Argh! It’s a hornet?! (No, it’s only a mummy potter wasp)

A student of mine was MSN-ing me questions about out module and when she finished told me about a recent incident in her house. A flying insect was building a nest in their home and they were nervous about it. After a few calls describing the nest, they were told it was a hornet’s nest. With her mum freaking out anyway, her dad closed the windows to prevent repeat visits of the insect and destroyed the nest. They found blue and green grub inside.

So she asked me about it and I told her about potter wasps. She sent me these photos and its identity was confirmed - a potter wasp mummy!

So I explained essentially that the harmless mummy wasp had been building each cell by harvesting little clay bits from around the estate - you can see where she dropped some bits. Two of the cells were complete and she was working on a third. She would have been hunting for caterpillars to paralyse with her venom and transport back to the third cell. This fresh meat is for the as yet unhatched egg she would lay later. The “blue and green grub” they saw in the broken down cells were probably the prey. Finally when all the cells are complete, mummy wasp will cement the lot up and fly away.

I pointed her to my old blog posts on potter wasps, including the one at my door in 2005. She found it fascinating! It was a pity she was not able to observe the process to completion - if successful, she would have eventually seen a tiny hole announcing the emergence of the young wasp. But she explained, harmless or not, her mum was freaking out anyway! It’s not an uncommon reaction for urban Singaporeans. Perhaps if she tells her mum the story, it might make a difference if a wasp ever visits again one day.

I’m waiting for a revisit!

Thansk to yels.

Dealing with stress

NUS’ Counselling Centre highlights their Exam Anxiety webpage in the weeks leading to the exams.

Besides the peak period focus, students under excessive stress aren’t out my mind the rest of the semester. I adopt strategies in each module, integrate those into the teaching. A balance has to be struck with module standards but it is usually complimentary.

To maintain my awareness and alertness, I talk to teacher-friends armed with case study histories, discuss some aspects with friends on my mailing lists, reflect on past incidents and read some journal papers. This helps me to maintain an appreciative grasp of the issue over the years. Now that I actually have time to prepare my teaching, I want to consult the pros!

So after the Faculty of Science workshop, “Teaching is OUR Priority” last Friday, I way-layed the Counseling Centre’s head for a quick chat. I will drop in after clearing the exams so examine strategies and get advice about those and profiles. I am certainly looking forward to the consult - my previous session was a long time ago at Changi Village after a Pedal Ubin ride. One of the staff attended the ride and I ran a bunch of stuff by him - the benefits of being a guide!

It’s important to think about and review pre-emptive measures every year, just as we should do for fire and field safety. And you have to try look for loopholes. I find that exercise useful for teaching methods as well. Since I have field safety guidelines to pen, May is going to be safety month!

See “Struggles of Students Today,” by Ann-Marie Lew. Alumnus, Apr 2007.

Exhausting week, too tired to blog

I have been hunting down students, marking and processing marks for the past two weeks. Did what I could and my Reading Week schedule went out the window; good lesson though. It’s all over now and boy oh boy, was excel useful! I updated the post about excel functions I use to check marks and will provide it with figures as a webpage for the TAs. I will be getting them to use the gradebook functions built into NUS’ web-based IVLE system.

Am now dealing with the last of student queries via MSN; setup a live.com account for that. Still have the honours theses to examine this weekend. Hopefully I finish that before the exams begin on Monday. I am actually looking forward to marking exam papers to make comparisons after the changes in teaching methods I applied this semester.

Meanwhile, the exam invigilation reminders have turned up at the entrance of the department office. This announces the final and critical leg of the semester. Laurence used to present them like performance billings but I guess he’s too busy mopping up coffee to get fancy. At least he kept the colour, very useful. Its a good reason to drop by the department office every now and then. You can keep track of breaking news!

The notice reminded me of the stress our students must be under so I I SMS-ed cheery greetings to my research students and Toddycats project managers - I had their numbers in my handphone and ssw their replies come in thick and fast!

Thankfully, back at home, Mr Bats has been keeping me company during my marking processing and student hunting phase. He will reprise that role next week.

