How Poetry and Math Intersect | Smithsonian

"Both require economy and precision—and each perspective can enhance the other" says Evelyn Lamb, Smithsonian.com.

 

Artists and poets have long been inspired by the mathematical patterns found in nature—for instance, the remarkable fact that a sunflower’s seeds follow the Fibonacci sequence. But there are myriad other ways that the realms of poetry and mathematics can intersect.
Photo: DILEEP CHANDRAN / Alamy

 

April is both National Poetry Month and Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month, so a few years ago science writer Stephen Ornes dubbed it Math Poetry Month. If the words “math” and “poetry” don’t intuitively make sense to you as a pair, poet and mathematician JoAnne Growney’s blog Intersections—Poetry with Mathematics is a perfect place to start expanding your math-poetic horizons. The blog includes a broad range of poems with mathematical themes or built using mathematical rules. 

 

Take “Geometry,” by former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove:

I prove a theorem and the house expands:
the windows jerk free to hover near the ceiling,
the ceiling floats away with a sigh.
—from “Geometry” by Rita Dove

Or “In Praise of Fractals” by Emily Grosholz, published in The Stars of Earth: New and Selected Poems (2017, Word Galaxy Press):

Euclid’s geometry cannot describe,
nor Apollonius’, the shape of mountains,
puddles, clouds, peninsulas or trees.
Clouds are never spheres,
nor mountains cones, nor Ponderosa pines;
bark is not smooth; and where the land and sea
so variously lie about each other
and lightly kiss, is no hyperbola.
Compared with Euclid’s elementary forms,
Nature, loosening her hair, exhibits patterns
(sweetly disarrayed, afloat, uncombed)
not simply of a higher degree n
but rather of an altogether different
level of complexity:
the number of the scales of distances
describing her is almost infinite.
—from “In Praise of Fractals” by Emily Grosholz

Growney casts a wide net on her blog, which begins with the words: ″Mathematical language can heighten the imagery of a poem; mathematical structure can deepen its effect.” Some poems she features, like “Geometry,” use mathematical themes or images; some are by mathematicians or math students. Growney has also gotten interested in the mathematics of poetic forms and poetic forms that employ mathematics.

Of course, sonnets and haiku are famous for employing strict counts on lines and syllables. But she is also interested in newer forms, often inspired by the constrained writing exercises of the French Oulipo group, which was founded by mathematicians and poets. 
Read more...

Source: Smithsonian

Indiana education officials are taking another look at regulating virtual charter schools | Chalkbeat Indiana

Follow on Twitter as @ShainaRC

"Nearly five months after Gov. Eric Holcomb called for “immediate attention and action” on Indiana’s subpar online charter schools, state education officials might soon take steps to address them — although they could fall short of the sweeping changes virtual school critics are pushing for" writes Shaina Cavazos, Reporter & Community Editor.

A Hoosier Academy Virtual teacher keeps track of answers during a math review game. 
Photo: Shaina Cavazos

The Indiana State Board of Education is expected to vote Wednesday on forming a committee that could become Indiana’s first effort in recent years to strengthen virtual charter school oversight. State board member Gordon Hendry would lead the committee. Hendry said it’s the state board’s responsibility to ensure online charter schools are performing and are managed properly, especially when Hoosier tax dollars support them.

He also added that if lawmakers won’t step in and take more immediate, decisive action — which they’ve been hesitant to do — the state board needs to add regulation. The Republican-dominated legislature killed three bills this year that would have regulated charter schools and declined to address virtual charter schools, which are public schools that allow students to attend school online from home.

“I have had my reservations about the poor performance of many of these schools,” said Hendry, a Democrat who has been on the board since 2013. “So I hope that we can draw some attention to the issue, bring in some of our thought leaders both in Indiana and nationally and try to solve some of the problems in a constructive way.”
Read more...

Source: Chalkbeat Indiana 

‘Distance learning need of hour’ | Islamabad - The News International

Pakistan needs skills development and vocational training programmes through distance learning initiatives, said Prof Dr Nabi Bux Jummani, former dean of Faculty of Social Sciences, International Islamic University Islamabad (IIUI).

Photo: Pexels

Talking to ‘The News’, he said that distance education can bring about a change in the society if it is in line with the industry. He said media and the appliances associated with it are helpful in promotion of distance learning.
Read more...

