. Unfortunately, that takes time and the students probably do not make an effort to read them.

One thing that makes their lab reports bad is the lab manual itself. Before the procedure, there is an objectives and a theory section. Between the two, all of the concepts and ideas that the students are suppose to discover during the lab are given away. As a result, the students think that instead of analyzing their data, they can say that their data corroborates the theory and be done with it.

So, I end up writing "Discuss more than the theory, error, etc. Compare, analyze, and discuss the results", "Results --> Theory --> Error", and other such things about 70 times per week. In order to cut time, I made a document that lists all of the comments. I assigned numbers to general comments that can be applied to any lab and letters to comments that pertain to the results and objectives of the particular lab being graded. The result? My grading time got cut in half.

An added benefit is that now, after having made the comments list available to my students via a Google Docs shared document, I can now see when my students are looking at the list. As I am typing, Anonymous User 1337 is checking the comments I left on his or her lab report, and I am smiling knowing that my efforts are not entirely in vain.

Thank you, Anonymous User 1337.

Think again

In an effort to prove or disprove any of my recent hypotheses, I began to think up experiments that could be performed for such a purpose. In my last Mison Space entry, "Barriers, shmarriers", I argued that particles, instead of actually tunneling into and through classically forbidden regions, they enter into Mison Space and go around said region by releasing energy.

One misconception that I had, which S.R.D. Rosa cleared up in his paper, "Student Understanding of Tunneling in Quantum Mechanics", is that particles lose energy during the tunneling process. In tunneling problems, the classically forbidden region is usually represented by a barrier whose height represents is energy, leading to the misconception that the particle wave amplitude is a measurement of its energy. What the amplitude actually represents, however, is the probability that the particle will be found at that particular location.

So, contrary to my previous argument, particles do not release energy as a means of entering Mison Space. On the otherhand, within the classically forbidden region the amplitude of the particle's wave function decreases exponetially, which means that the probability of it being found diminishes exceedingly fast the farther in one looks for it. The rapidly decaying wave function could still be evidence for the particle's escapade around the barrier.

To prove this, one would simply need to put a detector within the forbidden region to see if the particle can be found there. I found an article entitled "Detection of particles under a potential barrier". It is a theoretical paper in which the authors propose a 1- and 3-D model detector for finding particles within potential barriers. The detector is able to locate a particle without significantly disturbing its wave function (to do so, the time of encounter is left unknown). By stringing several together in a simulation, they were able to encounter particles at various locations within the barrier and found that their trajectories are straight line paths.

That may debunk my side-stepping hypothesis, but then again, the simulation is based on the creator's pre-conceptions of how particles behave as they enter into the forbidden region. At any rate, in trying to reconcile this finding with previous hypotheses, I have begun to consider space in a different light, but that will have to wait for a future post.

References

1. Rosa, S.R.D. Student Understanding of Quantum Mechanics. Proceedings of the Technical Session, 22 (2006) 47-52. Institute of Physics, Sri Lanka
2. Vilenkin, A. and Winitzki, S. Detection of particles under a potential barrier. Phys. Rev. D. 30, 8 (1994)

Priorities

Last week, my best friend had a baby and has been understandably out of touch and (pre-)occupied. Thus, my random comments, odd stories, comic discussions, and good-for-nothing banter has been piling up waiting for his return. Mixed in with that is my excitement and concern for him and his family.

When I sit down and look for him on chat, I think about him, his baby, and his wife and wonder how they are doing and how they are coping with such a giant, fantastic change. At the same time, the typical idiocies that we pass back and forth come to mind and I am sort of hit with a weight of realization. Here I am, working, goofing off, reading comics, teaching, grading, and generally just sort of living non-chalantly, and there he is with a baby. A human baby. A defenseless, dependent, pure, innocent human baby that will need nurturing, attention, education, morals, and an unfathomable amount of love.

