This is the web home of Jason E. Miller, Ph.D. The pages and links share information for Miller and those people with similar interests.

  • Fun activity today - CVARC on the air from Anacapa Island

    Today, the Conejo Valley Amateur Radio Club is organizing a trip to Anacapa Island in the Channel Islands National Park to ‘activate’ Anacapa as part of ‘Parks on the Air’ (POTA) and ‘Islands on the Air’ (IOTA) amateur radio activities. If you have a license and want to get on the air, this gives you a fun opportunity to do so. And monitoring their activity will be interesting, too.

  • My Commencement Remarks, May 2023

    One duty of the Chair of the Academic Senate is to deliver brief remarks to the graduates at commencement. Below is a copy of the remarks that I delivered to the Office of the President for inclusion in the ceremony.

  • CalState Channel Islands Amateur Radio Interest Group Newsletter, May 2023

    CSUCI AMATEUR RADIO INTEREST GROUP State of the Club Message May 2023

  • How Could the Club do SOTA?

    This post explores SOTA as an activity that could increase student engagement in a radio club.

  • How to Build Relationships with Other College Clubs

    We know that Cal Poly SLO has an active radio club. CSUN used to have an active club. There are probably other campuses nearby that have some degree of radio activity (e.g., is anything happening at our community college partners?).

  • Grant Ideas for our Amateur Radio Group

    Tonight I participated in the ARRL Zoom-inar where three leaders described a new grant program where ARRL will be giving away grants in amounts between $5000 and $25000 to amateur radio clubs.

  • Activities our Amateur Radio Group Might Consider

    This document is meant to pull together a few ideas the club might consider as focal activities or one-off topics of conversations at a meeting.

  • Helping students use LaTeX for class

    I’m teaching mathematical modeling in the spring. This is an upper-level (senior) course, and I think I’m going to take the opportunity to have students use LaTeX to typeset some of their work.

  • Notes for SENATE OFFICERS AND INTERIM PRESIDENT YAO, Monday, January 3rd

    On Monday, January 3rd, the Officers of the Academic Senate had a regular meeting with Interim President Yao. Raquel and Jason were present. So was Provost Avila. Conversation focused on repopulating campus for the Spring 2022 and the options the president was considering.

  • Notes for SENATE OFFICERS AND INTERIM PRESIDENT YAO, Tuesday, December 14th

    On Tuesday, December 14th, the Officers of the Academic Senate had a regular meeting with Interim President Yao. Topics of conversations included a report on the dire enrollment numbers for Spring, a mention of a HERD-funded effort to support students, an effort to get seniors the classes they need to graduate, low-income housing effort, a joint-plan with community college leaders to help everyone’s enrollment, and some conversation about the campus budget process. This note will summarize some of this.

  • Committee Notes for UNIVERSITY POLICE ADVISORY COMMITTEE, Monday, December 13, 2021

    The meeting focused on the University Police Department’s implementation reporting requirements of the Racial and Identify Profiling Act (CA Senate Bill 953 from 2015). Information was presented by Interim Chief Drake Massey and Officer Hector Gomez.

  • Committee Notes for CROSS-DIVISIONAL COMMUNICATIONS GROUP, Friday, December 17, 2021

    The agenda was light. The report on campus COVID number showed that numbers were very low; the campus’s first ‘outbreak’ was behind us. Looking back on the term, there was a feeling of contentment and ease with how things were going. But then conversation turned in two different directions.

  • Radio Room on Campus

    Amateur radio is one step closer to having a place on campus. Yesterday, Bill Boyd from the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department Office of Emergency Services came to campus with Stu Sheldon, a representative of the volunteer Auxilliary Communication Service (ACS), to check out Bell Tower 2301. This small closet between Bell Tower and Bell Tower West has been identified as a potential home for a radio room on campus.

  • Sign-up for Intro to Math Modeling in Spring 2021

    In Spring 2021, the Mathematics Department will be offering a topics course (MATH 490) on Introduction to Mathematical Modeling. This describes this course and what students can expect from it.

  • Standards-Based Grading Conference

    Registration is now open for the STEM higher education Master Grading Conference on 11-12 June 2021.