Sometimes he crawls in to a nice comfortable bag and territorially swipes at my hand when it ventures too close his “cave door”…

Excel functions to help check marks

When managing student marks, I usually have marks from various assessments in separate files. When merging I need to be sure students get their marks and no one else’s! After examining the class data, I email students who did not submit work by checking the module database for their emails. Just in case there are problems I don’t know about. And when marks are uploaded to the exam system along with exam results, it is important to ensure the right marks are integrated.

While MS Excel makes marks management much easier, it is also easy to make mistakes. The few simple functions in Excel that I list below helps me double and triple check as well as highlight problems. And the very important final stage is ground-truthing of student marks - checking a random selection of actual submissions against the spreadsheet; than I finally feel safe!

• =exact(A1, B1) - very important for checking when you merge marks from separate data sheets. I check against matric numbers and names. The functions returns a TRUE or FALSE value. I “fill down” to make the comparison for the entire column. At the bottom I use a “countif false” and that indicates the number of mismatches. Then I use conditional formatting in the column to highlight the FALSE matches.
• =fixed(A1, 2) for two decimal places - “exact” comparisons are not possible between numbers that are rounded up to display a certain number of decimal places. The displays may actually reflect numbers truncated from a sting of digits and so are not exactly the same as a number corrected to a fixed number of decimal places. Thus when comparing two columns of numbers, I derive fixed numbers first (in separate columns) before making an “exact” comparison.
• =countblank(A1:A200) - counts the number of empty cells in a column. Helps in finding out who has not submitted work or if marks have not been allocated. Usually used in combination with conditional formatting.
• =countif(G1:G200, “<5″) or (J1:J200,”false”) - counts the number of cells below a specified value. Critical in identifying the number of false matches from an exact value comparison (i.e. the two columns are not an exact match). Also identifies poor form - if consistent across a semester, it probably highlights a student for counseling. Usually used in combination with conditional formatting.
• Format> Conditional Formatting… - specify a colour for cells that are empty or within a range of values. Helps to visualy highlight problems and track student performance. And when a row of coloured cells jump out at you from a single row, you might have a student who left the course or someone in trouble.

Know of any other useful functions I might find handy?

Talk to NUS librarians on lecture preparation

“Digital library, web2.0 and shareware contributions to LSM1103 Animal Behaviour lectures.”
By N. Sivasothi, Dept. Biological Sciences. Wed 23 Apr 2008: 3pm - 5pm.

Abstract – LSM1303 Animal Behaviour is a cross-faculty module for students with no ‘A’ level biology. The class of 200 students are exposed to the diversity and complexities of animal behaviour and the scientific process behind this relatively young science. Digital resources have contributed significantly to the story-telling approach employed during lectures.

In the absence of a suitable textbook, the lectures are built on a foundation of classical and recent case studies from academic papers obtained through NUS’ Digital Library. The approach is softened by material from a variety of web2.0 contributions which increase each year. The catalyst facilitating this use is a host of shortcuts and shareware that radically increase ease of use. I will illustrate the typical lecture preparation process involving various tools and methods and discuss practical issues affecting design.

An NUS Module Blog compliments this course and after experimenting with five blogs, we embarked on a student blog assignment. Kenneth Pinto and other CIT staff were instrumental in this attempt and he will join the discussion as well. See:
Module Blog - http://moduleblog.nus.edu.sg/blogs/lsm1303/
Student Module Blog - http://moduleblog.nus.edu.sg/blogs/lsm1303students/

Tools used that will be featured – NUS’ Digital Library, Google Scholar, AcidSearch, Creative Commons, Flickr, delicious, Tooble, Youtube, TubeSock, iTunes, podcasts, rss feeds, NetNewsWire, Textpandr, MarsEdit, Google Earth, Skitch, a variety of browsers, tabbed-browsing and sessions (most of these are either platform independent or have pc equivalents).

About the speaker – Sivasothi teaches biodiversity and ecology at the Department of Biological Sciences. He is an enthusiastic macintosh and web2.0 proponent and has numerous blogs and mailing lists dealing with macintosh, cycling, biology, nature and the environment. See http://blog.sivasothi.com

Learning the chemistry of elements with Elementeo

VanTan said “What a fun way to learn Chemistry! Especially in the post-Harry Potter age.” She pointed to this Wired article, “14-Year-Old Creates Chemistry Trading Card Game”.

