So, setting a bar of 10,000 hours as the necessary hands on goal is way too high. Maybe a better question to ask is, what's needed to become competent? Any idea?
You have hit the million dollar question in education, my friend. I suspect its a question that doesn't have a one-size-fits-all answer. Sadly, educational policy has long operated under the same-training-same-results mentality which is diametrically opposed to the differentiated instruction models that have slowly crossed into mainstream education from special education research. However, I agree that 10,000 hours from a college is unfeasible, even undesirable. In fact, I really don't think a degree makes you an expert. That being said, I think you have to admit that, in general, an hour under mentorship/teaching gets you more bang for your buck than trying to figure it out all by yourself. Granted, I'm assuming GOOD mentorship/teaching, which is a WHOLE other conversation.
Do yourself a huge favor. Get at least one of your degrees in math education as opposed to pure math the whole way up the ladder. If you go the pure math route, I think your fears are fairly well justified. Chalk-and-talk teaching is going the way of the dinosaurs. That's what the Khan Academy is for. Go learn some of the cutting-edge teaching techniques that are being developed and you'll have a skill set that no mere computer can replace.
If you think that online learning is "simply watching" you should really have a look at the new classes on Coursera and Udacity.
While I concur that some of these do have interactive elements, many of them are of them are of the watch-this-video variety. The TED-Ed stuff which started this thread is a great example.
Of course not the cutting part.
Thank you for making my point for me. Surgeons get paid for the cutting part, not the memorization part. Likewise, mathematicians get paid for designing new applications for mathematics, not just applying pre-existing formulas. Moreover, while the online courses you mention and similar ones for mathematics (like ALEKS) can be VERY good for memorization...IF AND ONLY IF you are a motivated learner to begin with. Only a real live teacher has ANY chance of changing the mind of a student who has a "When am I ever going to need to know this" mentality.
Why would people even go to college once this becomes mainstream?
Simply put, passively watching a video is better than nothing and even better than tuning out in the middle of class. However, there is simply no replacement for hands-on experience. That's why you see all those cutting edge new charter schools that are opening up moving away from textbook-based learning to project-based learning. As a math teacher, I am 100% behind sites like this providing opportunities for people to engage in life-long learning. That being said, I simply don't believe you can become an expert anything simply by watching. The cognitive psychology research says you need something like 10,000 hours of practice to develop the automaticity of an expert. That is to say, do you want the surgeon who has to check the anatomy book before he cuts into you or the surgeon who practiced on cadavers so much he can find the place to cut with his eyes closed? THAT, my friend, is what the value of college is. The other key feature of college is that gives you a chance to see where the holes are in understanding/technology/methodology. Universities, especially at the graduate level, are really about preparing people to engage in innovation. Do some people have good ideas without college? Surely. Are even half of those ideas feasible or attainable without some serious training? I doubt it.
The ad clearly states that the margin of error is more than half the size of the scale. Basically flip a coin. If it's heads add 50, if it's tails subtract 50. That's so hideously inaccurate that it's not even worth calling data. Imagine using a similar technique in measuring the temperature outside. Let see...my thermometer says 30...*flip a coin* Wow! It's 80 degrees out in December. Heat wave!
2) Data is impartial
It's not hard to pick criteria that may have some statistical correlation to student achievement that are utterly beyond the teacher's control. Why should those affect their score directly? This formula just adds a whole lot of random numbers together, including "Student Characteristics." What does that even mean? I mean, maybe if they were calculating this number through a MANCOVA or some other powerful statistical method, I could see how it would be worthwhile to account for student's being poor or whatever. However this formula relies almost entirely on addition. What? Shouldn't the "Student Characteristics" for example be a multiplicative coefficient? No. This is clearly a formula without fairness in mind.
3) It can't hurt anyone.
