10.30.07
Posted in astronomy, personal, science, wikipedia at 11:22 pm by danvk
Ars Technica has the write up of an experiment performed by two University professors. Instead of assigning an ordinary term paper, they had their students create a new Wikipedia article on some topic pertaining to the course. To summarize the summary, it was a rewarding experience for the students but had some issues. In particular, several of the articles were immediately deleted or merged into other articles. The original PowerPoint is worth skimming if you’re interested.
My take: this should absolutely be encouraged. How many term papers ever see the light of day after they’re graded? The paper benefits the student, maybe the professor, but rarely anyone else. Can you imagine how many papers college students have written about Rimbaud’s Drunken Boat? Wikipedia needs you!
I’ve thought about the merits of Wikipedia assignments ever since I started editing back in college. The issue of public exposure wasn’t so important. I’ve had that since I was little. It was mostly the idea of not letting all the research I’d done for a course go to waste. I was so enamored with the idea that I gave it a trial run myself. After writing a term paper on two ancient Greek astronomers in the Fall of 2005, I created articles about their works. It was a good but surprisingly time-consuming experience for me. Putting my work on display for all the world to see forced me to double-check everything I’d written, clarify my reasoning, and introduce explanatory figures and tables. But the finished product was great. Those two articles I wrote are undoubtedly the best online source for their two topics. And they’re unexpectedly deep content for Wikipedia, which is not necessarily known for its coverage of original materials or ancient history.
The main problem with this approach is that Wikipedia may not accept these changes with open arms. The professors made some good points about this in their slides. The Wikipedia way is to start small and rough, and edit your way to a finished product. I did this for my two articles. This is the way papers are written as well, it’s just that the process is less visible. What’s more, it helps to be familiar with Wikipedia culture before making major edits. For the students whose articles were deleted or merged, I’m sure they could have asked whether there articles were appropriate on some talk page or another. For contributors not familiar with Wikipedia’s style, their contributions will be a heaping mass of words in need of copyediting. This would be even more important if the students had been assigned to edit an article, rather than write one from scratch.
All in all, if done well, this use of Wikipedia can be great for both the students and the community. Here’s the money quote from one of the students:
This assignment felt so Real! I had not thought that anything I wrote was worth others reading before, but now I think what I contributed was useful, and I’m glad other people can gain from my research.
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08.28.07
Posted in astronomy, news, personal, science at 3:05 am by danvk
It’s just entered totality, check it out if you’re awake. It’s shocking how many lights my apartment complex still has on at 3 AM. Although this is an unusually long eclipse, it’s going to be a brief one for me. Lunar eclipses are way cooler when they happen at a more reasonable time.
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04.06.07
Posted in programming, science, wikipedia at 11:50 pm by danvk
While reading Wikipedia’s Mandelbrot set article, I stumbled upon the exceedingly cool Buddhabrot, and the even cooler Nebulabrot:
I’ll write more about the math later, but what I find most interesting about it is how it naturally fills in the “boring space” inside the Mandelbrot set:
The interior of the Nebulabrot is also a fractal, as a zoom shows:
Those little buds are all Mandelbrots.
Being a CS-type, once I saw the definition, I immediately set out to render the most detailed Nebulabrot ever seen. It’s 10240×7680 and gorgeous. Here are some zooms (click for full-res versions):
The most “nebular” part
“Island universes” along the negative x-axis
Here’s a link to the full JPEG (4.3MB) and the full PNG (44 MB).
If you zoom all the way in, you’ll see some graininess, even in the PNG. This isn’t a compression artifact. It’s a hint of further structure. If I’d cranked up the dwell limit in my rendering, the noise would have been even more miniature Mandelbrot sets!
Update: MarkCC over at Good Math, Bad Math has a post about MapReduce that discusses the way I generated this at length.
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10.03.06
Posted in books, reviews, science at 12:12 am by danvk
I just finished Stephen Jay Gould’s The Panda’s Thumb, so I figured I’d write a bit about it. I’ve been a fan of SJG since reading Wonderful Life, with its theory of punctuated equilibrium and Ever Since Darwin, which introduced me to the cool concept of Neoteny. But then again, Richard Dawkins once wrote in a review, “If only Stephen Gould could think as clearly as he writes! This is a beautifully written and deeply muddled book.”
The Panda’s Thumb is a collection of essays which generally follow the same format. SJG finds some interesting tidbit of history, like Mickey Mouse or the Piltdown Man. He tells a great story with heroes, usually Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley, and villains. Then he wraps it up with an attempt to connect to the contemporary world. I think this last step is just silly.
Gould is in his best form when he talks about the History of Science, a subject that he clearly relishes. Rather than summarizing our common perceptions of the past, Gould delves into the primary documents In The Panda’s Thumb. The results are incredibly interesting. In “Flaws in a Victorian Veil,” Wew learn why a racial theorist hold’s the views he does, in his own words. (a visceral reaction to black people when he first encountered them as an adult) In “Crazy Old Randolph Kirkpatrick,” we hear the familiar story about a scientist with a bold idea who sticks to his guns… but who’s completely wrong.
Then there’s “Dr. Down’s Syndrome,” which I found far and away the most interesting. Everyone has heard of Down’s syndrome, and it’s not too much of a stretch to guess that it was named this because it was first described by a Dr. Down. But according to Gould, almost nobody has ever gone back to read Dr. Down’s original 1866 work, and there’s good reason for this. The work “embodies an interesting tale in the history of scientific racism.” Obviously, Dr. Down didn’t name the disorder after himself. He called it “Mongolian idiocy.” I had never heard it called this before, but apparently the term was still in use 25 years ago.
The idea was that there was a hierarchy to the human races. Whites were obviously on top, followed by the “great Mongolian family.” These were also the days of recapitulation, which held that each organism, while developing, would go through the forms of its evolutionary forebears. So it seemed completely reasonable that a white European might get stuck at the Mongolian stage of his or her development and never quite make it to the top of the ladder. From this perspective, the name makes perfect sense!
The primary insight I get out a story like this is what a strange an interesting thing it is to interact directly with history, to see the prejudices and beliefs of a bygone era unfiltered. More so than any of the science, that’s the message I take out of The Panda’s Thumb.
Next on the reading list: Alexandre Koyre’s From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe. I’m going to try and get a review of the new Google Reader up as well.
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