More like grilling for the gadget-obsessed
on
Grilling For Geeks
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Personally, I think most of these gadgets are worthless. Yes, a thermometer is useful (but I prefer the instant-read kind like the Thermapen for quick checks in multiple locations). Otherwise, you really only need a good pair of extra-long tongs (that 3-in-1 thing in TFA looks clunky as heck) and a spatula.
If you really want to grill like a geek, check out Kenji Alt's Food Lab posts over on Serious Eats. He's got a nice guide up right now on how to grill a steak the right way (complete with explanations based on food science and his own experiments), and he's been doing a series on the best inexpensive steaks (at least, inexpensive compared to porterhouse and tenderloin).
The problem with many (maybe most?) attempts to put technology in schools and even home learning environments is that people don't think through the implementation. Technology is not magic. You cannot expect to get good results simply by dropping a chunk of technology into a classroom without spending a lot of time and energy rethinking how teaching and learning is going to work in that classroom. For example:
What, exactly, is the technology going to be used for? No hand-waving general answers allowed here (e.g., "enrich content with interactive multimedia presentations" is a useless answer). In what specific tasks will the technology allow you to do something that would have been cumbersome or impossible without it (e.g., using graphing or numerical methods to approximate solutions to equations that are not amenable to the usual algebraic techniques)? What more interesting or more engaging problems can you now attempt to solve (that address your learning goals) that you would not have been able to attempt without the technology? Will you want to change or expand your set of learning goals now that you have this piece of technology? If so, how? How much instructional time will be needed to get the teacher and students working comfortably with the technology? Is the potential benefit worth that amount of time? How do you implement the technology in ways that do not detract from the learning you are trying to do (i.e., what are the unintended consequences)? How might you plan ahead for negative unintended uses?
Almost every case I've ever seen or read about where technology was just dropped into an educational setting without painstaking planning and thought about curriculum and implementation, not to mention extensive training of teachers and staff, resulted in mixed results at best, and failure and rejection at worst. To answer the original questions directly, technology aids can help or hinder education- it's all in the amount of time, thought, sweat and tears that get put into the implementation. I won't comment more on the home schooling part of the question, as I really have no experience there (aside from supplementing my own kids' educations).
A number of others have already speculated about how bad this relationship must be for the woman to believe her spouse is spying on her. However, it is just possible that this is a post-divorce problem. Suppose they have already divorced and she ended up with this computer. I can imagine that she might want to make sure it isn't sending sensitive information to her ex. I could be completely off-base, but I thought I'd point out a semi-plausible scenario where someone might reasonably make this request. In any case, I think a wipe and re-install is probably the only reliable solution.
I'm pretty sure that MythTV used to use Zap2It to get their tv listing info, but a while ago we discussed that Zap2It was no longer going to provide this service for free. Where is this release pulling the listing data from? MythTV can get listing info from various sources, but I think most folks (at least in the USA and Canada) are now using Schedules Direct (http://www.schedulesdirect.org/). Schedules Direct was set up by various folks involved with open source video/television related projects like MythTV in response to the Zap2It free listings shutdown and has reached its goal of getting enough subscribers to hit a price point of $20 per year for listings data (with a 7 day free trial). My experience with the transition was that it was pretty much seamless.
The science-fiction author Spider Robinson wrote a short story a while back (it won the 1983 Hugo Award for Best Short Story) that dealt with this topic. His argument is essentially that perpetual copyright ends up cutting off future artists at the knees. He recently posted this short story to his website. Here's his introduction and a link to the story:
Copyright is a hot-button topic these days. Does information want to be free...or just reasonably priced? I discussed copyright at some length 25 years ago--a year before the first TCP/IP wide area network in the world went operational--two years before the first Macintosh went on sale!--in the following story. It won the 1983 Hugo Award for Best Short Story, and I hope you'll still find it illuminating today.
I'd consider practically anything by Spider Robinson to be a reasonable choice. The Callahan's books are a great place to start, but his other stuff is also very good. The fundamental theme behind many of his stories is that shared pain is lessened and shared joy is increased. The Callahan Chronicals collects the first three Callahan's books in one paperback edition.
One flaw with this reasoning is that any response to a survey on what math people use in daily life will be influenced by what the people know about math. My own experience is that being reasonably mathematically fluent, I see places where I can use math to make sense of a situation or solve a problem. Part of that is undoubtedly my personality. However, the basic point still holds: if you don't know the mathematics, you won't ever use it. For all we know, if everyone were mathematically proficient, the "math we actually use in life" might be much richer and more extensive than what it is now.
