Slashdot Mirror

The University of Vermont's Larner College of Medicine has begun phasing out lectures in favor of what's known as "active learning" and plans to be done with lectures altogether by 2019. NPR spoke with William Jeffries, a dean at the school who's leading the effort, about the thinking behind this move. From the report: Why are lectures bad? Well, I wouldn't say that they're bad. The issue is that there is a lot of evidence that lectures are not the best way to accumulate the skills needed to become a scientist or a physician. We've seen much evidence in the literature, accumulated in the last decade, that shows that when you do a comparison between lectures and other methods of learning -- typically called "active learning" methods -- that lectures are not as efficient or not as successful in allowing students to accumulate knowledge in the same amount of time.

Give us an example of a topic taught in a traditional lecture versus an "active learning" setting. A good example would be the teaching of what we would call pharmacokinetics -- the science of drug delivery. So, how does a drug get to the target organ or targeted receptor? A lot of the science of pharmacokinetics is simply mathematical equations. If you have a lecture, it's simply presenting those equations and maybe giving examples of how they work. In an active learning setting, you expect the students to learn about the equations before they get there. And when you get into the classroom setting, the students work in groups solving pharmacokinetic problems. Cases are presented where the patient gets a drug in a certain dose at a certain time, and you're looking at the action of that over time and the concentration of the drug in the blood. So, those are the types of things where you're expecting the student to know the knowledge in order to use the knowledge. And then they don't forget it.

The University of Vermont's Larner College of Medicine has begun phasing out lectures in favor of what's known as "active learning" and plans to be done with lectures altogether by 2019. NPR spoke with William Jeffries, a dean at the school who's leading the effort, about the thinking behind this move. From the report: Why are lectures bad? Well, I wouldn't say that they're bad. The issue is that there is a lot of evidence that lectures are not the best way to accumulate the skills needed to become a scientist or a physician. We've seen much evidence in the literature, accumulated in the last decade, that shows that when you do a comparison between lectures and other methods of learning -- typically called "active learning" methods -- that lectures are not as efficient or not as successful in allowing students to accumulate knowledge in the same amount of time.

Give us an example of a topic taught in a traditional lecture versus an "active learning" setting. A good example would be the teaching of what we would call pharmacokinetics -- the science of drug delivery. So, how does a drug get to the target organ or targeted receptor? A lot of the science of pharmacokinetics is simply mathematical equations. If you have a lecture, it's simply presenting those equations and maybe giving examples of how they work. In an active learning setting, you expect the students to learn about the equations before they get there. And when you get into the classroom setting, the students work in groups solving pharmacokinetic problems. Cases are presented where the patient gets a drug in a certain dose at a certain time, and you're looking at the action of that over time and the concentration of the drug in the blood. So, those are the types of things where you're expecting the student to know the knowledge in order to use the knowledge. And then they don't forget it.

KentuckyFC (1144503) writes The idea that people tend to use positive words more often the negative ones is now known as the Pollyanna hypothesis, after a 1913 novel by Eleanor Porter about a girl who tries to find something to be glad about in every situation. But although widely known, attempts to confirm the hypothesis have all been relatively small studies and so have never been thought conclusive.

Now a group of researchers at Computational Story Lab at the University of Vermont have repeated this work on a corpus of 100,000 words from 24 languages representing different cultures around the world. They first measured the frequency of words in each language and then paid native speakers to rate how they felt about each word on a scale ranging from the most negative or sad to the most positive or happy. The results reveal that all the languages show a clear bias towards positive words with Spanish topping the list, followed by Portuguese and then English. Chinese props up the rankings as the least happy. They go on to use these findings as a 'lens' through which to evaluate how the emotional polarity changes in novels in various languages and have set up a website where anybody can explore novels in this way. The finding that human language has universal positive bias could have a significant impact on the relatively new science of sentiment analysis on social media sites such as Twitter. If there is a strong bias towards positive language in the first place, and this changes from one language to another, then that is obviously an important factor to take into account.

