Once Upon a College: More anemometer testing

Thursday, July 23, 2009

More anemometer testing

Here's our test site on the former USAF radome building at the Charleston Correctional Center again.

This time we have the NRG Systems and RainWise Wind Log anemometers side-by-side, to do a scientific comparison of the accuracy of the RainWise device.

If the device is accurate, we may deploy several of them around the state to strategic sites, to start getting the data we need to correct the Maine wind maps. This project was previously out of the question because of the high cost of equipment. The RainWise device, if it works well, reduces the cost decisively.

Actually, the Charleston site is ideal not just for testing -- the USAF building is a superb test platform -- but also as a strategic site. We will learn a good deal about Maine wind just from this one site, which is in mid-central Maine on the highest point for 30-40 miles in any direction.

That kind of thing makes me very happy indeed.

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What this is about

A long time ago, in an educational universe far away and almost certain never to return, the professors of a certain small college experimented with experiential learning and taught their students not just to "read, write, think, and figure", but also to do practical things with that learning. Educational theory and research results from Kurt Hahn to modern scholars suggests strongly that experiential learning works better, particularly for active young people. It also matters greatly that young people have the physical and mental confidence to do something positive with their learning, particularly to make social and environmental change, in other words, to lead. This kind of confidence comes with physical challenge and being made to defend your ideas out loud, among other things. The small college was built around these ideas, deliberately, by a group of determined and innovative educators. With this success, along came the inevitable bean-counters who believed such a valuable education was way too expensive for those students. Wanting to keep more of the students' money (to pay their six figure salaries, of course), they cut the programs the first chance they got and went all-online where the teaching help is way cheaper and less demanding of budgets for tools and materials. I happen to think it was well worth the investment for any student who really engaged with the opportunity, but... bean counters gonna count beans. So the college is, for all useful purposes, gone, or at least changed beyond all recognition and not any good at teaching anyone anything practical at all. But the memories remain. And, despite the best efforts of the new administrators to erase them, so does quite a bit of open-source computer data to remind us of those memories, in the form of this and several other blogs and video pages online. In the case of this blog, the blog data were mine, not the college's, all along, even though they tried many times to get their cold dead bean-counter hands on them. So fuck 'em. Oh, and yes, this particular professor cusses more now that I don't have to worry about pointy-headed supervisors. Fuck them too. Enjoy. And remember, llegitimi non carborundum. If you're one of our former students and looking for stories you wrote or photographs or records of projects you worked on, just use the keyword search function or the chronological record to find your projects. They're all still here. Drop me a line using the comments section. I'd love to hear from you.

Once Upon a College

Thursday, July 23, 2009

More anemometer testing

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What this is about

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