Vision Scientist at @NDSU, comics fan, retro-gamer, amateur artist and dad. Co-Editor at @VisualCognition. All views, posts, and opinions shared are my own.
Jan 18, 2022 • 11 tweets • 4 min read
My students in S&P have their first problem set due at the end of this week, so here's some examples of the kind of stuff I want them to work on this week. First, the goal: Practice with dot-products, vectors, trig, and using formulas. Time to calculate stuff! <1/n>
Many of the problems are quite dull: Here are some dot-products, practice multiplying and adding. Here are some trig functions (and inverses) to calculate. Here are two points - calculate the Euclidean distance between them. Hopefully this is re-awakening old skills. <2/n>
Jan 12, 2022 • 15 tweets • 4 min read
First day of S&P is on the books! Today involved telling students how assessments work, so now seems like a good time to share my (new) approach for this term. The TL;DR version: We're not doing points. Points annoy everyone and this ain't Hogwarts. Read on for more. <1/n>
First, a word about #ungrading. I REALLY want to like ungrading. I have colleagues who are strong advocates for it and I've seen success stories here and elsewhere about it. I also had a terrible go at trying it in a much smaller class last year - just didn't work at all. <2/n>
Jan 11, 2022 • 11 tweets • 4 min read
Another 🧵 about what I'm doing this week in S&P at @NDSU. One goal for Week #1 is to begin re-introducing students to the math they'll need for the course. This is tough going - many of them will have taken no math at all since freshman year, save for our methods seq. <1/n>
As a group, they aren't confident in their quantitative skills. My first "quiz" is always to ask what the most advanced class is that they've taken and how they'd rate their confidence in their quantitative skills. This usually ends up between 1-2 on a 1-5 scale. <2/n>
Jan 10, 2022 • 13 tweets • 5 min read
A 🧵re: Week 1 of S&P at @NDSU. This time around, I'm going to tweet out more details of what I cover each week and what kinds of problems I want my students to learn how to solve. Hope this is useful and remember you can find demo ideas/etc at sites.google.com/view/hands-on-…. <1/n>
Week 1 focuses on what the class is about: What's interesting about studying vision? Why does Dr. Balas think I should use math to understand it? @NDSUPsychology students tend to have a good bit of skepticism about both propositions. <2/n>
Jun 26, 2021 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
Updated preprint from myself, @gnomicbrain and Dr. Sarah Weigelt! In this study we used a production task to measure children's estimates of typical face configuration in upright and inverted contexts. Short 🧵 about the main results... <1/n> psyarxiv.com/5btma/
We asked kids between the ages of 5-10 and adults to make "typical" faces by placing the eyes, nose and mouth inside either an upright or inverted face outline. <2/n>
Apr 25, 2020 • 16 tweets • 5 min read
Alright, time for more comparative color #visionscience, but this time the species is far less well-researched. On Monday, I'm talking to my S&P students about the visual system of the animal below. <1/n>
In case you don't know what that thing is that is the PREDATOR. This alien essentially won the 1980's by being the most ridiculously awesome scary alien I had ever seen by the age of 8 (and I'd seen some stuff by then - trust me). <2/n>
