Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

The interesting thing is that Sweden is a highly regarded education system, they simply are not convinced that cramming technology education down the throats of students at an early age is conducive to actual education. They're removing tablets from early education, which I am absolutely a supporter of. And the students and teachers seem to be responding positively to it.

Personally I think the American education system could benefit from this. I think it's a crutch to funnel ever increasing amounts of money to equipment and textbook makers.

https://apnews.com/article/sweden-digital-education-backlash-reading-writing-1dd964c628f76361c43dbf3964f7dbf4

https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/09/13/2257252/sweden-brings-more-books-and-handwriting-practice-back-to-its-tech-heavy-schools

We reopened on August 19, I have no idea what the rational is on starting on a Wednesday rather than a Monday, but that's the way it is. With few face-to-face exceptions, all classes are online or remote learning. Kinda hard to teach chemistry labs remotely. We have an absolute mask requirement for students, faculty, and staff when on-campus, and it seems to be going well, especially with fewer students wandering around.

For the previous two weeks, we were averaging a gate count of 40-45, which isn't bad. We have air conditioning and WiFi, and Alamogordo is still seeing temperatures of 90+, though it looks like it's cooling down a little this week. I only had to chide one young woman without a mask last week, she had one with her and apparently removed it when she sat down. She immediately and without complaint put it back on. I told her about me missing half my immune system, maybe this will give her a reason to remember.

My library has four private study rooms, and they're doing booming business! I put up signs with a warning that social distancing is not possible in these rooms, so we've done what we can. Elsewhere in the library, we've removed chairs and deactivated computers to enforce social distancing. It's a little sparse compared to the first 2.5 months of the year before the shutdown.

We're allowed to remove our mask when we're in our office, and while my office is a cubie without walls to the ceiling or an actual door, I sometimes take mine down. We have pretty strong air conditioning, so that circulation should sweep out any nasties in the air.

We also have a bonus of a very low case count in Alamogordo: Otero County has had a TOTAL of 218 cases and TWELVE deaths (excluding prison facilities: you do not want to know about them!). We apparently peaked in June/July, but that's no reason for complacency! There is still a state-wide mask requirement and my family unit is still strident about mask use and more, depending on the situation.

I don't know how long we'll stay open until main campus has major outbreaks among students or staff. My (proverbial) money was on not making it until October, so we'll see. I'm doing very brisk business with interlibrary loan, I currently have more books out on loan than I was averaging pre-pandemic, which is very good! And as a final bit of good news, with three of us being permanent employees, the library director decided that we'd work from home one week in three, so this is my first week of staying up later than is reasonable and not waking up to an alarm! Tomorrow I'm going to Las Cruces to take care of some shopping, but most importantly to get my firk ding blast glasses adjusted: the prism is off. We were watching the Swedish version of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and I was seeing two lines of subtitles. *sigh*. It'll make reading computer screens a lot easier.


And now the bad news.

It looks quite likely, though not yet confirmed, that Russet's observatory has a case in the day staff.

The symptoms look very likely that someone is infected. This person is one of the engineers who works in one of the outlying buildings and doesn't normally go into the main building where Russet and most of the astronomers work. With luck, testing results will come in today, and we'll know. But there's always the risk of a false negative, which is so vexing! There's no way of knowing what kind of test they did, so we'll have to wait and see. If positive, site shutdown for two weeks to see if anyone else is sick and contact tracing to see who else that works there needs testing.

And that's where trickiness ensues. The second big telescope, the 2.5 meter Sloan Digital Sky Survey, is in shutdown for its major maintenance window. And that's what the guy was working on. And he was in contact with some of the 2.5 astronomers. So in that indirect pathing, some of the people in the main building could have been exposed.

Everyone in the main building is supposed to scan a QR code with their smart phone when they enter a room. So naturally one member of Russet's team on the 3.5 meter did not have a smart phone, or a smart enough smart phone, that could scan QR codes. So he was supposed to maintain a paper log, which you can guess probably wasn't adequately maintained. And on his last work shift, which would overlap with the period when this guy was likely infected but not yet symptomatic, he forgot to scan codes. Which means that if they have to map everybody in the main building, there are going to be serious breaks. Which is a surprise to nobody, contact tracing is a difficult process.

