I'd have to agree with that last statement; Ady is a hell of a guy. Eric too.
I worked on this project as well (summer of 98) with Troy who had come back to work on it a second time. And actually (I think) worked on it a third semester as well.
The best part was when a friend of mine who receives the APL letter sent it to me. I read it and almost fell out of my chair!
I have seen a few articles in car related magazines quote results from a program called Quarter Pro. At $265 a copy it's a little bit much for the occassional street racer, but for someone who runs every weekend, it could sure save them plenty of time/money/effort in the long run (pun intended).
My brother, who will soon bring his '85 Cutlass to the track for the first time, may eventually purchase a copy, but until then I cannot give you any personal impressions or simulation vs. real-world results just yet. Unless of course someone would like to donate a copy for review. *wink* *wink*
I have read many comments about changing posture, keyboard design, and doing exercises, but none about changing the keyboard layout.
During my first year of college my honors cs prof mentioned in class that he was teaching himself how to type using the dvorak layout so I searched for information on it and decided if it could help keep me from getting RSI or CTS, it was worth the effort. I waited until the summer to convert and am very glad that I did.
After using someone else's machine I immediatelly notice how fluent it feels (I spent more years using qwerty than dvorak) and how much less I have to move off of the homerow. Dvorak is not a cure-all and may in reality help much, but I typed quite a bit in the last five years and have not had any complaints.
I would suggest doing the easy things (different posture, different keyboard design, exercises, etc) first, but, in the end, dvorak may still be beneficial.
Just as an aside, I have learned how to toggle the keyboard layout on many differnt platforms and can change it easily in windows using left alt+left shift or in linux with two simple scripts, "aoeu" and "asdf". That way any machine I use is still totally accessible to anyone.
I don't know anyone with MP Durons, but I love my MP Athlons (w/Tyan MB). After testing my MP system using ScienceMark, the same program the author of the recently released 1.2GHz Celeron vs. Duron article used, I scored higher than the program's creator utilizing only one proc. If the same type of architecture is employeed in the MP Duron system, I'd recommend it highly.
As an undergraduate I worked an a project that would be perfect for your needs as long as you do have long-rang line-of-sight. The the lab's page is not up yet (a lab was just created to work solely upon this research) but you can contact him directly, if you wish. His lab is the Ultrafast Laser Spectroscopy and High-Speed Communication Lab (Prof. R. Martini)
http://attila.stevens-tech.edu/physics/Research.ht m
Just realize that this is being worked on in a RESEARCH lab. I am unsure how far along in development this project currently is and may not be ready anytime soon.
Hope this helps
Mr. Wizard would have liked this
on
Star In A Jar
·
· Score: 3
An astro prof here (CMU) has a neat classroom demo that he does during the lesson on supernovae which he calls star in a jar.
He mixes a two compontent apoxy in a clear plastic cup using way too much hardener (i.e. 5 times what the directions say). Be sure to do this on a large piece of metal you don't care about and do it outside cause it makes quite a mess and smells.
Basically what happens is that the apoxy undergoes an exothermic reaction, but due to the excessive amount of catalyst present, more heat is created than can be dissapated through the viscous flow of the apoxy (don't forget the apoxy is hardening the whole while). Eventually the apoxy heats enough to melt the cup, crack the hardened apoxy, smoke, etc. This gets the entire class's attention because he mixes the apoxy at the beginning of the class and proceeds to lecture for a while before anything begins to happen. It takes a little while.
I have not seen the link to science e-Print archive yet, so here it is
http://xxx.lanl.gov/
Astro-ph has proven a very valuable method for getting young (read undergraduate) scientists to get their hands on current articles. Not all of the information is correct since these are just preprints, but at least one can quickly and easily find out what just about everyone else in a particular concentration are doing right now. It is also nice, since it is just a click away, to be able to email the contributing authors about errors they might not be aware of or get more information on their collaboration.
Like many people in AP cs, I'm sure that a lot of your students know already that they are going into other fields next year in college. Use their interest in other fields (bio, engineering, etc) to help you keep their interest in your class. Tell them to research a problem in their proposed field (should not be hard, there are plenty of books on algorithems in Pascal/C++/Fortan for scientists) of study and solve it with a program. If you're lucky they'll learn several valuable lessons from this such as:
1) computers are NOT fast enough yet to be a sloppy programmer. It's easy for me to overload almost any pc solving even a trivial problem to a few decimal places using efficient code.
2) that precision is an always present struggle. In some programs I have had to keep more than 10 or 12 places to get a solution within 5 sig figs.
3) maybe the field that they want to go into is wrong for them. Better to find that out now than their 2nd or 3rd year in college.
4) it will give them experience reading code in one language (i.e. Fortran or some other non-object orientated language that is commonly used by scientists) and recoding it in another.
5) the final write-up that you have them do will HAVE to be clear since you are not an expert in every field and may not understand what they are trying to achieve, what problem they are solving, why, or how.
6) they may discover a better way to do it. This happened to my roommate and me while writting a simulation and it was very exciting and challenging since we were the only experts on the technique.
One of my most useful and fustrating classes in college was computational physics for all of these reasons and more. I'm sure that they will enjoy it.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd have to agree with that last statement; Ady is a hell of a guy. Eric too.
