It's VIFF time again. VIFF is the Vancouver International Film Festival, which takes place each year 'round this time. Lots of great films from everywhere. I tend not to go to films much during the rest of the year - action films bore me silly, and most of the rest from Hollywood seem to be longer versions of what's already on TV and just as vapid. The Ridge has better stuff, but it's a bit out of the way for us car-less folk.

Thus far, I've seen:

* Shangri-la

* Getting My Brother Laid (the funniest of the four)

* A Cab for Three

* Springtime in a Small Town

You can see my taste runs mostly to comedy; the first three were loads of fun. With a few exceptions (notably Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), I normally like Chinese films, but Springtime was less enjoyable on several counts, not the least its maddening slow pace and stilted dialogue.

Four down; seven or more to go.

Big trouble in the world of "Big Physics": Six months ago, Jan Hendrik Schön seemed like a slam dunk nominee for a Nobel prize. Then some of his colleagues started to take a closer look at his research.

From Salon, a detailed report of another scandal over faked research results and the failure of peer review to catch them. There's the predictable blaming of reviewers:

A referee in a new field doesn't want to "be the bad guy on the block," says Dutch physicist Teun Klapwijk, so he generally gives the author the benefit of the doubt.

and

When the names of eminent people and places appear on the top of submitted papers, says Florida physicist Hebard, "reviewers react almost unconsciously" to their prestige.

There's also not a little blame-seeking elsewhere: his supervisor? the journals? About the only acknowledgment that the peer-review system itself may be partially at fault is this comment about the huge "publish or perish" pressures faced by academic researchers: " ..there's an incredible amount of pressure on young and midcareer scientists. They always need to know where the next grant is coming from." Expectations of grantsmanship are of course no excuse for dishonesty, but the rewards for grantsmanship are often great, sometimes more than for actual research. The consequences are predictable.

There's an interesting draft paper up for discussion on ITFORUM: An Updated and Theoretical Rationale for Interaction, by Terry Anderson. At its heart is Anderson's "equivalency theorem":

Sufficient levels of deep and meaningful learning can be developed as long as one of the three forms of interaction (student-teacher; student-student; student-content) are at very high levels. The other two may be offered at minimal levels or even eliminated without degrading the educational experience.

High levels of more than one of these three modes will likely deliver a more satisfying educational experience, though these experiences may not be as cost or time effective as less interactive learning sequences.

The paper lists many corollaries and consequences of this theorem. I like that the discussion is even-handed: it acknowledges the role of student-content interactivity as a component of learning equally valid with student-teacher and student-student interaction. Moreover, it raises the possibility that student interaction with sufficiently well-designed content could actually replace student-teacher and student-student interaction. This is an anathema to many educational theorists, who tend to minimize or ignore altogether the role of content interaction in the educational process in favour of interpersonal interaction.

It's highly subject-dependent, of course: discussion-oriented subjects like philosophy, for example, would still require substantially more interpersonal interaction than would content-based subjects like mathematics. But with the continuing world-wide shortages of teachers and the increased inclusion of technology in education, the electronic communication of content is going to assume a much greater importance than many currently realize. A better understanding of the design of that content will become a necessary and important part of the communication process.

A propos my earlier post, an interesting article in the latest SFU News: A Monumental Failure of Peer Review: "How could allegedly fraudulent research, not just get published, but win prestigious academic prizes?" The Bellesiles scandal - a US historian whose claims didn't hold up to close scrutiny.

An interesting article, though it strongly endorses maintaining peer review as it is: "All academics must work to keep the peer review process healthy and act vigorously to root out unprofessional conduct." (That statement makes me uneasy - I have visions of a posse of academic vigilantes going after the black hatted guys.)

Extra vigilance to shore up an inherently flawed system is ultimately a less useful option than examining the workings of that system and possibly changing it. Even if the change proceeds at academia's usual glacial pace.

This afternoon, I went to a tour of NewMic (New Media Innovation Centre, an "Industry-Academia-Government collaborative centre focused on researching and developing new media technologies"). Lots of impressive high-tech equipment and space for researchers and students to work. The highlight of the tour was NewMic's CAVE.

CAVE is one of those trendy self-referring acronyms: CAVE Automatic Virtual Environment. Basically, you put on a headset and find yourself inside a projected 3-D environment - in our case, inside a world of knots generated by Rob Scharein's KnotPlot software. Using a pointer/wand thingy, you draw the knots and then press a button to move them or let them relax into simpler shapes. Very convincing - it's hard to resist the urge to reach out and grab a knot, or move automatically out of the way when it comes towards you.