In my own experience (from grade school math through grad school math), I have almost always found that the texts aren't terribly helpful until *after* you've learned (at least to some basic level) the mathematics. In one of the posts above, SuperBanana notes this problem, and suggests that you try adult ed courses. I agree that the human interaction with a professor and fellow students can be invaluable. In fact, some of the biggest mathematical ah-ha moments I've had have been when I've been trying to work through an idea with friends. Only then did the stuff in the textbook really make sense.
Now, that's not to say that there aren't good books out there to help you learn about mathematics. It's just that the ones that are written as textbooks (particularly in the traditional theorem-proof style) don't seem to be written with a learner in mind. By presenting all of the mathematics in a *mathematically* logical progression, many of them end up hiding the kinds of thinking that has to happen in order for someone who doesn't already know the math to learn it. After all, mathematicians don't do their work by smoothly going from stating fixed definitions to giving a theorem with proof- there's a lot of work going on there that we don't see in the formal presentation. I should be careful, though, not to exaggerate. Most textbooks try to give some exposition to help the reader along. However, this usually doesn't do enough to change the fundamental problem of structure that comes with using the mathematically logical sequence to guide the organization of a book intended for learners.
You may find that some of the newer so-called "reform" materials may be closer to what you are looking for. Many of them do make an explicit effort to focus on the ideas and concepts underlying the mathematics (though some complain that they don't focus enough on developing fluency with procedures). The trick with these is that, when used in schools, they generally work best with teachers who themselves have this kind of deep understanding and thus know where the materials are pointing. There has been quite a bit of venom circulating around these newer materials. My suggestion is to try a few different kinds of materials in both the "traditional" and "reform" styles, and see what works for you.
So, here are a few suggestions of books that I found useful in making sense of mathematics, its ways of thinking, and how it can relate to the world. The first several aren't really textbooks, but rather books about mathematics.
Philip J. Davis & Reuben Hersh - The Mathematical Experience
George Polya - How to Solve It
John Allen Paulos - A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper
John H. Conway & Richard K. Guy - The Book of Numbers
Barry Cipra - Misteaks... and how to find them before the teacher does
The Calculus Consortium at Harvard has developed several textbooks, including Functions Modeling Change: A Preparation for Calculus (Eric Connally, Deborah Hughes-Hallett, Andrew Gleason) and Calculus, Single and Multivariable (Deborah Hughes-Hallett, Andrew M. Gleason, William G. McCallum)
The points made in the article are apt, but I worry that some of them may sound a bit too much like "common sense." Just as Park points out that modern scientists have learned to distrust isolated anecdotes as evidence, I have found that I am learning to distrust common sense. There are too many instances when the commonly accepted way of thinking about something is wrong.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist, so I'm not automatically inclined to believe in, for instance, claims that a powerful establishment is suppressing certain scientific work (Park's point 2). However, I think we should be careful about dismissing out of hand the possibility that the establishment might stop at nothing to suppress discoveries that might shift the balance of wealth and power in society. Instead of making this a criterion for junk science, perhaps we should be sensitive to the influence of the establishment. After all, we're willing to question research that is funded by a party that has something to gain by the results. Why not keep an eye out for cases where the opposite might be happening?
I suppose what I'm saying is that we should allow for some wiggle room in our interpretation of Park's criteria. Park seems to think so too- just before he gives his list, he notes that "even a claim with several of the signs could be legitimate."
Over the past several months, I've been using Kino to edit together a wedding video for my brother-in-law and his wife. I did the original filming with two cameras, so I had some extensive editing to do. Wanting to get away from Windows and the 4GB file size limit, I decided to explore Kino.
After some work setting it up, everything worked surprisingly well. DV capture (from a Sony TRV-950) was painless and the editing went pretty smoothly. I ended up having to create a separate audio track to dub over the entire video. It was at that point that I discovered a bug in Kino's dubbing feature. Because of the way audio was handled, there was a progressive desynchronization of the audio and video. The good news is that after posting some messages on their forum, the issue got fixed in the CVS (and I presume the new version incorporates the fix).
I've been exporting the finished product (several gigs of DV) to VCD, and the results have been very satisfactory. All in all, anyone who wants to try editing DV video in Linux should at least give Kino a good try- the interface is clean and relatively intuitive and I was able to figure things out without a lot of trouble. Before using Kino, my only experience had been a little work with Pinnacle Studio 7.0.
I've recently been doing some video editing work on Linux with Kino. Kino works with DV video and supports capturing via firewire(with the right modules installed). I captured from my Sony TRV-950 with no problems once all the bits and pieces were installed.
