Basic Stupidity

I’ve been meaning to use Moodle more in my classes and this semester for one of my classes, I’m doing just that. Class started on Monday, and on Friday, they are already helping each other with homework problems. Hell, I’m amazed someone is doing a non-assigned homework problem during the first week of class:

The good news is that one of my students is proficient enough with English, and has a large enough vocabulary, so that he can make puns.

The bad news is that he used this ability to chose an email address with “genocider” in it.

It’s the beginning of KAIST’s spring semester (and the school year) today, and I have two lectures with a total of about 360 students. In this situation, I think it’s important to set a tone, which is why I’m wearing a nice suit and my blue tie with skulls all over it.

I just spent four days at the Joint Math Meetings in San Francisco. This is an annual math conference, usually attended by about 5,500 people. They usually take over a large downtown convention center for this.

In the last few years, having free wifi throughout the convention center has become de rigeur. For many years they’ve had a little room with some computers connected to the internet so you could go and check email or whatever, but nowadays everyone has a laptop and just wants wifi.

Free wifi was advertised for this year’s conference, but the network didn’t work at all. It was total crap. When you could actually connect, the nameservers would fail; when DNS resolved, the connection was slow. I found myself thinking, “if only there was, say, a company in or around San Francisco that has some expertise in networking or technology”. At any rate, the Moscone Convention Center was completely unable to provide working network access for us.

The irony is that I am writing this while on a bus to the airport. I’m not writing on my laptop and saving it for later—I am on a bus in rural Sonoma County, ssh‘ed into my computer in Korea, and writing this. The bus company that takes people to the airport has no trouble connecting a frickin’ bus that’s going down highway 101 to the internet —but the major convention center in downtown San Francisco can’t put in regular wireless routers and hook them up to a network connection.

Anyway, free wifi on an intercity bus is super sweet.

I think the main cell block of Alcatraz is just about the least likely and strangest place to randomly run into a friend.

Nevertheless, that is exactly what happened to me earlier this week.

I’m sitting in the Naver internet lounge in the Incheon airport enjoying the free wifi and free power. They have a tv that shows maps of the world and scrolls around, showing the time, currency exchange rates, and temperature in many cities around the world. Their exchange rates seem accurate, and the times are correct, but right now they are claiming that it’s –18 Celsius in Auckland (where it’s the middle of summer) and –17 C in Los Angeles (where it’s the middle of Los Angeles). Overall it appears that the sign of all the temperatures is reversed—it should be +18 and +17, I’m guessing.

The bad temperature display is really about the worst thing about the Incheon Airport. Free wifi, free luggage carts, extremely easy navigation, fast security lines, fast immigration lines…this is my favorite airport.

Oh, and yes: I’m leaving for a trip to San Francisco. I’ll be in the city for touristy things for a couple days with my mom and nephew, then up visiting my grandfather, and then back in the city for a conference.

Just now I read an article on austism clusters in California linked to highly-educated parents which I guess should be a concern of mine, sincedanae and I are highly educated and are planning to have kids. (Although we don’t live in California, so we should be fine, right?) Then I remembered an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education: Autism as Academic Paradigm. Here’s a key quote from that article:

Autism is often described as a disease or a plague, but when it comes to the American college or university, autism is often a competitive advantage rather than a problem to be solved.

Perhaps those autism clusters are simply because high-functioning autistics tend to be highly educated, and when they have kids, the autism traits get concentrated and better diagnosed because the parents are highly educated. Perhaps the Eloi were just some end-state of autistic evolution?

Last night my friends Kim and Audrey and I started our first-ever batches of homebrew beer. We ordered the equipment (and by “we”, I mostly mean “Kim”), had been picking up ingredients for a while, and so last night we made our first n00b-style batch, in which we just poured the can of already-prepared malt syrup into our big pot and boiled it. Kim had also bought some kind of just-add-water powder mix, which we are trying, although I don’t expect it to be that good. In case, though, there are two big jugs in Kim’s apartment that by now should be fermenting.