Politicians have been looking for ANY excuse to badmouth teachers for DECADES. Despite the very clear claims that this method is "experimental," you know it won't be long before some member of congress goes "And look at the average teaching effectiveness in New York, we should cut their funding some more" if the numbers are artificially low, those number are going to be used politically.
Imagine there was some measure of say, likelihood of being a rapist based on similarly arbitrary criteria. If your score indicated a high likelihood that you were a rapist based upon the "fact" that two of your neighbors are rapists, would you want that "data" published?
The math behind this is totally bizarre. Twenty bucks a month for 5mbps or 60 bucks a month for 15mbps makes sense. Triple the bandwidth, triple the cost. However, add some some arbitrary all user cap of, say, 100GB per month:
So, about 45 hours of low speed internet for $20 dollars, but only 15ish hours of high speed internet for $60. You pay more to get less overall internet access! Only if triple bandwidth also implies triple cap does this make any sense whatsoever. Using this same logic, if you're one of the lucky few on a 50mbps connection, OF COURSE you're going to use ten times as much data as the person with 5mbps connection. Probably more, really, considering the person who wants the cheapest available internet probably doesn't use it to its full capacity. Someone needs to explain high school math to these companies. A little statistics, maybe a little calculus, and it wouldn't surprise you at all that only the very few people who buy the best internet use the most bandwidth. Gee, I wonder who's going to use more water, the single bedroom home or the big restaurant down the street?
Yeah, I've actually bought a couple of the old SNES rpg favorites on my Wii's virtual console. I actually owned the old cartridges, once upon a time. However, teenager me said "Pfft, the playstation will make me forget all about the SNES." How wrong I was. I feel legally justified in owning the roms, but its nice having proof for the games I couldn't live without.
I learned how to use DOS at the same time I learned how to read. In fact, some of my earliest memories include a luggage-sized computer with a three-inch monochrome monitor. Today, I spend the vast majority of my free time at my computer desk. I can program in several computer languages. My desktop dual-boots 64-bit versions of Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.4, and I am even typing this essay on an ergonomic keyboard that I brought from home. I am, to use a term coined a decade ago, a digital native. So, when I look at the state instructional technology today, I am both impressed at the technological progress over the course of my lifetime and utterly disgusted by the shortcomings of its implementation in our society.
Foremost among my concerns is the mind-boggling disparity in access to technology, particularly across socio-economic status. I can point to you on a map two schools within mere miles of each other where one has SMART boards in every classroom and the other did not even have a classroom set of calculators available to me as a math teacher. That is only just digital technology. On a far more fundamental level, I can point to a different set of two nearby schools where one has automatic-flush toilets and the other had such frequent plumbing problems to a point that drinking from the water fountain was risky business. I simply do not feel that I can ethically spend time researching Facebook or the iPad as instructional technologies when not every student in the public education system has access to comfortable and healthy analog technologies like air conditioning.
Another issue that gives me significant pause is Mooreâ(TM)s Law. Technology is advancing at a prodigiously exponential rate, to the point that futurists predict an upcoming event dubbed the Singularity at which technology will progress faster than society can cope with its evolution. I am particularly fond of a TED talk given by Ray Kurzweil on the topic of the integration of technology with the body, particularly the part on an already-possible synthetic red blood cell which would, to paraphrase Kurzweil, allow the average teenager to regularly outperform todayâ(TM)s Olympic athletes. Even the advent of internet-enabled phones has caused notable distress among teachers. I can not even imagine the discord when the technology is implantable and can not be turned off or confiscated. On the other hand, the standardized management paradigm behind the OGT and the SAT would finally collapse, so it would not be all bad. I digress.
