Past OFE events
CIRT events

What is “Stretch Your Noodle”? UNF faculty lead discussions on current and controversial topics and encourage you to “Stretch Your Noodle” by allowing you to challenge your assumptions and to think creatively about the world. These events will start with a brief faculty lecture and proceed with open discussion. Refreshments (including noodles!) are served.

Upcoming Events:

"Machine Intelligence": Visual Analytics, Your Medical Records, and the Limits of Computation Friday, November 20, 12:00 - 1:15PM Faculty Commons, Building 10, Room 1102; RSVP to ofe@unf.edu What can computers do better than humans, what can humans do better than computers, and why? Why can't my medical records in hospital X be perused by physicians in hospital Y? As technology advances, people are learning new ways to interact with machines. Dr. Arturo Sanchez-Ruiz, School of Computing, will lead a discussion on how computational thinking, visual analytics, and just-in-time virtual environments offer the potential of making our lives better and how these advances are presenting challenges for humans and machines. Come join the discussion and enjoy a noodle lunch. RSVP to ofe@unf.edu

Past Events:

10/23/09 Going Beyond the Page (and Onto the Pond): Writing on Water Boundaries of thought and imagination restrain us from invention and marvel. Dr. Clark Lunberry, Associate Professor of English, has shown us how to cross those boundaries into new ways of expression. During this Stretch Your Noodle event, Dr. Lunberry will discuss his long-term “writing on water” project that involves the installation of large-scale poetry in the landscape. The presentation will focus upon both the practical dimensions of these installations, but also equally upon their theoretical and pedagogical repercussions in which language itself has been materially and conceptually re-enlivened by these projects, re-imagined as liquid resonance, as floating form. Photographs of this on-going project can be seen at his Web site: http://www.unf.edu/~clunberr.

4/17/09 Once Destroyed: The Trouble with Natural Restoration What is the real impact of economic development on the natural world? Is there hope for natural restoration projects? In this “Stretch Your Noodle” installment, Dr. Courtney Hackney, Professor and Director of the Coastal Biology Flagship Program, will discuss his research on the difficult process of ecological restoration. Come join the discussion. And, enjoy a noodle lunch.

2/20/09 The Amazing Stability of Teaching Effectiveness Ratings Do college students’ ratings of a professor’s teaching effectiveness suggest that a professor’s teaching improves with time? Does anything predict which instructors receive the highest ratings or improve the fastest? Dr. Adam Carle discussed his research using longitudinal growth models to examine whether students’ ratings of teaching effectiveness change across time and whether online vs. face-to-face, tenure, discipline, course level, sex, or minority status affect ratings and rates of change in these ratings. Presentation Handout

11/21/2008 The Strange Reality of our Quantum World: Modern Applications of Quantum Weirdness Dr. Robert Vergenz, Department of Chemistry & Physics, tickled our curiosity with Quantum Weirdness. In 1965 the famous scientist, Richard Feynman, gave a detailed explanation for the layperson of why "... nobody understands quantum mechanics." There are good reasons to believe this is still true today. Dr. Vergenz provided a guided tour (for the layperson) of modern experimental tests of the most counter-intuitive aspects of the fundamental assumptions of quantum theory.