Sadly, I won’t be around for the bottling, as I’m leaving tomorrow for San Francisco and won’t be back until the 19th. I’m looking forward to the end of this month, when we can taste our first homebrew and hopefully start on our next batch.

Today we saw Dances with Fern Gully—uh, I mean, Avatar. Despite being a science fiction remake of Dances With Wolves and having a pretty heavy-handed, predictable message, it’s good. The 3D visuals are amazing, even to someone like me who because of a lazy eye doesn’t have great depth perception.

The ironic thing is that for a 3D movie, the characters are pretty two dimensional. There’s the Military Bad Guy, the Corporate Shill, Treehugging Scientist, and so on. Characterwise, Avatar offers very, very little. I would have liked to see some justification for the destructive mining operations on the planet, even one that the audience is encouraged to reject. It would have been no effort to toss in something about “we’ve cured cancer” to give at least a tiny bit of depth to the bad guys.

That said, I liked the movie and recommend seeing it in the theater, since it will lose a lot going to DVD.

Oh bloody hell. If I was in a position to cancel my trip to San Francisco next month, I would. Here’s my summary of the story:

TSA announces limit of one carry-on bag, no personal items during last hour of flight

followed by

Terrorists announce plans to put firecrackers in their one carry-on bag, to light them one hour and ten minutes before end of flight

As usual, Bruce Schneier has a reality-based comment. The only bright spot here is that I’m flying Singapore Airlines, which is not US-based and is well-known for good customer service.

“For internal Rutgers use only”

It looks silly—a department using a global (well, North American, at any rate) job website to handle their internal grad student stuff—but I actually welcome this. It means that mathjobs.org is really becoming the single go-to place for academic jobs in mathematics, which is definitely good for me. (I have applied for several jobs there, and will put in a few more applications soon.)

So on Saturday we went out with some friends to the Weizenhaus, a local brewpub here. We started off with a 2 liter growler of hefeweizen, and as there were four of us drinking beer, we quickly polished it off. We ordered another, and another.

We were having a great time, mostly because of Tae’s coworker who is terrifically funny and entertaining. Good times begat more enjoyment of beer which begat more good times.

I knew we had had a lot when the waitress came by, plunked down another 2 liter growler, and told us it was complimentary.

That’s right, we drank so much beer they gave us two liters of it for free.

All told, our share of the bill was 30,000 won—about $26 at current exchange rates.

Yes, I know it’s about 99% lame gimmick, but I still kinda want some Sapporo Space Beer. It’s made from barley “descended” from barley that was taken into space, which probably is not really different than any other kind of barley…but, dude, it’s says “Space Barley” on the label.

Oh man, I could sure go for a Mobius strip bagel right now.

Holy cow. I spent innumerable hours as a kid playing this game atandy_drake’s house. The game is now available for modern computers. Remember when computers had a “turbo” button? I remember needing to turn it off to play this game.

Glorious four-color graphics…an emulated PC speaker…oh man, this is awesome.

Whoever writes this blog is brilliant. It’s the most spot-on poorly-translated Korean I’ve seen.

Anyway, their driving exam certainly must be copied from the real thing, if my experiences on roads and streets here is any guide. Here’s a sample:

Lunar Calendar Date: __

Given Name: ____

Family Name(Circle one): KIM/PARK/CHOI/LEE

Sex(Circle one): MALE / PASSENGER OF MALE

Type of License(Circle one):

* Personal/Commercial/Taxi/Public Transportation

* Chuseok/Seollal Only

* Frankenstein Motorcycle/Pickup Truck combo

* Wheelbarrow for pull the piles of cardboard to be recycle

1.What is the speed limit for drive on a sidewalk?

* A: 15km/h

* B: May only park on sidewalk

* C: Not faster than pedestrian directly in front of your scooter

* D: Faster than pedestrian directly in front of your scooter if you have the jjamppong for a deliver

I genuinely don’t know the answer to question 1. They all seem correct!

There’s a bunch of other good articles there too.