I realized that, compared to having a baby, everything I do must be pretty insignificant... and with that realization came a double dose of hope. Firstly, and rather selfishly, is that having a baby does not change everything everything; and secondly, that I will one day be able to experience such a change.

Barriers, shmarriers

Continuing the development of my light-as-a-fourth-dimension hypothesis, I know embark upon potential barriers and tunnelling.

For this, matter needs to be thought of as a potential wall more or less proportional to its viscocity. We can run through air like a hot knife through butter because air just moves out of the way. Our mass, viscocity, potential barrier, or whatever you want to call it, is much greater than that of air, so we move through it easily.

But now think about running through water. Or worse yet, honey or molasses. Much more difficult. They are more dense and have a higher viscosity (a greater potential).

Finally, try running into a brick wall or a barn door. Actually, don't. It hurts. Think of them as huge potential spikes. The cumulative energy of your body is not sufficienty high enough to pass over the potential spike, so you bounce off of it and are turned away.

Small, energetic particles, the subjects of quantum mechanics, are known to tunnel through matter. Classically, their energy is lower than the potential barrier and should be turned away. Quantumly*, however, on occasion, they pass through the barrier and wind up on the other side.

My claim is the following: Each object is seen as a potential barrier with a certain height and thickness. On either side of the barrier, the potential feel drops steeply to that of "empty" space. Depending on the size and thickness of the barrier, these small particles can sense the lower potential on the other side of the barrier. Its energy field feels out the a way around the barrier through the 4th dimension that light travels through. In effect, the particle is able spend its energy to create a small wormhole-like link to equipotential field on the other side of the barrier, then passes through it.

I support this claim by first re-iterating my previous claim (see 4D Glasses) that electrons orbit atoms on equipotential field lines of this 4th dimension (which will here-to-forth be called Mison Space), then by noting that a change between electron orbits results in the emission or absorption of a photon (which, as I argued earlier, lives in Mison Space).

The loss of energy that occurs when a paticles tunnels through a potential barrier, I argue, is not simply expended in the particle's efforts to penetrate the barrier. Rather, the energy is released and travels through Mison Space, creating a portal for the particle to travel through. The portal exists on short temporal and spacial scales and is a link that traverses a space perpendicular to the 3D space that we live in. Essentially, the particle goes around the barrier, which is a perfectly reasonable thing for it to do.

Future Mison Space topics to be oublished:

• Why are electron orbits so crazy and how can they go through the nucleus iteslf (partially answered previously)?
• EM waves, as the name implies, are made up of both electric and magnetic fields, which travel perpendicular to one another, so how can Mison Space be just one extra dimension?

Lab Reports

I am currently general physics laboratories in Spanish at the University of Costa Rica. Teaching phsyics at the university level is a career goal of mine, and though I am not teaching theory classes quite yet, I am developing some of my own material.

Thus far, I have written a document explaining what a lab report consists of and how to write a good one, a sample lab report, as well as a rubric and a grading scale for each section of the lab reports. As I read and comment on my students' lab reports, I take notes, refine, and update my description of what a good lab report is.

I uploaded all of my teaching resourses to a Google Docs folder and shared it with the world, so you can find them here. So far, they are only in Spanish, but eventually they will be in English, and I will keep uploading and oublishing about everything that I make.

Casual Science

QuestionEverything and I have a little project in the works. A book club of sorts, only in this club, the books are articles published in scientific journals. My goal is to find an article in a field that is receiving a lot of attention, or just one that suits my fancy, read it, oublish a review, and pose some questions about it. Then, QuestionEverything will try and find an article to answer one or a few of those questions, write a review, and pose more questions. In the meantime, I read his review and answer a couple questions that he posed. This little back and forth repeats until all of the current knowledge in and about the universe has been amassed and assimilated, and until all of the possible questions have been answered. Whatever remains will be beyond the grasp of human knowledge and experience and thus is unimportant.

