4/10/2014
I explored the Google Sky to see if I can use it for my Astronomy course. The tool is sill under development, so it's not as sophisticated as Google Earth. We can not navigate to get anywhere we want to go as we can with Google Earth, and the map is not 3-d. Instead, it's a huge collection of beautiful pictures of the universe, including different constellations, galaxies, planets, etc. , which serves well as visualizations of different objects and phenomena in the universe. I look forward to seeing more happening with this google tool. It could be very useful for any level of study of the universe.
Thursday, April 10, 2014
Monday, March 10, 2014
Blog Post #4 - My Project Idea
3/7/2014
I have been thinking about how to effectively apply the techniques and methods I have learned in our PLS seminars to my teaching of science courses. It is not very straightforward for me because science teaching is not quite the same as humanities teaching. For me, most techniques or apps/tools we use to do text analysis cannot be organically incorporated into my science teaching.
I did some"out of the box" thinking and finally came up with a very good idea: Instead of using the text analysis and other tools which works better for humanities and less appropriate for sciences, especially physics/astronomy teaching, I am going to construct a pool of tools/apps for physics and astronomy teaching and post the links on my ePortfoio or Blackboard. These links will be open to all my students and colleagues, especially adjunct faculty members,who usually are not expected to devote as much time to pedagogy research as we full-time faculty are.
I have been thinking about how to effectively apply the techniques and methods I have learned in our PLS seminars to my teaching of science courses. It is not very straightforward for me because science teaching is not quite the same as humanities teaching. For me, most techniques or apps/tools we use to do text analysis cannot be organically incorporated into my science teaching.
I did some"out of the box" thinking and finally came up with a very good idea: Instead of using the text analysis and other tools which works better for humanities and less appropriate for sciences, especially physics/astronomy teaching, I am going to construct a pool of tools/apps for physics and astronomy teaching and post the links on my ePortfoio or Blackboard. These links will be open to all my students and colleagues, especially adjunct faculty members,who usually are not expected to devote as much time to pedagogy research as we full-time faculty are.
Friday, February 7, 2014
Post #3 - Exploring Text Visualization Tools
2/7/2014I selected a book from Project Gutenberg titled as " The Evolution of Modern Medicine- a Series of Lectures Delivered at Yale University " by William Osler in April, 1913.
The above word cloud was created using Wordle based on the whole text of the book.
And then I created a visualization of the same text using the Voyant Visualization tool. It gave me a summary as follows:
- There is 1 document in this corpus with a total of 66,108 words and 9,270 unique words.
- Most frequent words in the corpus: the (5,782), of (3,853), and (2,154), in (1,776), to (1,349).
And a visualized graph was generated as shown below:
The experiments with these text analysis tools were fun and pretty easy to use. I believe students will love this.
Tuesday, February 4, 2014
Post #2 Challenges and Opportunities in the Digital Humanities
2/4/2014
I read the NYT article "Digital Keys for Unlocking the Humanities’ Riches" by Patricia Cohen. This article mainly discussed the challenges humanists are facing when it comes to digital humanities. More specifically, how big data are changing the scope and the way humanist do research.
In this article, the author mentioned that "Digital humanities scholars also face a more practical test: What knowledge can they produce that their predecessors could not?" In other words, what can humanists do with the unprecedented data available to them and what conclusions can they draw from them?
After reading the article, I personally think digital humanities is more like an opportunity than challenge to humanists. Most time, a good book, an amazing movie, a fantastic musical may mean different things to different people. The impact of them is in our hearts, in our mind, hard to describe accurately, even harder to share sometimes. But with digital tools, imaginations, pictures in our mind, even feelings can be built into a concrete object. More amazingly, a lot of people can work together to make it more accurate, comprehensive and delicate.
To me, this evolution in humanities is very similar to the evolution form 2D to 3D movies in the film-making industry. It's not destroying something old and building something new. Instead it's develop new things on the basis of old things.
There are challenges, but more opportunities coming with it. Every one should embrace this new era or big data, both scientists and humanists!
I read the NYT article "Digital Keys for Unlocking the Humanities’ Riches" by Patricia Cohen. This article mainly discussed the challenges humanists are facing when it comes to digital humanities. More specifically, how big data are changing the scope and the way humanist do research.
In this article, the author mentioned that "Digital humanities scholars also face a more practical test: What knowledge can they produce that their predecessors could not?" In other words, what can humanists do with the unprecedented data available to them and what conclusions can they draw from them?