Source: The News International (blog)

Distance learning: AIOU postgrad exams start May 14 | The Express Tribune

"The final examinations of Allama Iqbal Open University (AIOU) postgraduate programmes will start simultaneously from May 14 across the country, said an AIOU press release on Friday" reports News Desk. 

The programmes include: BS (microbiology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, statistics, environmental sciences and accounting), PGD, MA, MSc, MS, MPhil and PhD in different disciplines. Roll number slips have been sent to all the enrolled students for the Autumn 2017 Semester at their postal addresses. The same have also been placed at the university’s website www.aiou.edu.pk the press release said. To facilitate the students at their door-steps, exams centres have been set up at district and tehsil level. The students can also download their roll number slips from the university’s website for appearing in these exams. Students are also advised to read the instructions mentioned on roll number slip carefully before entering the examination centre.

Source: The Express Tribune

Did Math Kill God? | New Republic

Photo: Josephine Livingstone

Josephine Livingstone, culture staff writer at The New Republic inform, "A new book on Renaissance mathematics makes a bold case."

Photo: New Republic

One upon a time, a great Italian published a work called the Siderius Nuncius. Galileo had seen the moons of Jupiter through his telescope. He had seen Venus moving. So, in 1606, he endorsed the ideas Copernicus had written down a half-century earlier in the De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. The earth moves around the sun, Galileo said. On February 24, 1616, the Qualifiers of the Inquisition declared heliocentrism heretical. After a trial Galileo was sentenced to house arrest in 1633. There he stayed ever after, moving indeed around a sun, but stuck indoors while thinking about it.

You have likely heard this tale many times. But what does the story mean? For children it shows that you should stick to your guns when you know you’re right—especially if you’re a scientist. For adults it represents a key moment in the development of astronomy and the sciences in general. And those two lessons bind into a bigger story that we use to define who we are, in our time. The Galileo Affair becomes part of a metanarrative, or, in Jean-Francois Lyotard’s term, a Grand Narrative. It says that early seventeenth-century Europe hung at a crux, with religion pulling it backward into medieval ignorance and science straining to push time forward into modernity. Against the benighted church Galileo labored, alongside the other great thinkers of the sixteenth century who gave rise to our rational modern age.

As many scholars have observed in the past century or so, this is a deeply suspicious way to think about events from the past. When Lyotard coined his term, he was observing the tendency to conceive of knowledge in the form of story-telling. Such narratives legitimize certain ideas, he argued. The story of Jesus is not merely a biography, but legitimizes Christianity as a social norm. In the same way, history and science are driven by narrative. When we learn about physics in class, we do not ourselves perform every experiment. We hear the narrative about forces exerting themselves in an equal and opposite direction, and we believe it. When those narratives culminate in a meta-narrative, we see a result that seems almost pre-determined. We see things as pursuing a teleology.

The Great Rift:
Literacy, Numeracy,
and the Religion-Science Divide

In a new book called The Great Rift: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Religion-Science Divide, Michael E. Hobart offers a new twist on a huge old metanarrative: the death of God...

Josephine Livingstone ends her article with following: "Although it is impossible to fault the passion with which he has ventured into historical mathematics’ every daunting nook and baffling cranny, the speed and the sweep of Hobart’s argument makes it hard for a reader suspicious of metanarrative to remain unsuspicious of his book. Technological determinism is perhaps the great intellectual temptation of our decade—try not to fall for it."
Read more... 

Source: New Republic

Meet The Millennial Entrepreneurs Slaying the eCommerce Game | Forbes

"With female entrepreneurship on the rise -- women now make up 40% of new entrepreneurs in the United States -- it’s no surprise that digitally savvy millennials are excelling in the eCommerce space" says Kate Talbot,  freelance content marketer, author, and entrepreneur who helps brands engage millennials. I wrote a best-selling book,"Oh Snap! You Can Use Snapchat for Business".

Photo: Storyblocks.com

Millennials are turning their side hustles into full-time endeavors using social media platforms and web integrations to acquire customers and build communities.

Meet, three millennial entrepreneurs who are embracing the digital space by utilizing Instagram, Amazon, Etsy, and Shopify to successfully scale their businesses.

