Fall 2008 Games Now Available

The game demos from my Game Programming 1 class are now available on the web. You can view movies and download actual versions of the game. This year's class was impressive, out of 12 groups, we got 12 playable games. See http://larc.unt.edu/demos/fall08/4210/ for full details.

What happens when a snake meets a bulldozer? Fail!

More on Discovery Park

I just discovered that we're not the only Discovery Park. Wikipedia lists several of them. Eastern Arizona College has one, as does Purdue University, so we're in distinguished company. I hope none of them has copyrighted the name. UNT had to change its School of Visual Arts to the College of Visual Arts and Design when it was discovered that the term "School of Visual Arts" was copyrighted and the owner threatened to sue. That would be unfortunate, given that the big sign out front of the Research Park was changed to read "Discovery Park" some time over the last few days.

Discovery Park?

I saw this sign posted a few weeks ago in the building I work in at the Research Park (sorry, "Discovery Park"). Don't worry, it's in the public domain so the author won't mind if I reproduce it here.

Eureka! I found my publications!

I found my publications! Right there. Right over there. Sitting on top of that rock. Behind that bush, where no one else had looked yet.

Perhaps I am merely sensitive, but does the change from Research Park to Discovery Park seem to belittle what we do here?

Changing "Research" to "Discovery" seems to embrace the inexplicable American trend of anti-intellectualism. Did the word "Research" not attract the right kind of students? Was it too intimidating? It does seem to suggest an arguably unfair requirement of effort.

Discoveries, on the other hand, usually happen to someone by accident. To anyone, really, and usually that person was not looking for anything at all. Inspirational, I admit, and not at all intimidating. I expect peer reviews will relax to accommodate this movement: "We applaud your uncompromising resignation to luck, the cornerstone of discovery. You have the most tremendous luck of any of the authors, nee adventurers, who have submitted a paper thus far. Paper accepted."

I am not genuinely angry. I am confused. I am a little disappointed. When looking at all of the signs we now need to replace, I am thinking about how parking is no longer free.

Disclaimer: I have no publications, discovered or otherwise. I read email sent to (email address deleted so the student doesn't get spammed).

This document belongs to the public domain. It's yours.

I don't know how long it's been there. Signs like this usually get taken down quickly, so if anybody in authority notices this blog they will surely hunt down the sign and remove it.

The author has a good point though. "Discovery Park" is a weak name. It sounds almost as if some administrator went to a thesaurus looking for synonyms of "research" and picked "discovery". That's well and good, but as Chris points out, "Discovery" has negative connotations that were unnnoticed by the administrator involved.

But how important is this? What's in a name, after all a Research Park by any other name would smell as sweet (sorry Will). I don't think the choice of name will affect the quality of research done here or affect the chances of getting grants, or attracting new researchers. That's all in the hands of people like you and me, who value substance over image. They don't care about the name.

Administrators tend to value image over substance. To them the choice of name is important. It's unfortunate and ironic that that fact alone makes them unqualified to make the choice.

But I prefer to look on the bright side (call me "Brian").

I assume that no researchers were involved in the choice of the name "Discovery Park". The time that administrators took making the choice (which probably took committee meetings) could have been spent doing things that are actively harmful to research, such as making more rules and regulations. But it was spent doing something harmless and meaningless. Some administrator no doubt got a bullet point on his or her resume:

• Named Discovery Park

Meanwhile, we researchers got time to do research while this high-level decision making was going on.

Sounds like a win-win situation to me!

Of all the pictures I took at the beach this year, I think that one's my favorite. Click for a larger image.

Signs of the Times

While on vacation this month the following signs caught my eye.

The first one, the white sign in the background (click for a larger image) says "no tress passing". My dictionary defines a "tress" to be "A long lock or ringlet of hair." Does that mean that we can't pass hanks of hair to each other on the beach? The sign in the foreground does manage to spell "trespassing" correctly, with only three esses.


The next one shows a complete and utter communication failure. It doesn't look like an invisible fence to me! Or maybe I'm just hallucinating the fence. The dog, however, does appear to be invisible. How appropriate.

That's a fail. Just like this parking meter.

Student Evaluation of Instructor

My department has finally updated the evaluation form that students use to evaluate their instructor. The old 12-question form has been changed only once in the last 18 years as far as I can remember. The new form has only 6 questions.

I finally got the evaluations from Spring 2008 back this week. It takes a while for UNT to get around to collating the results. I've posted mine here. Not all professors post theirs, but I think that they should so that students can get full information on their future instructors. Mine are always pretty good so I have no problems posting them.

I'm a little annoyed at one of the comments in my 4220 class this semester though. It's more than a little skewed, shall we say. Since the survey is of necessity anonymous and completely confidential, students sometimes get away with writing the most biased things and we don't get to respond. This time I've decided to respond here.

Not many students have bothered to evaluate me on off-campus sites such as ratemyprofessors.com.

Blast from the Past

I rediscovered this picture recently. (As one of my favorite quotes says "One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries", this from A. A. Milne, the creator of Winnie-the-Pooh.

It's a publicity photograph of me taken during my years as a young Assistant Professor at Penn State. I'm guessing it's from about 1985. I was in my mid 20s. It was a whole different world back then.

How to Use a Digital Picture Frame

Many of the departments here in the nascent College of Engineering have big $1000 plasma screen TVs hooked up to $600 computers showing a promotional slideshow of their activities. I decided to spend around $100 on a digital picture frame to do the same thing outside my office. After looking at a few frames I decided to buy a Kodak Easyshare SV1011, the old cheap one without the wifi link. Of all the cheap frames I looked at, that one had the best image quality.

I got out my Dremel and bolted it to the wall hard enough so that anybody seeking to steal it will have to totally destroy it to get it off the wall.

I used a few photos I had lying around, and I used the "Save as jpg" feature in PowerPoint to make a few informational slides. If you buy another frame, make sure you check it out on some jpgs of text saved by PowerPoint, because it looked sucky on some of the screens I tried. I was totally unprepared for that, but I guess it figures that the frames are optimized for showing photos cheaply, and people are not going to notice the loss of resolution that really shows up on text.

Do you think any other faculty will follow my lead?