Category Archives: Education

How I Ended Up in Geophysical Fluid Dynamics

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How I Ended Up in Geophysical Fluid Dynamics

Lately, I’ve been disclosing the various biases I bring to practicing and enabling Data Science. Motivated by my decision to (finally) self-curate an online, multimedia portfolio, I felt such biases to be material in providing the context that frames this effort. Elsewhere, I’ve shared my inherently scientific bias. In this post, I want to provide additional details. These details I’ve been able to extract verbatim from a blog post I wrote for Bright Computing in January 2015; once I’d settled on geophysics (see below), I aspired to be a seismologist … but, as you’ll soon find out, things didn’t pan out quite the way I’d expected:

I always wanted to be a seismologist.

Scratch that: I always wanted to be an astronaut. How could I help it? I grew up in suburban London (UK, not Ontario) watching James Burke cover the Apollo missions. (Guess I’m also revealing my age here!)

Although I never gave my childhood dream of becoming an astronaut more than a fleeting consideration, I did pursue a career in science.

As my high-school education drew to a close, I had my choices narrowed down to being an astronomer, geophysicist or a nuclear physicist. In grade 12 at Laurier Collegiate in Scarboro (Ontario, not UK … or elsewhere), I took an optional physics course that introduced me to astronomy and nuclear physics. And although I was taken by both subjects, and influenced by wonderful teachers, I dismissed both of these as areas of focus in university. As I recall, I had concerns that I wouldn’t be employable if I had a degree in astronomy, and I wasn’t ready to confront the ethical/moral/etc. dilemmas I expected would accompany a choice of nuclear physics. Go figure!

And so it was to geophysics I was drawn, again influenced significantly by courses in physical geography taught by a wonderful teacher at this same high school. My desire to be a seismologist persisted throughout my undergraduate degree at Montreal’s McGill Universitywhere I ultimately graduated with a B.Sc. in solid Earth geophysics. Armed with my McGill degree, I was in a position to make seismology a point of focus.

But I didn’t. Instead, at Toronto’s York University, I applied Geophysical Fluid Dynamics (GFD) to Earth’s deep interior – mostly Earth’s fluid outer core. Nothing superficial here (literally), as the core only begins some 3,000 km below where we stand on the surface!

Full disclosure: In graduate school, the emphasis was GFD. However, seismology crept in from time to time. For example, I made use of results from deep-Earth seismology in estimating the viscosity of Earth’s fluid outer core. Since this is such a deeply remote region of our planet, geophysicists need to content themselves with observations accessible via seismic and other methods.

From making use of Apache Spark to improve the performance of seismic processing (search for “Reverse-Time Seismic Migration” or “RTM” in my Portfolio), to the analysis of ‘seismic data’ extracted from Twitter (search for “Twitter”in my Portfolio), seismology has taken center stage in a number of my projects as a practitioner of Data Science. However, so has the geophysical fluid dynamics of Earth’s mantle and outer core. Clearly, you can have your geeky cake and eat it too!

Teaching/Learning Weather and Climate via Pencasting

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I first heard about it a few years ago, and thought it sounded interesting … and then, this past Summer, I did a little more research and decided to purchase a Livescribe 8 GB Echo(TM) Pro Pack. Over the Summer, I took notes with the pen from time-to-time and found it to be somewhat useful/interesting.

Just this week, however, I decided it was time to use the pen for the originally intended purpose: Making pencasts for the course I’m currently teaching in weather and climate at Toronto’s York University. Before I share some sample pencasts, please allow me to share my findings based on less than a week’s worth of `experience’:

