Working the travel mix

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For most of my career, I’ve separated travel for work from travel for leisure/pleasure. Maybe it was emotional laziness: it’s hard to switch gears, and leisure time seemed soooo precious that I didn’t want to contaminate it. And now that I’m halfway through our two-month European loop, yes, it’s hard, but it’s led to all sorts of authentic experiences we would not have had any other way. I’m loving it.

In the past, work travel meant somewhat stressful conferences, punctuated by brief exchanges with colleagues in cities that were often charm-challenged. If held in beautiful locations, nobody wanted to actually attend the sessions. I’d rather just go somewhere nice and enjoy it.

This trip is different. We are visiting people where they live. We get into town on the train, figure out public transport to get to our AirBnB or hotel, meet whoever is renting the space to us, and get recommendations for neighborhood eateries and shops. The next day I go to my host colleague’s office, see their work space, meet their students, maybe give a seminar. I get to really learn about what they are doing, their philosophies and approaches. I get very constructive feedback on my work. So much more valuable than what happens at a conference!

After, we spend another night or two or six in the area. We’ve done some touristy stuff, but not a lot. Our places usually have kitchens, so we’ll go to the grocery store and try to figure out what to get. Yay for the Google Translate app! Sometimes we get to meet up with Boulder or Balkan camp connections in these towns, and my colleague Einar Heiberg generously invited us to a dinner party at his home in Lund.

The hard part has been deciding what to do with unscheduled time: work vs exercise vs explore vs curate gigs of photos. Take the opportunity to sample a local European delight or finish that conference paper? Hmm. Go to the beach at Den Haag, or finish this post? In this case, I went to the beach. It was freezing, with quivering foam. Call it flow vis.

I’m so grateful for the privilege to have these choices!

Aesthetics and Emotional Engagement: Why it Matters to Our Students, Why it Matters to Our Professions

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Kate Goodman and I have proposed a special session for the 2015 Frontiers in Education conference. Our goals are

  • To foster conversation and document ideas about how the aesthetic qualities of engineering topics can be used to deliberately draw the emotional engagement of students.
  • To gauge how the FIE community currently views the aesthetics of engineering, and brainstorm new visions for how aesthetics could be used to improve recruitment and retention of a diverse student population as well as lead to innovative methods for the teaching and learning of core engineering content.
  • To explore the feasibility of viewing aesthetics-driven emotional engagement as a necessity and not an ancillary benefit in course design.

Really, we want to move forward on creating community around this idea. Noah Finkelstein and I did a version of this workshop at the Physics Education Research Conference 2013,  and Kate and I did it in February at the CU Boulder DBER meeting. We’ve had great conversations so far, and FIE seems like the perfect next venue. Here is our proposal for the session, complete with details.

We are hoping that participants will be interested enough to check out this little background paper, or at least use it to decide whether to attend. Comments welcome!

Sabbatical Travelogue

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Volos 002Fantasy realized: sitting on a train, heading for a Greek port with a funky hotel waiting, working on my laptop. James beside me, searching a hotel for the next night on his phone. My fingers are still tender from starting to build calluses on the baglama we bought a few days ago in Athens. Rain showers pass by outside, wetting the green fields as we ride.

Yesterday I met with a couple of professors at the University of Athens. George Tombras is the chair of the Physics department, with a huge plate of challenge in front of him. 1500 students, 85 faculty (all “strong personalities”). 35 courses, 7 labs, and all students do a thesis. In the past four years an 80% cut in funding. Yes, 30% was not hard to absorb, but the other 50% has been painful. Couple that with the reality that only a few percent of their graduates can expect to find employment in physics. Over at the Technical University, the engineering graduates have an employment rate of maybe 15%. Think we have trouble with student motivation in the US? Yikes!

George and his assistant professor colleague Hector Nistazakis are exploring student conceptions of electricity and ways to increase the relevance of their courses. Our interests overlap in the area of how visualizations can be used. Hector also described his research on the use of wireless networks at optical wavelengths; dedicated building to building links for the ‘last mile’, the impact of atmospheric turbulence on signal attenuation, and how diffuse LEDs might be used for secure wireless transmitters in a room.