But, you might ask, what about the loose ends? The questions that are being asked right now but for which no answers yet exist....

Ahhhh! Now you see! That is the science for our brains.

4D Glasses

I have been contemplating the constancy of the speed of light and the relationship between electric and magnetic fields for a long time and think I may have stumbled onto an interesting hypothesis.

One of the axioms of general relativity is that the speed of light is constant in all inertial frames, even ones that are moving at nearly the speed of light. However, in the normal world, if you travel at the speed of something, that something appears to be moving with velocity zero from your perspective. How can it be, then, that light is different than everything else in the universe?

I will tell you how it can be: light travels orthogonal to space. Consider yourself to be holding a radar gun that police use to catch speeders and driving a car approaching a crossroad. Travelling towards you along that crossroad is a race car. You flash your lights, signalling a race, and begin to speed up. The race car, not knowing that he has been challenged, continues at a steady pace.

As you speed up, you expect the difference in speed between you and the racecar to diminish, but, dishearteningly, the race car continues to move in the positive direction, even as you surpass its meager pace.

If the racecar had been travelling in the same direction and along the same road as you, it would have appeared to stop, then travel backwards towards you as you reached its speed and surpassed it.

The difference? Orthogonality. Light always appears to be travelling at 3x10^8 m/s, no matter what, because it is moving perpendicular to three dimensional space.

But how to prove it... One way would be to spontaneously combust hot enough to turn all of your molecules into light and see what happens. Unfortunately, the reverse process is not very predictable, so gathering evidence and showing reproducability would be difficult. Another way is to consider things that behave sometimes like light and sometimes like particles: electrons in the double slit experiment.

Electrons have charge that produce an electromagnetic (EM) potiential and fields. There is an upper limit on their mass, but they could very well be massless. When there is a single slit present, electrons pile up behind the slit in a gaussian distribution, behaving like a particle. When there are two slits present, however, it is believed that they travel through both slits in a wave-like manner, causing an interference pattern behind the slit.

Now change your idea of what an electron is. Think of it as an EM particle living in the EM space that is perpendicular to our 3D space. We already know that EM waves can interact with things in our world. Afterall -- we can see. How they move, however, could very well be a mystery, if there is indeed a 4th dimension.

As an aside, imagine yourself at a campfire in late autumn. You forgot to bring a sweatshirt, so are sticking fairly close to the fire. There is a ring around the fire in which the temperature is comfortable and you feel like you can hang out for the rest of the night. Closer in you start sweating or start to feel burnt, whereas any farther out you get cold and start to shiver. This heat field is like a potential well. It attracts you to the ring around the fire at which you body heat lets you be in comfortably.

Now, consider 3D space to be the campfire and you to be the electron. The electron can be in any ring of 3D space that is an equipotential to its own potential field. It spreads out over that space in a way that is not alltogether clear, it being a 4th dimension and whatnot. The two slits comprise two equipotentials that the electron can pass through without problem. It follows the 3D potentials through the holes to the detector plates and causes an interference patter. Not, however, because it is a wave, but because it is travelling along the 3D equipotentials of space.

If one of the slits is closed, the potential of that particular path is increased by a whopping amount, and the electron can no longer pass through it. It must stick to the single, open slit, behind which the 3D space potential is that of a macroscopic particle.

If you believe me this far, you might be wondering how we can map this 4th dimension. Ponder for a moment, if you will, the orbits of electrons around an atom. They move along EM equipotentials at discrete energy levels. If the EM dimension is perpendicular to 3D space, then these equipotials have to be wrapped around the fabric of space itself. All we have to do is map the electron orbits to see how EM space fits in with our own.

And there you have it. The culmination of my thought experiment. Now to prove it...

No, you cannot.

Being here in Costa Rica has involved a lot of running around dealing with incompetent people, people who lie just to make life difficult, and trying not to lose patience. Immigrating into a foreign country can be hard enough when you have a job lined up and the company has a vested interest in hiring you. It is an entirely different beast when the comany could care less and it is I who is interested in working for the company.