A cool visualizaton tool for those working in mathematical knot threory. It's not all work, though - the CAVE version of Quake seemed to attract as much interest as the knots did, at least among the male cohort of the group.

I'm spending more time immersed in actionscript again. Loads of fun: I've been making educational widgets for learning math. Some day I'll try to get some of them up on the Juniverse for folks to look at - stay tuned.

It's amazing how fast the daylight hours shrink at this time of year. A few short weeks ago, it was dark by the time I got home from the gym; now it's dark before I set out. I'm not complaining. I like this time of year better than others: summer's focus on sun & fun is over, and I look forward to cooler weather and more non-daylight hours spent at work or with books and other indoor pleasures.

I once lived in southern California, where it's almost always sunny. I found it very hard to focus on productive work there - having grown up in grayer climes, my whole subconcious believes that sunny days are rare and meant to be enjoyed outdoors. Closing the drapes and turning on a desk lamp created a helpful illusion of grayness that let me work, but I never quite got used to near-continuous sun - in fact, it was quite stressful.

Like some houseplants, my brain thrives better away from direct sunlight. In a month or two, Vancouver days will be mostly gray and rainy as well as short, and the de rigeur complaining about Vancouver weather will start once again. You won't hear any complaints from me.

Subitizing is the ability to recognize numbers of objects perceptually, without counting. Most of us can subitize up to five or six items; some can go even higher (a friend of mine to about 17). It's sometimes not clear what is subitizing and what is counting; see Babies don't count.

From a NIMH press release entitled "Even neurons have favorite numbers":

"At least a third of the communicating cells in a front part of the brain critical for reasoning and planning seem adept at keeping track of the number of things seen, report scientists funded by the National Institute of Mental Health. What's more, they even pick favorite quantities. "

The research measured the prefrontal neuron activity of two monkeys trained to release a lever when the number of dots on a computer screen matched the number they had seen a second before (two to five). Indications are that the at least a third of the cells were attuning themselves to different quantities. The researchers suggest that "future studies may lead to a better understanding of such numerical competence, with possible applications in education and in the treatment of cognitive deficits. "

Some interesting sites I happened upon during the past week.

Bembo's Zoo. A "high-concept abecedary", this website animates the letters in the name of each animal into a picture of the animal itself. Based on (and a promo for?) the children's book by Roberto De Vicq De Cumptich,. (Bembo is a classic typeface.)

Hand-drawn holograms. "I've stumbled across a technique for drawing holograms directly upon a plastic plate by hand. It sounds impossible, but I've been sitting on the livingroom sofa making holographic images of floating polyhedra, words, 3D starfields, opaque objects, etc. No laser, no isolation table, no darkroom, no expensive film plates. This takes nothing more than a compass and some scraps of plexiglas. Too cool, if I say so myself! " An old-but-goodie, with a list of related hologram links.

Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics. "Technonerds go to movies strictly for entertainment, and of course, the most entertaining part comes after the movie when they can dissect, criticize, and argue the merits of every detail. However, when supposedly serious scenes totally disregard the laws of physics in blatantly obvious ways it's enough to make us retch. The motion picture industry has failed to police itself against the evils of bad physics. This page is provided as a public service in hopes of improving this deplorable matter. The minds of our children and their ability to master vectors are (shudder) at stake."

On a more positive note, the Math in the Movies Page rates the good math content as well as the bad.

I went to an open house at SFU's GrUVi Lab yesterday (GrUVi = graphics + usability + visualization). Several interesting demos on things like a Cell Projection Program, Digital Fog Simulation, Digital Geometry Processing, etc.. An interesting one on a Laparoscopic Training Environment: at one end, the handle part of the scissors-like thingy used to do the surgery, and at the other a computer screen with a simulated human body (with triangulated surface) which could be operated upon by suitably manipulating the handles. Some very realistic but bloodless gashes appeared (there's the potential for a very gruesome slasher movie in this somewhere).

An interesting comment by one of the observers: if we're going to computerize surgery like this, wouldn't it be better to eliminate the clumsy scissors thingy and allow the surgeon to operate more directly by drawing a finger over the simulated body? Seen in this light, the set-up seems very HC (horseless carriage: adjective used to describe a new technology modeled directly on a previous technology rather than using the affordances of the new one). However, if the idea is to teach potential surgeons the "hands-on" use of existing equipment, the set-up makes more sense. It's still in its very primitive early stages, though.

