I'm a little extra tired because I was part of set-up this morning at church. So getting there at 7:30 AM was more like getting there at 6:30 AM. I need to not take a nap, because if I take a nap I'm going to really screw up my sleep schedule. Apparently, there's something like a 6% increase in fatal car collisions the week after daylight saving goes into effect. Which is just another reason why the whole thing is silly and we should figure out how to be smarter about these things.
The semester is continuing its steady march forward. The MATH 127 course did okay with their midterms. It was probably a little weaker than it ought to have been, and a lot more students than usual have been skipping the write-up assignments, and so that's a strong indicator of the reason why they're struggling. But they have enough opportunities to catch up on those assignments and get back lost points on their exams that I'm not too worried about them not having opportunities to pass. But I also know that historically, there's no reason for me to expect a full turnaround except for maybe a couple students. But I do have an assignment where I have the students reflect on their performance, and it's rare that any of them cite a lack of resources and materials as their reason for not being successful or that the test seemed unfair or unnecessarily difficult. They all talk about not having enough time to study, or they talk about test anxiety, or they say something about their time management.
The MATH 352 class is coming along just fine. The minor adjustment I made to preparing seems to be doing a good enough job of keeping me on track. I'm having a lot of fun with the class, because the students are expressing a deeper intrinsic interest in the topic than what I get from something like a Real Analysis course. The questions are a little bit more insightful, and the discussion requires a bit better on-the-fly thinking and examples. This has really picked up since moving into the statistics part of the course.
ART 240 will be moving into Fusion 360 next week. I'm looking forward to it. This semester is going so much better than past semesters, and I'm hoping that will continue into this transition. And the MATH 454 course is doing just fine.
One of our faculty passed away unexpectedly last week. I knew her, but we weren't close. She had an office down the hall from me a few years ago. But I did not have a lot of deep interaction with her. But she was always smiling and energetic, and she seemed to be fairly popular with the students. There's supposed to be a memorial service or something planned for the campus, but I don't know when it will be. I do hope that it will be helpful for the students that had her and the faculty that worked more closely with her.
Other negative news, though not as heavy, is that the math search made two offers and both were declined, so we're going back to the pool to see if there's anything left. This is an awkward sort of thing where we don't want to lower our standards just to get someone into the position, but we also feel that sense of desperation to find someone. My mindset is that it's better to not hire than to hire poorly, because at least if we don't hire we can start with a fresh pool of candidates next year. But if we hire poorly, that's probably going to lead to at least 2-3 difficult years of trying to get someone on board and up to speed that maybe won't be able to make it. So we'll see how that goes.
The Data Science search committee has submitted its recommendation, and we're just waiting to see what the Provost is going to do with it. I think we've identified some good candidates, and I'm optimistic that things will move forward in a healthy under their guidance. There's not too much more I can say about that for now.
The search for a new Dean for LAS is in a rough spot, too. They had identified two candidates, but one took a position elsewhere and the other had to decline for personal reasons. This is a bit disappointing because there are a number of things that are difficult and unclear without guidance from that position. The interim Dean we have has been doing a great job, but part of the role as an interim is to go away after a set amount of time, so that's going to lead to another interim next year unless the committee finds a new candidate that they like. So that's another one that's going to keep things interesting.
The President of the college announced that he will not be seeking a renewal of his contract, and so will be ending his service at Nevada State at the end of next year. This has been in the air for a while now, so it's not a surprise. And since he announced it this early, it will give us the chance to find a replacement without needing to go to an interim. But there's always the chance (just as with the Dean search) that it's not going to land. But that's for next year to worry about.
I've continued to play with the computer vision stuff over the last couple weeks. After a marathon session to get things jump-started two weekends ago, my time on it has been more measured. But I have been able to write a program that can take a string of three consecutive photos and identify the differences between them, then draw an outline around those things to make them easier for a person to look at and identify whether the changes are creatures or just noise (such as a branch waving in front of the camera). There was a collection of about 5500 images that I was able to process this way in about 15 minutes, so I feel pretty good about that. I still need to take a deeper look at the Haar classifier to see if I can get it to tell the difference between a rat and a rabbit. I have no idea how well it will work. I guess that will depend on how well I select the training images.
I'm slowly making progress on the materials for MATH 126. I've got about 7 sections of text typed up, and I need to loop back and make some worksheets to go with it. I'm probably a little behind where I should be right now, but that's mostly due to the search committee stuff taking more time than I had hoped and a few other things that have come up. I should be able to refocus a bit more on this in the next little bit and get myself caught up. Fortunately, I have until the start of the Fall to pull that all together, and a lot of it can be borrowed from previously developed materials.
Officially, the vision committee for church is done with its work. We didn't get to a full vision statement, but we did lay a solid foundation for things in the future, and we're starting to influence the language a bit that the church is using, which is a simple organic-feeling way for new ideas to be introduced. There was also a sense of how to structure things so that they keep moving in that direction. I'll be interested in seeing how that gets implemented as we start to move towards the 3-month and 6-month marks. It's easy for these types of things to just die on the vine after some initial sprouting, so we'll just have to see what happens.
I talked with Dave after church today, and things are kind of on hold with the science center for now. It's clear that we won't be going back to Eloxochitlan because the political climate is not going to let us get back there. This means we've lost a little bit of money that was spent cleaning up that building and getting it painted, re-tiled, and getting those concrete tables poured. However, there's some possibility of moving it to Santa Catarina, which is where we held the last medical clinic with the students. It's not quite as remote if we come up from the other side, and it has a lot of youths that have a level of energy for and interest for that sort of thing. Some of his camp leaders are from the area, and that gives us a bit more organizational energy behind it.
I've officially applied to UNLV graduate school. My application is still under review, but based on the conversation I had with the coordinator, it's essentially guaranteed, so it feels very much like a formality to me. I have not heard anything negative about the updated plan, so I'm going to keep moving forward with it. I'm still hoping that the Provost's Office would be willing to put up some funds to help pay for it. But I'm still waiting for some of the dust to settle on the formal position before really leaning into that one. There's also plenty of time.
Thor is continuing his journey towards becoming a normal cat. I haven't done the exercise of trying to pick him up again, but I was able to get him inside the cat carrier and close the door behind him a couple times (using a string and staying a distance away). I'm going to keep doing that exercise a bit more. The other morning, he was at the foot of the bed and came over to be pet when I called to him, which is a brand new thing. That's opening him up to be touched more, which will hopefully continue acclimating him to it. I'm still trying to see where the limits are with him in terms of getting my hands on both sides of him and/or underneath him. It's a bit harder because while I'm on my back in bed, there's really no good angle for me to even begin to try to pick him up, so I'm still working that one out.
Other things: My aunt has her feeding tube out and seems to be eating well, so that's good news. She still has a lot of recovery to go, but this is a good starting point. I have a different friend who was in the hospital after a car crash. She sounds like she's doing pretty well in general and is in a rehab clinic now. I've got a couple interesting decisions coming ahead among all the other things going on. I'll probably piano a bit after I'm done with this. I kind of miss curling, but there won't be another opportunity for that for a while. People hoarding toilet paper is among the stranger things I've seen as a result of the coronavirus. I think there are things more important than that if you're preparing for a post-apocalyptic world. I guess drinking bleach is a worse idea, so there's always that. (I guess it's factually true in that if you're dead you can't get the virus anymore...) And that's a good place to end this thing.