  • Decent-quality pencasts can be produced with minimal effort – I figured out the basics (e.g., how to record my voice) in a few minutes, and started on my first pencast. Transferring the pencast from the pen to the desktop software to the Web (where it can be shared with my students) also requires minimal effort. “Decent quality” here refers to both the visual and audio elements. The fact that this is both a very natural (writing with a pen while speaking!) and speedy (efficient/effective) undertaking means that I am predisposed towards actually using the technology whenever it makes sense – more on that below. Net-net: This solution is teacher-friendly.
  • Pencasts compliment other instructional media – This is my current perspective … Pencasts compliment the textbook readings I assign, the lecture slides plus video/audio captures I provide, the Web sites we all share, the Moodle discussion forums we engage in, the Tweets I issue, etc. In the spirit of blended learning it is my hope that pencasts, in concert with these other instructional media, will allow my TAs and I to `reach’ most of the students in the course.
  • Pencasts allow the teacher to address both content and skills-oriented objectives – Up to this point, my pencasts have started from a blank page. This forces me to be focused, and systematically develop towards some desired content (e.g., conceptually introducing the phase diagram for H2O) and/or skills (e.g., how to calculate the slope of a line on a graph) oriented outcome. Because students can follow along, they have the opportunity to be fully engaged as the pencast progresses. Of course, what this also means is that this technology can be as effective in the first-year university level course I’m currently teaching, but also at the academic levels that precede (e.g., grade school, high school, etc.) and follow (senior undergraduate and graduate) this level.
  • Pencasts are learner-centric – In addition to be teacher-friendly, pencasts are learner-centric. Although a student could passively watch and listen to a pencast as it plays out in a linear, sequential fashion, the technology almost begs you to interact with it. As noted previously, this means a student can easily replay some aspect of the pencast that they missed. Even more interestingly, however, students can interact with pencasts in a random-access mode – a mode that would almost certainly be useful when they are attempting to apply the content/skills conveyed through the pencast to a tutorial or assignment they are working on, or a quiz or exam they are actively studying for. It is important to note that both the visual and audio elements of the pencast can be manipulated with impressive responsiveness to random-access input from the student.
  • I’m striving for authentic, not perfect pencasts – With a little more practice and some planning/scripting, I’d be willing to bet that I could produce an extremely polished pencast. Based on past experience teaching today’s first-year university students, I’m fairly convinced that this is something they couldn’t care less about. Let’s face it, my in-person lectures aren’t perfectly polished, and neither are my pencasts. Because I can easily go back to existing pencasts and add to them, I don’t need to fret too much about being perfect the first time. Too much time spent fussing here would diminish the natural and speedy aspects of the technology.

Findings aside, on to samples:

  • Calculating the lapse rate for Earth’s troposphere – This is a largely a skills-oriented example. It was my first pencast. I returned twice to the original pencast to make changes – once to correct a spelling mistake, and the second time to add in a bracket (“Run”) that I forgot. I communicated these changes to the students in the course via an updated link shared through a Moodle forum dedicated to pencasts. If you were to experience the updates, you’d almost be unaware of the lapse of time between the original pencast and the updates, as all of this is presented seamlessly as a single pencast to the students.
  • Introducing the pressure-temperature phase diagram for H2O – This is largely a content-oriented example. I got a little carried away in this one, and ended up packing in a little too much – the pencast is fairly long, and by the time I’m finished, the visual element is … a tad on the busy side. Experience gained.

Anecdotally, initial reaction from the students has been positive. Time will tell.

Next steps:

  • Monday (October 1, 2012), I intend to use a pencast during my lecture – to introduce aspects of the stability of Earth’s atmosphere. I’ll try to share here how it went. For this intended use of the pencast, I will use a landscape mode for presentation – as I expect that’ll work well in the large lecture hall I teach in. I am, however, a little concerned that the lines I’ll be drawing will be a little too thin/faint for the students at the back of the lecture theatre to see …
  • I have two sections of the NATS 1780 Weather and Climate course to teach this year. One section is taught the traditional way – almost 350 students in a large lecture theatre, 25-student tutorial groups, supported by Moodle, etc. In striking contrast to the approach taken in the meatspace section, is the second section where almost everything takes place online via Moodle. Although I have yet to support this hypothesis with any data, it is my belief that these pencasts are an excellent way to reach out to the students in the Internet-only section of the course. More on this over the fullness of time (i.e., the current academic session.)

Feel free to comment on this post or share your own experiences with pencasts.

Synthetic Life and Evolution of Earth’s Second Atmosphere

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I have the pleasure of teaching the science of weather and climate to non-scientists again this Fall/Winter session at Toronto’s York University. In the Fall 2011 Term, time was spent discussing the origin and evolution of Earth’s atmosphere. What follows is a post I just shared with the class via Moodle (our LMS):
Photosynthesizing anaerobic lifeforms in Earth’s oceans were likely responsible for systematically enriching Earth’s atmosphere with respect to O2. Through chemical reactions in Earth’s atmosphere, O3 and the O3 layer were systematically derived from this same source of O2. The O3 layer’s ability to minimize the impact of harmful UV radiation, in tandem with the ascent of [O2] to current values of about 21% by volume, were and remain crucial to life as we experience it today.

