Day 327 of 1000
It is amazing to me that some men do not model masculine behavior to their sons. Boys should be taught to take responsibility for social and other situations. It boggles my mind when that does not happen. It is not only a matter of masculinity, but of good manners to stand up and be counted.
Day 326 of 1000
We had a few days of heat a week or so back up around 105 degrees. Then we got a series of thunderstorms that brought the high temperature down to about 85. That would not be so bad if it were not so muggy. It is about the opposite here as in Oregon. In Oregon there are about eight months of drizzle followed by four months of the most beautiful place and weather in the world. The good months are in the summer. In North Carolina there are about eight months of good weather (I count the two or three weeks of freezing and snow as good because that is they way I was made), followed by four months of humid inferno. Maybe what we ought to do is try to figure out a way to live in North Carolina during the Fall, Winter, and Spring, then head out to Oregon for the summer.
It seems kind of crazy that the places that seem to be prospering most in the current economic climate have about the worst weather conditions in the lower 48–Texas, North Dakota, Montana. What is that all about. I guess if you are tough, you can handle all conditions climate and economic.
Day 325 of 1000
Both Kelly and Christian are taking a compressed semester class this summer. The classes are normally given over a period of 16 weeks, but during the summer they are given in five weeks. The classes meet every day of the week for an hour and a half. Kelly is taking a three hour class in Foundations of Advanced math–a proofs class, so that is here entire class load. Christian’s class includes a lab, so he spends a LOT of time on campus. The thing that is kind of surprising to me is that they seem to be assimilating the material very well even though both of them literally need to learn a new language with a new “alphabet” in just five weeks. They have just about as much homework as they did when they had a full course load spread of 16 weeks. They are doing OK so far, but the big tests will start next week.
Christian has to get up in his Chemistry lab sessions and explain how he solved problems. He asked me how to teach. The only thing I could think to tell him was practice. He has a stellar Chemistry professor that explains things very, very well. Kelly is in an even better situation with an emeritus professor who is 75 years old that comes back during the summer to teach on class out of love for the material. The students in both classes know exactly what to expect and the professors articulate the material very well in class. What a gift.
Day 324 of 1000
My buddy Brett from my current job and I went out to dinner with four guys from a company I pretty much desipise. It is a large machine vision company with its headquarters in the Northeast who have practices and attitudes I have found to be very suspect over the years. They have a bad reputation in the industry and an inflated opinion about the quality of thier products. After the somewhat restrained business discussions we went out to dinner with these guys and had a great time. Even though the company is from the Northeast and has the attitude and morality you might expect from a company from that part of the world, all the guys with whom we met were from the Southeast. One of them even gratuated from the Citadel. We had a great time. They were good guys and, I hate to admit it, might have been more redneck than me. The funny deal is that they were wildly more informed about all things political than anyone I have every met from the area around their world headquarters. I was very pleasantly surprised and am looking forward to doing business with them in the future.
I just received the following clarification from a representative of the Saylor Foundation in response to our previous post about her organization. We thank Cami Roden for taking the time to explain Saylor’s methods for documenting and certifying the completion of a course.
Hi there,
Thank you so much for including the Saylor Foundation in your blog post! I’m the Community and External Affairs for the Saylor Foundation, and just wanted to quickly clarify your point about ways our students can demonstrate that they took the course. If you click through any of our completed courses, you’ll see that each course starts with a set of learning objectives, which are further broken down across each of the course units. At the end of each course, there is a final exam that tests the student’s knowledge and comprehension of each of the course objectives. Upon passing the final exam, students can download and print a certificate of completion – and those students who are using our ePortfolio system also can show proof of completion via their transcript. I hope this clears up any points of confusion! If you have any questions about Saylor.org, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
My best,
Camie
Day 323 of 1000
The last issue of World Magazine had an article on the most recent Rodney Stark book, the Triumph of Christianity. I have read other books he has authored: The Rise of Christianity, The Victory of Reason, and God’s Battalions. He is an amazing author whose non-fiction books on the sociology of Christianity read like novels. I have not yet read this one. Stark was a professor at University of Washington for 32 years before he moved on to a position as University Professor and co-director of the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University.
I had bought into a many of the popular myths about Christian culture that permeate our society before I read his books. Some of the ideas held by society at large with respect to the Crusades, the Dark Ages, and the spread of Chrisitanity are just wrong. Rodney Stark has done more to debunk these myths than anyone. Whenever I hear such myths confidently propounded, I want to just start handing out Stark’s books. I can hardly wait to read his latest effort.
Day 322 of 1000
I read an article today from the Washington Post titled U.S. pushes for more scientists, but the jobs aren’t there. I know they are not a very credible source–I am kind of embarrassed citing anything from the NYT or the WP, but this one took the cake. The article is about highly degreed people in scientific fields who do not have jobs. The problem with the article is that it talks almost exclusively about people working in chemistry, biology, and medical disciplines. The word math shows up only once in the article while engineer and engineering also only show up once each. It is especially hilarious that the first person with a “science” degree described in the article got her PhD in neuroscience.
