After I wrote about the academic schedule, I got into several conversations about the schedule and timelines of the Colleges.  The United World Colleges around the world run the same IB program (with exception of Venezuela college), but we differ in operational details.  It would be interesting to look at and summarize the similarities and differences.

I chose to break down an academic year into the microscopic schedule (academic schedule: how does day-to-day classes work?) and the macroscopic timeline (what celebrations and events happen in the year, and when?).  For the timeline I will be using the Clock representation, adapted for months.

Thanks goes to Mark Sylvester for the current Adriatic operation (and rationale), and Trevor Marriott for the considerations going into LPCUWC’s calendar.

Daily Schedules

For the UWCs I’ve studied or taught at (Adriatic, Pearson, LPC), classes are morning activities and end at lunch.  Within the constraint there’s minor differences in arrangements.

Different daily schedules from each UWC

Breakfast: The Hong Kong college have 30 min breakfast after the first class.  This is a student health support measure, to make sure that everyone eats breakfast (instead of just rolling out of bed and into class).  Mahindra gets 20 min breakfast time.  Duinese get no breakfast slot, presumably from the practical constraint of mensa being far from the school building (I do still remember the yogurt, selected flavours disappearing preferentially).

Class length: LPC > Ad > Mahindra.  What surprised me was that, at 10 minutes each, the blocks at Mahindra is actually substantially shorter.  Over 200 blocks, Mahindra would actually only get ~167 hours of contact time, equivalent to 167 of LPC blocks.  Adriatic sits exactly in the middle.

Last block extension: In every college, the last block can be optionally extended for 30 minutes.  This is usually used for labs.  (Though in my own teaching I haven’t made use of them… yet.)

Academic Cycles

Unlike a static week-based calendar, where the same classes happens at the same day/time from week to week, all UWCs run in cycles.  In the Cycle system, the first academic day starts at Cycle 1, Day 1.  Each academic day that follows will either increment in Day (e.g., Cycle 1, Day 2), or loop to Day 1 of a new cycle when the end is reached.

Mahindra and LPCUWCs both run on 7 day cycles.  In these two systems, all blocks appear exactly 5 times in each cycle.  However, the LPCUWC cycle have vertical cycles of sequential blocks (A always precedes B), but Mahindra have horizontal cycles, so a different class will follow block A on different days.  I’m not sure what were the practical reasons that drove these decisions.

Adriatic, on the other hand, runs on an 8 day cycle.  Not all block are equal here: 4 blocks are higher level blocks, which appears 6 times each, and the others are SL blocks that appear only 4 times in a cycle.  (LPCUWC used to run on 8 day cycles as well, but with each block appearing exactly 5 times.  By switching to the 7-day cycle, there is more contact time overall for HL subjects over the year.)

HL/SL:

ToK:

Yearly Timeline

As the school year kicks off, I mused about how to present the course outline.  Do I send off two pages of PDF?  Do I send off a spreadsheet?  Should it be “moodle-lized”?  The progress should be planned, and the plan clearly communicated to students and co-teachers.  But the plan must also be flexible.  The best of planners draft plans that survives unscathed with reality; I am not one of them.  (There are also plan-pushers-come-hell-or-high-water, but I’m not one of those either.)

There happened to be an empty board outside the lab/classroom, and I decided we’ll do a bright, vibrant, tactile, and physical display!

How should it be structured?  The structure of the display has to conform with the inherent structure of the calendar.  At UWC Hong Kong, academics are structured in cycles, with 7 different academic days in each cycle.  Each day contains 5 classes.

The 7 different academic days — note that A always precedes B, B before C, and so on.

The upshot is that each class is present for 5 times in a cycle.

All classes happen 5 times in each cycle.

Which means that instead of labeling lessons sequentially with 1, 2, [...] 40 for a term, they can be organized instead into cycle 1 – class 1 (1-1), cycle 1 – class 2 (1-2), [...], 2-1, 2-2, [...], 8-5.  Which means a single term with 8 cycles can be planned with a grid like this:

Or, in my world of card-board and stickies, this:

Term planning with color stickies and big sheet of paper

Now it’s time to work on the actual board!  Outside our lab there’s a pair of big white-boards, so I went with measuring tape and markers, to doodle and erase and doodle and erase while contributing to the mosquitoes’ welfare.

Scribbling on the white-board with markers. The basic idea here is conserved to the end, but the final display was corralled into the board on the right.

