It's September, and another school year started with a departmental picnic at the Toronto Island. One of my biggest dilemmas every term is what courses to audit. Since this university is so large, it offers courses that you can't imagine. Take this one for example.
To provide so many courses, many graduate students are also teaching assistants (TA). Although not a very interesting work, it is a good experience and help reducing the workloads of the professors that are always busy and don't have time to think about research problems. In general, the system here is very efficient. For example, they lend the TA's the course's textbooks for the whole term. There are not many dirty jobs to do, since programming assignments are usually marked automatically. In comparison, professor Askold Khovanskii
(a student of Arnold), once told us that when he was a student in Moscow, graduate students had to run numeric algorithms by hand to verify the conjectures of their professors in the theory of differential equations.
Almost all undergraduate courses have a midterm, assignments and a final exam, which have to be marked. In a course with several TA's exams are marked together in a "marking party", and the lecturer will usually buy Pizza or donuts to everybody. Several ways are used to reduce the marking load. If there are not enough hours allocated in the contract, the TA will mark only part of the questions. Some courses allow submission in pairs. Now there is a new method: students can get 20% on a question if the write "I don't know" instead of filling pages proving the same thing (in one occasion, after a final exam I saw a student approaching the professor and saying he didn't know he could write "I don't know"). Sometimes students find my email and just to be on the safe side they ask clarification questions, since marking here is very strict and according to marking schemes. Here is an example I just got two days ago: "I forgot to write down "no outside discussion" and "no extra text consulted" on my cover page. Does it matter?".
Teaching a class is much more fun than marking, and is also a good English practice. In general, classes here are infra-quiet. Several things I learned from the blackboard position. First, there is the invisibility illusion. Students think they can see me but I cannot see them. This is untrue, except when I turn my back to write on the board. A second misconception is that students assume they can hear me but I can't hear them. Given the silence in the classroom, this is wrong even when I turn my back. However, most times I can't understand what they are whispering, simply because I don't understand Chinese.
It has been a while since I wrote you about interesting computer vision applications. We had a visit of researches from the ATR media lab in Japan. They developed an olfactory system that generates smells by commands from the computer (could be useful for virtual reality). The problem with smells is that once a smell is produced, the next one has to override the previous one, and all the people in the room will smell the same thing.
To overcome this, they developed an air canon and a nose tracking system, which projects chemicals directly to the tracked nose.