It has been my premise that people who can handle the math (including hard statistics) have plenty of opportunities. No one capable of doing hard math has lacked for opportunities, even during the persistent and growing under employment and unemployment that is a staple of the Obama recession. I know this anecdotally from the number of headhunter calls I get asking for help in finding technical programmers. You will find a list of graphs on the Business Insider website, here, that puts numbers to this phenomenon.
Just another reason to drop your subscription to the Washington Post and get a math, statistics, or engineering degree.
Day 321 of 1000
Another day at the Hill Library on the NCSU campus. The kids are studying math and chemistry. I think I get more done in this enviroment than any other. Today I was able to align the individual frames from the videos I have been using, perform background suppression and accentuate the things in the image that are in motion. The result is pretty noisy, but we know things about the items we want to find in the image that will help us isolate them to tell us the information we want. I do not have any pictures to put up today because I need to do some additional pre and post processing to make them show what we have done. Still, I am very satisfied and still might have something to show by the end of the weekend.
Day 319 of 1000
Update: See clarification from Saylor Foundation here on how they provide certification of course completion.
I just read an article about a company named Udacity that provides free, college level education on line. It does not have a lot of content yet, but, if I get the concept, it sounds better than some other on line educational systems. The idea is this:
If you are into education solely for the sake of learning stuff, then their are probably better sites around. Andrew pointed us to the Saylor Foundation website. It has full blown college classes by great universities, but no way for a student to unequivocally demonstrate they took the course and understand the material. If the Saylor Foundation added some say to do that, they would be way ahead of Udacity and have a way to make more money. They same is true for Khan Academy. Stanford and MIT also have classes on line. It seems like they would benefit greatly by following this model, too.
I think this is the future. The whole issue with on line education is that it is difficult to prove you were the one who actually took the class.I think these are tremendous ideas to which there will be additonal innovation both in terms of content delivery and confirmation that the student has actually learned the material and been certified in a manner that is appreciated by industry and even academia.
Kelly has been working on her portrait skills by sketching her friends. Really, she wants to cartoon, but she has such a heavy school load that she cannot work it in other than about one drawing per night and a few on the weekend. She figures if she keeps up her drawing skills for the next couple of years she will be ready to dive in again on her cartooning during graduate school. Kelly started drawing a set of comic strip characters based around a little girl named Betty Blonde since she was nine. Then she drew and published a daily comic strip for two full years starting when she was fourteen. You can check it out here: Betty Blonde
Day 318 of 1000
Happy 4th of July! I got up early to work on our CoffeeVision project. Yes, it has a name. I picked CoffeeVision because I couldn’t think of anything else. If it comes to anything, we will probably change the name. We are still very early in the process. I got most of this done before the family all went out to McDonalds for lunch. It has been a great day so far. Today, I added the ability to import videos to the machine vision image processing buffer a frame at a time. We need a framework for development and testing. This is it. I have added a YouTube video to show and explain what we did. I need to add just a little more infrastructure before I can start adding code to analyze the images.
Day 317 of 1000
Kelly drew this picture of our wonderful friend Jon the other day and put it up on Facebook. I thought it was good enough that I did not just want to put it up there, so I put it here. Jon writes a blog (a little bit sporadically, but well worth a daily visit to see if there is something new). He writes very, very well has some great pictures of Chile and Brazil.
Day 316 of 1000
Lorena’s thing lately is Caprese salad. It consists of fresh tomato slices topped with a thing slice of fresh mozarella cheese topped with a basil leaf all with olive oil and a little bit of salt and pepper. It is VERY good and probably pretty healthy. Saturday night, though, we went over to dinner at my old boss and friend, Igor’s house. For an appetizer, the served something that reminds me of the Caprese salad, but, at the expense of possibly offending Lorena, might have been even better.
They started with a sauteed slice of eggplant, topped with a slice of fresh tomato, a basil leaf, and Parmesan cheese. It was also had olive oil and some spices that included garlic. It was awesome. I know I ate way to much of it, but it was health, right? Now Lorena has decided that we need to start eating more sauteed eggplant. All of us are in complete agreement.
Day 315 of 1000
This is the first time in many election cycles that my father-in-law did not work in one of the voting casillas. This is a very big election with what appears to be no good choices. My biggest fear in this election is that the people are so feed up with years of corruption, they will vote for anyone other than the two main parties, the PAN and the PRI. The problem with that is the man they might elect is a good friend of Hugo Chavez and could take Mexico down the path taken by Cuba and Venezuela. That would be a very sad turn of event. Lorena will call her mom in a couple of hours to hear how it went. She will call her dad now to get his take on the whole thing.
Day 314 of 1000
I remember when I got my first ID card at Oregon State. It was bright orange and I was quite proud. I think I still have it around here somewhere. I need to put an image of it up here for posterity. It made me feel official. Well, now that Kelly and Christian have been to school for two days AND they have their ID cards, I guess they are official now, too.