In tracing the evolution of Earth’s second atmosphere from a composition based on volcanic outgassing to its present state, the role of life was absolutely critical.

On my drive home tonight after today’s lecture, I happened upon a broadcast regarding synthetic life on CBC Radio‘s Ideas. Based upon annotated excerpts from a Craig Venter lecture, this broadcast is well worth the listen in and of itself. And although I’m no life scientist, I can’t help but predict that Venter’s work will ultimately lead to refinements, if not a complete rewrite, of life’s role in the evolution of Earth’s second atmosphere.
If you have any thoughts on this prediction, please feel free to share them here via a comment.

Targeting Public Speaking Skills via Virtual Environments

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Recently I shared an a-ha! moment on the use of virtual environments for confronting the fear of public speaking.

The more I think about it, the more I’m inclined to claim that the real value of such technology is in targeted skills development.

Once again, I’ll use myself as an example here to make my point.

If I think back to my earliest attempts at public speaking as a graduate student, I’d claim that I did a reasonable job of delivering my presentation. And given that the content of my presentation was likely vetted with my research peers (fellow graduate students) and supervisor ahead of time, this left me with a targeted opportunity for improvement: The Q&A session.

Countless times I can recall having a brilliant answer to a question long after my presentation was finished – e.g., on my way home from the event. Not very useful … and exceedingly frustrating.

I would also assert that this lag, between question and appropriate answer, had a whole lot less to do with my expertise in a particular discipline, and a whole lot more to do with my degree nervousness – how else can I explain the ability to fashion perfect answers on the way home!

image006Over time, I like to think that I’ve approved my ability to deliver better-quality answers in real time. How have I improved? Experience. I would credit my experience teaching science to non-scientists at York, as well as my public-sector experience as a vendor representative at industry events, as particularly edifying in this regard.

Rather than submit to such baptisms of fire, and because hindsight is 20/20, I would’ve definitely appreciated the opportunity to develop my Q&A skills in virtual environments such as Nortel web.alive. Why? Such environments can easily facilitate the focused effort I required to target the development of my Q&A skills. And, of course, as my skills improve, so can the challenges brought to bear via the virtual environment.

All speculation at this point … Reasonable speculation that needs to be validated …

If you were to embrace such a virtual environment for the development of your public-speaking skills, which skills would you target? And how might you make use of the virtual environment to do so?

Confronting the Fear of Public Speaking via Virtual Environments

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Confession: In the past, I’ve been extremely quick to dismiss the value of Second Life in the context of teaching and learning.

Even worse, my dismissal was not fact-based … and, if truth be told, I’ve gone out of my way to avoid opportunities to ‘gather the facts’ by attending presentations at conferences, conducting my own research online, speaking with my colleagues, etc.

So I, dear reader, am as surprised as any of you to have had an egg-on-my-face epiphany this morning …

Please allow me to elaborate:

It was at some point during this morning’s brainstorming session that the egg hit me squarely in the face:

Why not use Nortel web.alive to prepare graduate students for presenting their research?

Often feared more than death and taxes, public speaking is an essential aspect of academic research – regardless of the discipline.

image004Enter Nortel web.alive with its virtual environment of a large lecture hall – complete with a podium, projection screen for sharing slides, and most importantly an audience!

As a former graduate student, I could easily ‘see’ myself in this environment with increasingly realistic audiences comprised of friends, family and/or pets, fellow graduate students, my research supervisor, my supervisory committee, etc. Because Nortel web.alive only requires a Web browser, my audience isn’t geographically constrained. This geographical freedom is important as it allows for participation – e.g., between graduate students at York in Toronto and their supervisor who just happens to be on sabbatical in the UK. (Trust me, this happens!)

As the manager of Network Operations at York, I’m always keen to encourage novel use of our campus network. The public-speaking use case I’ve described here has the potential to make innovative use of our campus network, regional network (GTAnet), provincial network (ORION), and even national network (CANARIE) that would ultimately allow for global connectivity.

While I busy myself scraping the egg off my face, please chime in with your feedback. Does this sound useful? Are you aware of other efforts to use virtual environments to confront the fear of public speaking? Are there related applications that come to mind for you? (As someone who’s taught classes of about 300 students in large lecture halls, a little bit of a priori experimentation in a virtual environment would’ve been greatly appreciated!)

Update (November 13, 2009): I just Google’d the title of this article and came up with a few, relevant hits; further research is required.