People say it takes a year or two of difficult, depressing, frustrating, inconceivable bullshit before life starts to turn around. A year or two of beuarocracy, uncertainty, instability, and struggle. But then one day everything is finished and life can go on, uninterrupted and unburdened by the exhausting efforts of others trying to make life more difficult than it needs to be.

I am near the peak. For me, it has been 1 year and 10 months. I have been jobless, I have taught English in schools that went out of business and in schools that had me detained in immigration for hours, I have worked in a hostel for a warm bed to sleep in and a free breakfast in the morning, and I have lived off of $18 or less per week.

I found the University of Costa Rica, was hired as a research professor, and was given promises that were not kept. I did other peoples' jobs to ensure myself of my own and have spent my life's savings just trying to get by.

In all of this, the only person who knows anything is my advisor. When people at immigration do not know what forms I need to fill out or where to go, I talk to my advisor. When people in the phsyics department cannot give me a straight answer about my salary, contract, or future, I talk to my advisor. When people lie to me because they are too lazy to do their job or do not want to admit that they do not know, I talk to my advisor. Why? Because she had to go through all the bullshit too. She immigrated as a refugee with two kids and no money and had to deal with the same stuff. She has the answers that the others should have.

So, on the brink of being moneyless, homeless, jobless, and having to leave the country, I went to talk with her to see what else I could do. Unfortunately, when I entered her office, the life-slug was there. The life-slug is a creature that has attached herself to my advisor, agreeing with everything she says, doting over her, being obsessed with everything she does, and, essentially, draining the life out of her via ever-present exasperation.

Ignoring the presence of the life-slug, I embark upon my tale and the options that I have. Understanding, my advisor relates her story to mine, gives me advice, and tells me where I can go and who I can talk to. She says that I should think about everything extra hard because the fight is long and hard and is for less than what I can get somewhere else.

Then the life-slug chimes in. The 30 year old life-slug that lives at home with her parents, has no repsonsibilities, and has not had to worry about anything except getting more bottles for her bottle collection. She chimes in and says,

"The truth is, we both can relate."

One Windy Name

I have, at long last, begun reading The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss for the second time. Why at long last if it is my second time reading it? Well, first of all, I have had it on reserve for over a month, so that explains the long part. Secondly, and in regard to "last", the second book in the King Killer trilogy came out and the unprecedented spectacularness of the first demanded a re-read so as to not die from over-exposure to the brilliance that the second is sure to contain. Consider it a tolerance building exercise of sheer joy.

Reading the Name of the Wind for the first time was like eating an adventure wrapped in a refried bean spread wrapped in a tortilla. It was a wonder burrito that had me digesting and farting child-like enrapturement for days.

My life during that period was like a mix of Narnia and The Neverending Story. When I opened the book, I became an innkeeper in Newarre, performed in the traveling circus, Edema Ruh, lost my parents to the Chandrian, and studied at the University. My name was Kvothe and my hair was true-red (instead of silver-blonde). I was transfixed the way only a little boy can be transfixed, being the life of the book, frighted that with the turning of the next page my life would end.

When I read the book, I gasped, laughed, stammered, welled up with tears, and, when the suspense, tension, joy, or fear grew too great, my arm would weaken, casting the hand-clenched book down to my side, and I would stare inward, blank and breathless until I calmed down enough to read again.

Now, I have just finished chapter one on my second take and the anticipation of being part of such an intense, wonderful story has once again hightened my vigor to a vivacious extreme. I am reading via a book reader on my ipod, which can display about 100 words per page. Each passing page comes with a flick of my finger and an imagined whoosh sound as one slides of the screen and the other slides on. It feels like flying.

Cash & West and 5CC

My buddy, Question Everything, created a comic book for Christmas last year for his brother-in-law that starred his two sons. He is in the process of publishing it online here.