The third problem that I have with instructional technology is that there is far to much emphasis on innovation and far too little on revision. Take the TI-nspire. Look, it now includes a computer algebra system but has a terrible user interface, and just as math teachers were starting to get comfortable with the idea of allowing graphing calculators in the classroom, we have made the technology even more powerful â" re-emphasizing the original concerns about the calculators doing all the work. Similarly, take all these new educational iPad apps on top of the virtual man
While it is very true that practically nothing uses the Honeycomb-specific Fragments UI, the simple tweak using an app called Spare Parts will scale pretty much every app to an appropriate size on a big tablet. Only the most sloppily designed apps don't scale well on my Galaxy Tab 10.1 (which has been well worth the three days after release of going from store to store to find at 32GB version in stock). Don't let the "lack" of apps keep you from buying a tablet. Again, the Spare Parts app fixes just about everything, and there's lots of tutorials on the web about how to do it, notably at jkkmobile.
I use TOR to get around restrictive firewalls at coffee shops and such. For example, the local Panera uses OpenDNS, which seemed to think googlecode.com as a whole was infected with the Conficker worm. TOR let me access it no problem.
While what Watson represents is a huge leap forward in AI, ultimately it's not much different than some of the better chat bots. The only difference now is a massively better database from which to query. While the ability to "understand" idiosyncratic speech, such as puns, will merge nicely with speech recognition softeware that already exists so that you can now use "Call mother" and "Call mom" interchangeably without programming those specific phrases, it is nothing like true intelligence. Some thoughts.
1) Can Watson MAKE even the most rudimentary puns just because it can process them? Call me when a computer comes up with something even as dreadfully literal as "Want to hear a dirty joke? A pig fell in the mud." The creation of puns requires the creator to have some sort of theory of mind of the listener. Statistics does cool things, and may eventually inform a computer that algorithmically generated statements that contain references to farts are generally received as "funnier," but that is about it.
2) The response about Wonder Woman being the first woman in space is a crucial component to intelligence. It's all just data to Watson. Until we can really define what makes Wonder Woman fictitious, Mark Twain fictitious and Samuel Clemens real, Watson ain't got a prayer in the world. Hell, real live people have trouble telling when Stephen Colbert is being himself or his person. How do you let one of Watson's descendants participate in socially constructed reality?
3) How do you explain in rules that "1+1=2", "one cow meets another cow is two cows," and "A day after a day from now is two days from now" are all the same class of statement? We don't even really know how humans make some of these incredibly simple relationships.
If you want to create something revolutionary, create a store and forward message system that can run on mobile devices and can transfer messages via bluetooth. It's akin to carrier pigeon, but it might actually work.
This actually exists! See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers
I think your bluetooth not-net idea would actually work pretty well in a densely populated urban environment. The problem would be how does someone living even in tech-friendly but less densely populated suburban area connect?
And that is how the TOR for Android app was born. Seriously, I'm not worried about this at all. For every attempt to monetize tracking, an obfuscation method will be developed to negate the tracking. Unlike, say, developing for Ubuntu, there is a significant financial incentive for people to code simple workarounds. I mean, how fast did the Google TV for streaming video services workaround happen?
Thirty years ago, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) released a controversial document entitled An Agenda for Action. Part of what made the position statement so controversial was the recommendation that computers and calculators should be a part of every mathematics classroom (http://www.nctm.org/standards/content.aspx?id=17282). Many teachers and parents feared that students might never learn mathematics properly if they could just press a few buttons to produce a correct answer. In stark contrast, the schoolchildren of the YouTube generation are virtually inseparable from their portable electronics - many of which are more powerful than early graphing calculators that NCTM. Dubbed digital natives (http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky - Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants - Part1.pdf), none among them were alive during a time when there was no Internet. As a result, the question is no longer “if” technology should be a part of public education but is now “how much”.