I've found it to be quite easy to use, though it's very much under development. Unlike Cinelerra, the interface is pretty intuitive. At the moment, the biggest limitation in my eyes is the lack of multitrack editing. They're working on it, though.
Personally, I think the best SF I've read are the Callahan's books by Spider Robinson (though I think the earlier ones are the best). They've got interesting stories, great characters, and painfully good puns. Who could resist a barful of booze hounds who really care about each other...
This kind of sound-bite quoting always worries me when I read articles about education. In my experience, quotes like that were never meant to refer to the things that the article implies. I can't say for sure what the student was really commenting on in this case, of course, but there are plenty of cases where I've heard people make the same kind of statement with perfect correctness. Here is one example of a case where having the technology makes something possible that otherwise wouldn't be practical (or maybe even possible) in a school mathematics classroom (*NOTE: I DID NOT SAY "MATHEMATICALLY IMPOSSIBLE" WHICH IS A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT MATTER*).
Suppose you wanted to explore the behavior of polynomial functions. Since any polynomial over the reals can be factored into linear and quadratic terms (with real coefficients), one way to conduct such an exploration is by examining the underlying lines and parabolas. A simple case would be looking at a parabola as the result of "multiplying" two lines. In order to make any sort of conjectures about these relationships, it helps to be able to generate a number of examples. This can be a bit cumbersome to do by hand, and if you already know how to graph linear equations, a real waste of time. Why not let the calculator deal with the graphing and use the time to generate some more examples to analyze. Now, you can analyze the graphs to conclude that the zeros of the parabola are clearly related to the x-intercepts of the lines. Moreover, this opens up a reason to think about how the algebraic expressions are related to the behavior of the graph ("of course the zeros and the x-intercepts are related, since the linear factors are multiplied to make the quadratic", and so on). You could push this further to make some conjectures about why the parabola increases on one interval and decreases on another. This could be easily expanded to look at other conics (albeit piecemeal) and other higher-degree polynomials. The key, though, is that the technology has made it practical to do this kind of combined graphical/analytical/numerical thinking.
The Marx statement is, I think, generally misinterpreted. Keep in mind that Marx made it in the early 19th century. At that point, opium was a key medical drug for relieving pain.
I don't really think that Marx meant to imply that religion put people into an unthinking daze in which they would be content with their situations. Rather, the focus was that such pain existed, in a social sense, and the fact that people needed something to help them deal with it was indicative of a real problem that needed to be addressed. In other words, the statement isn't a commentary on the merits of religion, but rather on the state of society.
(side note: if I recall correctly, I first encountered this interpretation in a book by Edward Hays)
I remember when I was in high school and some of my friends decided to up the ante by getting these things. My solution was to get a deck sprayer and blow them away- nothing like _real_ hardware to do the job!
However, keep in mind that the IDE internals that are currently being shipped can be obtained by the rest of us. If you do a quick search on pricewatch you'll find a few places on the web that have them for individual purchase.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I think most of these gadgets are worthless. Yes, a thermometer is useful (but I prefer the instant-read kind like the Thermapen for quick checks in multiple locations). Otherwise, you really only need a good pair of extra-long tongs (that 3-in-1 thing in TFA looks clunky as heck) and a spatula.
If you really want to grill like a geek, check out Kenji Alt's Food Lab posts over on Serious Eats. He's got a nice guide up right now on how to grill a steak the right way (complete with explanations based on food science and his own experiments), and he's been doing a series on the best inexpensive steaks (at least, inexpensive compared to porterhouse and tenderloin).
The problem with many (maybe most?) attempts to put technology in schools and even home learning environments is that people don't think through the implementation. Technology is not magic. You cannot expect to get good results simply by dropping a chunk of technology into a classroom without spending a lot of time and energy rethinking how teaching and learning is going to work in that classroom. For example:
What, exactly, is the technology going to be used for? No hand-waving general answers allowed here (e.g., "enrich content with interactive multimedia presentations" is a useless answer).
In what specific tasks will the technology allow you to do something that would have been cumbersome or impossible without it (e.g., using graphing or numerical methods to approximate solutions to equations that are not amenable to the usual algebraic techniques)?
What more interesting or more engaging problems can you now attempt to solve (that address your learning goals) that you would not have been able to attempt without the technology?
Will you want to change or expand your set of learning goals now that you have this piece of technology? If so, how?
How much instructional time will be needed to get the teacher and students working comfortably with the technology? Is the potential benefit worth that amount of time?
How do you implement the technology in ways that do not detract from the learning you are trying to do (i.e., what are the unintended consequences)? How might you plan ahead for negative unintended uses?
