Post 1024

I’ve finally gotten to more posts than I can count on my fingers (10000000000 in binary, 2000 in octal, 400 in hexadecimal, or 1024 in decimal).

Since this is a milestone on my blog, I should probably report a few statistics:

1,023 Posts, 20 Categories, 1,305 Tags

211,322 Views, 2,878 Comments, but about 40% of those comments are from me (either adding notes to a post or responding to another commenter, so I’m really getting only about 8 comments for every 1000 views.

The big categories are

Circuits course	164
home school	127
Robotics	46
data acquisition	36
printed circuit boards	34
science fair	27

Because WordPress.com still does not support displaying posts in chronological order (only reverse chronological), and the theme I use does not include next/previous links (the one major complaint I have with the theme), I’ve had to create and manually maintain a couple of table of contents pages:

Circuits course

Homeschool Physics

The major tags are

education	297
circuits	158
teaching	127
high school	109
physics	105
home school	96
course design	95
bioengineering	86
Arduino	75
higher education	67
computer science	56
bioinformatics	49
science education	44
math	41
programming	40
Matter and Interactions	37
AP physics	37
engineering	36
science fair	35

There are probably a number of posts that should have the “home school” tag but don’t.

The major referrers are

Search Engines  (almost all Google)	84,867
Various Yahoo mail servers	1,879
Google Reader	1,468
WordPress.com	1,401
Facebook	915
computinged.wordpress.com	762
santacruzsentinel.com	486
blogger.com	470
mail.live.com	443
Twitter	432
blog.mrmeyer.com	359
google.ca	283
engineerblogs.org	283
larkolicio.us	208

Since I have neither Facebook nor Twitter accounts, the number of referrals from those social media sites are surprisingly large, but searches and e-mail referrals are clearly a far more common way to get to my blog. The coming loss of Google Reader may end up hurting my readership numbers, though I suppose that most Google Reader users will switch over to a different RSS reader. I’ll have to choose one soon myself (I’m thinking of The Old Reader, NewsBlur, or NetVibes, though I understand that NewsBlur has stopped giving out free accounts for now, because they got too many new users with the demise of Google Reader).

Here are some of my all-time most popular posts (some of them are definitely not among my favorite posts):

Title	Views	Comment
Home page / Archives	57,462	I show a few recent posts on the home page for the blog, so many of my readers just view posts there.
2011 AP Exam Score Distribution	13,937	Just a pointer to data on someone else’s web page, with minimal commentary
West Point Bridge Designer 2011	5,189	middle-school students trying to cheat on their homework
Installing gnuplot—a nightmare	4,233	The comments on this post have proven to be useful—the instructions for installing gnuplot in the comments are better than the post or the official gnuplot installation instructions.
Why no digital oscilloscope for Macbooks and iPads?	3,244	Obsolete now, as the BitScope USB oscilloscope does work with a MacBook.
Bring back the mammoth!	2,734	A throw-away comment that got a lot of views from Russia, for reasons I still don’t understand.
How many AP courses are too many?	2,526	thoughts on the tradeoffs between challenge and overwork
Computer languages for kids	1,922	The post I point people to when they ask about how to teach kids to program. Because my son has been an excellent programmer for a while, I get asked this a lot. I don’t recommend teaching (most) kids the way my son learned, but I have given some thought to how I think programming should be taught to youngsters.
West Point Bridge Design Contest 2012	1,847	Middle-schoolers cheating on their homework, but using a more recent version of bridge designer. Interestingly, this year’s post for the 2013 contest has not had many hits—probably because it is not part of the positive feedback loop that causes posts on the first page of Google hits to become more commonly reported by Google.
2012 AP Exam Score Distribution	1,697	Yet another pointer to someone else’s web page with minimal commentary
County Fair with Pictures	1,513	I’ve never understood why this post gets so many hits. There must be 1000s of better collections of County Fair pictures.
Why Discrete Math Is Important and The Calculus Trap	1,468	A pointer to some good articles on the Art of Problem Solving web site, along with some commentary.
Instrumentation amp lab	1,297	Another post in the Google positive feedback cycle. I have better posts than this one about instrumentation amps and labs using them, but this one is the one that gets clicked on.
Resources for bioinformatics in AP Bio	1,225	This post has a number of pointers that I collected that are useful for AP bio teachers and students. The teachers now have a resource repository on the College Board website that is probably more useful to them. I’ve not checked whether everything I’ve listed here has been put into the College Board repository, and probably never will have the time or energy to do that.
Adding bioinformatics to AP Bio	1,194	I think that this post was about the need for adding bioinformatics to high school biology, rather than resources for doing so. Some grad students and I have done some volunteer teaching and lesson development since then (see bioinformatics in AP Bio lessons)
Google Scholar vs. Scopus and SciFinder	1,190	A somewhat dated look at different scholarly indexing services, using searches for my work as one measure of coverage and false positives.
Waterproofing cameras for underwater ROVs	1,187	A record (with pictures) of the workshop taught to high school students for the MATE Rover underwater vehicle contest. It is a surprisingly cheap and simple way to create waterproof video cameras.
A use for an Ion Torrent	1,088	A throwaway idea for a market niche for a fairly low-cost sequencing platform. From what I’ve heard, Ion Torrent is still trying to get their error rates down to reasonable numbers, and they were badly hurt by sleazy moves by their marketing people (suppressing papers from early adopters, for example).
Soda-bottle rockets	1,066	Soda-bottle rockets are a great topic, and I have some other posts under the rocket tag, but I probably get more hits on a much older pair of PDF files for one-page handouts on how to make a simple soda-bottle launcher (English and Spanish).
Should high schools and colleges teach sentence diagramming?	1,042	Sentence diagramming seems to have gone through a nostalgia phase about a year ago. I’m not convinced that it helps students much, but it is probably better than ignoring grammar entirely or just teaching parts of speech.
What is giftedness?	1,035	I nearly always get a wave of views when I e-mail a link to post to one of the larger parent-of-gifted-kid email lists, but I try to minimize how often I do that, and only point to posts that are highly relevant to the conversation in progress on the list, so as not to be viewed as one of those obnoxious people who are just on the mailing list to shill for their books, courses, or blogs. I try to limit my mentions of my blogs to about one out of ten of my comments on the e-mail list or less.

