I Can't Follow This

How to give directions

According to Alycia Hund and colleagues at Illinois State University, there are two ways to give directions. One is using a so-called “route perspective”, as in the example above. This adopts a first-person spatial perspective and is characterised by references to turns and landmarks. The other is a so-called “survey perspective”, which gives directions as if looking down upon a map. This type of direction giving is characterised by references to cardinal directions (North, South, East and West) and precise distances.

The Quality Factor

Interesting question over at Incoherently Scattered Ponderings: How do you measure “quality” of education?

Part of it is the assumption that you get a better education at certain schools — the feedback loop of good schools having the ability to be selective in both the faculty and the students it accepts. And that’s probably valid — if the quality of the faculty hired is based on how well they can educate. There are schools that have grad students teaching the classes, and professors who do research and view teaching as an annoyance.

But how to measure this is a different issue. Surveying faculty for where they got their education reinforces the notion that being in academia is “success.” And in a way somewhat related to Chad’s recent discussion on student-athletes, one has to recognize that, in a broader sense, education is not just what you learn in class.

It's a Communist Plot

There were a number of records set at Domino Day 2008.

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I thought the scene of the last 45 seconds or so, showing a field of dominos falling in parallel, was particularly interesting. The curve that defined the leading edge of falling dominos was not a straight line, and it changed shape a little — the speed of propagation through a line of tiles is not constant. With identical tiles it should depend on the spacing, which would dictate the time it takes for one falling tile to hit the next and the speed with which a domino strikes its target. But wile a larger spacing means the tip is moving faster, it also strikes at a lower point, which means it exerts a smaller torque to get the next tile to fall, so it wouldn’t be a simple relationship. You could also change the mass for another variable in the domino wave equation.