Daily Archives: May 5, 2010
Patriot Games
[T]he infamously Machiavellian coach told his draft picks that there was no potable surface water for “hundreds of miles”; that it would be in their best interests not to attempt to contact any locals who crossed their path; that only the fruit at the very center of the thornbushes would be edible; that most of the indigenous wildlife, especially the arachnids, was very, very poisonous; and that one of the things he had just told them was a lie.
“Show me what you got, boys,” Belichick said to the group from the backseat of a spotless black Range Rover. “If you want to be on this team, I’ll see you in four days. And if you’ve been paying attention at all, you’ll know exactly what to do. Oh, you can take your blindfolds off now. “
Superluminal Man Meets The Microquark Kid
Faster than light, smaller than an atom
What do you do when you get an unphysical answer on an exam, and is there any way to mitigate this?
Some combination of carrot and stick is the usual way; of course; when I had control over grading policy it was in the navy and we mainly used the big stick: grossly unphysical answers were conceptual errors and it meant a big loss of points on the question — there was no amount of correct information that would let you have a passing score on that particular problem. To drive this home, it was reinforced with feedback from homework and quiz results — I tried to not let an opportunity pass where I could point out how wrong such an answer was and how much it would cost come test-time. But it was also buttressed by having other divisions using similar grading policy, which is a knob not really available (or at least less accessible) in an academic setting.