Blended Learning Panel

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York University’s Institute for Research on Learning Technologies is sponsoring a panel discussion on blended learning:

“A recent workplace survey reported by Brandon Hall Publishing (2008) indicates that employing a mix of web-technologies with face-to-face learning is more effective than either e-learning or face-to-face instructional approaches alone. To explore the use and potential of “blended learning” further, please join us for a panel discussion featuring experts from various fields …”

This event has been re-scheduled for April 2, 2009 at 12:15 pm in TEL 1009 at York’s Keele Campus. I anticipate a lively and interesting discussion!

(Please check the IRLT Web site for the latest updates on the event.)

ORION/CANARIE National Summit

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Just in case you haven’t heard:

… join us for an exciting national summit on innovation and technology, hosted by ORION and CANARIE, at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, Nov. 3 and 4, 2008.

“Powering Innovation – a National Summit” brings over 55 keynotes, speakers and panelist from across Canada and the US, including best-selling author of Innovation Nation, Dr. John Kao; President/CEO of Intenet2 Dr. Doug Van Houweling; chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley Dr. Robert J. Birgeneau; advanced visualization guru Dr. Chaomei Chen of Philadelphia’s Drexel University; and many more. The President of the Ontario College of Art & Design’s Sara Diamond chairs “A Boom with View”, a session on visualization technologies. Dr. Gail Anderson presents on forensic science research. Other speakers include the host of CBC Radio’s Spark Nora Young; Delvinia Interactive’s Adam Froman and the President and CEO of Zerofootprint, Ron Dembo.

This is an excellent opportunity to meet and network with up to 250 researchers, scientists, educators, and technologists from across Ontario and Canada and the international community. Attend sessions on the very latest on e-science; network-enabled platforms, cloud computing, the greening of IT; applications in the “cloud”; innovative visualization technologies; teaching and learning in a web 2.0 universe and more. Don’t miss exhibitors and showcases from holographic 3D imaging, to IP-based television platforms, to advanced networking.

For more information, visit http://www.orioncanariesummit.ca.

An Eight Pack of Leadership Traits

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I recently came across an article by Hank Marquis on effective leadership traits for those in IT. 

Marquis distills the following eight pack of traits:
  1. Leadership means focusing on the needs of others, not yourself
  2. Leadership comes from your actions, not your title
  3. Leadership makes you accountable, even if it’s not your fault
  4. Leadership is not a 9-to-5 activity
  5. Leadership takes trust from your followers
  6. Leaders get their best ideas from their team
  7. Leadership thrives on diversity
  8. Leadership comes from continuous communication
Marquis elaborates on each of these traits in the article.
And as two final nuggets to further whet your appetite, consider the following two quotes:

Effective leaders build a trusted team and then follow the team’s advice.

… always give the credit to the team. The leader’s credit comes only by crediting the team he or she leads.

Injury Time: Remembrance of Things Just Passed …

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What happened?

I strained my lower back. Badly. It was the result of two careless acts: 
  1. Lifting a heavy prop awkwardly at our annual Mardi Gras event. I felt a twinge of pain, and suspect that this predisposed my back towards injury.
  2. Attempting to leave a leg-press machine before completely releasing the 220 lbs of weight that I, back included, was still supporting. 
The pivotal incident (involving the leg-press machine) happened last Wednesday at the University’s athletic complex. Of course, I finished my hamstring curls and rowed for 20 minutes before calling it a day. Doh! 
And yes, I knew then that I was in deep trouble. 
Contrary to my spouse’s advice, I hauled my sorry self off to the University the next day, because I had things that must be done. Doh! With a notable, curvaceous list (upwards to the left), and walking speed 10-20% my normal, I can honestly state that I got a deeper appreciation of what it means to be differently abled. People rushing past me, icy walkways, plus doors stiff to open, were all-of-a-sudden on my radar. 
I barely made it through that Thursday.
I started my formal convalescence (aka. sensible acknowledgement of my predicament) on Friday morning. 

What did I do?
I convalesced. At this point, I had no choice! I took muscle relaxant and installed myself upon a heating pad. Save for attending to primal bodily functions, and attempting to do a few exercises I learned in physio that last time I strained my lower back, I remained in a sub-horizontal state through the entire weekend. I had to pass on a friend’s birthday party and a ski day 😦  
But, I:

I fretted. About work – not being there, work piling up, etc. And about my exercise routine – that picked me up, and then knocked me down! I communed with my family – when they weren’t making up for my shortfalls – and with our pets (three cats and an obnoxiously vocal husky).