Read more... 

Source: Forbes

The Hardest Students to Teach | Teaching Professor Blog

"Some students are more challenging to teach than others. They require pedagogical skills of a different and higher order" argues Maryellen Weimer, PhD.

Photo: The Teaching Professor Blog

Sometimes it’s easier to sigh and just turn away. And that’s legitimate in the sense that students (indeed, people of all sorts) have to figure things out for themselves. But many of us were such “works in progress” when we were in college, and a teacher (or several of them) ended up being instrumental in moving us in more productive directions. It’s for that reason I’d like us to consider some of these challenging students, each one a unique individual, but many displaying the same counterproductive attitudes and actions. Descriptions of these students come much more easily than solutions to what’s holding them back. Said more directly, my goal here is to start this conversation and ask for your wisdom, insights, and experiences with students who are tough to teach.

The Teaching Professor Blog

The Student Who’s Cruising – The one who is just going through the motions, doing coursework with the least amount of effort. Often these students are polite, sometimes even apologetic, but they’re fundamentally uninterested in learning what’s being taught in the course, and one strongly suspects they’re not interested in any of their courses. Can personal attention make a difference? Can showing you care inspire even a modicum of motivation? What about choice? “Is there a way you could do this assignment that would make it more interesting?” What about challenge? “Study hard for one exam—put your brain to the test so you know what it can accomplish.” What about confrontation, constructively framed, but still in the student’s face? “Why isn’t coursework part of your agenda in college?”...

Two points in summary: Maybe the best we can offer these challenging students is our vision of their potential, unclouded by their behaviors. And we may never know that we made a difference. Writer T. C. Boyle had three college teachers who were instrumental in his discovery that he could write. Of one of them, he observes, “He saw something in me—in my writing and my intelligence—and he tried to promote and encourage it.” Boyle says of this teacher who became his mentor, “I hurt him. I didn’t attend classes. I hung with the losers.” But that teacher’s vision caused Boyle to move in a new direction. He started to read books.
Read more...  

Source: The Teaching Professor Blog

Changing Mobile Learning Practices: A Multiyear Study 2012–2016 | EDUCAUSE Review

Student surveys on mobile technology usage highlight a need for better mobile integration in coursework and institutional strategy.

---

"Since the first iPhone was invented in 2007, mobile devices have progressed from a convenience in our daily lives to a necessity" says Ryan Seilhamer, Baiyun Chen, Sue Bauer, Ashley Salter and Luke Bennett.
 

In higher education, the use of mobile technologies in learning has also increased rapidly over that 10-year period.1 Given mobile's changing nature and affordances, however, it is still unclear how to best integrate the technology into both coursework and institutional strategy. 

At the University of Central Florida (UCF), we conducted online surveys in 2012, 2014, and 2016 to gather student perspectives on mobile learning at the university. Our goal was to get an overview of students' mobile device ownership and learning activities over time and understand related trends. This article compares the results of the 2016 survey to the previous two surveys and addresses three research questions: 

1. What types of mobile devices do students use, and how has device ownership changed over time?
2. How do students use mobile devices and apps, and how has that usage changed over time?
3. What are students' beliefs about mobile usage, and how have those beliefs changed over time?

Mobile Technology and Education 
According to the ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2017, 95 percent of undergraduate students own a laptop or a smartphone and 30 percent own a laptop, a smartphone, and a tablet.² Mobile technology's high ownership has translated into increased usage to support student learning; this is particularly true with smartphones, which are conducive to agile tasks such as communication, easy information access, and photography.³

According to a recent survey, for example, 70–79 percent of University of Washington students reported using smartphones for academic purposes in at least one class.⁴ Other study results show that 78 percent of students consider their phones to be at least moderately important to their academic success,⁵ while 83 percent used a smartphone for course-related activities for one or more of their courses and 25 percent used a smartphone for all of their courses.⁶

Although usage for academic purposes has clearly increased, several challenges remain in implementing mobile technology in higher education. These challenges include a disconnect between student and instructor views of mobile technologies, a lack of pedagogical support or training for instructors, and a lack of effective technical support for mobile learning...

