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## If some of my students were writing problems

$\vec v_A, \vec v_B; v_{AB}?$

## In my inbox

Sometimes life’s just too funny. I get stuff like this in my inbox from a site that stores old tests:

Why use a study guide when you can have the old
exam? Spend more time partying and less time studying.

Needless to say, when the site advertises things similar to “Why study the night before an exam when you can study on the day of the exam?” I wonder who buys this stuff. In the end it sounds like an invitation to cheat. Fortunately, most of the times this does not work, unless we professors get too lazy. This is when random number generators actually do a great job for science courses.

What is more dangerous nowadays is that people cheat by using the internet during exams even if they’re not allowed to. The problem is catching them. Fantastic tools like Wolfram Alpha can be used to remove the thinking out of a problem. Check this one (simple) example I just cooked:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=time+velocity+%3D+120+Km%2Fhr%2C+distance+100+m

The main problem is that at some point one actually needs to know if the student actually knows what a velocity really is. Or if the student can actually convert hours to seconds. In the end this is what certification of knowledge is about: we need to be able to certify that a student actually knows this stuff.

In the meantime, in the famous words of Garth and Wayne, party on.

## All is well that ends well

Last week was a week of endings.

First, the program I was organizing in the KITP ended. However, it is not all over: I’m in the coda, writing the exit report. In my opinion the program was successful, we had a lot of interactions and very interesting talks. And we will see what happens with the seeds that were planted a year or two down the line.

Secondly, I also finally had time to finish two  books that I was reading. Surprisingly, I finished them on the same day.

## Blackboard humor

To celebrate the near end of the quarter I thought I would publish a photo of a blackboard near my office captured a few days ago.

The bottom equation proves that it comes from a bona fide physics department blackboard, although to me it seems that there might be a factor of $i$ missing . Well, maybe it can be counted as circumstantial evidence for coming from a blackboard in a physics department.

## The areas of expertise I didn’t know I was an expert on.

I guess I’m easing my way back to writing blog posts. Of course, I could bore you to death with the list of things I was actually doing instead of writing here, but that will really have to wait for another day.

Today, I will just give you some information on some of the recent spam in my e-mail folder that comes from Open Journals (which I have discussed about in the past) and random conferences around the world. I just have the impression that my e-mail is in a “general list of scientists”, or “general list of scholars”, or “general list of people who have written something” that the companies buy and then bombard with queries asking me to select them for publishing in. The rest is a (sufficiently edited) list of such that I have gotten invited to contribute recently in:

1. Journals of Statistics.
2. Journals of Geometry.
3. Journals of quantum information.
4. Journals of applied mathematics.
5. Journals of law. (US law in particular).

I’m not really an expert on any one of these, although I could probably  do something with my research that might be considered for journals 1, 2, 3, 4 with a long stretch. But in item 5 I declare myself a complete amateur even though I do follow some court rulings and such because I find them interesting.

My inbox would also suggest that I am expert on informatics, engineering, cybernetics, communications, computing, molecular and cell biology, as I seem to keep getting invited to attend conferences on these subjects and maybe even chair one session or two on them. It makes me wonder how the hell I got into their e-mail databases.

In the meantime, I’ll go back to my cave where I will be back doing the things that I usually do that force me away from writing posts like this one on a regular basis.

## Copy and paste and oh what a waste

Right now I’m in the middle of writing a long paper. This is a rather intense and time consuming effort that I don’t find particularly gratifying. On a good day, I can write a lot. But when I get annoyed at how something is organized I usually copy/paste and end up reorganizing things and that is usually not bad (it’s easier than retyping). However…