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from the fixing-the-teachers-should-help dept.
Active problem-solving confers a deeper understanding of science than does a standard lecture. But some university lecturers are reluctant to change tack.
Outbreak alert: six students at the Chicago State Polytechnic University in Illinois have been hospitalized with severe vomiting, diarrhea and stomach pain, as well as wheezing and difficulty in breathing. Some are in a critical condition. And the university's health centre is fielding dozens of calls from students with similar symptoms.
This was the scenario that 17 third- and fourth-year undergraduates dealt with as part of an innovative virology course led by biologist Tammy Tobin at Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania. The students took on the role of federal public-health officials, and were tasked with identifying the pathogen, tracking how it spreads and figuring out how to contain and treat it — all by the end of the semester.
In the end, the students pinpointed the virus, but they also made mistakes: six people died, for example, in part because the students did not pay enough attention to treatment. However, says Tobin, "that doesn't affect their grade so long as they present what they did, how it worked or didn't work, and how they'd do it differently". What matters is that the students got totally wrapped up in the problem, remembered what they learned and got a handle on a range of disciplines. "We looked at the intersection of politics, sociology, biology, even some economics," she says.
Tobin's approach is just one of a diverse range of methods that have been sweeping through the world's undergraduate science classes. Some are complex, immersive exercises similar to Tobin's. But there are also team-based exercises on smaller problems, as well as simple, carefully tailored questions that students in a crowded lecture hall might respond to through hand-held 'clicker' devices. What the methods share is an outcome confirmed in hundreds of empirical studies: students gain a much deeper understanding of science when they actively grapple with questions than when they passively listen to answers.
http://www.nature.com/news/why-we-are-teaching-science-wrong-and-how-to-make-it-right-1.17963
Original Submission
(Score: 1) by anubi on Saturday July 18 2015, @08:12AM
Thanks for the links! I will have to look into those.
Actually, the plastic is what I need... so I can get the water flows, electrode positions, and the magnets all held in the proper orientation.
The problem about machining the channels so precisely is the flow has to be laminar. Any turbulence only remixes the streams. Part of how this thing works is based on bernoulli effects - similar to those used in fluidic computers.
( Yes, there is a such thing as a fluidic computer.... google it if you do not believe me. )
You are so right... it is very easy to fall into defeatism, when one gets so discouraged that one decides that pursuing something is futile. What makes it so frustrating to me is I see no physical explanation why this will not work; I believe there is a great need for it; yet I see very little interest in it. I get the idea business is not interested because once one sees this thing, he can go off and make his own and not worry about patents. It looks scalable on any level from cups to swimming-pool fulls. Knowing me, I will release what I do under the MIT license and tell 'em to have at it. I am not big enough to protect a patent anyway - but I would like to know that a lot of people could get fresh water out of this thing from the oceans or other sources of salty water. If I can get this thing running, I will probably end up putting it up on YouTube along with links to the files to print the channels and where to get the magnets. I do not want this to be another Bedini motor thing that has done nothing but get everyone's hopes up and only pranksters on YouTube seem to be able to make operable units. I have been watching another jokester based in Italy stringing people along for years promising unlimited power, but allows no-one except handpicked people to evaluate his system.
I am sure if I release such a thing, I will see patent attorneys throwing cease and desist letters all over the place. Business may not want to have much to do with creating something, but they will spend money on lawyers to tell other people they can't do stuff - and our Congress will back them up. That is why I think its so important these things be made in such a way people can make their own and not involve the elite and their pens and paperwork.
Good excuse to start learning Solidworks.
As usual, I have no intention of involving investors until I am sure my end is solid.... if there is one thing I hate to do, its to get someone else's resources - whether it be tools or funds - and screw it up. When I can put this in a truck, drive over to the Pacific Ocean ( not far from me ), drop the inlet hose in the sea, and send potable water out the other end, then I will invite the others to work with this design and take it to the next level. Most likely out of China.
If I can make this work, then I will know I have enough "street cred" to take this further.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by Geotti on Saturday July 18 2015, @09:13AM
The links I supplied before all link to metal printing, if it's plastic you want, that makes it a lot simpler and cheaper, as there are quite a few online services that you could turn to (most well-known being shapeways probably).
But maybe it would still be a good thing to keep in the back of your head that you can print titanium parts as well. As a matter of fact, with tools like Within (http://www.withinlab.com) you could probably make a printed structure much lighter but at the same time more robust/resilient/flexible than a traditionally manufactured one [citation needed].
Regarding patents, just be a pirate and throw it out in the open under a pseudonym, similar to how "they" did it with bitcoin.
And finally, I have a similar attitude to taking other people's money, but if you clearly state that this is experimental and all you need is for a thousand people to chip in a tenner, it'd still be worthwhile for them, even if the design does not work out as long as you document it etc. Even Billy is supposedly investing in disrupting technology as he believes that iterating on existing tech will fail to bring us forward as much as we need to attain a sustainable future. There's a lot of other people willing to invest in projects, where the risk may be much higher than usual, but the potential for change would be far greater than with "traditional" means. I know I would.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Monday July 20 2015, @09:02AM
About the patents... I am not the first to think of flowing a current through water so I can exert force on it with a magnet.
If one googles "magnetohydrodynamic desalination" [google.com], they will get a good start on what I am tinkering with.
Another similar technique is the "Linear Kinetic Cell" offered by Ener-Tec (PDF) [ener-tec.com]. That one is mostly for addressing scale buildup in heat exchangers. I am concerned the field orientation is not proper for desalination.