It stars Cash and Weston as two police detectives, and follows them as they try to unravel a mystery involving all their favorite cartoon characters! Check it out!

He also draws the comic 5 Color Control. It is about the card game Magic the Gathering and has a casts of real life people that do not-so-real-life things. However, if you visit Toys from the Attic, you my find yourself wondering which world you are actually in. Check it out!

Armpit of my Soul

It took awhile, but I finally found some one to finally call things like "lady bug", "chrysanthemum", and "Diana". Some one special... I mean cursingly special... so special that every time I see her I get slapped in the face...

...with love and life. It sort of hurts, but in a way that tickling sort of hurts. I laugh until I cry, smile until my face goes limp, and squirm and wiggle because her presence touches a part of my soul that had rarely been touched by carressing fingers before. It is the part of the soul that is easily forgotten or ignored until some one else finds it and starts poking around... and now she has built a summer-home in the armpit of my soul.

Re-do

So, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to organize my blog posts by topic, which you can read about here. You can save yourself some time, though, and just add the "Labels" widget to your blog's page and do the same thing (read more here).

I also spent a lot of time looking into free backup software and settled on Toucan. However, the generalness of Toucan sort of lost its appeal when I wanted to select some sub-folders within a folder and move them from on place to another. It was either move the whole folder and delete what I did not want or move the folders individually. So, I just backed everything up and forgot about it.

Also, the purpose of my blog keeps on a-changing and, even though the goal is still to blog about my projects, I have not been making what you would call "progress" on my projects for reasons tangentially related to them. Also, oublishing about my projects puts the actual, future publication at risk of being stolen and published first by some one more competent. Thus, it is time to expand, revamp, and oublish about whatever the hell I want.

So, delete, reset, pick a new background photo, and go, right?

Free Backup Software Review

This is a review of all of the free backup software packages that I try while I look for one that suites my preferences. My basic criteria are fairly limited and simple: it must have a robust folder/file selection system that allows me to pick exactly what I want to archive; it must display said system in a straightforward and useful manner; and it must allow the option to do a mirror backup, not just a zip backup.

The software of this review include:

• AceBackup 3
• Roxio BackOn Track
• Backup Maker
• Toucan

AceBackup 3

With AceBackup, you start the process by creating a new project. The default setting is to backup all files in the AceBackup proprietary format (which means that if you want to do a restore, you need to have AceBackup in order to restore your data). Normally backup software archive data in .zip files, which is a universal compression format. If you do not want to use the proprietary format, you can backup your files "As is", which creates a mirror image of the files you want to save at the destination location.

Next, instead of offering full and partial backup options, AceBackup will, upon the name of any two files being the same, either update the older file, create a new file, or overwrite the older file. One of the disadvantages of this is that multiple versions of a file cannot exist. Other backup software, as mentioned earlier, offer full and partial backups. Full backups, as the name implies, executes a complete backup of all the selected files. A partial backup only backs up that which was changed since the last full backup. The partial backups can be stored as separate .zip files available until the next full backup, allowing several versions of the same file to exist.

AceBackup also has a filter to exclude or include only specific file types, perform an operation (such as shutdown or restart the computer) before or after the backup executes, and schedule when the backup should be performed.

One of the drawbacks is that you have to add directories or files to the project one by one. The user interface is broken in to two main sections. The upper section shows what is available on the local system. On the left, there is the typical explorer file tree, and on the right a view of the contents of the selected folder. The selected folder (only one allowed) and its subdirectories will be added to the backup project upon creation. The will then appear in the lower section, which has a similar explorer file tree showing that backed-up directories and a window into the contents.

In order to add more files or folders to the project, one must click on "backup" and add a file or folder to the project. The backup will then take place and you can repeat the process to add more things to the project.

