The Academics Thread

[Cancer]

From the University Vice President for Magical Thinking

[Pariah]

We got some direction from our principal yesterday about what the fall term is going to look like. There are basically three options ahead of us:

 

If the number of cases continues to escalate and we go back to red or orange status, we'll be in a full distance learning model like we did in the spring.

 

If we remain at yellow, which I personally think is unlikely, then we will have students in the building under special social distance rules. My school runs on an A/B block schedule, so it would look something like this. Half the students, last names A through L, let's say, attend their A-day classes on Monday. The other half, let's say M through Z, attend their A-day classes on Tuesday. Repeat the pattern on Wednesday and Thursday with B-day classes. Friday becomes a flex day where students are not required to come to the building, but can come in to get individual help if they need it.

 

If we end up at green status, which possibility I consider extremely unlikely, we would be back to effectively business as usual, but with an emphasis on wearing masks, pushing hygiene practices, and disinfecting everything as often as possible.

 

Under guidelines released by the governor yesterday, the district will have to tell parents what's happening no later than August 1st. I don't anticipate knowing what my job is really going to look like next year before that. I'm preparing for the worst.

[Cancer]

What is "worst" as you see it?  I find myself wondering what option is safest, both for the participants (me and students), and in terms of making headway on the material to be taught.

[Pariah]

My first year of teaching was 2009. That spring, we got called into an emergency faculty meeting where we were told that one of our students had tested positive for the measles. As a result, all of us had to provide proof that we had had at least one measles vaccination or not work for the next two weeks. I spent the next hour and a half on the phone to my child childhood doctor's office 500 miles away trying to get confirmation that I've been vaccinated. They finally found a handwritten record in a storage box in the basement from 1989. I brought that to work, and as a result I was able to continue teaching. For the next two weeks, I was the only person in my wing of the building that wasn't a substitute.

 

Why did this happen? Because, for some inexplicable reason, this state in which I happen to live has more than the usual number of anti-vax nutjobs. Patient zero in this case was in my fourth-period Class. He had contracted measles when he and his family, none of them vaccinated, went to Poland to pick up his sister from an LDS mission. They brought it back.

 

Sadly, I'm seeing the same attitude here with COVID-19. So many people who don't think it's a big deal. So many people who think it's just like the flu, because our know-nothing know-it-all president said so. So many people who think that being asked to wear a mask or maintain social distance is a violation of their constitutional rights. Last week, the governor gave officials in Salt Lake and Summit counties the authority to require masks in public. In response, a county commissioner in one of our rural counties compared the governor to Adolf Hitler. The criticism of that commissioner has been underwhelming.

 

So to me, the worst is the idea of spending five days a week in a classroom with an average of at least 35 kids, most of whom won't be practicing appropriate social distancing or mask-wearing or hand sanitizing or any of that because their parents DGAF.

 

I'm going to have to sit in my petri dish of a room and hope that I don't contract the virus myself, or worse, take it home to my wife and kids. I'm going to have to do everything in my power to isolate myself for my students, because I can't trust for the briefest fraction of a second that they are going to do it for themselves.

 

But, the way the political winds are blowing, there will be pressure to get the classroom back open and functioning as close to normal as possible, even though we're not remotely ready for it.

 

I hope I'm wrong.

[Old Man]

School resumes here on 8/4 more or less as usual except that masks will be required and teachers are supposed to rearrange their classrooms to maximize distancing.  I am not sure how students are supposed to eat lunch with their masks on, or in what universe elementary school kids might actually wear them.

 

The key to successfully reopening schools is masks and frequent testing, which is how Germany and other enlightened countries have pulled it off.  Israel attempted a free-for-all school reopening and had to shut them back down inside of about three weeks.

 

I wonder if I can get into New Zealand for a while.

[Badger]

5 hours ago, Pariah said:

We got some direction from our principal yesterday about what the fall term is going to look like. There are basically three options ahead of us:

 

If the number of cases continues to escalate and we go back to red or orange status, we'll be in a full distance learning model like we did in the spring.

