Scatterbrained thoughts after Week 4:

See if you can follow all of the tangents I go on. The good thing about it is, if you have to comment on my blog, I’ll give you plenty of different topics from which to choose.

It’s kind of strange, the way I am looking at the world after being in these Stritch classes, especially Digital Storytelling. I find myself being more aware of all the stories that are constantly being told around me…

My wife and I just subscribed to AT&T Uverse. Part of the package that we received includes some premium channels. As of yesterday, we are receiving even more channels as some kind of promo. It’s just what I need, more channels/distractions. I haven’t mentioned that I am a TV junkie. As I do homework, I like to have something on in the background.

Since we have a week off from class, I woke up this morning (Saturday) and thought I could channel surf the 300+ channels now streaming into my home and find at least one worth while thing to watch. I found one of my favorite movies of all time, “Patton” with George C. Scott. As I watched, I thought, here is a great digital story. It may have originally been put to film with analog technology, but as true as I sit here, it is streaming in as “1’s” and “0’s”. During the film, at critical points, there is this recurring music made from what sounds like a marching band or parts thereof. This music gives a “joyous” and “happy” mood when things are going well for Patton and the American Army. The same score is played in the minor or flat notes and yields a “sad” and seemingly “haunting” mood when happenings do not go well. It is a powerful use of repetition and mood enhancement, I thought.

As I was watching some of the college football games today, there was a story the announcers brought up about one of the student athletes being adopted. This was after his father abandoned him and his mother passed away. I wish I had heard the whole story.

It even occurred to me that commercials in between and interrupting programs quite often tell a short story. This had occurred to me before, but never so resounding.

Gotta go! Another story is starting, “The Hurt Locker”.

Thoughts for Week 3 - 530

Signal to Noise Ratio

This is a phrase that I haven't heard since I was performing analyses on water and soil samples. I recall reading in some of the manuals in order to confirm and be certain the signal came from the sought after analyte, the S to NR had to be 3 to 1 or better. This 3 to 1 ratio is referred to as the detection limit. But one also had to be aware of interfering analytes that emitted signals in close proximity as well...

If you have ever listened to two people talking at the same time about entirely different topics and their voices were at the same volume/loudness and you tried to concentrate on what one of them was saying (the signal), the other would be considered the noise. In this situation, the signal to noise ratio would be considered 1 to 1. Attempting to concentrate on what the signal is broadcasting is a difficult thing to do in this scenario and is far below the limit of detection. In other words, the person you want to hear has to be talking about 3 times louder than the other person in order for you just to be confident that you are actually hearing what they are saying, let alone understand it. That brings in the concept of limit of quantification, which I won't get into. Let me just say, obviously the bigger the signal to noise ratio, the better.

The point that I am trying to make is: It excites me to remember some of the information from earlier classes and experience and tie it in with this one. I called upon a previous understanding of signal to noise ratio to further my understanding of what it can be applied to. Seems kinda silly to make such a big deal out of it, but I get the idea [and buy into it 'cause I felt it happen to me] of my students having to tie the information into something they know in order to understand it and undergo deeper cognition.

Thoughts for week 2 - 530

When I taught Geometry a few years back, I used to spend a couple days on something I called "Story time". During "Story time" I read some of the stories that were printed in my college textbooks. One of the stories told of the evolution of human beings' understanding of the irrational number, Pi. The story describes how originally people thought the ratio of a circles circumference to its diameter (what Pi happens to be) was three. As more people made more measurements through history and knowledge grew, the approximation steadily got better.

Another story I would share was the tragic tale of French mathematician, Evariste Galois. The quadratic formula had been solved for centuries. The cubic and quartic were solved somewhere in the 1500's. In the advent of these solutions being determined, mathematicians looked for the solution to the quintic. For over 250 years, mathematicians tried. According to the story I read to my students, it occurred to Galois that perhaps there was no solution. He developed his theory, proved it, wrote his paper and submitted it for review. The reviewer lost it. Galois wrote another paper and submitted it. The reviewer died before reading it. He again submitted it. This time the reviewer did not possess the intellect to understand it. At the age of 20 before getting the acknowledgement for his crowning achievement, he was forced into a duel (the circumstances remain unclear). Knowing he had little chance of surviving, he wrote his thoughts and ideas feverishly the night before his demise.

The moral of these stories is the proof of us standing on the shoulders of giants. We need to further their legacies and honor their work instead of taking it for granted.

Finding some biographical histories for some of these giants could give another reason for students to study mathematics. Perhaps these biographies could be put into voicethread by students as a way to get "cross-curricular" and create some digital stories.