Some drawing, fidgeting with sizes, printing, shopping, cutting, laminating, more cutting, more shopping, and a thousand little unexpected minutiae later (quoting Sally Brown, “Fold? Crease? Cut?! WHY IS IT SO COMPLICATED?!“)… we have our bright, vibrant, tactile, and physical display!

The “course outline” display by mid-term time.

Hong Kong is humid and sometimes windy, which means that anything affixed by tape falls off shortly.  Tape also makes it (relatively) hard to move elements around.  A solution to this dual problem is to use neodynium disc magnets (1mm thick, 10mm diam.) to attach all pieces to the board — they are at once strong enough to keep things on, and allow simple repositioning.

A cycle is represented by a laminated strip with 5 boxes, each perfectly sized for a 3″ post-it note.  I got 5 colors of sticky-notes, each signaling a different kind of event:

• yellow: a HL/SL class
• orange: a HL only topic
• green: lab
• pink: test!
• blue: homework.  This sits on a parallel track, and comes with arrows to show when they are expected.

Each sticky-note describes the subject for the day, the relevant topic in the IB syllabus (e.g., “periodic table” is 3.1), and page number references for different textbooks.  I try to update it about a week ahead, so students can read ahead for class if they care enough.  (Some EAL students appreciate being able to do this.)  It seems fine enough for what we need (survey to students at end of term), but this was not the original idea.

The original, more ambitious idea was to hold all the additional information (syllabus, text page#) in a companion website which has systematic URLs.  (For example, topic x.y is always represented as www.jkwchui.com/IBchem/x-y)  Then we can paste onto the post-its stickers with only topic numbers and QR-codes: all that the students need to do is either to search the topic number in the website, or scan the QR-code.  This will be tied in to the Badges system too (a “Steam achievements”-like awards for above-and-beyond efforts):

What happened?  To my chagrin, I greatly overestimated my abilities.  I thought I can teach new curricula (chem+ToK), lead new activities, supervise 5 EEs, and simultaneously be writing and illustrating “the best interactive IB chemistry” website.  It’s so crazy I don’t even know why I tried…

(But then, it’s so crazy it might just work!)

History is usually represented as a sequential time-line, stretching from the beginning on the left to the end on the right.  As a picture-thinker I have a hard time visualizing and placing in events.  Our visual width is usually not enough to take in the entire span, and if it is zoomed in, I quickly lost sense of the scale and reference to events outside the current view.

When I see a zoomed in view, I get the relationship between the events within the “scene”. I can tell that M precedes N and P. However, unless the history is already intimately familiar to me, I have only a faint idea of where and how far A and G are relative to the field of view.

I would be surprised that Richard the Lionheart is as far away from Shakespeare as Shakespeare is from us, or that Cleopatra is temporally closer to the moon landing than the construction of the pyramids (h/t wonderfuldog on Reddit).

This becomes even more of a problem when different sources or systems of time is used.  In particular, I had absolutely no sense of whether the Tang (唐) dynasty co-exists with Jesus, St Augustine, or Thomas Moore.  (The answer is “none of the above”.)  I really wanted to make sense of this once and for all.

The solution, I thought, was to roll time into a clock, so that each point in time sits at a unique spatial location.  (I first came across a mentioning of this in a lecture by a Catholic priest around 2004, whose name I have long forgotten.)  The challenge was then two-fold:

1. establishing a useful scale, and
2. preparing it allaccurately.

I did say bones, didn’t I?

Since history had no beginning or end, the choice of a scale (and thus ends) is necessarily arbitrary.  I sketched out all reasonable combinations: scale of 100-500 yr / “hour” against sliding the end-times from 2000 to 2200.  For the history I’m interested in (where meaningful oral / written records exists), a scale of 300 yr/hr ending at 2100AD worked best.

The outstanding problem is to chart things accurately (and not break too much sweat about it).  I wrote some simple Processing code that sketches out a backbone of the a tab-delimited text file of (i) spot events, and (ii) events with duration.

(The code is nothing to write home about.  It simply converts time into polar coordinates, and draw arcs on the frame.  It really should do more to help the next steps, but that’s what I don’t have time for!)

I could then bring the backbone into Illustrator to spice it up, and overlay different timelines together.  The final output for Chinese dynasties against European civilizations is shown here.  (With the usual disclaimer that periods are fuzzy around the beginning or end; dynasties and periods often languish and blend into the next.)