Roxio BackOn Track

This consists of a Backup Guide, along with options to restore or back up files. The Backup Guide simply has an icon for the backup and restore links already available in the sidebar. Not helpful.

The backup option allows you to pick the folder that you want to back up, a particular type of file to back up, and has a primitive scheduling feature. What I did was select a folder to back up, backed it up, then selected another folder to back up.

In Roxio's backup scheme, it creates a folder structure similar to the one on the local drive that is being backed up. If any part of this folder structure overlaps upon backing up a second directory, then you will either have to delete the old backup or discontinue the new one. I decided to uninstall Roxio BackOn Track instead.

Backup Maker

Backup Maker is an excellent program. It can handle big and small projects, so that you can backup everything at the same time, or split up the backup into smaller parts so that only the most highly used directories are backed up on a frequent basis. Furthermore, it has a plethera of backup options (more in the expert mode), so that you can set filters, assign tasks before and after backups, perform a full, partial, or mixed backup, and archive bit control (it can clear, set, or leave unchanged the archive bit after a file is backed up, thus dictating how it will be viewed during partial and full backups).

The folder and file selection process is also quite superb. An explorer menu appears, allowing you to sift through the contents of your computer and put a check by any directory that you want backed up. Any number of directories can be selected from the outset.

The downside, and what prevents me from keeping Backup Maker, is that I am looking for a mirror backup and Backup Maker does not have that option. Instead, it makes a .zip file of all the backed up archives.

Toucan

Toucan is downright awesome from a nerd's perspective. It has command line input and the ability to write backup and synchronization scripts to fully customize and optimize your backing-up experience. What's more, it is portable, so you can stick it on your thumb drive and use the synchronize feature to move large amounts of files back and forth.

But I am getting ahead of myself... Toucan has both a Sync feature and a Backup feature. Sync has the options to copy, mirror, equalize, move, or clean. "Copy" copies things from the source to the destination while "mirror" copies to or updates the destination folder. "Move", meanwhile, moves the selected files from the source to the destination. I am not entirely sure what "clean" and "equalize" do, but they increase the number of options from 3 to 5, which is pretty sweet.

Under the Backup tab, one can perform a complete backup, update the current backup .zip file, or a differential backup. Also there is the option to restore the selected backup. Backed up archives can be saved as a Zip, 7-zip, or gzip file, the level of compression can be varied, and password protection and encryption can be selected.

Toucan also gives you the option to secure your files. In the "Secure" tab, you can select the files and folders you want encrypted (or decrypted). Additionally, you can set rules and define variables to refine your backup and synchronization needs.

The directory and file selection process is quite simple and visually satisfying. While sync-ing, there is a window pane on the left (source) side with a browse button to search for a given folder to synchronize. Adjacent to this window is a button to expand all folders and subfolders to see the contents as well as a button to add a variable to refine selected contents. The same is true for the right (destination) side.

For backing up and securing, the "expand folders" button is replaced by a add directory button. This way, you can add as many folders to the backup or secure project as you want. All types of projects are savable for future use.

There is no scheduling feature, but I am sure that a script could be written to have Toucan perform scheduled backups.... And this brings me to the drawback of Toucan; documentation is hard to come by, so it would take a while (presumably) to use it to its full potential.

One thing that you must be careful about is that Toucan will show every file on your computer, including system files, registry files, hidden files, etc. Take care not to delete or move any critical files.

Conclusions

For what I need, Toucan is the clear winner. I want to be able to copy or move my music and pictures onto an external drive to free space on my active drive. I also want to mirror my documents onto the external drive. These two things are straightforward processes in Toucan.

On the otherhand, if I were only interested in making a backup of my information, then BackUp Maker would also be a good choice.

A Few Side Notes

As I was monkeying with Toucan, I noticed that it had a directory called "Recycle Bin" on my external drive. This prompted a little investigating and I found a great forum thread that explains how the Recycle Bin works. Basically, the Recycle Bin on the primary machine manages deletions on all partitions and drives. Sometimes, however, the Recycle Bin on the external drive can become disconnected. If you do not realize this, that space on the external drive will be unaccessible and unusable. Fortunately, there are steps you can take to cure the matter.

