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.