The final output surprised me on a few things:

• The brevity of the Qin (秦) dynasty — after uniting a China which had been at war for 600 years (!), this dynasty only lasted for a paltry 19 years.
• The chaos that was historical Europe.  It turned out to be extraordinarily difficult to sketch out detail timelines for Europe, since borders, names, faith, factions, and races are all continuously shifting and war was perpetual.  It seems to be more fruitful to speak of defining (localized) events rather than (large scale) patterns, but I’m no historian.  (On that note: pundits jeer at the selection of the European Union as a Nobel Peace prize recipient, but one would be hard-pressed to find a (Western) Europe in peace for 60+ years.  Taking the long view, the period of peace we dwell in is truly remarkable.)
• The even longevity of Chinese empires.  The “registered” dynasties all have lengths within the same magnitude, and there does not seem to be a hastening of pace as time marches on.  I’m mystified onwhy should lifetimes NOT be power law distributed, given that mass riots are power law distributed (note to self: citation needed).

The future of the project: what I’d like is to move the entire work-flow into Processing, and use Processing.js to make this an interactive application that readers can zoom-in/out, filter, and get access to more details via tool-tips.  A poor man’s Simile Timeline, but with a meaningful beginning and end.  If you want to help out, or take the idea and run with it, give me a shout and I can get the (ugly, elementary) Processing code to you.

The flat at move in (August 2012). Moving involved only two trips, each journey with one suitcase and backpack. The guards were surprised.

But I have no use whatsoever for the TV stand.  (I haven’t watched TV for more than 15 years.)  The maintenance staff kindly took that away, and left behind a blank wall.  I decided to do something with it.   I like chalk, maps, and magnets; the wall would be all that.

There shall be a magnetic chalkboard on the wall, in the shape of a world map.

Rust oleum carries separately a magnetic primer, and a chalkboard paint.  I picked up a gallon each, and tinted the chalkboard to be a navy blue.  The painting, however, would not be done for several months.

The first step involves drawing a world map on the wall.  Borrowing a projector from the Art Department, I traced out a simplified world map onto the wall with a 2B pencil.  Then I sanded the surface with a fine-grit sand-paper, so chalk goes on evenly.  The entire process takes about 3 hours.

In hindsight I should have learnt about a place called New Zealand. Or the Caspian Sea.

(In hindsight I should also have polished first, and traced later, even if that means more elbow grease.  The pencil marks don’t entirely go away when sanded, but it occasionally streaks out to the side, and the streaks were difficult to remove by eraser.)

Leila helping mask Asia.

The next step, which I’m chiseling away for a few minutes each day, is masking it with tape, so the 3 coats of primer and 2 coat of paints can have sharp edges.  This turned out to be not too bad… until I was stuck.

Well, you see, masking with artist’s tape was a fine solution except that it fails on irregular shapes.  And it fails especially badly when there is an indentation.  However, Leila discovered that tape can go on (lightly), the needed portion traced on top with pencil, and then cut to right size.  Sticky scissors and huge time sink aside, it works really well.

Since then I’ve been shaping and pasting tape for a few minutes every other day.  With much additional help from Leila, the Americas and Africa are now finished, and only the Mediterranean and the SE Asian coastlines remain unmasked.  Paint shall soon be applied.  Stay tuned!

Further along…

(More hindsights: if I were to do this again, knowing now how long it takes to mask irregular shapes, I would have made a stencil of the map.  There are so many things that was opaque and unknowable in front but crystal clear looking back.)

“Yes, but…”

The day reminded us of the vast variety of creations that have been referred to as “art”.  Even within visual arts, there are different techniques, media, intentions, popularity, and a myriad of factors.  A large part of the day’s discussion revolved around “what is art”.

The issue is complex.  The discussions, as with many discussions of complex issues, went nowhere.  Throughout the day I sat back, musing why it went nowhere.

I first noted the poorly articulated positions.  This is not a function of the lack of ability by the students, but intrinsically that our (default) language is incapable of expressing the nuances required.  We live in a messy world with exceptions, corner cases, and chaos that cannot be neatly enclosed, interpreted by monkeys raised in vastly different conditions.  Any statement will be true in some cases, false in others, with a “truthiness” that vary between individual monkey.

Take the assertion A, “something mass-produced by non-artists cannot be art”.  This is true-at-first-glance.  At the same time, most people would recognize Ai Wei Wei’s Sunflower Seeds as art, contradicting what we just agreed as true.  We could have modified the statement to be “something mass-produced by non-artists cannot be art except [...]“, but that, you’d agree, is far from the default way we think or speak.

