Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

Finally, something new to report on the “benefits analysis” request of the College of Computer Science students doing their undergraduate thesis on astronomy software.

It’s worse than I thought: they want concrete evidence of how much their software is going to be saving the department: money, first and foremost, but also in terms of man-hours and materials.

That’s not anything I or probably anyone else in the department, even the chairman, can accurately quantify. How do we justify saving energy not having to present a traditional chalkboard style lecture anymore because of their software? Other than with higher exam scores, how do we measure the volume of the users’ knowledge from using their program? How do we concretely show that the university will, in the long run, produce better, well-rounded graduates from these innovative students’ work?

We can provide some very general estimates, but what will the students do and say if their panelists question those document non-supported numbers?

I take back what I said yesterday about the thesis personnel in that college having any knowledge of exactly what computer aided instruction software is supposed to do. They are more geared towards evaluating and rating programs that are of supreme use to business applications, but not those for the classroom.

I’ll provide these students with whatever answers I can, but ultimately I can’t promise being able to satisfy their demanding professors’ requirements.

In other news, in my electricity and magnetism class yesterday I gave them two, just two, problems on the last chapter we discussed, Gauss Law, in lieu of the the photocopier being on the fritz so they couldn’t reproduce the multiple choice questions in the book from the last two chapters.

One problem was to get the flux for one face of a cube, given the x and y components of the electric field. Again I had to remind them how to get the magnitude and angle of the resultant vector.

The second problem asked for the charge, flux and electric field around a uniformly charged sphere whose radius and surface charge density was given. Of course I had to give them also the equation for the surface area of a sphere.

They took most of the period (not including the waiting time for news of the photocopies) to answer them. Would they have crunched it if I gave them three problems instead?

In yet other news, we had the meeting for the Committee on Interactive Science today. Basically, besides wanting to plaster the campus with posters, printouts and news clippings about the history, current state and future of science and technology, the administrators also want to provide the students and visitors with demonstrations on common and obscure physical principles. There is a need for the apparatus to be low maintenance, environment friendly, and as much as possible, something that people can duplicate in their own homes with easily accessible materials.

We have already compiled a list of possible set-ups. It’s just a matter of prioritizing some for initial construction based on current resources and fast assembly.