Day 11

This morning I read the Kindle free chapter of "Complexity Explained" by Peter Erdi. This was pretty interesting. It's kind of an easy to read, not-overly-mathematical, intro to the concept of complex systems. I think it's one of those Springer "not quite a full on book yet, but on the way" manuscripts, as there are a fair few grammatical issues in the text. But all in all, quite readable - I may add it to my Christmas list. It's $55 for kindle version or $64 for the softcover. Strangely - it's more on bookdepository... :(

This got me thinking about the Applied Mathematical Modelling honours unit that (at this stage) I am teaching next year, semester 2. I'm thinking that we might (the class and I) do a bit of reading around the uses of mathematics in reality (such as in complex systems etc) with some very new books in the area...I'll probably end up buying them myself or getting the library to get them in. Perhaps even do some book review writing (like the reviews that appear in journals). I'm also thinking of getting some invited speakers in to talk about their view on what Applied Mathematics means.

I'm also working with Professor John Frazer on starting a seminar series on "Complexity"...tentatively our first seminar will be on Dec 3 (location to be determined) in the afternoon, featuring Professor Simon Kaplan and followed by discussions among the group. This should be really interesting too - I've not seen Simon speak about academic research things before but understand he is great to listen to. John Frazer is quite cool (academically I mean :P ) I think. He's a Professor of Design Science and a pioneer of the use of computer technologies in architecture and design. He has lead some truly awesome research (inlcuding that described in the book at An Evolutionary Architecture) and has recently been working on using cellular automata-like programs to design/grow buildings. Cool.

Day 10

Day 10 was boring - Faculty Teaching and Learning committee meeting, then finishing up solutions for practice exams...this was a "nonresearchday".

Day 9

Went to two research related events today. The first was a workshop/info session about ALTC grants over at Kelvin Grove Campus. I got some interesting ideas about selecting good collaborators which I think will strengthen our FaST applications in the upcoming rounds.

This afternoon I went to the first "TEMPO" meeting. TEMPO is a group headed by Chris Langton from Physics and John Frazer from BEE which is basically a group/club where people who work in modelling, simulating, describing etc spatially and/or temporally varying stuff. This was great - some really exciting researchers there from all over the place: BEE, FaST, CI...very interesting. John Frazer uses CA and genetic algorithms to essentially design buildings from what I understand. There were other folk there from Airports of the Future project (where Charisse is doing her PhD) too.

John and I will be starting a Complex Systems seminar and discussion series soon (around December). I think Simon Kaplan (Exec Dean - FaST) is to be the first speaker...to be confirmed. Stay tuned if you are interested.

Day 8 (late again)

Had a meeting with the unsuccessful ARC grant group (Kunle and YT). All agreed on going ahead for a retry in the next round. We think that the downfall of the application was that we didn't get across our philosophy of how we would move from biology/mechanical concepts to the mathematical/computational model...basically, the CA rules I think. It's important to take a step back and see what is obvious for you, but not for others.

Day 7

Well, not much happened today - just a lot of practice exam writing for my DEs and PDEs classes and some curriculum renewal project work. I did have some brief discussions with Graeme and Scott about a proposal for an American Institute of Mathematics workshop next year - that sounds promising.

Day 6 update

And of course, to make a bad day worse we have a classic Willahra Tower fire alarm. Thanks a lot jerks - we all think that man managed to understand fire to some basic level during the earliest periods of our existence...but alas, not the morons who live in this building.

But the firewoman gave little Dan a keyring and stickers and a balloon - he loved it.

Day 6

A bad day - I've felt like absolute trash since last night actually...which is not good for getting things done on a day that you are fortuitous enough to have blocked out in your diary for a research day. So another day worth of email has piled up and I'm still somewhat ill. Also, ARC Discovery Project outcomes were released today - the application I was on with Kunle Oloyede (from Engineering) and a few others was unsuccessful :-(  Then I realised that the submission due date for one of the conferences I am attending in March was TODAY!!!! Argh...