Archiving Blogs by Topic in Blogspot

Since this blog is about my various, simultaneous research and teaching projects, I felt it would be nice to archive my blog posts by topic instead of by date. Here are the steps I took...

Blogspot gives you the option to put an archive gadget on your blog that organizes your posts by date (Design | Page Elements | Add Gadgets). The gadget is even editable! Unfortunately, it only lets you change the order and the dating style, not the overall organization. So: to Google.

Blogspot lets you edit the HTML code of your blog, so I thought I could put in an HTML table, giving a column to every topic with hyperlinks to my various entries. Also, I recollected that HTML tables were pretty aweful to work with, pages that have them do not show up in Google, and that instead, one should use "div" tags and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

It was BloggerBuster that got me headed on the right track, as he had done something similar on Blogger. Unfortunately, this did not work in Blogspot. The divisions kept stacking one on top of another instead of resting side-by-side as they should. After a little more searching, I found a site by positioniseverything.net. About a fifth of the way down, they have a piece of code that suggests the use of a container division. So, implenting the container division, I came to find that the colomns were resting side-by-side, but were also offset by a carriage return. Back to Google.

Eventually, I found a informational tutorial site by YourHTMLSource that gives instructions on how to use style sheets. The best way is to create a .css file that can be linked or imported to each particular page that you crease so that you do not have to format each HTML tag individually. Another option is that in the section you can create classes and ids that can be used throughout a particular page. The HTML editor in Blogspot, however, does not give you access to the source code (no access to the to import or define classes and ids). Instead, I had to look around and find what to include in the tag.

No matter what I tried, nothing seemed to work, so I switched over to the "Compose" tab, made some changes, and saw how it affected the code under the "Edit HTML" tab. Turns out, I needed to use a CSS class unknown to me and also include the "span" tag to keep everything even.

I decided to put my "Archive by Topic" post on a new static page instead of posting it as a blog entry (Edit Pages instead of Edit Posts). Now, there is a link to my "Archive by Topic" archive page on the main page of my blog above the archiving gadget! It is still a work in progress, but after a few headers (h#) unordered lists (ul), and hyperlinks (a href=" ") it is there for you to check out.

I also created a public Google Doc for everyone to see/copy the code.

Drawbacks

The only drawback to this is that every time you post a blog, you have to go to the static page and code in a new hyperlink to the particular page. This is a bit stinky because, without being able to import a .css file or create a class in the header, the (div style=" ") tag needs to be changed in order to keep everything organized. This makes having multiple divisions almost as bad as having an HTML table.

If anyone can figure out a better method, email me or leave a comment.

"Hello, World"

When I first created this blog a few months ago, I wanted it to be a jounal of all of the research and educational projects that I am working on. My first post was intended to be a formal mission statement that outlined all of the projects am currently working on or will be working on in the future. Following that would be the development of each project. Unfortunately, as I began writing, I realized that I did not know as much as I thought and put off the task of blogging until I did some more research.

Eventually, I realized that by the time I do enough research to blog about the entity that I want, I would have the project finished. Thinking about blogging turned into a means of motivation for developing my projects, but no real blogging has thus far taken place... Until now.

Revamping my strategy, I have decided to blog a stream of consciousness of sorts: listing the steps that I have to take to further my projects, describing what I do/don't understand, mentioning a random new thing that I stumbled upon, talking in circles, etc.; then blog about what I learned as a result of taking those steps. In effect, I suppose, this accomplished my original goal, but makes the writing/blogging process easier to handle.

One of the first tasks that I have assigned myself is to see if I can organize archived, older blogs by something other than the date it was published (e.g. the particular project that the blog relates to).

Ready? Go!