I worked on this project as well (summer of 98) with Troy who had come back to work on it a second time. And actually (I think) worked on it a third semester as well.
The best part was when a friend of mine who receives the APL letter sent it to me. I read it and almost fell out of my chair!
When my g/f comes with a f'in manual, you let me know and I'll read it like it's the f'in Bible.
I have seen a few articles in car related magazines quote results from a program called Quarter Pro. At $265 a copy it's a little bit much for the occassional street racer, but for someone who runs every weekend, it could sure save them plenty of time/money/effort in the long run (pun intended).
My brother, who will soon bring his '85 Cutlass to the track for the first time, may eventually purchase a copy, but until then I cannot give you any personal impressions or simulation vs. real-world results just yet. Unless of course someone would like to donate a copy for review. *wink* *wink*
I have read many comments about changing posture, keyboard design, and doing exercises, but none about changing the keyboard layout.
During my first year of college my honors cs prof mentioned in class that he was teaching himself how to type using the dvorak layout so I searched for information on it and decided if it could help keep me from getting RSI or CTS, it was worth the effort. I waited until the summer to convert and am very glad that I did.
After using someone else's machine I immediatelly notice how fluent it feels (I spent more years using qwerty than dvorak) and how much less I have to move off of the homerow. Dvorak is not a cure-all and may in reality help much, but I typed quite a bit in the last five years and have not had any complaints.
I would suggest doing the easy things (different posture, different keyboard design, exercises, etc) first, but, in the end, dvorak may still be beneficial.
Just as an aside, I have learned how to toggle the keyboard layout on many differnt platforms and can change it easily in windows using left alt+left shift or in linux with two simple scripts, "aoeu" and "asdf". That way any machine I use is still totally accessible to anyone.
I don't know anyone with MP Durons, but I love my MP Athlons (w/Tyan MB). After testing my MP system using ScienceMark, the same program the author of the recently released 1.2GHz Celeron vs. Duron article used, I scored higher than the program's creator utilizing only one proc. If the same type of architecture is employeed in the MP Duron system, I'd recommend it highly.
As an undergraduate I worked an a project that would be perfect for your needs as long as you do have long-rang line-of-sight. The the lab's page is not up yet (a lab was just created to work solely upon this research) but you can contact him directly, if you wish. His lab is the Ultrafast Laser Spectroscopy and High-Speed Communication Lab (Prof. R. Martini)
t m
http://attila.stevens-tech.edu/physics/Research.h
Just realize that this is being worked on in a RESEARCH lab. I am unsure how far along in development this project currently is and may not be ready anytime soon.
Hope this helps
An astro prof here (CMU) has a neat classroom demo that he does during the lesson on supernovae which he calls star in a jar.
He mixes a two compontent apoxy in a clear plastic cup using way too much hardener (i.e. 5 times what the directions say). Be sure to do this on a large piece of metal you don't care about and do it outside cause it makes quite a mess and smells.
Basically what happens is that the apoxy undergoes an exothermic reaction, but due to the excessive amount of catalyst present, more heat is created than can be dissapated through the viscous flow of the apoxy (don't forget the apoxy is hardening the whole while). Eventually the apoxy heats enough to melt the cup, crack the hardened apoxy, smoke, etc. This gets the entire class's attention because he mixes the apoxy at the beginning of the class and proceeds to lecture for a while before anything begins to happen. It takes a little while.
I have not seen the link to science e-Print archive yet, so here it is http://xxx.lanl.gov/ Astro-ph has proven a very valuable method for getting young (read undergraduate) scientists to get their hands on current articles. Not all of the information is correct since these are just preprints, but at least one can quickly and easily find out what just about everyone else in a particular concentration are doing right now. It is also nice, since it is just a click away, to be able to email the contributing authors about errors they might not be aware of or get more information on their collaboration.
Like many people in AP cs, I'm sure that a lot of your students know already that they are going into other fields next year in college. Use their interest in other fields (bio, engineering, etc) to help you keep their interest in your class. Tell them to research a problem in their proposed field (should not be hard, there are plenty of books on algorithems in Pascal/C++/Fortan for scientists) of study and solve it with a program. If you're lucky they'll learn several valuable lessons from this such as:
1) computers are NOT fast enough yet to be a sloppy programmer. It's easy for me to overload almost any pc solving even a trivial problem to a few decimal places using efficient code.
2) that precision is an always present struggle. In some programs I have had to keep more than 10 or 12 places to get a solution within 5 sig figs.
3) maybe the field that they want to go into is wrong for them. Better to find that out now than their 2nd or 3rd year in college.
4) it will give them experience reading code in one language (i.e. Fortran or some other non-object orientated language that is commonly used by scientists) and recoding it in another.
5) the final write-up that you have them do will HAVE to be clear since you are not an expert in every field and may not understand what they are trying to achieve, what problem they are solving, why, or how.
6) they may discover a better way to do it. This happened to my roommate and me while writting a simulation and it was very exciting and challenging since we were the only experts on the technique.
One of my most useful and fustrating classes in college was computational physics for all of these reasons and more. I'm sure that they will enjoy it.