  • Great advice for everyong heading into the New year

  • Academic Integrity

    On Christmas Eve, a letter from a member of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) appeared in MAA Connect, a community discussion board. The member, who is named Richard, was sharing his frustration with incidents of dishonesty he’d uncovered in one of his mathematics classes. He shared a letter he wrote and sent to the students, and he invited others to share how they have dealt with academic dishonetsy in their classes. This is what I wrote and posted in MAA Connect in response.

  • Conic Sections on Twitter

    Saw this cool tweet and wanted to see how it would render on this web site.

  • Adding post tagging to jekyll's Minima theme

    It’s almost Christmas Eve and I’m fiddling with a web page. I moved my content from a Wordpress site to a jekyll installation that can be hosted freely by GitHub. The ‘minima’ theme seems to scratch most of my itches, but there are a couple I want to address in the next couple days. Today’s is tagging.

  • Liquid Template Language in Markdown on Jekyll

    As I’m trying to document my experience customizing my jekyll install to allow posts to have tags, I realize that the blocks of Liquid template langauge don’t render in my syntax blocks.

  • Adjusting My Teaching During Our Public Health Emergency

    On Wednesday evening, the University responded to public health concerns about the novel coronavirus (SAR-CoV–2) by transitioning all face-to-face lecture classes to virtual instruction. This change affects all my courses. I’m writing about my plans here so my students know what to expect.

  • Needs proof

    Every triangle has a line through it that simultaneously divides its area and its perimeter each in half. (Why?) For an isosceles triangle that special line is its line of symmetry. Where is that special line for a 3-4-5 right triangle?

  • Student Agency and Performance Climate

  • Memorizing Mathematics

  • Research Opportunity with the U.S. Navy

    If you’re a member of the CI faculty, and you’re interested in work being done at one (or more) of the commands at Naval Base Ventura County, then you should consider applying to participate in the ONR’s Summer Faculty Research Program. The application is not onerous, and you don’t even have to line up a collaborator, first. (Though I imagine that would help.)

  • Problem with the Anabat Swift

    The purpose of this post is to describe an error we’re experiencing with two of our Anabat Swifts. The third Swift in our stable works perfectly well, we think. In this post, I’ll summarize our problem. Then I will give a detailed report on our last encounter with the problem. If we solve the problem, I will edit this post to include an explanation of the source of the problem (as I understand it) and the solution to the problem.

  • Trouble with Anabat Insight

    I’m experiencing some ‘bad behavior’ from Analook Insight, a program I’m using to clean call files recorded with an Anabat Swift.

  • Making and Edukating: an idea waiting to happen (revised)

    Across the country, a handful of companies, nonprofit groups, public educational agencies and even science museums are trying to make manufacturing seem, well, fun. Focusing mainly on children aged 10 to 17, organizations including the Da Vinci Science Center in Allentown, Pa.; and Stihl, a maker of chain saws and other outdoor power equipment in Virginia Beach, Va., run camps that let students operate basic machinery, meet workers and make things.

  • Up and Up: Putting the Balloons to Bed

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  • Tremendous. Experience.

    [Kauffman_group

  • Up and Up: If Lost, Please Return To....

    Balloon_route_2

  • Up and Up: Still Winds Over Campus

    Christian_and_sara_prepping

  • Up and Up: Breaking Against the Wind

    On_campus

  • Up and Up: Failure Lies on the Path of True Knowledge

    There’s a failure meme out there, and here is our contribution. I post this for fun and to contribute to the meme.

  • Up and Up: Further adventures in educational ballooning

    ![Kauffman_balloon_-tiltshift](/assets/images/kauffman_balloon-_tiltshift.JPG.scaled1000.jpg)

  • Making and Edukating: a fun test leading to a big week

    In a little over a week, I play host to 33 junior high students from Kansas City who are going to come to Truman’s campus and spend three days learning what college is like. For the last few weeks, I’ve been madly putting a program together that leans somehow on model rocketry. What can be more fun that controlled explosions, right?

  • A Pogue PR Misstep?

    Just caught this on the NYTImes.com: popular gadget reviewer and a freelancer for The Times, David Pogue, is caught up in an ethics foofaraw concerning his relationship to public relations (PR) people.