Our visit was on the Monday of their Easter break. Despite their difficulties, profs and grad students were working away, focused on what they do best.

Seeing into the heart

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 Our visual systems are pretty impressive. Even when we are looking at images on a flat surface, our brains use all sorts of cues to create a 3D mental map. Shading on round objects helps, and of course the differences between what your right and left eyes see. If it’s moving, foreground objects will move faster than far field, and they’ll be larger (motion parallax). Shapes change as they rotate, and our brains interpret that easily. Occlusion, when an object passes behind another, is a big cue. Babies stop laughing at peek-a-boo when they figure that one out.

I’ve been spending a lot of time with my stereoscopic computer monitor, looking at flow in the right heart. It’s so complicated that even when I use lots of shading and occlusion, twisting and turning the representation, I still need the stereo cues to really see what’s going on. But it’s thrilling when I do.

So now I want to show it to everybody, but nobody else I know uses the 3D technology, even though it’s now dirt cheap (Thank you gamers!). So we’re back to motion parallax, shading and occlusion: it needs to move. The flow also needs to be simpler, so in this video, I’ve removed all the small velocities and vorticities, edited out almost all left heart and other extraneous flows, and tried to keep the colors from being overwhelming (although I love saturated colors).

Please enjoy this intro ride through the right heart. I hope to have more soon.

Not an accident!

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Flow enters the right cardiac atrium from above and below, bringing wall generated vorticity with it.

Here’s the image I was trying to get before New Year’s. This shows flow entering the right atrium of a normal subject’s heart. Blood flow is shown by the white pencils. Vorticity (the amount of spin of a bit of fluid) is shown by the colored arrows. Only the strongest velocity and vorticity is shown here, to keep the image from getting too cluttered. The right atrium is shown in transparent white, and the right ventricle is the big triangular shape in yellow. Flow is entering the atrium from the top, through the superior vena cava (SVC). You can see vorticity ringing the flow, since it is being generated at the SVC surface. Flow up from the bottom, through the inferior vena cava (IVC), is more complicated. Venous (return) flow from the liver comes in and wraps around behind the main IVC flow from the lower abdomen. The two flows mix as they enter through the bottom of the atrium. This is useful, since you want all the important chemicals from your liver to mix with the rest of your blood before it gets pumped to your lungs and beyond. Too bad this type of imaging (4DMRI) can’t give more details about the mixing process.

Graduate students interested in research with me?

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As you can see, I have a small but active program, with lots of opportunities. However, I don’t spend a lot of time hunting for money, so I don’t have a lot of funding. No open funded positions at the moment, but when I do get an opening there often isn’t a lot of time to find somebody, so please check back here now and then. I’m always happy to help students apply for the NSF Graduate Fellowship, and explore overlapping interests with self-funded students.

I prefer to work collaboratively with my graduate students on topics of mutual interest.  I expect my students to be self-motivated and own their research. I love to provide resources in the form of basics like equipment, space and funding (when possible). I also believe it’s important to provide introduction to the academic research community; how to proceed through the iterative research process, how to mentor others, and how to communicate with peers and the public. In return I want to make contributions to fun and useful research, and to learn from my students.

Since my program is small I can provide individual attention. My current students are spread across my interests, with not a lot of overlap, so we have separate weekly project meetings (most projects have undergrads assisting us) instead of a big group meeting.

If you like the sound of this, please contact me directly!

NNMC seminar

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December 9 2014 I gave an invited seminar at Northern New Mexico College. They are in the process of evolving from a community college with 2 year degrees to a four year college, and are starting a Mechanical Engineering Technology program. Their students are very different from the students here at CU: 75% Latino/hispanic, 18% Native American, mostly Northern Pueblos, with a wide range of values, interests and preparation levels. We are exploring whether something like Flow Vis offered to incoming students will help with recruitment and retention of this population.

Jean R Hertzberg, Katherine Goodman, Tim Curran, and Noah Finkelstein. “Flow Vis and Beyond: ⬚The Power of Aesthetics in Engineering Education.” Invited, Northern New Mexico College, December 9, 2014. Powerpoint PDF: Jean R Hertzberg et al_2014_Flow Vis and Beyond
And I got a very nice gift box.