As far as tinkering with LKC's, I do have three old dryer motors I could sacrifice for their copper wire, which I could wind onto common plastic drain pipe and excite it from DC and up to see if I can get any unusual behaviour from a flow of briny water in it. I already have a good quantity of ammonium sulfate to tinker with... it, like sodium chloride, is ionic, and will conduct. However the ammonium sulfate is also quite useful as lawn fertilizer, so disposal is not a problem. I hate to buy anything I cannot recycle one way or another.
The design of my magnetohydrodynamic unit uses neodymium magnets where the flux is perpendicular to the flow, which is deflected by lorentz forces acting between the magnetic flux, the current flow in the water, and the inertia/fluid dynamics of the water. I use techniques very similar to fluidic computers to control the flows, as what I am working on would probably best be described as a hybrid fluidic analog computer.
I did not know what I was doing was called until I started horsing around with magnets, dishes of water, and injecting power just to see if the water would behave in a magnetic field like a motor winding would. Its such a tricky spelling I linked it directly, as just spelling the name of it correctly is a feat accompli.
YouTube is full of videos describing water doing strange things when you get containers of it at resonance. Nothing that defies physics, but some of it sure looks unusual. I could not help but think that I might be able to separate salinity of water using the same concepts as vortex and acoustic refrigeration.
If nothing else, I can sure make some unusual artwork with this. Using the water as a lens/prism and using multicolored LED arrays, there seems almost a limitless amount of water art I could construct if I were so inclined, using magnets, lorentz forces, and resonances to excite the water at different points.
Being I have had a lot of experience in the thermodynamics of heat transfer and phase change, as well as the electronic design of embedded controllers, if anyone could pull this off, I would be as good as any.
Especially, being unemployed and having the time to work on it.
I do not have that much money, but I do have plenty of "stuff". It just takes time to rebuild the stuff into what I need.
I have this shelved for now as I need to use my resources for other things... number one keeping the tax men fed and making good on debt service.
I do not want to drag myself down so much economically I end up working as a greeter for WalMart. That would take up all the time I need to do other things.
Right now, most of my work is on my Arduino and Propeller boards. And tinkering around with the actuators.
I will be needing those embedded resources to control everything else. Including the fluidic artwork which I intend to do as training exercises in fluidic resonance. I have to build up my infrastructure in the sequences in which I will use them.
I figure in a couple of years, I will be onto Social Security and have enough money to pursue actually building the desalinator.
I know this whole thing is a lot like that first oscilloscope.... I am apt to build it and be disappointed. But maybe I will learn enough from the ones that did not work to let me build one that does. I would have a hard time making promises to anyone when I do not know myself if what I want to build will even work. This is a personal curiosity quest I am going to have to do at my own pace and as my resources permit.
I know I am getting a little wordy with these diatribes, but I do have an ulterior motive for doing it. I want my work left on a public forum in case anyone is doing similar research or needs some evidence to say such things are already prior art. I also want a public timestamped record as to when I was discussing these things. If I am successful, but it took me years to do it due to something as simple as funding, it might give others who are in position to evaluate people the tolerance to let them try, even if they see it is "reinventing the wheel". I know I got into trouble on the job for trying to do things in unusual ways. I guess its something like OCD, where I seem compelled to do things that I have never seen before, kinda like wanting to take roads I have never taken before just because I do not know what is there. I pay the price for that curiosity, but then at least, like Frank Sinatra used to say, I'll do it my way. Even if I greet you at WalMart.
I see employers lamenting a shortage of technical people. I am of the strong belief we have absolute floods of very good technical people... all we need is tolerance to let us create. I do not believe anyone can create all caged up in a cubicle... neat rows of us like hens caged at an egg farm, with the manager constantly putting grain in the feed slot and expecting eggs at the other chute. They tried to do that to me, and I could not do anything in those conditions.
(Score: 2) by Geotti on Monday July 20 2015, @01:06PM
Really, I maybe understand a small part of what you're up to, but if you want a record, maybe a gist on github [github.com] is a good idea? It will keep revisions together with dates, so maybe it would be more suitable to keeping a record.
I am concerned the field orientation is not proper for desalination.
I'm not sure if that is at all possible, but couldn't you adjust the orientation dynamically? Like, uhm, an FPGA, or something? (Sorry, I lack the physics theory to be of more use here...)
Anyway, also maybe use sites like freelancer.com instead of working as a greeter? It'd probably be much more productive. It sounds like you live in a rural area, so, again, use the internet instead of constraining yourself to local businesses. If what you can do is going to benefit a lot of people then wouldn't that be a great motivation.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Monday July 27 2015, @09:01AM
Yes... it would make me feel a lot better if I knew others were interested, however at present, I feel like an an old red hen [wikipedia.org].
Its discouraging when I see how much our Government pays for the administrative skill to lay off domestic engineers, and how little our work means.
If I can get the desalinator working, my only hope is some friends who have relatives in China that may take an interest in replicating it.
Incidentally, was it you that remarked you lived "across the pond". England? I am quite impressed by Pico Technology over there. I have three of their oscilloscopes. I have recently bought some fantastic little Parallax Propeller based VGA controller modules from "HobbyTronics" in England as well.
I am seeing where more and more I am seeing other countries take the lead in this high-tech stuff. Especially Japan. Even the Arduino I am so fond of originated in Italy. A lot of the software tools I use came out of Russia.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by Geotti on Tuesday July 28 2015, @08:14PM
England?
Currently - Germany, so if you need someone to source you stuff from there/here, just ping me here.
and how little our work means.
The work means a lot to people. I think it's better to ignore governments (and corporations) in the case of a greater good.