The game’s webpage says,

“Elementeo is a strategic battle game where you use your elements across the battlefield in reducing opponent’s electrons to zero. You do that by harnessing the strength and moving properties of the elements and compounds, and by using their reactionary powers. For example, Oxygen can rust any neighboring metal or Copper Conductor can shock any metals and send them back to the deck.”

I’m sold - put in a pre-order.

Dry run with the UROPS students

The five undergraduate science research students in my care ran through their presentations with me; I was off-form due to the flu but still gave them enough feedback to polish up their presentations. I wished I had grilled them last week, and run through a revision 2 presentation before they meet their examiners.

Still, their examiners will give them feedback too. And there will be a reflection session for the lot with me after the exams. So I need not fear that they will not draw out the finer points of their experience. Else the experience is not maximised.

Also, they will have to share a watered done version with the public. After investing considerable time on a project, they do have something interesting to say about Chek Jawa, the fauna of Kent Ridge and specifics about the anurans, insects and spiders there.

Where to keep all those exam questions?

Twice a year we have to set exams, and that’s when I re-examine my security measures. This means no Auto-login (password always required upon startup), the mac is set to sleep in 15 minutes and a password is required to wake from sleep or the screen-saver (System preferences> Security). This is practically symbolic since students have no access to my computer and the mac is never left unattended behind unlocked doors.

If I am away even for seconds, my door is locked. It’s something we have had to practise since the late 90’s when many labs in the department were hit by a spate of thefts; you see, in the old days, every door was unlocked!

The mac is not turned on overnight. If I am called away I have no worries; an automatic shut down is executed every evening (System preferences> Energy Saver> Schedule). I do have to ensure my open documents are all saved before leaving since a shut down can be cancelled by a dialog box querying the absent user if he wishes to save or discard his unsaved document!

Since OS X 10.3, Mac users have had the use of FIleVault which provides encryption for the entire home folder. File Vault may prevents backup by Leopard’s Time Machine when logged in, so if I switch from SuperDuper to TimeMachine, I’ll sort that out.

I don’t leave sensitive material on my laptop, even though no one is allowed to use it. Staff members don’t exchange sensitive information via email, even encrypted files - although the real truth may be simply that many are clueless about these options! Instead of passing around soft copies, I use hard copy for exam originals and these are never left unattended or in full view.

When frequent access to exam files are necessary during the question setting and review process, I encrypt the specific folder using OS X’s Disk Utility. You can create an encrypted disk image in which to store files; it’s lovely! This excellent option is explained very clearly in this Flickr photoset by Derek K. Miller.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

You can also encrypt the final version of your documents as pdfs for Preview provides this option in the “save as” dialogue box.

Midnight break-ins are ruled out by camera surveillance and probably more importantly by the ever-present graduate student researchers, many of whom stay overnight. Since the biodiversity group occupies just two floors, strange faces stand out.

Its not that I worry about my students ever attempting to peek into my computer, they are an honest bunch. But I have a responsibility to to ensure they are well protected from any possibility of suspicion, if ever a breach in security occurs. Exercising good security means thinking about possible scenarios and plugging the loopholes early. And then reminding yourself about it every six months!

Kok Sheng is a “poster boy” for NUS

Kok Sheng’s slightly evil looking mugshot appears in this NUS advertorial yesterday (25 Mar 2008):

He’s featured for the Chek Jawa UROPS project. Dan is mentioned too, and the department so they kept the good parts in. Its a good advertisement for the Science undergraduate research programme (UROPS), of which I am reasonably keen about.

Having 10% of the department’s students (i.e. 5) was mildly challenging, especially without the traditional lab space to host them like we used to be able to do. It required adjustment on my part but there was SMS (which they favour), IM (runner-up), Google Groups, GMail and of course my compulsory blogs allowed me to keep an eye on them.

Undergraduate reports in the bag

It’s been a hectic time while the five of them got their projects tidied up and in the bag. The deadline was 2pm and the last of them was in all within time.

This was a short semester so its always more of a rush than Semester I. And they were thrown in the deep to discover the joys and grief of field research. They certainly learned a lot in the process.

Now there is just left the dry run, or the “Slaughter of the innocents,” their oral assessments and finally the dreaded debrief.