An anonymous reader sends us to Wired's Threat Level blog for news that the federally funded Popline database at Johns Hopkins University, said to be the largest source of information on reproductive health, has begun censoring searches that contain the word "abortion." Apparently they took this stop due to pressure from USAID, the federal agency that provides foreign aid to developing nations. From Wired: "Under a Reagan-era policy revived by President Bush in 2001, USAID denies funding to non-governmental organizations that perform abortions, or that 'actively promote abortion as a method of family planning in other nations.' A librarian at the University of California at San Francisco noticed the new censorship on Monday, while carrying out a routine research request on behalf of academics and researchers at the university. The search term had functioned properly as of January. Puzzled, she contacted the manager of the database,... who replied in an April 1st e-mail that the university had recently begun blocking the search term because the database received federal funding."

narq writes "From the world of Counter-Strike comes an interactive 3D environment for online interactions. Users will be able to accomplish productive goals or just waste time. I can't wait for the sword fighting algorithms to start to take shape. Here is the post at Counter-Server."

ctar writes: "Following is my review of O'Reilly's new book : "T1: A Survival Guide" by Matthew S. Gast. The short and sweet is, this book definitely fell short of my expectations." Read on to see what ctar found lacking, and a few bright spots as well. T1: A Survival Guide author Matthew S. Gast. pages 263 publisher O'Reilly and Associates rating 6 reviewer ctar ISBN 0-596-00127-4 summary A potentially useful but disappointing book; skimps on the details that a book for T1 administrators should be full of.

What a great age we live in, where you can teach YOURSELF your entire profession! As a self-taught network engineer with a major market data firm, I have great respect for some of today's tech writers who have single handedly taught me TCP/IP, Ethernet, Cisco routers, and Linux! The only aspect of my job for which I have had to rely solely on experience, (and the meager amount of information on the web) is T1s and synchronous circuits/leased lines. As far as I know, the only books which discussed the technical details of T1 and synchronous circuits are general telecommuncations text books. None are written from a contemporary network administrator's point of view. So, you understand my excitement at seeing O'Reilly take a stab at just such a book!

The book starts off at a good pace, talking about the history of the telephone network and its evolution into the digital age (the reason we have T1 available as a data service). It discusses the different terminology related to T1's, and the equipment that connects them to our routers, but makes very few analogies or examples to solidify the relationship of these terms to each other or to the big picture of networking. After discussing the physical and logical layout of T1 and its physical interface with our routers, Gast spends the next 40 pages on the nitty gritty details of T1: Timing, Framing, Coding, and the lights on the CSU/DSU. All the important aspects of T1 are discussed in a logical order. Unfortunately, it's not enough; Gast breezes through the most important and mysterious aspects of T1 without so much as one good analogy or explanation to develop the ideas. The diagrams are equally disappointing. They have a lot of information, but do little to clarify the subject matter. The T1 framing sections, especially did not get enough attention. This is the heart of T1, and really wasn't explained well enough.

After getting what seemed to be an introduction to the subject matter, I expected the rest of the book to go into further detail about the intricacies of T1 framing and coding, and ways to hash out possible problems on T1 circuits. Instead, the next 60 pages give the boring and useless details of the three most common link-layer protocols run over T1s: HDLC, PPP, and Frame Relay. Gast continues to litter the pages with confusing and uninformative diagrams, and then spends time explaining the details of each one step-by-step. Good diagrams don't need step-by-step explanation; they speak for themselves!

The level of detail he goes into for each of these protocols is similar to what you might find in a general Data Networking text. He discusses different principles of data communication as well as the specific frame formats of these protocols, but doesn't explain how these protocols specifically interact with T1. Although he gives the frame formats of these different WAN protocols, he doesn't give enough information or suggestions on using the information in any effective way. The oversimplification of many of the diagrams makes the book less useful than the RFCs which will give you the exact frame formats.

Gast assumes that if you don't work for one of the telcos, the only way you may come across a T1 is as a small business network administrator responsible for maintaining internet access via T1. That is not the case anymore; many large companies manage their own backbone and have access to leased lines, and T1 testers. The only time a T1 tester is mentioned, it's described as 'a handheld device with lots of buttons and blinking lights on it.' The principles behind T1 testing are quickly covered, but the intricacies of testing T1s and using T1 testers are not. This is unfortunate, as many Cisco routers have built in test pattern generation and loopback capabilities! (As do most standalone CSU/DSUs.)

It's obvious, as it is in many poorly written tech books, that the author knows his subject! The problem is, he doesn't consider the fact that we, the reader, may not. The book wasn't a complete waste of time; there is a lot of good information in here. Information on signaling and different types of alarms on T1s is present. The majority of it is just not explained very well, and too much time is spent on the link-layer protocols. I probably wouldn't be so down on this book if it didn't have O'Reilly's name on it.

