Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Hey, Richard Feynman Fans!

"Two new books now raise the question of whether Richard Feynman is rising to the status of superstar," says Freeman Dyson of his mentor in this review — The ‘Dramatic Picture’ of Richard Feynman. He has long held the "status of superstar" among Postechians.

I was impressed by this bit:
    [W]hen Feynman was mortally ill with cancer, he served on the NASA commission investigating the Challenger disaster of 1986. He undertook this job reluctantly, knowing that it would use up most of the time and strength that he had left. He undertook it because he felt an obligation to find the root causes of the disaster and to speak plainly to the public about his findings. He went to Washington and found what he had expected at the heart of the tragedy: a bureaucratic hierarchy with two groups of people, the engineers and the managers, who lived in separate worlds and did not communicate with each other. The engineers lived in the world of technical facts; the managers lived in the world of political dogmas.

    He asked members of both groups to tell him their estimates of the risk of disastrous failure in each Space Shuttle mission. The engineers estimated the risk to be of the order of one disaster in a hundred missions. The managers estimated the risk to be of the order of one disaster in a hundred thousand missions. The difference, a factor of a thousand between the two estimates, was never reconciled and never openly discussed. The managers were in charge of the operations and made the decisions to fly or not to fly, based on their own estimates of the risk. But the technical facts that Feynman uncovered proved that the managers were wrong and the engineers were right.
This is reminiscent of one of the shockers I took away from my recent reading of Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago Volume 1: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, that thousands upon thousands of engineers were sent to labor camps by the "managers" of the Soviet economy, accused as they were of the crime of "wrecking," which in reality meant being realistic about production quotas and whatnot.

Any thoughts on the article about Feynman?

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Tonight's the Night!


In a few hours, we will learn if Pyeongchang is successful — Last-minute efforts underway in Durban. What do you think? What is your prediction? Will Pyeongchang be chosen? Why or why not? Does it matter? Do you care? Why or Why not?

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Mr. Snyder's Resume

Address
Division of Humanities and Social Sciences
Pohang University of Science and Technology
San 31, Hyoja-dong, Pohang, Gyeongbuk 790-784
REBUBLIC OF KOREA
Tel: 82-54-279-8015
Fax: 82-54-279-3966
Email: snyder@postech.ac.kr


Education
1996 State University of New York at Buffalo. Buffalo, New York, USA. Ed.M., Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages(TESOL).
1994 State University of New York College at Buffalo. Buffalo, New York, USA. B.A., Spanish Language and Literature.
1993 University of Chile. Santiago, Chile. Study Abroad Program.

Career
2000-Present, Pohang University of Science and Technology, Division of Humanities and Social Sciences. Pohang, South Korea. Visiting Assistant Professor and Lecturer.
1997-2000 University of Ulsan, Language Education Center, Ulsan, South Korea. Program Developer and Visiting Instructor.
1996-1997 State University of New York at Buffalo-Stamford College. American Degree Studies Program. Petaling Jaya and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Branch Campus Coordinator and Visiting Lecturer.
1996 State University of New York at Buffalo English Language Institute and Office of International Education. Buffalo, New York, USA. Instructor and Program Assistant.
1995 Chilean-Canadian Centre. Santiago, Chile. Instructor.
1994 Literacy Volunteers of America, Inc. Buffalo, New York, USA. Instructor.

Confucius Says...



"Therefore, in his teaching the superior man guides his students but does not pull them along; he urges them to go forward and does not suppress them; he opens the way, but does not take them to the place. Guiding without pulling makes the process of learning gentle; urging without suppressing makes the process of learning easy; and opening the way without leading the students to the place makes them think for themselves. Now if the process of learning is made gentle and easy and the students are encouraged to think for themselves, we may call the man a good teacher.

"There are four errors in education which the teacher must beware of. Some students try to learn too much or too many subjects, some learn too little or too few subjects, some learn things too easily and some are too easily discouraged.

"These four things show that individuals differ in their mental endowments, and only through a knowledge of the different mental endowments can the teacher correct their mistakes. A teacher is but a man who tries to bring out the good and remedy the weakness of his students."

Quoted by Professor Elfren Sicangco Cruz in The wisdom of Confucius