Socorro

So. I'm in Socorro now. ^^ I love doing that. Disappearing randomly to some far off place. Maryland is further, but this Feels farther, probably because it's farther from Anything At All. Yup. Three cheers for the Middle of Nowhere!
I'm here for a two week workshop held at NM Tech. We're also staying in the dorms at Tech.
The workshop is the Summer Teacher's Institute for the Supercomputing Challenge and GUTS. In past years, STI has been only the Challenge. Last summer, in the rush and whirl of all the projects, special issues and general insanity, I ended up spending three days of the two weeks with STI as a "guest". That one was held at Central New Mexico College in Albuquerque. This year, I'm technically a Participant, but am functioning as a Facilitator.
The campus here is very Very green. Most places I would say it was pretty, but... such bright green lawns clash with the muted purple brown and red tones of the surrounding mountains. It seems out of place here in New Mexico. The green is pretty, and the mountains are STUNNING, and the sky is gorgeous. But the green doesn't go with the desert mountains, or with the seemingly painted backdrop of the brilliantly white/purple clouds on brightest blue.
*shrug* Maybe I'm just a desert child and green grass is fundamentally wrong in my mind. Like a pink sky would be wrong.
Anyway. At some point I have to go out and explore the seemingly exotic tropical flora, and the Wide variety of mushrooms that I've noticed growing in among the grass. (They mow the lawns every day, so I'll have to go in the morning, before they get a chance to cut everything down.)
I've also noticed a lot of birds around. There are lots of bright little goldfinches that remind me of my flock at home; except bright yellow instead of crimson. There are also a lot of doves, swallows, humming birds and robins. There's also a Handful of hawks (kestrels? sparrow-hawks? they aren't redtails, and they're not buzzards) that seem to live on campus, one I believe has taken up residence in a tree close outside my window. And of course, for desert flavor, there are buzzards. I've put up some bird pictures, but they're kind of hard to see.

Tomorrow, I'm presenting a curriculum I've been working on with Nick, about Voting and Polling, and also Wisdom of the Crowds. (I posted the very short WOC intro earlier.) I should probably be getting stuff ready for that... yeah. eh. I'll be fine.
We have a very rough introduction to the unit, we have a couple of hands-on activities, and one "out of the seat" activity. I think I might post more about each of these later, maybe after we've run the activities. They include a pencil and paper (or Excel) manipulation of data we got from people guessing how many Hershey's Kisses were in a container; a pencil and paper/Excel exercise manipulating made up election data to produce different winners; a caucus/district voting activity involving dumping beans on a paper divided into districts and counting the beans as votes for that type of bean; and the out of seat activity is manipulating polling data and showing interesting patterns when you do different things, like switch you're opinion based on who's around you. We also have some ideas about discussions attached to the unit. Primarily, "What decisions do people make as a group, and how do they make those decisions?". And a couple of models; one in Starlogo TNG, one in Netlogo, but I think we're only showing the TNG model tomorrow.
Not much is written up. I said we have a rough intro already, but aside from that only the out of seat activity is fully written up, WOC we have that small introduction and data we generated yesterday, district voting we have a first draft, and election data manipulation comes out of a paper which we have, but we haven't distilled it at all yet. The TNG model is as finished programming-wise as it's going to get, but it hasn't been written up yet either.
So I have my work cut out for me. What am I still doing blogging? ... eh. I needed a break and to unload my brain for a bit. And besides, these don't have to be finalized for this run. This is mostly a practice run for the teachers, and a test run for us. Even if we did have finalized write-ups for everything they would change between running them now, and when they Actually have to be finished for the students in the fall.
... Alright. off to work.