~imes

Правда

This was taken outside Ari’s dacha near Odessa at a time when we were all much more innocent.  Although only a bit of my own dapper collar is on show (thanks wrk), comrades Raymond, Drong, and Treellama–the old guard–are here.  Things took a grim turn shortly after that fall; let’s try to find ourselves, starting back-

Ray was always a believer–an Old Believer, to be precise…until one morning whilst sifting through Solovyov’s garbage, organizing breakfast, he found a bundle of Jesuit polemics.  Behoving a tonsured Reader, he read them and was changed.  Ray went to seek out new papal pals over the mountains.  I remember the last liturgy we attended together, an all-night-vigil at Nevsky Cathedral–his kiss of peace was dry, distant, distinctly Latin: sunt lacrimae rerum.

sign of the times

Drong got turned onto Traditionalism in a big way when he heard Mr. Plyae namecheck René Guénon at one of his storied garden parties. His search for the imam of his own being led him far afield–casting runes with Lovinescu at the latter’s hoary manor in the Carpathians, cracking skulls in a hushed-up stint with the Italian Ordine Nuovo, down-and-out and pole dancing (sacred poles, mind you) in Bloomington, Indiana with the remnant of Schuon’s ill-fated Maryamiyyah–Drong was lost to us; lost in a little toybox of perennialism, peyote, and ねこかわいい.

I miss you, Drong. I think of you every time the kettle boils.

Deaf to the warnings of his father-confessor, Mr. Smith set off in 1962 for a tour of the diaspora in the the American Midwest.  He never arrived.  Ken Olsen’s thugs were prowling the docks; our beloved brooder found himself press-ganged and marched to Maynard for a life of toil in the deepest warrens under The Mill.  His eyesight withered in the gloom, but his hair–or something like it–grew back, no doubt due to inhaling the eldritch vapours of the JUICE eddying in the VAXen herds’ feeding troughs.  Treellama’s part in events darkly hinted at elsewhere remains unclear to me.

’tis small wonder 090909 was a rather lowkey affair.

Leader: Patrick

Immense galaxy, habitable planets rare

No telling who's out there

Stay tuned for the tale of the forging of the Galactic CLIQUE Empire.

So long, Karuma.

Students often make errors when trying to solve qualitative or conceptual physics problems, and while many successful instructional interventions have been generated to prevent such errors, the process of deduction that students use when solving physics problems has not been thoroughly studied. In an effort to better understand that reasoning process, I have developed a new framework, which is based on the mental models framework in psychology championed by P. N. Johnson-Laird. My new framework models how students search possibility space when thinking about conceptual physics problems and suggests that errors arise from failing to flesh out all possibilities. It further suggests that instructional interventions should focus on making apparent those possibilities, as well as all physical consequences those possibilities would incur.

The possibilities framework emerged from the analysis of data from a unique research project specifically invented for the purpose of understanding how students use deductive reasoning. In the selection task, participants were given a physics problem along with three written possible solutions with the goal of identifying which one of the three possible solutions was correct. Each participant was also asked to identify the errors in the incorrect solutions. For the study presented in this dissertation, participants not only performed the selection task individually on four problems, but they were also placed into groups of two or three and asked to discuss with each other the reasoning they used in making their choices and attempt to reach a consensus about which solution was correct. Finally, those groups were asked to work together to perform the selection task on three new problems.

The possibilities framework appropriately models the reasoning that students use, and it makes useful predictions about potentially helpful instructional interventions. The study reported in this dissertation emphasizes the useful insight the possibilities framework provides. For example, this framework allows us to detect subtle differences in students’ reasoning errors, even when those errors result in the same final answer. It also illuminates how simply mentioning overlooked quantities can instigate new lines of student reasoning. It allows us to better understand how well-known psychological biases, such as the belief bias, affect the reasoning process by preventing reasoners from fleshing out all of the possibilities. The possibilities framework also allows us to track student discussions about physics, revealing the need for all parties in communication to use the same set of possibilities in the conversations to facilitate successful understanding. The framework also suggests some of the influences that affect how reasoners choose between possible solutions to a given problem.

This new framework for understanding how students reason when solving conceptual physics problems opens the door to a significant field of research. The framework itself needs to be further tested and developed, but it provides substantial suggestions for instructional interventions. If we hope to improve student reasoning in physics, the possibilities framework suggests that we are perhaps best served by teaching students how to fully flesh out the possibilities in every situation. This implies that we need to ensure students have a deep understanding of all of the implied possibilities afforded by the fundamental principles that are the cornerstones of the models we teach in physics classes.

Possibilities: A Framework for Modeling Students’ Deductive Reasoning in Physics

Courtesy of Underworld :mSpnkr:

From the late master of loch, Jacques Derrida, came a work called The Post Card. Says the back of the book:

You were reading a somewhat retro loveletter, the last in history. But you have not yet received it. Yes, its lack or excess of address prepares it to fall into all hands: a post card, an open letter in which the secret appears, but indecipherably.

What does a post card want to say to you? On what conditions is it possible? Its destination traverses you, you no longer know who you are. At the very instant when from its address it interpellates, you, uniquely you, instead of reaching you it divides you or sets you aside, occasionally overlooks you. And you love and you do not love, it makes of you what you wish, it takes you, it leaves you, it gives you.

On the other side of the card, look, a proposition is made to you, S and p, Socrates and plato. For once the former seems to write, and with his other hand he is even scratching. But what is Plato doing with his outstretched finger in his back? While you occupy yourself with turning it around in every direction, it is the picture that turns you around like a letter, in advance it deciphers you, it preoccupies space, it procures your words and gestures, all the bodies that you believe you invent in order to determine its outline. You find yourself, you, yourself, on its path.

The thick support of the card, a book heavy and light, is also the specter of this scene, the analysis between Socrates and Plato, on the program of several others. Like the soothsayer, a “fortune-telling book” watches over and speculates on that-which-must-happen, on what it indeed might mean to happen, to arrive, to have to happen or arrive, to let or to make happen or arrive, to destine, to address, to send, to legate, to inherit, etc., if it all still signifies, between here and there, the near and the far, da und fort, the one or the other.

You situate the subject of the book: between the posts and the analytic movement, the pleasure principle and the history of telecommunications, the post card and the purloined letter, in a word the transference from Socrates to Freud, and beyond. This satire of epistolary literature had to be farci, stuffed with addresses, postal codes, crypted missives, anonymous letters, all of it confided to so many modes, genres, and tones. In it I also abuse dates, signatures, titles or references, language itself.