ThinkingAboutTheThinkable

Over the years of my teaching, my major contribution is to  demonstrate  how to think, how to investigate a problem or issue or situation, how to be a scholar or a thoughtful person. I'm not sure I teach much in the sense of content, and the learning that occurs is usually demonstrated by projects students do (exams are useless, for my classes). I am student-centered, to use the current lingo, by my working with students on their projects, and by engaging with them, usually in class, taking their questions seriously. I understand inverting the classroom, or whatever it is called, and that is possible in the sciences too--but I did not see it. I do not do it now, although projects and consultation do some of it. My physics teachers were not particularly good didacts. We learned from watching them think. The textbooks did the rest of the work. My best teachers in undergraduate humanities and social science classes were similar. (I went to Columbia, where general education i...

Over the years of my teaching, my major contribution is to  demonstrate  how to think, how to investigate a problem or issue or situation, how to be a scholar or a thoughtful person. I'm not sure I teach much in the sense of content, and the learning that occurs is usually demonstrated by projects students do (exams are useless, for my classes). I am student-centered, to use the current lingo, by my working with students on their projects, and by engaging with them, usually in class, taking their questions seriously. I understand inverting the classroom, or whatever it is called, and that is possible in the sciences too--but I did not see it. I do not do it now, although projects and consultation do some of it. My physics teachers were not particularly good didacts. We learned from watching them think. The textbooks did the rest of the work. My best teachers in undergraduate humanities and social science classes were similar. (I went to Columbia, where general education i...

Over the last fifty years, there has developed a quantitative theory of finance and financial engineering that has implications for how we think and teach in planning. In particular, options and insurance may be understood in practical terms when we think about projects, cost-benefit analysis, and so-called big infrastructure. Option theory originally developed when it was noticed that securities’ prices seemed to move randomly from day to day. Such a “random walk” may be effectively modeled by thinking of those prices moving diffusively, moving as the square-root of time (rather than linearly, as we think of a velocity,) so that distance is proportional not to time but to the square-root of time. Diffusion is well understood by physicists, and its earliest formulation in terms of molecular motions and collisions is due to Einstein and Smoluchowski.   A securities option is a chance to buy a security at a certain price in a particular future time, and since we have a rough s...

Recently I was asked about my photographic documentation projects. I had no real overview of what I had been doing for the last almost twenty years. So I made the chart below. It may be a useful model for others. I have also inserted, above, a graphic I have made of my career so far. MK Yr Major Work  [Bold is books, 2 and italics is second edition. Underline is grants.] 1 2 1998 1998 My point is that much of what I have been doing in my photographing is not about individual iconic images, although there might well be some, drawing from contact sheets, as do art photographers or photojournalism. Rather it is documentation of what there is in the world, All or Many or a Large-Sample. Hence tens of thousands of images, All of which matter as a whole. Even when I was using film, but more easily with digital. 3   1998 1999 Since the early 2000s (actually 1998 or 1999) I have been doin...