I seem to have 20 posts with over 1000 views. I wonder what the blogging equivalent of the h-index is. Probably something like the largest h such that there are h posts with ≥50h views.

Student writing

In How does blogging about science benefit students?, Sandra Porter recommends that students (specifically biotech students at Portland COmmunity College) keep a blog :

My hypothesis is that a science blog for a science student can serve the same purpose that a portfolio serves for an artist or a set of articles serves for a writer.  Your blog can be your record of accomplishments.

Not only can your blog document your work, your blog can show that you can write, that you can spell (not a skill to take for granted), and can give you a chance to describe what you’ve done.

She describes her first job interview and what she is doing to avoid similar embarrassment for her students.  She has students in one class keep a professional lab notebook and bring it to interviews—showing that they can keep a proper lab notebook and providing documentation to support their assertion of knowing various protocols.

Student blogging is another approach she is experimenting with.  She encourages the students to use blogs as an on-line notebook (much like I’ve been doing on this blog for the circuits course), and to include the URL for the blog in resumes and cover letters for jobs.  If interviewers are interested, they can check out a few posts on the blog to see if the student can write coherently (a very important skill that can not be automatically assumed of college graduates) and, if there are search boxes and appropriate tags on the posts, whether the students know the protocols and equipment that the job requires.

In a subsequent post, The ten commandments of student science blogging, she talks about the guidelines she gives students for their blogs, to keep them from accidentally doing unprofessional things that would hurt, rather than, help their chances of getting a job.

The biggest problem I see with her recommendations is that the only audience she has identified for the student is a mysterious “job interviewer” whom the students have never met.  Writing for an unknown, difficult-to-imagine audience is hard. Writing for an imagined expert (an interviewer or professor) almost always brings out the worst writing, with inflated diction, misused jargon, and awkward ungrammatical sentences.  When writing to show that they know something to someone who knows it better, students stumble over nearly every sentence—leaving out important concepts and tossing in irrelevant minor points in a vain attempt to impress.

I think it might benefit the students to be given a more specific audience—one that they can picture writing to directly and actually informing of something new.  For an online lab notebook, it could be students at other schools (“look at the cool stuff we get to do here!”) or future students in the same lab (“never use the pink labels in the freezer—the glue on them cracks in the cold and the labels fall off”), both of whom are imaginable audiences.

The advice I gave in my circuits course is the standard advice I give to students: Write to students taking the course next year.  Assume they know what you knew coming into the course, but explain to them anything that you didn’t already know.  Make the report detailed enough that a student reading it could duplicate your work without having access to the original assignment—though they might have to looks a few things up on the web or in text books. (Provide pointers to appropriate readings, when possible.)  Explain not just what you did, but why, and provide warnings to help your reader avoid mistakes that you made.

Most of the students in the circuits course got this idea, and the reports were mostly coherent and directed at the right audience, though they were a little light on pointers to appropriate reading.