So we're a bit on tenterhooks, waiting to find out the likely diagnosis of this guy.

I'm doing an internship in our local university library through April, and my main task is scanning their annual 'Reports To The President', a précis of college activity sent up to main campus and bound in a book, usually hard-bound. The oldest book was 1965-66, the newest that I've seen thus far is '98-99. I believe there are newer already in PDF format online on the local network. Apparently by scanning them and then coding an RDA record for each file, we can get them hosted by the state academic library organization, or somebody, for free.

So that's cool.

I'm using a fairly spiffy Fujitsu specialized document scanner that can scan two pages of a bound book in one pass, but I don't think their software is as good as they claim it to be. It can handle a pretty significant amount of curvature in the books - for example, I was scanning three pages starting at page 385 of 427, so LOTS of curve when you're that far in. I was holding up the left side to get the right page reasonably flat, then holding down both sides with one finger.

And yes, the fingers were captured by the scan.

After you've done your scan, you get into the next phase, where you drag this wire frame to line up one line down the spine between the two pages, then you align four corners to the outside corners of the pages. The program does a good job of detecting the edges and snapping to it, but sometimes you have to do some dragging to improve alignment. Once you've aligned all the scanned pages correctly, you click an Apply button and it re-cuts the scans into individual pages and flattens them, programmatically removing the curve. It does a very good job, though not perfect.

THEN you have to go back through every page and remove the fingertips! It has a special tool just for it and works a lot like Photoshop's patch tool, but it auto-selects the fingertip. Click Apply, and the fingertip vanishes.

Once you've removed the fingertips, you can save it to PDF. Theoretically the program performs OCR (optical character recognition), but I can't see that it has any effect. I end up loading the PDF into Acrobat Pro and running OCR there.

And this is where I learned something tonight. While you can't do a spell-check on a scanned document because you're dealing with a scanned image, not words, there's something that's similar: a fragment check. Fragments are words that Adobe Acrobat recognizes as 'I think this is a word or something, but I'm not sure, therefor I didn't map it into the OCR side of the document. Fix it.' Acrobat can't provide a dictionary of suggestions like Word, so when it sees something that it thinks was a word but it couldn't map, you have to type the correction. Or page number. Or budget number. Or tell it to ignore it.

It took me a good half an hour to fix a three page document. I don't know how many times I typed the San of San Juan. Just the San, apparently Juan was recognizable.

And that was a three page document from '67-68. The latest document from '98-99? That was 40some pages, I'm going to run a fragment check on it tomorrow afternoon and we shall see how long it takes to fix.

One very odd thing about scanning two pages at once in bound books - the page sequence is reversed! This is easily fixed in Acrobat Pro when you're dealing with a handful or two of pages, you just slide page thumbnails around. But dealing with 30 or 40 pages? Next week I'll try scanning a book starting with the last pages and working my way forward and seeing how that works.

So important tip when creating PDFs from scanned docs for public consumption: running OCR is only half the job. If you need the document to be searchable, you MUST spend the time to run a fragment check on it and fix all of the problems! Otherwise you're going to frustrate anyone needing to do anything serious with the document.

One thing that makes me really wish I had a working Mac laptop: I'd like to take an unfixed doc and run it through text to speech and see how it works. Then run the fixed doc through TTS. Might be interesting.

Westcliff High School for Girls Academy did something interesting last year: they switched to Linux. Their servers, their student workstations, their faculty/staff workstations. Everything went SuSe/Gnome. And a year later, it's still going strong.

England had a school curriculum that dictated that all students would Learn Microsoft Office and that would make them computer literate. Fortunately they ditched that standard and made it more open for the individual schools/districts to teach more useful things.

The best thing about this, aside from tremendous savings in software, was the tremendous savings in hardware. Microsoft is in this tight clench with hardware makers and you end up replacing all your computers every four or five years, they just can't handle the load. That's the sweet thing about Linux: runs fine on 5-10 year old hardware. They did have to replace eight network switches to bring the entire network up to gigabit speeds, that seems to have been their major surprise that they had not anticipated in their mini-trials.

