Tests and Grandmatronly Mortality

It’s been conclusively proven: sad but true, students’ family members die at much higher rates just prior to exams. It’s even harder on the families of students who aren’t doing well -- perhaps they die of shame?There are graphs and everything, and according to my cargo cult understanding of science, graphs equals truth. Can’t argue with it.
So think about that, teachers and professors, next time you lift your poison pen to scratch out a test paper! J’accuse!
(H/T to Doc Grasshopper)

Real Robot Facts (also fun)

Something like 50% of the people who come to this blog are searching for "robot facts" and getting a joke post from earlier. That's... kind of embarrassing, actually. Here's some more useful stuff if you want to learn about the state of robotics:

Fact #1: Japan has the coolest robots in the world. Dr. Hirose is the guy to look at, his lab produces robot snakes that are just awesome. I first came upon his work at a symposium for search and rescue robotics at NIST, where his students had a 3m-long remote-controlled robot snake for use in searching deep rubble piles. You could spend all day looking at the videos on his page and still not see it all -- if your time is a little more limited, at least watch the swimming snake bot video.

Fact #2: One of the smallest robots in the world was built by a classmate of mine at Dartmouth. They rely on having a specially-designed platform that delivers voltage levels that not only power but steer them using alternating strips of conductive material. By raising and lowering the relative voltages they can not only power one tiny little robot, they can cause its arm to stick to the surface, making it pivot (A high voltage causes it to snap downward, making use of physical forces normally too small to notice, then another reversed voltage snaps the arm back so that the robot can continue on)

Fact #3: People have more senses than they think. Proprioception in particular is interesting: it is basically the sense of where your body is with respect to yourself, and lets you do things like touch your nose with your eyes closed. Like your other senses, it can be dulled by alcohol, hence that legendary road-size sobriety test. This can be devilishly difficult for a robot -- the more limbs, the harder. Trying to calculate where the head of that snake robot is from the tail would be a formidable task if you're relying on its internal sensors alone! Sensors, like human senses, have errors that accumulate.
Related to that is the concept of dead reckoning. Try this experiment: stand with your toes to a wall, and shut your eyes. Take two steps backward, then two steps forward. You can probably manage to hot give yourself a bloody nose with two steps. Now try it with five steps (you might want a pillow in front of your face or a friend you can trust) This is a good example of the accumulation of error, and is why your Roomba vacuum cleaner can't just retrace its steps to get back to its base.

Fact #4: Because robots are being proposed for wide use in search & rescue, extraplanetary exploration, and simple patrols, there's a great deal of interest in a subject called SLAM: Simultaneous Localization and Mapping. Basically, this is the art of turning a robot into a cartographer. SLAM requires using all of a robot's sensors to figure out its pose as precisely as possible, "pose" meaning the location, orientation, and position of every part of a robot with respect to itself, to its surroundings, and (in a very interesting case) other robots on its "team". Sebastian Thrun wrote a lengthy survey paper on the subject that I still refer to from time to time.

I'd be happy to expand on these if there's interest.
(Edit: A recent post on the development of deceit in swarm robotics might be of interest.)

Like barber college, but not as useful

One of the things that has always bothered me about the process of getting a PhD is that there were very few opportunities to get teaching experience for many departments. And despite the fact that many graduate students are better teachers than the professors, the stigma of "being taught by a grad student" remains. At the same time, students on both sides of the desks are wary of lazy professors dropping their grad students into the deep end, which is what often happens in those cases where students do teach.

Why not put together an after-hours community outreach teaching program, then? There's always a market for basic courses like introductory programming, mathematics, basic sciences, and languages. Many other courses, it seems, would be useful for high school kids looking to get an edge getting into college, retirees looking for something interesting, and college kids looking for something to do or for a head start on an upcoming course. I'd certainly be interested in filling in some of the gaps in my education, either by picking up Japanese courses again, taking some history courses, or making another attempt at learning optics. (It never quite took, the first time around.)

The college, then, would provide the facility, some organizational help, and some assistance in course development. In exchange, the college would split any proceeds with the teacher(s). (The plural is for the likely case of one student not being confident enough to take on a class alone, but being willing to team up with a fellow student). The classes themselves should be long enough to require meaningful planning, but not so long as to make it difficult for potential students to commit. Homework and exams should be included -- they help ensure participation, and are good practice. A final grade, however, would probably not be helpful: it might be better for both student and teacher to have a mediated exit interview.

I'm looking into typing this up as a proposal to send to the Dean of the school I just graduated from. Any suggestions would be welcome.

I should note that Dartmouth already has something kinda-sorta like this, the "Miniversity" courses. These are taught by students, staff, and professors, and tend to be along the lines of cooking, dancing, language. However, they're often somewhat expensive, and are not usually academically-oriented -- they're often quite good, but not what I'm thinking of.