Truth in a continuum.

The “intermediate truthiness” has an interesting and ugly consequence in discussions.  Because we do not default to speaking in exceptions and probabilities, utterances can always be shot down by counter-examples.  I describe these as “sniping at positions”, because when Peter shoots Jane down with a counter-example, he is himself invulnerable (since he never attempts to hold any position to start with).  At the end of the day, nihilism rules, and we are forced to admit we know nothing.  Socrates triumphs.

And then there is the “individual monkey” problem.  In the Osage Market Forces exhibit, a piece by Kentaro Hiroki named “My Work is Rubbish” reproduces the rubbish collected from the street.  It’s a technical marvel.  The ticket stub, in all its verisimilitude, was hand-drawn.  Is this art?  To my grandma, this is just a waste of time.

Ticket replica, in “My Work is Rubbish” by Kentaro Hiroki.

I took home a few messages and a lingering inquiry.  As a facilitator I should frame the discussion as a collective construction effort.  A first step that can be taken is encouraging note-taking, and allowing periodic breaks for consolidating what was spoken and how it all feeds into a central picture.  (As a picture-thinker, I think we should all have enough visual literacy to draw and arrange our thoughts.  I admire Betrand Russell, but I’m firmly with Wittgenstein in “what can be shown, cannot be said”.)

A second step is in pointing out sniping as it is: a purely destructive action that does not advance the collective understanding, but could have easily be constructive by articulating the underlying phenomena.  With the Ai Wei Wei example, one could have continued on to list political statement as one of the factors worth consideration, and that would have advanced our collective understanding.

Then there is the specific question of how to approach What is (Visual) Art.  My intuition is that the first step is to develop an ontology (“explicit formal specifications of the terms and relations among them”), so I sat down to

1. list possible criteria (concepts), and
2. their possible values (slots/properties).

Some factors that are definitely (definitely?) in play. Any more that should be added to the list?

The next steps are

• to think through their (i) types and (ii) relationships, and slot them into something like Protege.
• Use the ontology to generate allowedall allowed combinations, and
• Find examples that illustrate each combination.

An individual can then clarify what their positions are by classifying these examples as art or non-art.  There could be downstream investigations of whether experts have different weighing than non-experts, or cultural / age differences.

Chalk one more “large project” on the 70+ items to-do list.

UWC & HK flags

Three months came and gone since I’ve moved into LPCUWC as a chemistry/theory of knowledge teacher.  What was it like?  If I’m pressed for a one-word summary, it would be: intense.  With half the time, half the resources, we expect to accomplish twice as much — and we often do.  The string stretched tautest do ring brightest.

The work

My first realization of this came from course planning.  Coming back from an IB workshop in Singapore, I started laying out the plan for the year.  The academic term here is comprise of eight cycles, each with 5 x 1hr classes.  By midnight I had a large sheet of paper with stickies pasted on each of the 8 rows (cycles) of 5 slots (class) each.  Each sticky represents a topic in the syllabus, and where the syllabus calls for multiple hours, multiple slots were reserved.

Term planning with color stickies and big sheet of paper

Then came the heart attack.  Trevor (the resident chem/bio teacher) left me a schedule of what he did last year. Cross-checking against that, when I finish topic 2, he was finishing topic 4.  Oh, he  also finished topic 11.  Plus 6 labs.

It turns out that we teach the recommended 240 hours for the diploma Higher Level (HL) program in 160 hours.  While some at the Singapore workshop was talking about having December-March as revision time, we race to finish the options before the IB exams start — and we start sprinting from the gates in September.  (Which, for the kids’ sake, I prefer to not have to do — more on this later.)

Same story for Theory of Knowledge (ToK): the 2-yrs program is completed in 1-yr.

The time pressure, as I understand, comes from three places.  First, this being Hong Kong, we have holidays from the East (e.g., Chinese New Year) and the West (e.g., Christmas/Easter).  Second, our year runs short: 1st year students finish classes in April, whereas in some other schools their year flow into July.  And lastly, as a UWC, we ought to (and do) commit to service and education beyond the classroom, which means school days that are relatively short, as well as frequent irregular interruptions (e.g., China Week, Project Week).  All these contribute to the constraint schedule.

Jon-bound lab-books.