Many schools are emerging that are online-only (http://keystonehighschool.com/) or otherwise devoted to technology (http://www.neatorama.com/2010/01/09/school-teaches-its-students-almost-entirely-through-video-games/). You can even earn a doctorate at an online university (http://www.phoenix.edu/colleges_divisions/doctoral.html)! Additionally, online resources like the amateur Khan Academy or the commercial ALEKS (http://www.aleks.com/) are beginning to challenge several long-standing assumptions about the need for face-to-face instruction or even the need for teachers. Most importantly, it is worth stating that the research on eLearning is mixed, as a whole. A specific eLearning package may help in reading but not in mathematics, may help at third grade but not eighth grade, or may help on a state-level test but not on a national-level test. So, there is no clear answer on a “best” package or way to use technology. However, there are several key points to consider:
Embarrassment
To be honest, nobody likes to be wrong, and mathematics is a subject in which students are often told that they are, at least technically, incorrect. It is no wonder that eLearning can get such positive feedback from students. Many packages use little to no direct contract with a teacher; even if they do, a student is not going to be told they are incorrect in front of twenty or thirty of their peers. A private email is not so bad in comparison to even the gentlest public rebuke. Similarly, nobody needs to know if a given student has been successful either. It is often considered geeky to be good at school, especially in the STEM subjects. This turns many people away from science and mathematics, particularly girls. eLearning can provide a method to circumvent such peer scrutiny.
Motivation
Students like computers. Given a choice between a hands-on activity and an identical computer activity, many students will opt for the latter. Moreover, students like games, and eLearning developers are actively trying to capitalize on that appeal. While good in theory, a key implementation problem is that much edutainment uses the games as a reward for practice (http://www.funbrain.com/math/index.html) rather than as the means for actually teaching the material (http://ldt.stanford.edu/ldt1999/Students/kemery/esc/rockyDemoFrame.htm). I certainly approve of additional practice, but even the most motivated student requires a good explanation now and then.
Willingness
Another thing to keep in mind is that school occurs on a set schedule over which the student has little to no control. Much of eLearning is available whenever the student is willing to participate. In other words, those who succeed are those who have chosen to participate. In fact, research often shows that eLearning success is strongly dependent upon the amount of time a student participates. Of course, convincing someone to dedicate time and effort to actual eLearning is no
So what would those conditions be? With light spectrum, you have two options, reflect it or absorb it.
Plants are green given the relative energy and percentage of wavelengths in sunlight. In other words red is easy to absorb and there's lots of it. Similarly blue is hard to absorb, but there's not so much in our yellowish sunlight to warrant reflecting it. Green, though, it's sort of hard to digest and there's an AWFUL lot of it in our sunlight. Hence green leaves.
So, blue aliens are likely to come from an inner planet of a blue dwarf system because they'd need to reflect all that harmful blue light. Although, I could see how aliens from a coldish planet around a red giant might be blue because blue would be the only color they don't have to bother absorbing.
While a coat of aluminum oxide does count as a Faraday cage, I believe thickness is real issue with the protective power. Paint is only a few molecules thick (relatively) to the more traditional wire mesh. If you were going to build a new house, I think you'd be better including a brass mesh in the walls of your house.
I was always fond of the Daisy Chatbot, and I even spent a month once training her. The one thing that I felt always kept Daisy from progressing beyond fitful bursts of 5-year-old conversation was that you could never identify good responses from bad responses. The idea of generating a language database from scratch is downright brilliant compared to the programmed-response systems that float around. The problem is that there is no "evolutionary pressure" as it were. I think the next step in making AI more realistic is some sort of inherant reward/punishment system. After all, if you look at the development of cognition in humans, that's the next stage after basic language acquisition. A 3 year old can understand words and maybe even string a few together, but its not until 4 or 5 when the child learns that some words aren't appropriate that they move on to real dialogue and not just babbling.
Slashdot Mirror
So, setting a bar of 10,000 hours as the necessary hands on goal is way too high. Maybe a better question to ask is, what's needed to become competent? Any idea?
You have hit the million dollar question in education, my friend. I suspect its a question that doesn't have a one-size-fits-all answer. Sadly, educational policy has long operated under the same-training-same-results mentality which is diametrically opposed to the differentiated instruction models that have slowly crossed into mainstream education from special education research. However, I agree that 10,000 hours from a college is unfeasible, even undesirable. In fact, I really don't think a degree makes you an expert. That being said, I think you have to admit that, in general, an hour under mentorship/teaching gets you more bang for your buck than trying to figure it out all by yourself. Granted, I'm assuming GOOD mentorship/teaching, which is a WHOLE other conversation.