After reading the article, I personally think digital humanities is more like an opportunity than challenge to humanists. Most time, a good book, an amazing movie, a fantastic musical may mean different things to different people. The impact of them is in our hearts, in our mind, hard to describe accurately, even harder to share sometimes. But with digital tools, imaginations, pictures in our mind, even feelings can be built into a concrete object. More amazingly, a lot of people can work together to make it more accurate, comprehensive and delicate.
To me, this evolution in humanities is very similar to the evolution form 2D to 3D movies in the film-making industry. It's not destroying something old and building something new. Instead it's develop new things on the basis of old things.
There are challenges, but more opportunities coming with it. Every one should embrace this new era or big data, both scientists and humanists!
Friday, January 24, 2014
Post #1 Beyond Two Cultures
Jan. 24 2014
My name is Xin Gao. I am new here are LaGuardia as an Assistant Professor in the Natural Sciences Department, teaching Physics.
Students in my classes are mostly engineer or Math and Science majors. Most of them have pretty good science and math literacy. I am not sure if students feel a tension between Science/Math and the humanities. I personally love literature and do not feel these two areas conflict with each other. The digital tools actually makes it easy for me to read. There are many free books online. Instead of carrying a heavy book in my handbag. I just open an app in my cellphone and start reading whatever I like on my way to work/home. Without these tools, I would not be able to spare time to read this much.
For students, I think digital tools will do the same to them. No matter the student is a Humanities major or a Science major, it is only easier for them to pick up some knowledge from the other side with today's new technological gadgets.
I think when people say "two cultures", they mean the way scientists think maybe different from the way humanists think. It is possibly true. But it doesn't mean these two thinking methods conflicts with each other. I truly believe one can be both rational and perceptual. It just depends on the situations. That's also why great scientist as Einstein can play the violin very well. In this sense, "two cultures" do not only conflict with each other, but also compliment each other.
We all have potentials. We just need to explore them and give them the opportunities to develop.
My name is Xin Gao. I am new here are LaGuardia as an Assistant Professor in the Natural Sciences Department, teaching Physics.
Students in my classes are mostly engineer or Math and Science majors. Most of them have pretty good science and math literacy. I am not sure if students feel a tension between Science/Math and the humanities. I personally love literature and do not feel these two areas conflict with each other. The digital tools actually makes it easy for me to read. There are many free books online. Instead of carrying a heavy book in my handbag. I just open an app in my cellphone and start reading whatever I like on my way to work/home. Without these tools, I would not be able to spare time to read this much.
For students, I think digital tools will do the same to them. No matter the student is a Humanities major or a Science major, it is only easier for them to pick up some knowledge from the other side with today's new technological gadgets.
I think when people say "two cultures", they mean the way scientists think maybe different from the way humanists think. It is possibly true. But it doesn't mean these two thinking methods conflicts with each other. I truly believe one can be both rational and perceptual. It just depends on the situations. That's also why great scientist as Einstein can play the violin very well. In this sense, "two cultures" do not only conflict with each other, but also compliment each other.
We all have potentials. We just need to explore them and give them the opportunities to develop.
Friday, January 10, 2014
Ideas for Seminar Projects Using DH
1/10/2014
I did some research and "discovered" a bunch of websites for physics simulations and videos, such as:
Phet
MPEA
MyPhysicsLab
In the project, I will re-design the lectures for the course I am teaching and incorporate the simulation videos in my teaching.
I did some research and "discovered" a bunch of websites for physics simulations and videos, such as:
Phet
MPEA
MyPhysicsLab
In the project, I will re-design the lectures for the course I am teaching and incorporate the simulation videos in my teaching.
New wave of computer chips
New York Times 1/10/2014 by John Markoff
PALO
ALTO, Calif. — Not long after Gordon E. Moore proposed in 1965 that the
number of transistors that could be etched on a silicon chip would
continue to double approximately every 18 months, critics began
predicting that the era of “Moore’s Law” would draw to a close.
More than ever recently, industry pundits have been warning that the progress of the semiconductor industry is grinding to a halt — and that the theory of Dr. Moore, an Intel co-founder, has run its course.
If
so, that will have a dramatic impact on the computer world. The
innovation that has led to personal computers, music players and
smartphones is directly related to the plunging cost of transistors,
which are now braided by the billions onto fingernail slivers of silicon
— computer chips — that may sell for as little as a few dollars each.
But
Moore’s Law is not dead; it is just evolving, according to more
optimistic scientists and engineers. Their contention is that it will be
possible to create circuits that are closer to the scale of individual
molecules by using a new class of nanomaterials — metals, ceramics, polymeric or composite materials that can be organized from the “bottom up,” rather than the top down.