So I whipped up a quick 4 pager proposal: "Towards a classification of criterion referenced assessment models in mathematics courses - student and academic perspectives". Jen Flegg is on as co-author of course for her work with the survey design, and presumably some help in the future with drafting and proofing the final paper ;-)

Some things to note for the future here:

1. Keep track of the due dates of proposals!!!
2. Education conferences require much longer "proposals" than the abstracts I am familiar with for maths conferences. So far I've done a 3 pager and a 4 pager.

Also, yes I realise that this sounds a lot like what I talked about at QANZIAM. But it's more subtle than that. My thinking is that the whole criterion referenced assessment experiment thing that I ran this semester has a few prongs:

• there's just the idea of CRA in a maths course and how it is perceived by students
• there's the comparison of this across two courses (namely, PDEs and DEs, but anything really)
• and there's developing different models of how to implement CRA for mathematics courses.

The last one of these is what I'm really getting at in this conference paper.  I think that there are different ways to interpret the idea of a "criterion" and thus for designing its associated "standards". If you put some thought into it, these can be used to really reflect to a student what you believe in as being important in a mathematical response to a question/problem, thereby providing them with a better chance of doing what is required (by the discipline expert) and of course, getting the best mark.

Well, it's in now...but scrappy of course, so fingers crossed that it's accepted.

Day 5: aka Day 2 of QANZIAM 2010

A much more civilised 6.30 awakening today. Breakfast, then basically straight up to the conf for an earlier 9am start.

The student talks were finished off in the morning with Kelly Murphy, Mike Hsieh and Jackie Horne. All nice topics - hypertrophic scars, drug delivery/moving boundary problems, and bone healing respectively. Then Owen Jepps from Griffith finished off the morning session talking about topical delivery of treatments on the skin - something I will be investigating myself next year with a Pharmacy researcher from Otago (Natalie Medlicott).

Aftern morning tea I was up. The talk went ok I think, with lots of input and discussion from the audience, especially Graeme. But that meant I went way over time (10mins) so I'm sorry about that. But went ok I think. I got a few good ideas to help frame my next talk and also the paper that should come out of the work. I actually got a few things straight in my head as I spoke.

Scotty went next - talking about a "simple" example that he thinks would work well in an undergrad/grad class on asymptotics. I understood a fair bit of it which was impressive to me! I honestly can't recall really what he spoke about, but there was lots of integration in the complex plane and singularities expansions in small parameters and so forth.

Graeme then came on and talked about his work with Wechselberger that extends his holes in the wall of singularities work from his PhD back in the 90s. This was cool because I had also done some of this stuff in my PhD - analysis of phase planes with DEs of the form f(u,v) u' = g(u,v) and v'=h(u,v) where f can go to 0 giving a wall of singularities in the plane. G and Wechselberger looked at the problem under a different light, actually INCREASING the number of equations (rather than simplifying to less) to look at the problem in a higher dimensional space and showing that solutions through the wall (when f=g=0) can exist and what's more, are stable. They also demonstrated stable jump solutions. All quite cool - this was my favourite talk I think.

The last talk was Vivien Challis from UQ who also talked about topology optimisation but related to bone implants.

That was about it. QANZIAM as always was relaxed and fun... it was no Stanthorpe though :P

Day 4: aka Day 1 of QANZIAM 2010

The last of the free flowing traffic for quite a while.

We actually went up to Gympie on Friday, but that was after my Day 3 post. We got stuck in traffic on the Bruce Highway going up - turns out a ute turned over...that made me think of Lisette (who I did my PostDoc with for those of you not in the know there) who was in a bad accident on the freeway in LA recently. Hope she is recovering as quickly as possible and her one functioning hand is still tapping out emails :P

This is basically the whole room.
BTW: I don't think either of them is hiding on purpose.

Anyhoo, turns out the conference centre place wasn't an absolute dive - although, the double room was bloody small. Barely room for a "double bed", couple that with a child who needs a tent-crib and it makes for tight quarters. But not bad - it was warm and dry and I'd already written my talk so things were reasonably pleasant. Little Dan stayed up til 9.30.