Interesting couple of hours - good food, too.

Yippee! I've just learned that my noisey neighbours across the way have been evicted! I went to complain about the loud arguments and foul language that were disturbing my peace and quiet and discovered that the problem was much worse than I knew about - teenage drinking, gangs, etc. etc. - unbelievable! Just two more weeks till the end of the month!

An interesting article in the August issue of the Journal of Electronic Publishing: Quality Control in Scholarly Publishing On The Web, concludes that

"Most of the high quality materials on the Web are not peer-reviewed and much of the peer-reviewed literature is of dubious quality. Publishers and libraries need to approach the challenge of identifying quality with a fresh mind. "

The author (William Arms) gives numerous examples of various strategies for assessing web-based materials (academic and otherwise) other than formal peer review. Other quotes, of the "what everyone knows but no-one admits" genre (referring mostly to print journals):

"For the lowest-quality journals, peer review merely puts a stamp on mediocre work that will never be read"

"In many fields, the principal use of peer-reviewed journals is not to publish research but to provide apparently impartial criteria for universities to use in promoting faculty."

I've experienced both the authoring and refereeing ends of peer review (not to mention promotion and tenure committees), and have been somewhat cynical for a long while. Most mathematics journals have the same general criteria for quality: is it correct? is it new? and is it interesting/significant/whatever? (the words vary from journal to journal). My illusions about the first were shattered as a grad student when I found a non-trivial error in a paper co-authored by a prominent mathematician (J. Dieudonné) and many other errors by lesser-knowns, all in supposedly refereed journals. As for the second, a very nice result I once discovered and published in a refereed journal turned out to have been discovered and published at least twice independently before. The third criterion is highly subjective: more than once I've had a paper dismissed as uninteresting by one referee only to be praised as significant by another.

Peer review works reasonably well in some situations, in particular if the research area is well-developed and already has a substantial corpus of work and practitioners to its credit. In that case, it's the "many eyes" that make the difference: more eyes to spot errors, a large enough pool of knowledgeable referees to choose from, and an accepted canon of what's important or not in that area. In less travelled areas, peer review works less well: journal editors, often unfamiliar with the subject themselves, struggle to find any referee willing to review the paper and often resort to marginally qualified referees, or referees willing to pass judgment on what they don't really understand. Anything deviating too widely from established norms and interests is usually rejected (one wonders what they would make of Einstein's original relativity papers were they submitted for publication today). There are other problems with peer review, for example the minimal amount and quality of timely feedback to authors I wrote about in an earlier post.

With the advent of the web, the stranglehold of established academic journals over academic publishing/distribution is starting to loosen. It'll be interesting to watch as the stranglehold of peer review over evaluation begins to loosen and new forms of academic evaluation develop.

August was mostly dead as far as interesting education-related ideas are concerned. On the lighter side, a few interesting toy/entertainment sites I came across.

Turing machine. More art than math/computer science. Takes some experimenting to understand how/if it works - I'm not sure I do yet .... From a less interesting "teaser" site called Timehunt.

Kaleidosoup. A kaleidoscope with a choice of 80 or so 72 initial patterns to choose from. Adjustable size etc., but not the number of sections (an obvious parameter to vary for a geometer - why fix it at 9?). Before I saw it, I was thinking about trying a kaleidoscope as a Flash-learning exercise, but now I'd spend too much time trying to best this one.

Puppet tool. From lecielestbleu, a "tool for creating user-generated animated states". Animate a penguin, a crab, a somewhat dozy-looking horse, etc. As with real puppets, it's as easy to make them move unnaturally as naturally.

Warriors of the Net. A downloadable movie explaining how the net works (technically), in somewhat the style of a Hollywood mega-epic cum PBS science show. Fun - love that router!

... and the start of a new academic year. Since I'm doing web things nowadays rather than (direct) teaching, it doesn't have as much of the "new beginnings" feeling as in other years; nevertheless, the habits from childhood don't change that easily - I'm still tempted to buy pristine notebooks and unchewed pencils 'round this time of year.

What is (or will be) new are some upgrades of the Juniverse - new sections and new material as I move projects over from elsewhere. Stay tuned!