Being a non-profit, scholarship school, money is expectedly tight.  We are probably not as strapped as some other UWCs (Adriatic, alma mater mia, comes to mind), but there is certainly little resources floating around.  Activities with annual budget of $0 are not unheard of.  To afford the chemistry students lab note-books with page numbers, I would resort to designing, printing, photocopying, and binding the 5100 pages myself.  Madre di Dios.

And staff seems to (have to) take on much more in general.  I’ve heard that at other IB schools there’s separate residential staff, or that they would supervise 2 Extended Essays (EE) a year.  At LPCUWC our attention is expected on academics, residential life, as well as other activities, and there are colleagues loaded with 10 EEs.

I have a light load in comparison, with only 4 classes (5 regularly), 5 EEs, 2.5 activities, only one committee, and a tutor group with no letters of recommendation to write this year.  Even then, between the variegated commitments, being new to the IB curriculum, and my fatal worship of the Muses of Originality, I’ve been feeling the squeeze.  Most days stretch 0600-2200, with 0500-0100 days tossed in every now and then (with a nap in the afternoon).  (There is much to say about the teaching experience, and I’ll spin it off to another post.) (In August other teachers warned about getting run-down and sick whenever there are holidays, and that happened to me during this October break.)  My grandma is certainly wrong when she said “teaching is a lazy job”.

The people

Let’s start with the obvious (for those who know me): I’m hard to please.  I don’t dislike everyone, but there’s a small selection of people who I like, and I am demanding of them.  I want to spend my time with people who are well-meaning, competent, enthusiastic, kind, and open.  ”Who I spend time with” was the major component in deciding on this job — and it (mostly) lives up to its billing.  (No small feat.)

There are 27 teachers in the College, and the ones I have contact with are friendly, well-meaning, and extraordinarily competent.  (I suspect the rest to be the same, but I have no direct experience as evidence.)  They are respected by the students for the work they do, and some are active in the broader IB community as well.

I was positively surprised by our lab technician Jack.  I’ve seen technicians who make the solutions, and keep the lab running, but is all motions with no passion.  That was my expectations, but that is not Jack.  He goes above and beyond the bounds of his job, and does so with a dash of eagerness.  The EE students are direct beneficiaries of his organization and machining skills, and the new demos I try out for the classes are possible only with his enthusiastic support.

I sit by the admin and maintenance staff tables at lunch occasionally.  The maintenance staff take a liking to me both because I spend time with them, and probably also because I’m much younger than the other teachers, and grew up “in the neighbourhood” (a number of them live 5 minutes walk from the public estate where I grew up).

Then there’s the kids, who intersects with my life most.  A quick introduction for those of you who are unfamiliar with the UWC movement: with the lofty ideals of fostering world peace, students were selected on merit from over 70 nations to live, study, and learn from one another.  The selection process was done by individual National Committees in each country, and usually takes into account both their values and abilities (academic and otherwise).  Between their drive, the environment, (and a bit from the high-quality teaching), the kids generally do well in the IB diploma.

The kids do OK.

I am of two minds with the IB results, and the prevalent peer pressure to apply to big-name universities in the UK/US.  On one hand their dedication is admirable, and I understand the sheer need for some to secure scholarships for further education.  On other hand, I can’t help but think that this hems the students into a “me, my grades, my university placement” mindset, a mindset of craving the extrinsic rewards and anxious worship of self.

With 1st-years, this applies pressure for them to choose subjects they’re “good at” and “easy to get a high grade in”.  They drop what was an intellectually stimulating subject to them, or try to find the path of least resistance (e.g., Language ab initio as opposed to B, math studies as opposed to SL, SL as opposed to HL). I feel they were doing their future selves no favors.   Not only because the “harder” subjects are often more upwind (open more doors), but also because every time one walks away from a challenge, all future challenges become more formidable.  All that potential; all the creative clocks running to their peaks and them being blissfully unconcerned about it.

With all students, there is a temptation to do the least so they can have most time for academics.  The least time-consuming services; or that cultural understanding takes a back-seat.

College announcements, with the movement values hanging behind. Have we tried our best living the values? This is probably doubly challenging with the Hong Kong UWC. Both because it’s located in one of the swirling materialistic center of consumerism, and because the public know LPCUWC as an academically elite institution without understanding/caring for its greater purpose.

These are, of course, universal phenomena.  It is the default mode for us flesh-bags.  But I dream that the kids can all be driven by intrinsic rewards and all to embody (to quote DF Wallace) “attention and awareness and discipline, and being able to truly care about other people and sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day“.