One thing that Sandra Porter doesn’t mention in her “ten commandments”, but which I had to really rant about in my course: “Get the details right!”  Sandra mentions spelling and punctuation, which are markers for attention to details, but the accuracy of the content is far more important. I can forgive an occasional typo (though failure to run text through a spell checker indicates a level of sloppiness that would disturb me as a job interviewer), but the main engineering content needs to be checked and double-checked, both for consistency with the lab notebook notes and for general sanity (recompute the corner frequency from the RC values in the schematic—is that what was intended?).

If you are giving a circuit schematic, every wire must be correctly connected, every component must have the correct value, and pin numbers should be correct.  The students  in the circuits course had incredible difficulty with checking their own and each other’s work for accuracy, and obvious errors (like power-ground shorts) occurred on most of the assignment first drafts.  For a biotech student, the equivalent would be getting the wrong reagent in a protocol, putting ice in autoclave, or replacing µg with mg.

The rate of errors in schematics did not drop much over the quarter, though I felt it should have.  Other writing problems (like poor audience assessment, overuse of passive, or misuse of “would”) were generally fixed after being pointed out, but the sloppiness in the circuit diagrams continued to be a problem all quarter.  By “sloppiness” I don’t mean poor drawing skills, as most of the students used CircuitLab to draw neat schematics, but semantic errors that changed the meaning of the circuits.

If anyone has ideas for improving student attention to details in schematics, I’d appreciate hearing them.

In the top 40

One of my blog posts made it into Santa Cruz Sentinel‘s list of the top 40 blog posts for 2012 for their Media Lab bloggers: Are AP classes worthwhile?  Unfortunately it was  25th, and so the first post displayed after the “READ NEXT PAGE” button is pressed.  I suspect that means that few people will find the post from the Sentinel article.  Still, with 170 local bloggers in their Media Lab, it is nice to make it into the top 40, and Angus’s post about my blog (Media Lab Profile: Kevin Karplus – ‘Grateful Dead on the outside, Stephen Hawking on the inside’) also made it into the top 40, so I may get some traffic that way.

It’s always nice to make it onto a top-40 list, even if it is just being a big fish in a small pond.

2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here are some excerpts:

This blog was viewed about 110,000 times in 2012.

In 2012, there were 420 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 929 posts. There were 282 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 34 MB. That’s about 5 pictures per week.

The busiest day of the year was May 14th with 705 views. The most popular post that day was 2011 AP Exam Score Distribution

Some of your most popular posts were written before 2012. Your writing has staying power! Consider writing about those topics again.

Click here to see the complete report.

I’m a little surprised that I managed to average 1.15 posts per day—I knew I’d been spending too much time on the blog, but … I’ve been getting a lot of views (for an unaffiliated academic blog), over 8000 every month since March, despite my obsession since the middle of June with the design of the Applied Circuits course (98 posts and pages so far, and the course doesn’t even start for another couple of weeks).

I’m rather lax about posting pictures, so I was surprised to see the number up to 282 (and averaging 123kB each—I do use Photoshop Elements to crop, touch up, and downsample images before posting them).  I suspect that a lot of the “pictures” are actually circuit diagrams and gnuplot graphs, which would be much smaller if WordPress.com would allow a vector graphics format like SVG rather than insisting on raster graphics like PNG and JPG for everything.  I guess they feel they have to support obsolete browsers, like Internet Exploder, that still don’t support SVG.

Here are my top-viewed posts for the year (over 300 views):

Home page / Archives	28,751
2011 AP Exam Score Distribution	10,615
West Point Bridge Designer 2011	3,990
Installing gnuplot—a nightmare	2,836
Why no digital oscilloscope for Macbooks and iPads?	1,814
2012 AP Exam Score Distribution	1,638
How many AP courses are too many?	1,618
Bring back the mammoth!	1,424
West Point Bridge Design Contest 2012	1,320
County Fair with Pictures	925
Soda-bottle rockets	821
Why Discrete Math Is Important and The Calculus Trap	812
Teaching voice projection	711
Raspberry Pi	697
Underwater ROV contest	651
Waterproofing cameras for underwater ROVs	639
Resources for bioinformatics in AP Bio	637
Coursera Course Catalog	608
Soda-bottle rocket simulation: take 2	608
Learning to use I2C	591
Satisfying UC’s a–g requirements with home school	516
EMG and EKG works	503
Computer languages for kids	500
Speed of sound lab writeup	498
Underwater ROV	481
Magnetometer and accelerometer read simultaneously	474
Soda-bottle rocket simulation	472
Should high schools and colleges teach sentence diagramming?	470
Google Scholar vs. Scopus and SciFinder	466
DRACO: broad-spectrum antiviral drugs	398
Green beard effect	394
Adding bioinformatics to AP Bio	388
Carol Dweck’s Mindset	361
Medical Instrumentation, Chapter 6	355
NSF “clarifies” Broader Impacts	351
Better electrode placement for EKG blinky	351
Prevnar 13 approved for adults	341
Instrumentation amp lab	321
A critique of CS textbooks	315
iPad Oscilloscope	305