For
instance, semiconductor designers are developing chemical processes
that can make it possible to “self assemble” circuits by causing the
materials to form patterns of ultrathin wires on a semiconductor wafer.
Combining these patterns of nanowires with conventional chip-making
techniques, the scientists believe, will lead to a new class of computer
chips, keeping Moore’s Law alive while reducing the cost of making
chips in the future.
“The key is self assembly,” said Chandrasekhar Narayan, director of science and technology at IBM’s Almaden Research Center
in San Jose, Calif. “You use the forces of nature to do your work for
you. Brute force doesn’t work any more; you have to work with nature and
let things happen by themselves.”
To
do this, semiconductor manufacturers will have to move from the silicon
era to what might be called the era of computational materials.
Researchers here in Silicon Valley, using powerful new supercomputers to
simulate their predictions, are leading the way. While semiconductor
chips are no longer made here, the new classes of materials being
developed in this area are likely to reshape the computing world over
the next decade.
“Materials are very important to our human societies,” said Shoucheng Zhang,
a Stanford University physicist who recently led a group of researchers
to design a tin alloy that has superconductinglike properties at room
temperature. “Entire eras are named after materials — the stone age, the
iron age and now we have the silicon age. In the past they have been
discovered serendipitously. Once we have the power to predict materials,
I think it’s transformative.”
Pushing
this research forward is economics — specifically, the staggering cost
semiconductor manufacturers are expecting to pay for their
next-generation factories. In the chip-making industry this has been
referred to as “Moore’s Second Law.”
Two years from now new factories for making microprocessor chips will cost from $8 to $10 billion, according to a recent Gartner report
— more than twice as much as the current generation. That amount could
rise to between $15 and $20 billion by the end of the decade, equivalent
to the gross domestic product of a small nation.
The
stunning expenditures that soon will be required mean that the risk of
error for chip companies is immense. So rather than investing in
expensive conventional technologies that might fail, researchers are
looking to these new self-assembling materials.
Advert
In December, researchers at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, Calif., published a Science paper
describing advances in a new class of materials called “metal-organic
frameworks” or MOFs. These are crystalline ensembles of metal ions and
organic molecules. They have been simulated with high-performance
computers, and then verified experimentally.
What
the scientists have proven is that they can create conductive thin
films, which could be used in a range of applications, including
photovoltaics, sensors and electronic materials.
The scientists said that they now see paths for moving beyond the conductive materials, toward creating semiconductors as well.
According to Mark D. Allendorf,
a Sandia chemist, there are very few things that you can do with
conventional semiconductorsto change the behavior of a material. With
MOFs he envisions a future in which molecules can be precisely ordered
to create materials with specific behaviors.
“One
of the reasons that Sandia is well positioned is that we have huge
supercomputers,” he said. They have been able to simulate matrixes of
600 atoms, large enough for the computer to serve as an effective test
tube.
In November, scientists at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, writing in the journal Physical Review Letters,
described a new form of tin that, at only a single molecule thick, has
been predicted to conduct electricity with 100 percent efficiency at
room temperature. Until now these kinds of efficiencies have only been
found in materials known as superconductors, and then only at
temperatures near absolute zero.
The
material would be an example of a new class of materials called
“topological insulators” that are highly conductive along a surface or
edge, but insulating on their interior. In this case the researchers
have proposed a structure with fluorine atoms added to a single layer of
tin atoms.
The
scientists, led by Dr. Zhang, named the new material stanene, combining
the Latin name for tin — stannum — with the suffix used for graphene,
another material based on a sheet of carbon atoms a single molecule
thick.
The
promise of such a material is that it might be easily used in
conjunction with today’s chip-making processes to both increase the
speed and lower the power consumption of future generations of
semiconductors.
The
theoretical prediction of the material must still be verified, and Dr.
Zhang said that research is now taking place in Germany and China, as
well as a laboratory at U.C.L.A.
It
is quite possible that the computational materials revolution may offer
a path toward cheaper technologies for the next generation of computer
chips.
That
is IBM’s bet. The company is now experimenting with exotic polymers
that automatically form into an ultrafine web and can be used to form
circuit patterns onto silicon wafers.
Dr.
Narayan is cautiously optimistic, saying there is a good chance that
bottoms-up self-assembly techniques will eliminate the need to invest in
new lithographic machines, costing $500 million, that use X-rays to
etch smaller circuits. .
“The answer is possibly yes,” he said, in describing a lower cost path to denser computer chips.
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