Over at a website called “GOOD”, they have a really bad chart on the effects of bike commuting on obesity. Here’s a static image of the chart:

What makes this chart bad? Well, in the first place, it took me a few minutes to even figure out what the various bits mean. The columns are countries; the green part is the proportion of trips made on a bike, the orange part proportion of trips made on foot. Now, already we have a problem: why the hell did they curve some of the bars? It makes it impossible to see exactly how long the bar really is—and I’m not sure how the chart designer decided how far the bars go after they turn. Did the designer take into account the length of the quarter-circle for the turn when drawing the long bars? Or do you just add the vertical and horizontal parts and ignore the curving part? We don’t know, and because of that, you can’t accurately compare the lengths of the bars. You have to look at the percentages—and if you’re making us look at the percentages to get information, why are you making a chart?

The second part involves the obesity percentages. It took me a while to find them, as it took me a bit to figure out that the decoration on the ends of the bars are incredibly rotund cyclists. Using the cyclists to represent obesity is really stupid, because it’s their width that represents the obesity rate, but because they are circular, a reader’s eye perceives area—and area increases with the square of width. Hence, when you look at the UK and Norway, you would think that the obesity rate in the UK is about four times that of Norway, but it’s only twice that of Norway.

The length/area thing is a key tool to use when trying to lie with statistics— the author of this chart, deliberately or not, is effectively lying to us.

Another big problem with the chart is that, since you need to compare lengths of the bars with their widths, it’s almost impossible to see the trend. You can easily compare countries whose bars are next to each other, but that doesn’t seem to say much—for example, Finland has lots of biking and walking, but their obesity rate is basically the same as that of Canada and Australia, where people walk and bike far, far less than in Finland. If the chart is trying to tell me that biking and walking to work helps you be thin and healthy, the actual data are not bearing that out.

In the end, each country has two numbers associated to it: walking/biking rate, and obesity rate. Why not just make a scatter plot? Then, if there’s a clear correlation, it will be visibly obvious, and outliers can be quickly identified.

In the end, I’m saving this chart, so if I ever teach a quantiative literacy class, I can use this as an example of how not to communicate quantitative data.

Here at KAIST, they have a strict “no snogging while you are making an experiment” policy:

danae

mle292

sent us invites to Google Wave. So far I don’t find Wave very useful, although that’s simply a network effect; I have some ideas for how to use it, but they would work much better if anyone could get an account. Also, for the people who are on it, it’s not a primary communication tool and many don’t seem to log in very often, so they don’t respond.

However, I somehow got added to a wave on beer in Korea and through that wave—including the handy map gadget—I now know where to get Yebisu in Korea. So Google Wave is good for something.

If anyone is interesting in, uh, waving me (or whatever the verb is) my username is dan.drake.

Next semester I’m teaching a lecture with 230 students.

When I was told I’m teaching MAS 101Z, I was immediately suspicious— they label sections with letters, and a “Z” is very suspect. I learned what the deal is yesterday.

Korea has long had “science high schools”, which are very desirable because graduating from one helps you get into good universities—and until this year, KAIST only accepted students from these high schools. In the last year, KAIST asked the principal of every regular high school in the country to nominate a student for admission to KAIST, and they accepted 150 of these students for the 2010 school year. (The school year in Korea starts in spring.)

Meanwhile, KAIST has been accepting foreign students for a while, and many of these students come from places with the “usual” school calendar, so they start in autumn.

They’ve found that the foreign students that start in fall don’t do as well in the basic calculus courses as the usual Korean students. They are expecting that the new non-science high school students will also have some problems, so the plan is to split the usual one-semester Calc 1 class into two semesters. They’re starting it this semester, which is fine for the foreign students on campus, but there’s the 150 Korean students around the country. So they are videotaping the class and doing something online for these students.

Next semester, the 150 Korean non-science high school students and the 80 foreign students come together in a single lecture with me. Yikes. One nice thing is that it’s my own lecture and I don’t need to stay synchronized with other classes; I just have a set of topics to cover. The class will be a challenge, though.