Another quick two weeks have passed. The semester just keeps on marching on at the same, unrelenting pace that it always does.
I don't have too much to say about my classes. They all seem to be moving along decently well. CS 202 is finally getting around to some SQL stuff, which is good practice for me. I've done SQL queries before, but it's been a little while since I've done them, and so just putting all of the pieces back together again will be helpful. MATH 127 is doing okay. I feel as though the class is doing about the same, but it's hard to be sure because we changed the course content this last semester, and so I don't have quite the direct experience with the specific way that we're doing things. MATH 455 is looking good. I think we had a very good inquiry-based exploration day looking at quadratic reciprocity. This is the first time that I've done it this way, and I'll definitely be keeping it. MATH 427 is also doing well. We're in an area where I'm very confident in my knowledge of the subject, and so I can step into the material pretty confidently and just do it with them. It's also somewhat nice because we're doing some algebra-heavy content, which means that it's a lot of just letting them do the work and practice their organization, and not so much explaining new ideas to them.
A lot of things are about to crash together all at the same time, so the next few weeks are going to be a bit crazy. This coming weekend will be the AXIOM conference. Our registration is down compared to last year, which is a little disappointing. But we're going forward anyway and will do the post-mortem afterward. It's going to be an interesting conversation because there's a core belief that the idea is right, which means that there are things to look at in the execution. So we'll take a deep dive into the processes we've got and do some surveys and other things to help us figure out how to do things better.
The search committee work should probably start picking up soon. I have to check in (tomorrow) to see whether the candidate pool has met the diversity requirements that we need in order to start the review. I really don't know what to expect at this point, so we'll just find out whenever I hear back from HR about it. But once that one starts, I expect we'll be moving pretty quickly on things. Maybe we'll be through the phone interviews by early December? That would be ideal, but we'll have to see how things go.
We've got about two weeks to get the Data Science degree program paperwork together. So we're about to start having the final conversations about all of the details this week, just to make sure that everything looks/feels right. I am still pretty confident in what we've got, and I'm looking forward to seeing it all come together. It will be good to have this phase in the rear view mirror. It's been a good exercise for me to go through all of the conversations with different people to really try to work through how this is going to be put together, and it's really helped me to broaden my perspective and just get more experience with the data science world. I look forward to helping to guide things forward in the coming months, but it should be mostly hands off at that point at things just go through the various levels of review.
On the topic of data science, there's going to be a bioinformatics training session coming up in a couple weekends. That's going to be interesting because it's an area of data science that I don't have any experience with. I've been told that not having a deep understanding of genetics won't be a barrier to this, which is good because I don't have a deep understanding of genetics. I think it's going to be back-to-back all day events, and so it's going to chew up the whole weekend for me.
A response to my sabbatical application should be coming in pretty soon. It will be a very interesting thing if I get it, as this would make it the first time that I've had a real "break" from the academic routine that I've been in for the last 12 years. I had a bit of a break from the teaching for three years as Department Chair, but that doesn't actually count as a break. I'm optimistic that I'll get it, but I still need to wait for it to become official.
We're also going to start to look into what to do with the remedial policy. I know that the faculty that has taken the lead on this is starting to feel the pressure a little bit. There's also a meeting that we're sending a couple faculty (and other staff) to in late November, and that's when I think the rubber will meet the road and the real work will begin. It feels further away to me than it really is, which may be a somewhat bad sign.
I've also got to try to set up a meeting with the Oaxaca Medical team. We selected the team, and the students have been starting to buy their tickets, but I feel as though I haven't been as attentive to this as I maybe should be, even though I'm not sure what else I would do with it. Maybe it's not the Medical team as much as it is feeling a little bit unclear about the science center portion of it. I'm going to finalize some stuff to send to Dave this week, and maybe have a clearer vision for what will need to be put in place for the science center "soft launch" that we're thinking of doing. I hope that I'll get a clearer vision for this soon.
I'm also really moving into the plans for next semester. I'm perhaps about 25% through the semester for my notes for the 3D printing course. I'm going to change things up somewhat significantly this time around. I'm dropping TinkerCAD and spending more time fleshing out OpenSCAD before going into Fusion360. I still need to reach out to Alex to see if he would be willing to do the robot project again. I feel pretty good about the shift in the overall approach by setting aside TinkerCAD to spend more time exploring the other tools.
I've also got books selected for MATH 352, and am starting the process of thinking through what I would need to be able to do in R to teach those things the way I want to do it. I probably won't start looking at R and building out the notes until mid/late-November. But the big thing I want to do is simulations to build intuition and experience. I think the textbook does a pretty good job of setting this up, so all I really need to do is to spend time to learn how to code it effectively.
My arcade-style controller had a successful dry run, and so I'm starting to put things together in a more permanent way. I've had a little bit of difficulty with the connection between the controller and the machine. I haven't quite found the right way to secure all of the connector pins and so I keep getting a bad connection. I think I've got it on this last iteration, but I've said that to myself before and have been wrong about it. But once I've got this worked out, it's just going to be solder and heat-shrink tubing to finish it off.
I caught Thor drinking water from the toilet, which is strange because he has a water bowl and there was water in it. I'm not entirely sure what that's all about, but it's probably not good for him to do that. This will likely mean that I'm going to have to develop the habit of either closing the door or closing the lid, but either habit will take some effort to develop. I've also added a second water bowl that I'm going to put in the bathroom (a "yes, drink this" to go with the "no, don't drink that") and try to monitor the amount of water that he drinks. For all I know, he's been feeling like he hasn't been having water shortages, and this is the first time I've actually caught him drinking the toilet water.
Other stuff: Piano? Ha! I really need to set aside an hour sometime and force myself to sit there and play. The church is doing a chili cook-off in a couple weekends, and it's also been a while since I last made chili, so I'm going to enjoy the process of doing that again. I've been doing pretty well with consistent walking once a week. I finished reading the book on Bayesian statistics, and I'm not sure what's next.