Do yourself a huge favor. Get at least one of your degrees in math education as opposed to pure math the whole way up the ladder. If you go the pure math route, I think your fears are fairly well justified. Chalk-and-talk teaching is going the way of the dinosaurs. That's what the Khan Academy is for. Go learn some of the cutting-edge teaching techniques that are being developed and you'll have a skill set that no mere computer can replace.
If you think that online learning is "simply watching" you should really have a look at the new classes on Coursera and Udacity.
While I concur that some of these do have interactive elements, many of them are of them are of the watch-this-video variety. The TED-Ed stuff which started this thread is a great example.
Of course not the cutting part.
Thank you for making my point for me. Surgeons get paid for the cutting part, not the memorization part. Likewise, mathematicians get paid for designing new applications for mathematics, not just applying pre-existing formulas. Moreover, while the online courses you mention and similar ones for mathematics (like ALEKS) can be VERY good for memorization...IF AND ONLY IF you are a motivated learner to begin with. Only a real live teacher has ANY chance of changing the mind of a student who has a "When am I ever going to need to know this" mentality.
Why would people even go to college once this becomes mainstream?
Simply put, passively watching a video is better than nothing and even better than tuning out in the middle of class. However, there is simply no replacement for hands-on experience. That's why you see all those cutting edge new charter schools that are opening up moving away from textbook-based learning to project-based learning. As a math teacher, I am 100% behind sites like this providing opportunities for people to engage in life-long learning. That being said, I simply don't believe you can become an expert anything simply by watching. The cognitive psychology research says you need something like 10,000 hours of practice to develop the automaticity of an expert. That is to say, do you want the surgeon who has to check the anatomy book before he cuts into you or the surgeon who practiced on cadavers so much he can find the place to cut with his eyes closed? THAT, my friend, is what the value of college is. The other key feature of college is that gives you a chance to see where the holes are in understanding/technology/methodology. Universities, especially at the graduate level, are really about preparing people to engage in innovation. Do some people have good ideas without college? Surely. Are even half of those ideas feasible or attainable without some serious training? I doubt it.
@SJHillman
I think there's few key flaws with your idea.
1) The idea that data is accurate
The ad clearly states that the margin of error is more than half the size of the scale. Basically flip a coin. If it's heads add 50, if it's tails subtract 50. That's so hideously inaccurate that it's not even worth calling data. Imagine using a similar technique in measuring the temperature outside. Let see...my thermometer says 30...*flip a coin* Wow! It's 80 degrees out in December. Heat wave!
2) Data is impartial
It's not hard to pick criteria that may have some statistical correlation to student achievement that are utterly beyond the teacher's control. Why should those affect their score directly? This formula just adds a whole lot of random numbers together, including "Student Characteristics." What does that even mean? I mean, maybe if they were calculating this number through a MANCOVA or some other powerful statistical method, I could see how it would be worthwhile to account for student's being poor or whatever. However this formula relies almost entirely on addition. What? Shouldn't the "Student Characteristics" for example be a multiplicative coefficient? No. This is clearly a formula without fairness in mind.
3) It can't hurt anyone.
Politicians have been looking for ANY excuse to badmouth teachers for DECADES. Despite the very clear claims that this method is "experimental," you know it won't be long before some member of congress goes "And look at the average teaching effectiveness in New York, we should cut their funding some more" if the numbers are artificially low, those number are going to be used politically.
Imagine there was some measure of say, likelihood of being a rapist based on similarly arbitrary criteria. If your score indicated a high likelihood that you were a rapist based upon the "fact" that two of your neighbors are rapists, would you want that "data" published?