 

If we remain at yellow, which I personally think is unlikely, then we will have students in the building under special social distance rules. My school runs on an A/B block schedule, so it would look something like this. Half the students, last names A through L, let's say, attend their A-day classes on Monday. The other half, let's say M through Z, attend their A-day classes on Tuesday. Repeat the pattern on Wednesday and Thursday with B-day classes. Friday becomes a flex day where students are not required to come to the building, but can come in to get individual help if they need it.

 

If we end up at green status, which possibility I consider extremely unlikely, we would be back to effectively business as usual, but with an emphasis on wearing masks, pushing hygiene practices, and disinfecting everything as often as possible.

 

Under guidelines released by the governor yesterday, the district will have to tell parents what's happening no later than August 1st. I don't anticipate knowing what my job is really going to look like next year before that. I'm preparing for the worst.

Can't expect teenagers to social distance. Bullying is harder to do from 6 plus feet.

[tkdguy]

On 6/14/2020 at 10:30 PM, Cancer said:

There are a few people here for whom this might be relevant.  Teaching workshop July 20-24.

 

Has anyone heard back from them? I just signed up, so I may have missed out. Still, I wonder how long it takes them to confirm your registration.

[Cancer]

I have a conflict so I haven't tried registering; no help from me.

[Pariah]

13 hours ago, tkdguy said:

Has anyone heard back from them? I just signed up, so I may have missed out. Still, I wonder how long it takes them to confirm your registration.

 

I got an e-mail from them last week.

[Pariah]

I wanna smack 'em both with a wet fish. Maybe a swordfish.

 

'It's time to do it': Trump vows to put 'a lot of pressure' on governors to reopen schools this fall

 

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said “it’s not a question of if – it’s just a question of how” schools reopen this fall. She also warned against “excuse-making or fear-mongering.”

[tkdguy]

18 hours ago, Pariah said:

 

I got an e-mail from them last week.

 

I hope I didn't wait too long. I know the cutoff is 200, and there were already 170 people registered when I joined in.

[Pariah]

[Bazza]

That probably should go in the politics thread...

[L. Marcus]

It works as a cross-over.

[Badger]

Where does the Predator pop up. The predator always pops up in crossovers

[Cancer]

In my class, according to my students.

[Cancer]

OK, I've had another idea for a virtual lab exercise hot off the desk of Dr. Satan.

 

Send the students off to random.org.  Have them get 5000 rolls of a d6.  That's easy to do, and I'd give them instructions on how to do that.

 

Have them send those to me.  I will send them the stream of results from a deterministic function of their random numbers.  (That is, the input numbers are random, but the function accepting those results is not random; a particular set of input numbers will always give the same output.)  The function gives integer outputs.  The students then look at those results and think about what they have.

 

Turns out that the combination of random inputs and this particular function results in a "fat tail" distribution.  Such distributions do not have a formally decidable mean.

 

As an example, I have a string of 10000 d6 rolls, which look exactly the way you think they should.

 

When you get the results back from the function, you can look at the output values, but you also get a statistical digest of the outputs: number of outputs, mean output, and a sorted list of how many times each output value was found in the results.  For example:

Quote

read 10000 numbers from file bs.txt
got 1632 outputs from 10000 input integers
  (411 distinct output values)

 mean result: 139894070186259936.00  (1.398941e+17)
       value obtained  Count of value
                   1   271
                   2   38
                   3   51
                   4   51
                   5   45
                   6   65
                   8   21
                   9   7
                  10   16
                  12   30
                  15   10
                  16   11

...

(about 400 lines omitted)

...

  335923200000000000   1
 5733089280000000000   1
16907568257433600000   1
94036996915200000000   1
110930555337021849600   1

 

... How is your average life science major going to deal with the Whiskey Tango Foxtrot result?  They will get the list of output values in addition to this statistical digest.

 

 

[Cancer]

Further down the email thread ...

 

Quote

I rather like the idea of plotting the distribution of the reciprocals of the dice data.  Suddenly they have nonlinear spacing.  They know how they got it, but they almost certainly don't know what to do with it.  They will hate this.  Yeah, let's do that.  We just need to make sure we're on the same page about how we respond to their inevitable questions.