Almost every case I've ever seen or read about where technology was just dropped into an educational setting without painstaking planning and thought about curriculum and implementation, not to mention extensive training of teachers and staff, resulted in mixed results at best, and failure and rejection at worst. To answer the original questions directly, technology aids can help or hinder education- it's all in the amount of time, thought, sweat and tears that get put into the implementation. I won't comment more on the home schooling part of the question, as I really have no experience there (aside from supplementing my own kids' educations).
A number of others have already speculated about how bad this relationship must be for the woman to believe her spouse is spying on her. However, it is just possible that this is a post-divorce problem. Suppose they have already divorced and she ended up with this computer. I can imagine that she might want to make sure it isn't sending sensitive information to her ex. I could be completely off-base, but I thought I'd point out a semi-plausible scenario where someone might reasonably make this request. In any case, I think a wipe and re-install is probably the only reliable solution.
The science-fiction author Spider Robinson wrote a short story a while back (it won the 1983 Hugo Award for Best Short Story) that dealt with this topic. His argument is essentially that perpetual copyright ends up cutting off future artists at the knees. He recently posted this short story to his website. Here's his introduction and a link to the story:
. html
Copyright is a hot-button topic these days. Does information want to be free...or just reasonably priced? I discussed copyright at some length 25 years ago--a year before the first TCP/IP wide area network in the world went operational--two years before the first Macintosh went on sale!--in the following story. It won the 1983 Hugo Award for Best Short Story, and I hope you'll still find it illuminating today.
http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants
I'd consider practically anything by Spider Robinson to be a reasonable choice. The Callahan's books are a great place to start, but his other stuff is also very good. The fundamental theme behind many of his stories is that shared pain is lessened and shared joy is increased. The Callahan Chronicals collects the first three Callahan's books in one paperback edition.
One flaw with this reasoning is that any response to a survey on what math people use in daily life will be influenced by what the people know about math. My own experience is that being reasonably mathematically fluent, I see places where I can use math to make sense of a situation or solve a problem. Part of that is undoubtedly my personality. However, the basic point still holds: if you don't know the mathematics, you won't ever use it. For all we know, if everyone were mathematically proficient, the "math we actually use in life" might be much richer and more extensive than what it is now.
In my own experience (from grade school math through grad school math), I have almost always found that the texts aren't terribly helpful until *after* you've learned (at least to some basic level) the mathematics. In one of the posts above, SuperBanana notes this problem, and suggests that you try adult ed courses. I agree that the human interaction with a professor and fellow students can be invaluable. In fact, some of the biggest mathematical ah-ha moments I've had have been when I've been trying to work through an idea with friends. Only then did the stuff in the textbook really make sense.
... and how to find them before the teacher does
Now, that's not to say that there aren't good books out there to help you learn about mathematics. It's just that the ones that are written as textbooks (particularly in the traditional theorem-proof style) don't seem to be written with a learner in mind. By presenting all of the mathematics in a *mathematically* logical progression, many of them end up hiding the kinds of thinking that has to happen in order for someone who doesn't already know the math to learn it. After all, mathematicians don't do their work by smoothly going from stating fixed definitions to giving a theorem with proof- there's a lot of work going on there that we don't see in the formal presentation. I should be careful, though, not to exaggerate. Most textbooks try to give some exposition to help the reader along. However, this usually doesn't do enough to change the fundamental problem of structure that comes with using the mathematically logical sequence to guide the organization of a book intended for learners.
You may find that some of the newer so-called "reform" materials may be closer to what you are looking for. Many of them do make an explicit effort to focus on the ideas and concepts underlying the mathematics (though some complain that they don't focus enough on developing fluency with procedures). The trick with these is that, when used in schools, they generally work best with teachers who themselves have this kind of deep understanding and thus know where the materials are pointing. There has been quite a bit of venom circulating around these newer materials. My suggestion is to try a few different kinds of materials in both the "traditional" and "reform" styles, and see what works for you.
So, here are a few suggestions of books that I found useful in making sense of mathematics, its ways of thinking, and how it can relate to the world. The first several aren't really textbooks, but rather books about mathematics.