The math behind this is totally bizarre. Twenty bucks a month for 5mbps or 60 bucks a month for 15mbps makes sense. Triple the bandwidth, triple the cost. However, add some some arbitrary all user cap of, say, 100GB per month:
5 mb/s = 300 mb/min = 18000 mb/hour = 2250 MB/hour = 2.2GB / hour.
So, about 45 hours of low speed internet for $20 dollars, but only 15ish hours of high speed internet for $60. You pay more to get less overall internet access! Only if triple bandwidth also implies triple cap does this make any sense whatsoever. Using this same logic, if you're one of the lucky few on a 50mbps connection, OF COURSE you're going to use ten times as much data as the person with 5mbps connection. Probably more, really, considering the person who wants the cheapest available internet probably doesn't use it to its full capacity. Someone needs to explain high school math to these companies. A little statistics, maybe a little calculus, and it wouldn't surprise you at all that only the very few people who buy the best internet use the most bandwidth. Gee, I wonder who's going to use more water, the single bedroom home or the big restaurant down the street?
Yeah, I've actually bought a couple of the old SNES rpg favorites on my Wii's virtual console. I actually owned the old cartridges, once upon a time. However, teenager me said "Pfft, the playstation will make me forget all about the SNES." How wrong I was. I feel legally justified in owning the roms, but its nice having proof for the games I couldn't live without.
I learned how to use DOS at the same time I learned how to read. In fact, some of my earliest memories include a luggage-sized computer with a three-inch monochrome monitor. Today, I spend the vast majority of my free time at my computer desk. I can program in several computer languages. My desktop dual-boots 64-bit versions of Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.4, and I am even typing this essay on an ergonomic keyboard that I brought from home. I am, to use a term coined a decade ago, a digital native. So, when I look at the state instructional technology today, I am both impressed at the technological progress over the course of my lifetime and utterly disgusted by the shortcomings of its implementation in our society.
Foremost among my concerns is the mind-boggling disparity in access to technology, particularly across socio-economic status. I can point to you on a map two schools within mere miles of each other where one has SMART boards in every classroom and the other did not even have a classroom set of calculators available to me as a math teacher. That is only just digital technology. On a far more fundamental level, I can point to a different set of two nearby schools where one has automatic-flush toilets and the other had such frequent plumbing problems to a point that drinking from the water fountain was risky business. I simply do not feel that I can ethically spend time researching Facebook or the iPad as instructional technologies when not every student in the public education system has access to comfortable and healthy analog technologies like air conditioning.
Another issue that gives me significant pause is Mooreâ(TM)s Law. Technology is advancing at a prodigiously exponential rate, to the point that futurists predict an upcoming event dubbed the Singularity at which technology will progress faster than society can cope with its evolution. I am particularly fond of a TED talk given by Ray Kurzweil on the topic of the integration of technology with the body, particularly the part on an already-possible synthetic red blood cell which would, to paraphrase Kurzweil, allow the average teenager to regularly outperform todayâ(TM)s Olympic athletes. Even the advent of internet-enabled phones has caused notable distress among teachers. I can not even imagine the discord when the technology is implantable and can not be turned off or confiscated. On the other hand, the standardized management paradigm behind the OGT and the SAT would finally collapse, so it would not be all bad. I digress.
Looking only at today, I question why the research on technology on Second Life as an educational venue is only in its infancy when that particular medium has begun to be replaced by other, newer alternatives like Free Realms. Similarly, Facebook is being replaced by Twitter and Diaspora just as Facebook replaced MySpace replaced Livejournal replaced Xanga replaced Geocities. Honestly, Facebook is so passé that even governmental agencies have investigated its use. I forget which one, but just a few months ago around ten red balloons were placed at random locations across the continental United States. All of them were found within about eight hours. My point is that research that focuses on a specific technology in response to a cultural fad is doomed to failure from the start. By the time anything practical made its way to teachers, students would already be offended by the outdatedness of it.