 

[Cancer]

There is a blog post here pointing out that the onset of the pandemic was actually a golden opportunity for the Intelligent Design people to demonstrate that they are (as they assert to the public) about actual inquiry and understanding natural phenomena ... that is, they're scientists.  Their (entirely fake) premise is that some? all? organisms cannot have come into their present form via the slow and unguided operation of random mutations, tested against environmental success or failure, with survival being the mark of success; rather, they assert, an intelligent operator must have been present to produce the organisms that exist today (with emphasis on humans as the result of that intelligent operator).

 

By contrast, it seems obvious to us in the science racket that this is a verbalistic facade.  It is simply the camouflage the fundamentalists are wearing these days to insert their particularly American version of religion into secular curriculum.  When examined with logical rigor, the concept is a tautological fallacy, constructed not to explain anything but to pass the linguistic tests needed to bluff their way into the discussions of content in school textbooks.  It is nothing but another tactic in their more-than-century-long power grab, and that they want all discussions of the Universe to be ordered on their own peculiar flavor of religion, a viewpoint that -- absolutely not coincidentally -- puts them at the absolute apex of the Creation, answering only to the things they like to hear emanating from their Deity.  To use the word in the late-20th/early-21st Century meaning, Intelligent Design is simply a sophistry constructed to gain access to power.

 

Around the beginning of the year there were some viable suggestions that COVID-19 was something that was produced in a bioweapons lab in China, and either intentionally or inadvertently released into the world.  The bloggers point out that if true this would actually be a scientific argument for the Intelligent Design concept: in effect, it stems from positing that the virus could not have arisen via natural mutations followed by cross-species zoonotic infection, but had to be the result of guided synthesis toward a premeditated goal of making a disease in humans.

 

As it played out, the bioweapon lab hypothesis has been refuted, by conventional scientific means.  That refutation by itself doesn't actually bear directly on the bankruptcy of the Intelligent Design concept.  What does bear on bankruptcy of the concept is that none of the proponents of Intelligent Design pointed out that the pandemic and bioweapon idea is the same as their own.  To put it a different way: the Intelligent Design idea would be relevant to the pandemic in this situation, and it makes a scientifically testable case for their concept.  In short, if they were actually scientists, they would have been all over this idea, and would have investigated vigorously the bioweapon hypothesis as a test of the concept.

 

Instead, they did nothing.

 

To a scientist, that is absolute proof that the Intelligent Design proponents are not scientists in any way.  They are wannabee theocrats.  They don't have to test their ideas, because their ideas themselves are Intelligent Design: they know the answer and testing is irrelevant.

 

So, of Intelligent Design advocates pretending to be part of science, I can only quote from Matthew 7:16.  By their fruits shall you know them. 

[Starlord]

Zoonotic is a funny word.

[Cancer]

It is, but it's one I encountered almost 50 years ago.  Why would a SAC base (that's B-52s, thermonuclear warheads, etc.) need a veterinary office on base?  What the actual f----?  They had one!  And, officially, it was to deal with zoonoses (pronounced zoe-oh-no-sees), animal diseases that had or could jump to humans.    (At the time, the B-52s were still flying to Thailand and back, and dropping bombs on Viet Nam and neighboring areas.)

[Bazza]

This thread title still makes me laugh. As does some posts. 

[Cancer]

Then it fulfills its true purpose.

[Old Man]

3 hours ago, Cancer said:

It is, but it's one I encountered almost 50 years ago.  Why would a SAC base (that's B-52s, thermonuclear warheads, etc.) need a veterinary office on base?  What the actual f----?  They had one!  And, officially, it was to deal with zoonoses (pronounced zoe-oh-no-sees), animal diseases that had or could jump to humans.    (At the time, the B-52s were still flying to Thailand and back, and dropping bombs on Viet Nam and neighboring areas.)

On-base veterinary clinics are usually there to support military working dogs, take care of the pets of active duty personnel (especially when traveling), and conduct human-animal hybrid experimentation. 
 

Looks like the one you’re referring to is still there. It outlived SAC!

[Cancer]

Yeah ... that's what happens when the big round of base closures comes when the base is part of Tom Foley's district (Foley was only Speaker of the House at the time).