So now to Day 4. Yet again, since I had written my talk, I was free to wander about. So when Dan woke at 5ish, we went out into the fog and walked around for an hour or so. It was great - very quiet, cool and no-one around - it's good to be alone sometimes. We saw some bunnies hopping about in the fog and then a horse over the other side of a small pond, which for some reason (probably the fog coupled with its reflection in the pond) looked like a sloth.

Early morning walk - doing our "this is scary" faces.

Now for some research talk. After breakfast, Charisse and Dan went off to Hervey Bay to visit her mum and cousins. I took my macbook down to the pool area and sat in the sun for a while. Having no internet connection, I had to rely on the papers etc that already reside on my machine. I decide to open up a PhD thesis from UWollongong that I had sitting in my "read this eventually" folder. It's interesting because it's a PhD done in a maths/stats department that was unashamedly Maths education focussed - I need to keep this in mind and work figuring out how QUT would take these sort of shenanigans.

After a while I made my way up to the conference room and said hi to some folks waiting outside. There were about 20 people there I think.

The talks got started eventually and there were some really good ones I thought. Particularly Amy Chan, an hons student from UQ who talked about topology optimisation...something that has always puzzled me. Scott's army of PhD students also went well and the invited speaker (Mike Plank - University of Canterbury) was interesting too - he talked about modelling populations of fish essentially.

This is how we roll people. Macs, pens and paper and sticks to open our beers.

After lunch, Graeme and his (our) PhD student Jackie kicked back to do some research looking out over the field (and highway). Scott, Angela (partner of), Gabrielle (son of) and I joined them after heading into town to acquire some beverages.

That was basically it for me for the day. We had HJs for dinner and skipped the conf dinner to try to give Little Dan a good night sleep.

Day 3: QANZIAM talk - finshed version, the first.

So here it is. QANZIAM talk, take 1. Doubtful that I will get back on here for any reasonable length post today, so this is probably it. I may post some photos tonight of the stunning conference venue: The Gympie Conference Centre.

QANZIAM slides

Day 2

Second day of the non-teaching period. 


PhD supervision with Tris this morning. We discussed her work on fixing my errors in a preliminary CA code to model colorectal cancer development and immune cell interactions with the tumour cells. Good work really. We have implemented a framework code for the model, but now need to work on developing realistic rules based on the known biology, including diffusible species in the calculations and rules. Translating all of this into words to slot into a draft manuscript is also currently on our minds.


I also continued work on my QANZIAM talk. It's about student perceptions of criterion referenced assessment in university maths classes. Working on the QANZIAM talk so much is actually something I'm okay with: even though it is only QANZIAM, it will help in building the paper that will come out of the work. Today I brought down the data from the surveys (designed by Jen Flegg) on surveymonkey and starting some preliminary work on that - no series stats, just descriptive and summary work. What I'm hoping for here is to get a whole heap of fairly basic conference papers out as well as some more advanced journal papers that synthesise the finding across the units in which I experimented.


Tonight I've been working on FaST curriculum renewal work. That doesn't sound like research, but the way I'm viewing it, it is. We are attempting to build a culture of importance of teaching and learning, and research into T&L, within FaST. This means developing a plan for staff PD (incl seminar series to disseminate research, T&L experiments etc), a series of invited speakers to guide our work and provide us with input from external experts, a commissioned grants scheme which will see curriculum renewal work receiving (at least some) funding from the Faculty for directly relevant projects that will run like educational research projects with a view to applying for (and hopefully gaining) external funding such as that available from the Australian Learning and Teaching Council.


Phew...that's it.

Day 1 (posted a day late)

Wednesday 20 October marks the start of an extended period without teaching! The plan is to document what happens over the period of about 9.5 months so that I can look back and either copy this next time (if it's a success) or b) figure out where I went wrong (if it's a dud).

What happened on Day 1

So there is some teaching activity still going on, and of course my other job working on the Faculty curriculum renewal etc...but:

- Made a QUT Beamer template

- Wrote part of QANZIAM seminar

- Attempted to convince Scotty to begin work in new research area (research into postgrad supervision)...I reckon it's a good idea, but he'll need more pushing.