This is an article with their IT administrator who did the switch after many hours of grilling by school administration.

http://opensource.com/education/13/7/linux-westcliff-high-school

http://linux.slashdot.org/story/13/07/31/1645240/a-year-of-linux-desktop-at-westcliff-high-school

They have one of the lowest highschool graduation rates in the country, and they want to add this? They also want abstinence-only education, guaranteed to increase the teen pregnancy rate.

I guess we'll see a book published in a couple of years titled "Why Billy Bob Can't Think".

GO TEXAS!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/27/texas-republican-party-2012-platform-education_n_1632097.html

http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/06/28/2059203/texas-gop-educational-platform-opposes-teaching-critical-thinking-skills

"This is the kind of, the kind of snobbery that we see from those who think they know how to run our lives. Rise up, America. Defend your own freedoms."
— Rick Santorum, on President Obama's (alleged) suggestion that all kids should go to college

I just listened to a podcast from NPR called Intelligence Squared, wherein (usually) four people in two teams debate a point. The one in question posed the question "Do too many people go to college?" The audience votes before the show starts, the panelists make an opening statement, take questions from the moderator and the audience, make closing statements, and the audience votes again. The team, pro or con, that changes the most minds wins. It was interesting to listen to, and I believe that the BA has become overvalued but I think the main reason has been due to the failure of primary and secondary education. I wish we had more technical and good quality trade schools, not just schools that suck $20,000 from you for a piece of paper and no job.

Contrary to popular 'wisdom', you don't need a BA to be a server administrator or network cable installer.

Broader availability to education is a good thing. I was reading that in some third world countries that a smartphone is a lot of people's only computer, I hadn't thought about that in terms of a tech revolution.

http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/12/20/198231/mit-to-expand-online-learning-and-offer-certificates

http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/11/23/2159216/stanfords-free-computer-science-courses

I'm not sure what I think about this. My university, NMSU, is considering the following change:

"These changes, if approved, would incorporate a grading system that factors pluses and minuses in GPA calculations, thus increasing or lowering a student’s GPA if the student receives a “+” or a “-“ with his or her course grade.

Under the proposed system, an “A-“ would count as a 3.7, rather than a 4.0 on students’ transcripts. Obviously many students should be concerned about this, considering that an “A-“ is an admirable achievement. On the other hand, students who receive a “B+” would get credit for scoring a few percentage points higher, perhaps motivating us to exert extra effort in our coursework. The new system would count a “B+” as 3.3 points, instead of 3.0 points under the current system. It is important to note that the changes would not go into effect until summer of 2012, and would not affect previously issued grades."

So a B+ is 3.3 instead of 3.0 and an A- is 3.7 instead of 4.0, but they don't explain it fully so I don't know if a B- is downgraded to a 2.7 instead of a 3.0. I currently have a GPA greater than 3.6, I don't know exactly what it is off-hand, and I have so many hours right now that it wouldn't greatly affect me, but I don't think I like it.

Here's the bit that I really like: "This Thursday [tonight] at 6 p.m. the ASNMSU Senate will vote on a similar resolution. The meeting will take place in the Senate Chambers, located on the 3rd floor of Corbett Center Student Union. Students wanting to express their concerns directly to the ASNMSU Senate may do so by signing up for Open Forum by 5 p.m. on Thursday." The email was time stamped 4:53pm and I didn't see it until after I got out of class at 6:45pm.

Of the comments posted on the student senate web site, I have yet to see one in favor of it. A couple of good points came out. First, it would put NMSU students at a competitive disadvantage against students from schools who don't factor in a + or -. Second, students who rely on financial aid could really be screwed. But I really liked this comment:

"...I wouldn't worry. The only way it can be changed is by a vote of the Board of Regents. They won't vote on anything that doesn't involve throwing massive amounts of money at the football team, so I think we're safe."

To eliminate cheating, of which there is no solid evidence, much less proof that attending classes and taking exams in person eliminates cheating, there is a provision in a new education law that may require you to have an electronic monitoring device in your house for when you take tests.

Naturally, some of these systems only work with Windows computers.

Now, obviously you can unplug the stupid things when they're not needed, but WTF?

http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i46/46a00103.htm

http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/24/1724225