Typefaces

My secret passion, in all of the science and mathematics and philosophy that I love, is actually typography.  A distinctive font can subtly set your work off, and it demonstrates that you care enough not to use Times New Roman for everything.  I find myself trying to figure out the typefaces used in advertising and documentation, with middling success.

These are a few of the better-designed fonts out there, in my opinion, and several of them offer features useful to scientists.

Calibri

This is (inexplicably) the standard font with Office 2007.  Now, I say inexplicably, because you’re never supposed to use a sans-serif font for your basic text.  An entire generation of freshman college students, however, has unwittingly walked into this trap.  But don’t let that ruin the gracefulness of this font for you; when applied correctly, it shines (the default usage in Excel is perfect).  Also, it features a backwards-combining overhead dot which facilitates expression of flow rates:

The Symbol menu allows easy access to this character, or see my earlier post on character shortcuts for more ways to use this feature effectively.

If you don’t have Calibri, or a couple of these other fonts (Cambria, for instance, which I don’t mention), then you can download the PowerPoint Viewer 2007, which has them packaged with it.

Gentium

Gentium is the most beautiful open font that I’ve ever discovered.  A full-featured set of Latin-based Unicode characters combine effortlessly with the modifying characters.  Just compare:

As demonstrated, a combining overhead dot, very useful to engineers, can be added via Character Map or a number of other methods.  And, unlike Calibri or many other fonts, the dot aligns at a perfect visual center for the character.

Gentium is also slightly narrower than Times New Roman, and can help you fit a little bit more into a page if you need to.

Book Antiqua

This is Gentium’s counterpart–the great secret about this font is that it occupies slightly more horizontal space than Times New Roman, and thus can make a paper look slightly longer than it otherwise might:

It also has some subtle features, like the tail on the Q and the slight tilt on the upper-left serif of the X and Y that make it really charming.

Consolas

This is often my default viewing font in Notepad and SciTe, for what it’s worth.

Inconsolata

Slightly less full-bodied than Consolas, Inconsolata is another lovely sans-serif monospace font I use sometimes in PowerPoint presentations.

I have a soft spot for Goudy as well, but that’s a pricey one for a grad student to use, at 26 USD to download (times two, if you want the italics).

I actually carry these fonts on my flash drive for use anywhere.  You can also embed them into PowerPoint documents, at least, by checking Tools→ Options→ Save→ Embed TrueType Fonts.  Since I tend to print documentation to PDF, that also saves me the trouble of trying to ensure that everyone has the same fonts as me as well.

Uses of technology in education, part one

This is a topic I put a lot of thought into (present tense).  I see technology handled so poorly in the classroom, even by fully qualified instructors who should know better.

Mathematics

My mathematical training was done between two schools (but mostly BYU).  The BYU math department always came across as very anti-technology to me, except finally in a partial-differential equations class in which the professor used Matlab to demonstrate Fourier series.  But that was it.  Throughout the program, no mention of software packages, numerical methods, even calculator tips.

I understand the aversion many mathematicians teaching students feel towards letting the students use too much technology at the expense of not learning the material.  But it’s not a very practical standpoint when taken to an extreme, as in where no calculators are allowed to be used in the class, ever.  You’re going to use a calculator in any real-life situation, or something more powerful.  You may as well learn to use it from the beginning.

Any student worth his or her salt will use technology as much as possible to facilitate the exercise of his or her skills, and engineers will try to utilize the mathematical tools as much as possible so that they can focus on the other portions of problem-solving.

(On a side note, where on earth are engineers supposed to learn how to do proofs?  I basically failed a mathematics class several years ago, because the tests consisted of six or seven proofs, which I have never been trained to do.  I’ve since learned to do proofs by contradiction, but that’s it.)

Also, the utilization of visual demonstrations will help most students understand the point better.  I used Mathcad to help my brother understand what a derivative was.

Demonstrating the derivative with Mathcad

After all the confusing explanations he’d had in class, seeing me plot (and actively change!) the function, and being himself able to interact with the program, helped him immensely to grasp the nature of the rate of change with respect to a variable.

Presentation

I’ve also been following the Zen model of presentations, in which simple but powerful slides are used to effectively convey information.  What should the relationship of this style be to engineering?

I actually picked up Al Gore’s book, An Inconvenient Truth, and thumbed through it a few weeks ago.  I was amazed at how well he could use images to promote his story.  Whatever I may think of his premise, I cannot for a moment challenge the artistry that went into selling it.  How can we use graphical storytelling like that to transform science and engineering education?

I realize that most engineering lectures are a data dump, and that most engineers never have and never will receive any formal training in design.  But there has to be a better way to go from seeing mainly this*:

to something like this, supplemented by knowing the above:

I suspect that perhaps a set of handouts/notes different from the actual slides, with more information on them, could solve this.  I do remember being completely turned off by long lectures of equations and text, even though normally seeing such things in a textbook turns me on.  I guess part of the problem is that it places a greater burden on the teacher and his assistants to prepare two such sets, and to ensure that they correspond well when updates are made.

I don’t know that there’s much hope to change any of this soon.  I’ve thought about taking some engineering education courses, trying to work on the problem (and maybe writing up something that can help allay it), but for now, my task consists mostly of observation of what does and doesn’t work, and why.  As any of you go into higher education, remember to reconsider and reexamine how technology can help you get your message across to you students more effectively, and how it can help them complete their tasks better.

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*With apologies to Dr. Wheeler.  Both of these are from one of his note pages, and I’m using them to make a point, not to criticize.