Unattainable expectations aside, most kids are fantastic.  Some are spectacular.  At university I’ve taught students who didn’t want to be there, and spent time with weary adults with spirits worn down by the vagaries of life.  It is refreshing to teach and model for (usually) earnest, (often) idealistic kids.  I am grateful to be teaching and live with these kids.  (Teachers live on campus, and there are upshots to living in such a tight-knit community.  I wanted to adopt a persona to keep some distance, but that is nary possible to put on.  You are who you are, and everyone knows who you are.  Small society ethics definitely apply here.  I’m strangely comfortable with it.)

The other parts of life

Mixed in with the schedule are regular and irregular activities.  My regular activities are circus, coral monitoring, and Global Issues Forum (GIF).  These are substantial enough that I’ll probably write about them another time.

ToK Art Day visit to the Osage Gallery.

Irregular activities occur as part of the tutor group, blocks (the buildings where the staff and students live), cultural group, and all sorts of other reasons.  With the tutor group it’s often casual snacks, dinners, and outings; block activity take up a full weekday, and have so far involved a walk and a hike at Dragon’s Back (龍脊).  We had outings to a gallery as part of the ToK art curriculum (blog entry for ToK Art Day here), and most impressively a Middle East South Asian (MESA) cultural week.  Then there’s music nights and triathlons, and probably much that I can’t think of now.  Lara from Germany maintains an active blog of all that happens at LPCUWC.

As for the all-important minutiae of daily life: we get pretty decent food at the canteen.  Memories are deceiving, but I’d say the veggie food is better than both Pearson and Adriatic.  I was very happy that there’s a new soup every day; it took two weeks before I clued in that it’s always potato soup (with a little bit of other ingredients mixed in).  It’s not great food, but then, regular indulgence makes one soft.  The canteen ladies, occasionally grouchy to students, are usually very nice with me… I baked muffins for them one Saturday morning (it just feels right to feed those who feed me every day), and now they’re duper nice.

All in all, I’ve been strung pretty taut the past few months, occasionally near the breaking point.  (The stream of coffee and heart palpitations!)  I get exasperated about the kids (and annoyed with myself) more often than is healthy, and should step back and put it in perspective.  It’s a very meaningful and challenging experience, and blessed are the few who get this as their life’s work.

That said, I can’t say if this is something that I want to do in the long term.  Reading, learning new stuff, practicing, failing, training, socializing (with adults!) have all been put off entirely.  I have no time to work on projects that I feel only I can do, including that series of educational comic book.  For this to be a sustainable career I’ll need to learn to create space for myself, and put self-care higher up the list.  We’ll see how well that works.

The United World Colleges. Modified from a graphic by Wizardist in Wiki Commons.

Saying bye to Canada, I’ve returned to Hong Kong, and will be teaching chemistry and theory of knowledge (ToK) at the Li Po Chun United World College of Hong Kong (UWC-HK, or LPCUWC).  This is a pre-university school teaching the International Baccalaureate (IB) diploma, and one of the 12+ United World Colleges where the central characteristics are

• students who are selected from diverse backgrounds (nationalities, race, religion, culture, socioeconomic background) on basis of merit,
• who undergo a challenging and transformative education experience,
• to create, collaborate, and share a community together,
• with the explicit aim for developing a peaceful and sustainable future.

As an upshot to this large change in my life, the content of the blog will likely shift from technical notes and undergraduate chemistry to reflections on teaching and life in this unique community, as well as advice suitable for IB chemistry/ToK students.

About half a dozen friends and readers have asked about this career choice, so in the next post I’ll curate my responses to those questions.

I didn’t find anything like it when I searched for “South Africa spiky spider”, and I was ready to ask for help from the bug-ID experts at the WhatsThisBug subreddit.  Lo and behold, this gentle spider is a FAB (“Frequently Asked Bug”).  It’s a spiny-backed orb-weaver called Gasteracantha cancriformis, and they seems to come in great number of colors, but all share that spiky shell (to deter predators from swallowing it) and creepy smiley face pattern (to creep humans out?).  Wikipedia suggests that this is a New World spider, which is probably why my initial search went nowhere.