Next Steps 
Our mobile survey results offer a systematic view of mobile learning implementation and its implications for practice at UCF. Our hope is that it might also help other institutions promote and more systematically establish mobile learning practices of their own.

Among our short-term plans are to eliminate the disconnect between instructors and students through faculty training and pedagogical support. In addition to our stand-alone mobile training course, we intend to integrate learning concepts, such as universal design, into all training programs to help instructors design mobile-compatible online courses and assignments.

To support these mobile initiatives, UCF has created a new position, program director of mobile strategy, to focus on growth and awareness of mobile technologies.
Read more... 

Recommended Reading

Photo: leungchopan / Shutterstock © 2018

VR and AR: The Ethical Challenges Ahead by Emory Craig and Maya Georgieva.

Source: EDUCAUSE Review

Nvidia's amazing deep learning tool can reconstruct incomplete photos | TechRadar

Phil Hall, Photography Editor inform, "A glimpse into the near future of image editing."

Photo: TechRadar

It might look like witchcraft, but researchers at Nvidia have developed an advanced deep learning image-retouching tool that can intelligently reconstruct incomplete photos.

While removing unwanted artefacts in image editing is nothing new – Adobe Photoshop's Content-Aware tools are pretty much the industry standard – the prototype tool that Nvidia is showcasing looks incredibly impressive. 

Don't take our word for it – check out the two-minute video below to get a taste of what this new technology is capable off.

Research at NVIDIA: AI Reconstructs Photos with Realistic Results 
 

What differentiates Nvidia's new tool from something like Content-Aware Fill in Photoshop is that it analyzes the image and understands what the subject should actually look like; Content-Aware Fill relies on surrounding parts of the image to fill in what it thinks should be there. 
Read more...

Source: TechRadar and NVIDIA Channel (YouTube)

How Robots Are Helping MBA Students Be In Two Places At Once | BusinessBecause

"New technology lets b-schoolers attend classes and meet recruiters virtually via robots" summarizes Seb Murray at BusinessBecause.

Carey's “Gizmo”, one of three Segway robots at the business school
Photo: BusinessBecause

Albert Einstein once claimed that you can be in two places at once. The boffin was right—and you don’t need to be a quantum physicist to do it; merely a business school student. MBAs are attending campus classes using robots, controlled from halfway across the planet.  

Online learning has existed for decades, but schools are turning to newer forms of technology as the demand for digital degrees rockets and technology becomes increasingly prevalent in the workplace.

At Arizona’s W.P. Carey School of Business, MBA and Executive MBA students are able to attend classes virtually using “Gizmo”, one of three Segway robots with wheels that display a student’s face via an iPad strapped to the machine. A microphone and speaker enable conversations in real-time, while the wheels let students roam campus, interacting with anyone who crosses their path.

Lisa Bienstock says that she would not be able to get her Carey EMBA if it were not for technology such as Gizmo. “I’m a parent,” she says. “I also work full-time and I’m getting my Executive MBA all at the same time. I wouldn’t be able to do it if I didn’t have the support of ASU and technology like Gizmo to be in two places at once.”

She cites, as an example of how the robot has helped her, an instance in which she was attending a conference in Las Vegas but had to attend EMBA classes simultaneously in Arizona. “I was able to attend class through Gizmo, which was phenomenal as I didn’t miss anything,” says Lisa.

She controlled the Arizona-based bot from her Vegas hotel room using her laptop keyboard. “It’s great for parents or people who have sick children or disabilities — if you can’t get to class, you’re able to be there to participate [virtually],” Lisa says.

The robots may seem unusual but are now regularly roaming some campuses, with remote students routinely rolling into lecture theatres on wheeled machines, as well as meeting recruiters virtually using the devices.

MIT Sloan School of Management in Massachusetts, for instance, has been using robots designed by Double Robotics and Avaya Robotics since 2015, mostly in the executive education space where distance learning is more common than in MBAs.

Schools hope the robots mimic the feel of being on a buzzy campus, though nothing has truly replicated that experience yet. 
Read more... 

Recommended Reading: 

Photo: BusinessBecause

Be A Master Of Networking by Ania Zymelka at BusinessBecause.
"The ultimate guide to networking, from cycling clubs to lunching with CEOs. Plus how to write those pesky introductory emails."    

Source: BusinessBecause