We have not figured the transportation thing out. We have too many drivers and not enough cars. Our current game plan includes taking the bus home part of the time. We have not tried that out yet, but Christian has been poring over the bus routes and has it pretty well figured out. We will see how that goes. Eventually we are going to have to break down and buy another car. Maybe that was a poor choice of words.
I thought I would put up a brief update on the license plate reading project. The first thing we have to do is gather a bunch of images of the backs of cars in the right setting. I have made further progress on the application to do that. Our plan is to send out a camera and a netbook computer with some mounting hardware to my cousin in Oregon how is starting a new drive-through business. We will set up an ftp site in our office to gather images for a development and test data set. The business in Oregon is not yet open and we will probably not be ready to send anything out there for a couple of months anyway. Still, we have a good start and I am capturing images from a webcam. The next step will be to use an industrial machine vision camera rather than a webcam so it can handle life in the wild.
I am doing most of my programming on a Windows laptop, but also have my Xubuntu netbook which will be the delivery platform. I have a microcontroller for digital I/O hooked up and talking to the windows laptop. Tomorrow, I am going to get that going on the Xubuntu netbook if I have enough time.
Day 313 of 1000
Lately, our family talks about world views, morality, and world events more than has been normal for us in the past. I think this is because of the election in Mexico on Sunday, the election in the US in November, some Supreme Court rulings, propaganda filled college orientations indoctrinations, events in the Middle East, and our own rapidly changing lives. In the midst of all that, Christian is selling a lot of our old homeschool books to raise money to buy books, cell phones, and other stuff he and Kelly need for college. One of those books is titled, Understanding the Times by David A. Noebel. Kelly, Christian, and I read the book aloud together. We liked it very much because it pulled together a lot of material we had studied previously into a discussion about world views.
Actually, I have already written about the book a number of times. You can find those posts by clicking on the following links:
We read a lot of books, listened to audio talks, and watched videos about different worldview issues. Paul Johnson, Lila Rose, William Lane Craig, Greg Koukl, Dale Carnegie, William Dembski, Stephen Meyer, Robert Spenser, and others helped us to understand the historical reality of the death and resurrection of Jesus, the seminal role of Christianity in science, law, commerce, education, and the emancipation of slaves and women. They showed us why abortion and homesexual behavior are wrong and traditional marriage is right. The main thing Understanding the Times gave us was a grasp of how different worldviews understand all of these important topics and what to expect from people who are true to these competing worldviews.
The reason this has all come to mind is that we really tried to give the kids a sense for why they should hold to a biblical worldview. This book helped tie a lot of disparate topics together into a cogent whole. The deeper we delved into these subjects, the better we understood the truths on which a biblical worldview are founded. Understanding the Times did a good job of giving us the big picture when the kids were just starting high school. It has gone a long way to prepare them for what they have confronted in college. For that I am grateful.
The Weekly Standard has an article on the presidential election in Mexico this Sunday. It expresses hope for a Peña Nieto administration. He is a member of the PRI (political party) which has generally been a part of the problem in the past, but this article explains why it may not be the case. I have never been a fan of the PRI in the past, but this year the PAN, who I have generally supported has put forward a pro-abortion candidate, Josefina Vazquez Mota. That is especially sad because it has been so closely tied to the Catholic church in the past. I like the last paragraph in the article. It says,
It’s true that many PRI officials would prefer to take Mexico backward. But there are major structural forces (both institutional and societal) standing in their way, and Peña Nieto has sent encouraging signals about his appetite for reform. The country he will govern is an increasingly confident democracy with a healthy economy. Even on the security front, there has been progress, despite the horrifying number of drug murders. As former DEA administrator Robert Bonner wrote recently in Foreign Affairs, President Calderón “will bequeath to his successor major successes against the cartels, newly invigorated institutions, and a sound strategy.” Let’s hope that Peña Nieto doesn’t waste his opportunity.
Day 312 of 1000
We are running out of “first day of school” picture opportunities. If all goes well, the kids will be off to graduate school in a couple of years, but we doubt whether we will be there to take the picture. We often talk about the concept of life-long learning, so maybe I am wrong. I hope so. Our departed friend, John Sterling often told us about a fellow, I think it was Beach Paddon who just kept going to college. My understanding is that he got a new Masters degree every now and then.
This is a favorite topic of Charles Murray the co-author of, Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. Christian and I have spoken about how cool it would be to continue getting Masters degrees as a hobby after he finishes his “real” school. That is one way to continue learning, but self-teaching and pursuit of knowledge not readily available in college through alternate means are other good ways to keep learning. Homeschooling certainly served me well in that regard. Kelly has a sense for what she wants to do when she gets out of college and she will have to continually study and work to make it happen. Her school will give her something to do that she enjoys and will pay the rent, but her vocation lies in a completely separate direction.
At any rate, we have hit another milestone. The kids are stressed and excited. Lorena and I are a little bit melancholy.
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