week one and counting

First week at the forestry university.

I started off the week with lots of introductions to people in the engineering college. I got to see the human factor lab, which i am still not sure what is used for. The lab is full of machines to test reflexes, muscle memory, reaction times, multi-tasking abilities, estimation abilities and so on. Apparently the machines are useful to determine human abilities as they might relate to future machines and our abilities to operate them.

I also got to see the the provincial forest model. It is a comprehensive model of all of the provinces forests combined into one model and by combined i mean the model is divided into 4 parts with red lines and there is a fifth part on separate table. the thing is huge, probably 20ftX30ft. This last year several foreign forest experts came to admire the model, even western countries dont have a model as good as this one. dont get me wrong, other countries have forest models, but none are complete animated.... the whole thing is filled with little electric motors and wired up to a computer. every single tree can be 'cut down(fall over)' through the click of a mouse. even the little trucks and tree cranes move it really exciting. although this week it wasnt fully operational. i need to go back next week and see it in full action.

I started taking classes here as well. Right now I have two. One called environmental science, which is very uninteresting, and one called forest ecology which is actually pretty good. Environmental science consists of powerpoint slides copied directly from a poor quality american environmental science book from the 1980's. The professor has calls on students from the roster to read the english slides and then translate them into chinese. This might be a good idea if the students could read english or even if after stumbling through the slide they had any idea what they just read. That would make translating a bit easier. My motive for being in the class is not to learn anything new, but rather to help improve my chinese. This class does not help. The forest ecology class is good because the professor knows what he is doing and gives good lectures.