The third problem that I have with instructional technology is that there is far to much emphasis on innovation and far too little on revision. Take the TI-nspire. Look, it now includes a computer algebra system but has a terrible user interface, and just as math teachers were starting to get comfortable with the idea of allowing graphing calculators in the classroom, we have made the technology even more powerful â" re-emphasizing the original concerns about the calculators doing all the work. Similarly, take all these new educational iPad apps on top of the virtual man
While it is very true that practically nothing uses the Honeycomb-specific Fragments UI, the simple tweak using an app called Spare Parts will scale pretty much every app to an appropriate size on a big tablet. Only the most sloppily designed apps don't scale well on my Galaxy Tab 10.1 (which has been well worth the three days after release of going from store to store to find at 32GB version in stock). Don't let the "lack" of apps keep you from buying a tablet. Again, the Spare Parts app fixes just about everything, and there's lots of tutorials on the web about how to do it, notably at jkkmobile.
I use TOR to get around restrictive firewalls at coffee shops and such. For example, the local Panera uses OpenDNS, which seemed to think googlecode.com as a whole was infected with the Conficker worm. TOR let me access it no problem.
While what Watson represents is a huge leap forward in AI, ultimately it's not much different than some of the better chat bots. The only difference now is a massively better database from which to query. While the ability to "understand" idiosyncratic speech, such as puns, will merge nicely with speech recognition softeware that already exists so that you can now use "Call mother" and "Call mom" interchangeably without programming those specific phrases, it is nothing like true intelligence. Some thoughts.
1) Can Watson MAKE even the most rudimentary puns just because it can process them? Call me when a computer comes up with something even as dreadfully literal as "Want to hear a dirty joke? A pig fell in the mud." The creation of puns requires the creator to have some sort of theory of mind of the listener. Statistics does cool things, and may eventually inform a computer that algorithmically generated statements that contain references to farts are generally received as "funnier," but that is about it.
2) The response about Wonder Woman being the first woman in space is a crucial component to intelligence. It's all just data to Watson. Until we can really define what makes Wonder Woman fictitious, Mark Twain fictitious and Samuel Clemens real, Watson ain't got a prayer in the world. Hell, real live people have trouble telling when Stephen Colbert is being himself or his person. How do you let one of Watson's descendants participate in socially constructed reality?
3) How do you explain in rules that "1+1=2", "one cow meets another cow is two cows," and "A day after a day from now is two days from now" are all the same class of statement? We don't even really know how humans make some of these incredibly simple relationships.
If you want to create something revolutionary, create a store and forward message system that can run on mobile devices and can transfer messages via bluetooth. It's akin to carrier pigeon, but it might actually work.
This actually exists! See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers I think your bluetooth not-net idea would actually work pretty well in a densely populated urban environment. The problem would be how does someone living even in tech-friendly but less densely populated suburban area connect?
And that is how the TOR for Android app was born. Seriously, I'm not worried about this at all. For every attempt to monetize tracking, an obfuscation method will be developed to negate the tracking. Unlike, say, developing for Ubuntu, there is a significant financial incentive for people to code simple workarounds. I mean, how fast did the Google TV for streaming video services workaround happen?
Thirty years ago, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) released a controversial document entitled An Agenda for Action. Part of what made the position statement so controversial was the recommendation that computers and calculators should be a part of every mathematics classroom (http://www.nctm.org/standards/content.aspx?id=17282). Many teachers and parents feared that students might never learn mathematics properly if they could just press a few buttons to produce a correct answer. In stark contrast, the schoolchildren of the YouTube generation are virtually inseparable from their portable electronics - many of which are more powerful than early graphing calculators that NCTM. Dubbed digital natives (http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky - Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants - Part1.pdf), none among them were alive during a time when there was no Internet. As a result, the question is no longer “if” technology should be a part of public education but is now “how much”.