You can purchase T1: A Survival Guide from bn.com. Want to see your own review here? Just read the book review guidelines, then use Slashdot's handy submission form.

eastern european spy writes: "According to the BBC astronomers have obtained one of the most detailed views ever seen of the central regions of a so-called active galaxy that is ejecting energetic jets of material into space. The galaxy, catalogued as 3C120, has a supermassive black hole at its core that squirts gas jets in opposite directions. One jet is almost pointed head-on towards the Earth. Read the full story here." See also the author's homepage and some movies of the phenomena.

jpatters writes "CNN is reporting that the state of California will be selling confidential wage data to private companies. They hope to raise $15 million over the next decade. Read the full story "Yeargh-I love governments blurring the line between my life and companies.

jpatters tells us that Micro Processor Report is reporting (via MacInTouch) that a russian company (Elbrus International) claims to have a CPU design that achieves 135 SPECint95 and 350 SPECfp95. This compairs to Merced's scores of 45 and 70 respectively. It is claimed to run in a 0.18 micron process at 1.2Ghz consuming only 35 watts and 126 square millimeters of silicon. It includes a 256 Kbyte of on-chip L2 cache. It should also be both x86 and IA-64 compatible. Elbrus 2000 seems to exist (look at what Shevtsov is working on now), and seems to have had some history. Here is Shevtsov's FPU patent. S : I've tried to verify this story, but can't find the copy of MPR -- anybody else have it? Anyone care to speculate how it was done? Assynchronous logic? 256Kb L2 seems rather low though unless they're using a special point-to-point bus. From an Anonymous Contributor

"I get MPR. I've got about 7 minutes before I have to catch a bus, but, from the MPR issue itself:

The processor uses EPIC. The Elbrus team has been together for 40 years, originally designing supercomputers for the Soviet defense establishments. "They've developed computers based on superscalar, shared-memory multiprocessing and EPIC techniques long before papers on those subjects appeared in the West". MPR claims that the lack of a good semiconductor Fab has been what was holding them back. MPR says that the claims would be unbelievable except for the credibility of the team.

The X86 and IA64 compatibility rely on binary compilation assisted by emulation hooks, similar to what Transmeta is apparantly doing. Supposedly Dave Ditzel spent several years while at Sun working with the Elbrus team.

The processor exists only as an executable Verilog database. However, the E2K design is based on the Elbrus-3 processor that was fabricated in 1991. The Elbrus-3 was built in an "ancient process", used 15 million transistors in about 3000 LSI and MSI chips, and delivered twice the performance of a Cray Y-MP."

Some more he sent later:

" It is actually quite a long article... 6 pages plus the cover, I'm about two thirds through it. The architecture is in fact pretty stunning, and very similar to the Merced and the SPARC in several ways. It has a 64K, 4-way instruction cache: one i-cache only. It has two identical, synchronously-loaded 8K L1 data caches, and a 256K, 2-way, 4-bank L2 data cache. In addition, it has a 4K array pre-fetch buffer for use in loop overlapping. There are two regions, each with an L1 data cache, a 256-entry register file, and three ALUs. The regions are symmetric except that only one region has a divide function.

A great deal in this processor is left to the compiler, a fact that is demonstrated by the single, 64K i-cache; this will only work if the compiler does its job. Much also depends on the compiler's ability to identify instructions that can be executed in parallel. With an optimal instruction load, the multi-ported caches can provide a potential operand bandwidth of 288 Gbytes/sec at a processor clock of 1.2GHz. Much effort is expended to avoid branching; extensive branch prediction support is provided, and in some cases it will actually just go ahead and execute both sides of a branch to avoid doing the branch at all; with so many parallel execution paths, the cost of doing so is much lower than what would be the cost of branching.

When loops are identified, an effort is made to overlap the loop execution, taking advantage the same mechanism as used for the sliding register windows. The 4K FIFO Array prefetch buffer helps to feed data to the overlapped loop. In loop mode, for perfectly optimal code, the processor can rates as high as 23 operations per cycle.

Much of the processor is designed in standard static CMOS gates, but some of the critical paths through the processor use self-reset gates, which do not have a clock but rather are triggered by the completion of cycles in previous gates. According to MPR, these are estimated by Elbrus to run 10-15% faster than static CMOS gates.

Just a couple more facts about Elbrus: The Elbrus-1 computer was a "...superscaler, RISC, processor with out-of-order execution, speculative execution, and register renaming..." This machine was designed and built... between 1973 and 1979!! They dumped superscaler designs becuase they were too complex for the payoff. The Elbrus-3, built between 1985 and 1991, used "an EPIC-based VILW CPU", implemented as a "16-processor shared memory system"

They started working on the E2K in 1994, and it is now at Verilog RTL stage, with compilers and binary-compilation software written. MPR expresses great doubt that a home will ever be found to build the processor, what with the Russian economy as bad as it is, and most capable semiconductor houses already in the midst of implementing their own designs or just not wanting to compete with Intel."