The other that caught my attention was a string of flowers near the Cape of Good Hope.  While hiking up a hill, I caught a whiff of a faint but intoxicating smell, and followed my nose into the bush (a good 10m distance!)  The smell emanated from clusters of small white flowers:

These were catnip for me.  I just stood there sniffing and sniffing, and when finally torn away I couldn’t help but broke off a few of them (mea culpa).  With this sample, I asked several guides about these “fragrant white flowers” to no avail.  I noted that the flowers were not from the tree, but is instead a climbing vine.  Wikipedia happened to have a helpful category of “South African Creepers“, and scanning through the list, the pictures and info matches one Asparagus falcatus perfectly.

The plant was used traditionally pounded as poultice for swellings, and recently an anti-angiogenic lactone was isolated from its leaves.  Anti-angiogenic means that the compound restricts blood-vessel growth.   Medically this can be a good thing (like in the cancer drug Avastin) or a bad thing (as present in the infamous thalidomide enantiomer that accompanies most lectures on optical isomers).  Sadly the molecule(s) responsible for its sweet smell seems to remain unidentified; the good thing is that I could buy seeds to try growing it.  I’ll have to check if this is an invasive species – if not, I think I might just have my personal supply of catnip for a season a year!  (Plus, if I get to a GC-MS one day, I might just identify what the odorant is.)

Edit note: this isn’t working out :(

1. Live Trace of CS5
2. Image Trace of CS6
3. Vector Magic

I conducted two sections of tests.  The first section consists of throwing different types of image at the tracing engines.  This includes (1) simple B&W line art, (2) a Burberry pattern, (3) a clean illustration of a flute, and (4) a photograph.  The second section looks at how the engines deal with deteriorating quality of input, and re-uses the flute illustration in diminishing sizes, from 2000px in width to 500px in width.  Click on the images to expand.

Types of Image

B & W Line Art

The source image is a PNG diagram from Wikimedia Commons (indicatorbuis.png).  It’s a simple line-art diagram, with type, non-antialiased edges, and white background.

Vectorization of B&W line-art.  From left to right: (1) Source image.  (2) Using lettering presets, with small “mix px”.  (3) With fully auto option in CS6.  (4) Recommended options in Vector Magic.

Anchor points for expanded vectorization

With CS6, the fully-automated option misses thin lines (see lower right diagonal line), rounded out sharp corners (see corners of inverted U-shape at the bottom), and present inexplicable artefacts (see white space within the cross-shape).

Applying the lettering preset, with smaller minimum pixel, gave much better looking results, a pseudo-transparent background (more on this later), more fidelity to the letters — but many more anchor points on the circle.  Notably, there are few extraneous anchor points on the straight lines.

With VectorMagic, the default option does very well on the lines, less so on the lettering.  Its algorithm preserve the sharp corners, but also erroneously straightened out supposingly rounded corners.  I’m not quite sure why the lines leading out were tapered.

Burberry Pattern

The second image is a JPG of the Burberry pattern, which have significant defects on the edges and was something I expected all programs to have a hard time with.

Enlargement of Burberry pattern. Note the defects underneath the lowest black stripes.

Burberry pattern, vectorized.

That turned out to be true… to some extent.  The surprise was how VectorMagic failed abysmally on this task; no amount of fidgeting with the (limited) parameters gave results better than this.  CS6′s default didn’t do so great either.  Fidgeting with the parameters on CS5, I got something that’s visually alright, but the details still don’t work out.

Illustration – 2000 x 400px

This is the task I see most relevant to myself in using the image trace function.  The source is an illustration of flute terms I drew for Wikipedia, rasterized to 2000 pixels across.  (In the next section we’ll look at how each engine handles the same illustration, at lower resolutions.)  The edges are sharp.  The background is transparent, and there are partially transparent objects in the image.

Vectorizing a clean illustration. I optimize some parameters for CS5/CS6 engine to generate these results; within my explorations these are the best the engines could get to.

Outlines from vectorization.

CS5′s Live Trace gave questionable results, with much blurry shapes throughout, most easily seen from the confused outlines near the head (left) of the foot-joint.  Simple lines became thick-and-thin lines.  The type are not rendered particular well, even with this high resolution source.

CS6′s Image Trace did much better in terms of following lines: simple straight-lines remain simple straight lines, and circular shapes remain circular.  It did not handle type any better than CS5.  There are some missing lines (see barrel) and odd added shapes (see the black dot underneath the first key on the left).  The main defect here was with color: it somehow handles color differently than the other two engines, and not in a good way either.  The dash-lines were rendered funny; the dark gray in the center of the open keys were too dark, and I could not get it to pick up the subtle light shades of gray present on the keys or the flute (which CS5′s Live Trace did), even when expanding the colors it used by double the recommended numbers.