Many schools are emerging that are online-only (http://keystonehighschool.com/) or otherwise devoted to technology (http://www.neatorama.com/2010/01/09/school-teaches-its-students-almost-entirely-through-video-games/). You can even earn a doctorate at an online university (http://www.phoenix.edu/colleges_divisions/doctoral.html)! Additionally, online resources like the amateur Khan Academy or the commercial ALEKS (http://www.aleks.com/) are beginning to challenge several long-standing assumptions about the need for face-to-face instruction or even the need for teachers. Most importantly, it is worth stating that the research on eLearning is mixed, as a whole. A specific eLearning package may help in reading but not in mathematics, may help at third grade but not eighth grade, or may help on a state-level test but not on a national-level test. So, there is no clear answer on a “best” package or way to use technology. However, there are several key points to consider:
Embarrassment
To be honest, nobody likes to be wrong, and mathematics is a subject in which students are often told that they are, at least technically, incorrect. It is no wonder that eLearning can get such positive feedback from students. Many packages use little to no direct contract with a teacher; even if they do, a student is not going to be told they are incorrect in front of twenty or thirty of their peers. A private email is not so bad in comparison to even the gentlest public rebuke. Similarly, nobody needs to know if a given student has been successful either. It is often considered geeky to be good at school, especially in the STEM subjects. This turns many people away from science and mathematics, particularly girls. eLearning can provide a method to circumvent such peer scrutiny.
Motivation
Students like computers. Given a choice between a hands-on activity and an identical computer activity, many students will opt for the latter. Moreover, students like games, and eLearning developers are actively trying to capitalize on that appeal. While good in theory, a key implementation problem is that much edutainment uses the games as a reward for practice (http://www.funbrain.com/math/index.html) rather than as the means for actually teaching the material (http://ldt.stanford.edu/ldt1999/Students/kemery/esc/rockyDemoFrame.htm). I certainly approve of additional practice, but even the most motivated student requires a good explanation now and then.
Willingness
Another thing to keep in mind is that school occurs on a set schedule over which the student has little to no control. Much of eLearning is available whenever the student is willing to participate. In other words, those who succeed are those who have chosen to participate. In fact, research often shows that eLearning success is strongly dependent upon the amount of time a student participates. Of course, convincing someone to dedicate time and effort to actual eLearning is no
So what would those conditions be? With light spectrum, you have two options, reflect it or absorb it.
Plants are green given the relative energy and percentage of wavelengths in sunlight. In other words red is easy to absorb and there's lots of it. Similarly blue is hard to absorb, but there's not so much in our yellowish sunlight to warrant reflecting it. Green, though, it's sort of hard to digest and there's an AWFUL lot of it in our sunlight. Hence green leaves.
So, blue aliens are likely to come from an inner planet of a blue dwarf system because they'd need to reflect all that harmful blue light. Although, I could see how aliens from a coldish planet around a red giant might be blue because blue would be the only color they don't have to bother absorbing.
While a coat of aluminum oxide does count as a Faraday cage, I believe thickness is real issue with the protective power. Paint is only a few molecules thick (relatively) to the more traditional wire mesh. If you were going to build a new house, I think you'd be better including a brass mesh in the walls of your house.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas Kuhn
Coined the phrase "paradigm shift" and thoroughly smashed the romanticized view of science as linearly progressive.
I was always fond of the Daisy Chatbot, and I even spent a month once training her. The one thing that I felt always kept Daisy from progressing beyond fitful bursts of 5-year-old conversation was that you could never identify good responses from bad responses. The idea of generating a language database from scratch is downright brilliant compared to the programmed-response systems that float around. The problem is that there is no "evolutionary pressure" as it were. I think the next step in making AI more realistic is some sort of inherant reward/punishment system. After all, if you look at the development of cognition in humans, that's the next stage after basic language acquisition. A 3 year old can understand words and maybe even string a few together, but its not until 4 or 5 when the child learns that some words aren't appropriate that they move on to real dialogue and not just babbling.