What did I learn?
How good people are to me. From walking the dog to driving Miss Daisy (our teenage princess to/from dance/work/friends/etc.) to countless other things I normally do, my family filled the gaps and still had some energy left over for me in my supine state. When I did hobble into the office, I received all kinds of moral and physical support from my co-workers.
In addition to valuing my health, which I’ve been consistently better at for about the past seven months, I need to be careful – especially during acts of weekend heroism (aka. attempts at being handy) and/or exercise (technique and form do matter – ouch!).
I need to allocate more time for reading. All kinds of reading. Because I really don’t watch TV, except for NFL football, there’s nothing I can do there. Reducing the amount of time I spend handling email is about the only place I believe I can claw back from. In the 4-Hour Work Week, Timothy Ferriss presents some provocative suggestions on this front; I’d better re-read that! 
The BlackBerry is a wonderfully powerful platform that suits me when I am highly mobile, but also when I’m highly immobile – like flat on my back, literally! It’s also the only device my back can actually handle me moving around with at the moment – my laptop in an over-the-shoulder case is a non-starter for me in my current condition.

Why did I share this?
So that I have something to refer back to (sorry), when I’m getting careless!  

Net@EDU 2008: Key Takeaways

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Earlier this week, I participated in the Net@EDU Annual Meeting 2008: The Next 10 Years.   For me, the key takeaways are:

  • The Internet can be improved. IP, its transport protocols (RTP, SIP, TCP and UDP), and especially HTTP, are stifling innovation at the edges – everything (device-oriented) on IP and everything (application-oriented) on the Web. There are a number of initiatives that seek to improve the situation. One of these, with tangible outcomes, is the Stanford Clean Slate Internet Design Program.
  • Researchers and IT organizations need to be reunited. In the 1970s and 1980s, these demographics worked closely together and delivered a number of significant outcomes. Beyond the 1990s, these group remain separate and distinct. This separation has not benefited either group. As the manager of a team focused on operation of a campus network who still manages to conduct a modest amount of research, this takeaway resonates particularly strongly with me. 
  • DNSSEC is worth investigating now. DNS is a mission-critical service. It is often, however, an orphaned service in many IT organizations. DNSSEC is comprised of four standards that extend the original concept in security-savvy ways – e.g., they will harden your DNS infrastructure against DNS-targeted attacks. Although production implementation remains a future, the time is now to get involved.
  • The US is lagging behind in the case of broadband. An EDUCAUSE blueprint details the current situation, and offers a prescription for rectifying it. As a Canadian, it is noteworthy that Canada’s progress in this area is exceptional, even though it is regarded as a much-more rural nation than the US. The key to the Canadian success, and a key component of the blueprint’s prescription, is the funding model that shares costs evenly between two levels of government (federal and provincial) as well as the network builder/owner. 
  • Provisioning communications infrastructures for emergency situations is a sobering task. Virginia Tech experienced 100-3000% increases emergency-communications-panel-netedu-021008_2004.png in the demands on their communications infrastructure as a consequence of their April 16, 2007 event. Such stress factors are exceedingly difficult to estimate and account for. In some cases, responding in real time allowed for adequate provisioning through a tremendous amount of collaboration. Mass notification remains a challenge. 
  • Today’s and tomorrow’s students are different from yesterday’s. Although this may sound obvious, the details are interesting. Ultimately, this difference derives from the fact that today’s and tomorrow’s students have more intimately integrated technology into their lives from a very young age.
  • Cyberinfrastructure remains a focus. EDUCAUSE has a Campus Cyberinfrastructure Working Group. Some of their deliverables are soon to include a CI digest, plus contributions from their Framing and Information Management Focus Groups. In addition to the working-group session, Don Middleton of NCAR discussed the role of CI in the atmospheric sciences. I was particularly pleased that Middleton made a point of showcasing semantic aspects of virtual observatories such as the Virtual Solar-Terrestrial Observatory (VSTO).
  • The Tempe Mission Palms Hotel is an outstanding venue for a conference. Net@EDU has themed its annual meetings around this hotel, Tempe, Arizona and the month of February. This strategic choice is delivered in spades by the venue. From individual rooms to conference food and logistics to the mini gym and pool, The Tempe Mission Palms Hotel delivers. 

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