Results from VectorMagic looks very, very good, with no optimizing done.  Type, lines, and shapes all reproduce faithfully and economically – the outline looks just about as clean as my original vector drawing!  The colors were pretty much spot on, even with the somewhat tricky overlay dash-line between the red and blue keys.  (The only deficiency was the mis-colored embouchure hole.)  It was also the only engine that handles transparency and partial transparency – the only option in CS5/CS6 was to “ignore white”.  It’s hard to tell, but the dark gray in the middle of the keys are partially transparent, and VectorMagic picked up on that.

Photograph

In general vectorizing photographs are bad idea – they’ve always looked like machine-vectorized pictures, and with resource-hogging numbers of anchor-points to boot.   Nonetheless, to complete the evaluation, I handed a 8MP picture to each vectorizing engine.  The setting for both CS5 and CS6 were “photo high fidelity”, and likewise highest detail on VectorMagic.

Photo vectorizing.

Paths for vectorized photos

Vector Magic seems to optimize for simplicity, so it generates far less anchor points than either CS5 or CS6.  This comes at an expense of less fidelity to the photo.

While CS5 performs better than VectorMagic, vectorizing photos is where CS6′s Image Trace really shine.  Man, does it look good! Look at the brown on the side of the guitar, the tuning keys, and the gradient on the tube of the flute.  I’ve never seen such a nice result.

Quality Dependence on Source

This section compares the performance of the engines when the source resolution progressively degrades for the flute illustration above.

1000 x 200 px

At 1000 x 200 px, this is about the lowest resolution in which manual tracing can be done.  Files smaller than this would miss lines and require subjective interpretation to fill in the details.  As with above, the edges are unblended, and the background is partially transparent.

Vectorization for 1000px (1/4 resolution of 2000px above).

Paths for vectorizing from intermediate resolution source.

It is note-worthy that there are presets can have the same name in CS5 and CS6, but give very different results.  Sometimes the “same” preset give much better looking results in CS5 than CS6.  The default suggested, or expected, option is frequently not what the optimal one for the situation.  In this case, CS5 gives extraneous paths, to the tune of being unusable, whereas CS6 generally misses shapes with the same parameter.

Vector Magic, once again, does extremely well.  Its output is only marginally different from the result from a 4x higher resolution source.  The notably different parts is the fidelity loss on the type, the dash-lines between the red/blue keys, and the rightmost curve at the end of the flute.  Color me impressed.

500 x 100px

At 1/16th of the original size, the source image has text that can barely be read and lines that are no longer pixel-contiguous.  General trend from above holds: CS5 gives a mess of shapes, CS6 gives cleaner lines, and Vector Magic gets the idea across better than either of Adobe’s versions.

Low resolution vectorization.

(Early) Conclusion on CS6′s Trace

The tracing engine in CS6 is better than that in CS5 for all kinds of images.  It gives much more logical, clean, and faithful lines on non-photorealistic images, and sets the bar for photo-vectorization.  However, when it comes to non-photorealistic images, especially as the sources gets lower in quality, VectorMagic is still the king of the hill and probably not going out of business anytime soon.

I’m not so sure about Adobe’s claim in a feature video that CS6′s trace is simpler to use – there are similar plethora of presets to CS5, plus dozens of adjustable parameters, and the automated choices are often not the optimal one.  I remain confused by the presence of different presets in the control drop-down box and the Image Trace panel, and identically named presets behave altogether differently.

In terms of additional options, there is a new “overlapping shape” option in CS6 which I have not tried out yet.  There was an “outline” option that was new in CS6 Image Trace panel – I imagined that it searches for the boundaries between objects and strokes them.  It doesn’t do that – it just renders the shapes it find with a 1pt black stroke (identical to expand -> select all -> D (default appearance) -> / (remove fill)).

Personally, I can’t see myself relying on CS6′s trace any more than I would on CS5.  Most of the things I vectorize are relatively simple, non-photorealistic images from low-quality sources.  Being a pretty quick tracer (and armed with a tablet), most of these are 5-10 minutes effort with guaranteed clean lines in a logical structure.  That said, seeing its success with photographic images, I might try the CS6 ImageTrace for tracing complex gradients (matching them manually is painful and time-consuming).  It’s certainly not in itself a valid reason to upgrade…