People coming to the home page are still the biggest single group, but overall, more people are finding my pages through search engines than by other means. It is a bit disappointing that two of my top pages are just pointers to someone else’s collection of AP exam score distributions, and another two are for middle-school students looking to cheat on the West Point bridge design contest (which apparently some schools assign as homework).

The gnuplot post is mainly used by people looking for a way to install gnuplot on Macs. I think that the gnuplot community really needs to get their act together and put up a proper binary installer for Mac OS X. They need to stop pretending that everything is fine if you can dual-boot your system or put up a 2Gbyte Linux-lookalike environment on your Mac.

There is now an ok USB oscilloscope for the Mac, though the code is still clearly beta-release quality.  I posted about it in FET threshold tests with Bitscope.

A couple of the popular posts are mainly fluff (the mammoth post and the Green Beard joke picture).

A lot of my most-viewed posts are technical ones on electronics, computer engineering, robotics, or physics, though more at a teaching or hobbyist level than professional, cutting-edge stuff.  I’m fairly happy with that, as I’m turning more into a teacher than a researcher over the past couple of years—I’ve always enjoyed creating new courses, and I’ve been putting a lot of time into that lately. My more philosophical musings have had less readership, perhaps because they are harder to find in a Google search and are less likely to be searched for.

I’m still not seeing many comments (about 2.4/post and 40% of the comments are by me).  I’d like to have more feedback from my readers, but with so many of them being one-time viewers who came via search, I can’t really expect much conversation in the comments.

I’ve seen a strong weekly periodicity in my viewership, with dips over the weekend (people must be goofing off at work when they access my blog).  The plot is particularly clear when I look at the Google Webmaster tools, which has minima on Saturdays:

As much history as Google’s webmaster tools is willing to show me. It would really help to have the clicks and impressions on a log scale, so that the clicks didn’t have just a one-pixel fluctuation. I suppose it is too much to expect Google to be willing to provide free tools that are actually well designed for geeks like me.  My overall click-through rate of 4% is decent, I suppose,

My university web pages have a higher number of clicks, but 57% of them for the soda-bottle rocket launcher plans and the mead recipe, neither of which are related to my professional responsibilities.  The next few are for handouts from tech writing course I taught in 2003—I’ve not really been putting much of general interest on my University web pages lately.

Quantcast.com estimates my 2012 page views for my blog as about 103,000 (a bit less than WordPress.com number, which is more directly measured), but Quantcast also estimates the number of visits and people as about 55,000 and 43,000 respectively, so people are viewing about two pages per visit.  Somewhat surprisingly, given my age and how many of my posts are about educating my son, my demographics skews towards younger adults without kids.  Less surprisingly, given the technical content and academic tone, my demographics skew heavily towards people with graduate degrees.

Not visible to the outside world, I also have 169 draft posts (usually just a pointer to a web page I planned to comment on, or a couple of lines of notes) and 71 tabs in Firefox for web pages I planned to blog about but haven’t even gotten into draft posts yet.  So I have material for a couple hundred more posts, if I can remember what it was I wanted to say.  If I ever go through the lot of them, I’ll probably throw out ¾ of them as being no longer relevant or interesting—they weren’t compelling enough at the time to make me write the post immediately.

Overall, I’m fairly pleased with my blog this year, and hope that next year will continue to be successful—maybe I can get the draft-post backlog whittled down a little (though to-do lists always seem to grow rather than shrink, no matter how many things I do).

Profiled in the local paper

Today, I was profiled in the local paper by Angus McMahan, because of this blog. Perhaps it will bring me a few more readers.  In any event, I ha a fine time chatting with Angus and see that he did a pretty good job of extracting a newspaper-article-sized chunk from our rather meandering conversation.  If you want to follow his blog, he writes at Angus-land.

The appearance of the article reminds me that I promised to do a similar blurb/interview of Suki Wessling, who blogs at Avant Parenting and who is a professional writer (as well as a home-schooling parent).  I’ve been reading her blog for a while and have chatted with her a few times, but I’ve not arranged a time to interview her yet.  Yet another thing on my “to do” list.