Philip J. Davis & Reuben Hersh - The Mathematical Experience
George Polya - How to Solve It
John Allen Paulos - A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper
John H. Conway & Richard K. Guy - The Book of Numbers
Barry Cipra - Misteaks
The Calculus Consortium at Harvard has developed several textbooks, including Functions Modeling Change: A Preparation for Calculus (Eric Connally, Deborah Hughes-Hallett, Andrew Gleason) and Calculus, Single and Multivariable (Deborah Hughes-Hallett, Andrew M. Gleason, William G. McCallum)
The points made in the article are apt, but I worry that some of them may sound a bit too much like "common sense." Just as Park points out that modern scientists have learned to distrust isolated anecdotes as evidence, I have found that I am learning to distrust common sense. There are too many instances when the commonly accepted way of thinking about something is wrong.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist, so I'm not automatically inclined to believe in, for instance, claims that a powerful establishment is suppressing certain scientific work (Park's point 2). However, I think we should be careful about dismissing out of hand the possibility that the establishment might stop at nothing to suppress discoveries that might shift the balance of wealth and power in society. Instead of making this a criterion for junk science, perhaps we should be sensitive to the influence of the establishment. After all, we're willing to question research that is funded by a party that has something to gain by the results. Why not keep an eye out for cases where the opposite might be happening?
I suppose what I'm saying is that we should allow for some wiggle room in our interpretation of Park's criteria. Park seems to think so too- just before he gives his list, he notes that "even a claim with several of the signs could be legitimate."
Over the past several months, I've been using Kino to edit together a wedding video for my brother-in-law and his wife. I did the original filming with two cameras, so I had some extensive editing to do. Wanting to get away from Windows and the 4GB file size limit, I decided to explore Kino.
After some work setting it up, everything worked surprisingly well. DV capture (from a Sony TRV-950) was painless and the editing went pretty smoothly. I ended up having to create a separate audio track to dub over the entire video. It was at that point that I discovered a bug in Kino's dubbing feature. Because of the way audio was handled, there was a progressive desynchronization of the audio and video. The good news is that after posting some messages on their forum, the issue got fixed in the CVS (and I presume the new version incorporates the fix).
I've been exporting the finished product (several gigs of DV) to VCD, and the results have been very satisfactory. All in all, anyone who wants to try editing DV video in Linux should at least give Kino a good try- the interface is clean and relatively intuitive and I was able to figure things out without a lot of trouble. Before using Kino, my only experience had been a little work with Pinnacle Studio 7.0.
I've recently been doing some video editing work on Linux with Kino. Kino works with DV video and supports capturing via firewire(with the right modules installed). I captured from my Sony TRV-950 with no problems once all the bits and pieces were installed.
I've found it to be quite easy to use, though it's very much under development. Unlike Cinelerra, the interface is pretty intuitive. At the moment, the biggest limitation in my eyes is the lack of multitrack editing. They're working on it, though.
Personally, I think the best SF I've read are the Callahan's books by Spider Robinson (though I think the earlier ones are the best). They've got interesting stories, great characters, and painfully good puns. Who could resist a barful of booze hounds who really care about each other...
This is terrific news - just as long as they don't do a musical episode... :)
K-9 singing "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" was bad enough...
This kind of sound-bite quoting always worries me when I read articles about education. In my experience, quotes like that were never meant to refer to the things that the article implies. I can't say for sure what the student was really commenting on in this case, of course, but there are plenty of cases where I've heard people make the same kind of statement with perfect correctness. Here is one example of a case where having the technology makes something possible that otherwise wouldn't be practical (or maybe even possible) in a school mathematics classroom (*NOTE: I DID NOT SAY "MATHEMATICALLY IMPOSSIBLE" WHICH IS A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT MATTER*).
Suppose you wanted to explore the behavior of polynomial functions. Since any polynomial over the reals can be factored into linear and quadratic terms (with real coefficients), one way to conduct such an exploration is by examining the underlying lines and parabolas. A simple case would be looking at a parabola as the result of "multiplying" two lines. In order to make any sort of conjectures about these relationships, it helps to be able to generate a number of examples. This can be a bit cumbersome to do by hand, and if you already know how to graph linear equations, a real waste of time. Why not let the calculator deal with the graphing and use the time to generate some more examples to analyze. Now, you can analyze the graphs to conclude that the zeros of the parabola are clearly related to the x-intercepts of the lines. Moreover, this opens up a reason to think about how the algebraic expressions are related to the behavior of the graph ("of course the zeros and the x-intercepts are related, since the linear factors are multiplied to make the quadratic", and so on). You could push this further to make some conjectures about why the parabola increases on one interval and decreases on another. This could be easily expanded to look at other conics (albeit piecemeal) and other higher-degree polynomials. The key, though, is that the technology has made it practical to do this kind of combined graphical/analytical/numerical thinking.
The Marx statement is, I think, generally misinterpreted. Keep in mind that Marx made it in the early 19th century. At that point, opium was a key medical drug for relieving pain.
I don't really think that Marx meant to imply that religion put people into an unthinking daze in which they would be content with their situations. Rather, the focus was that such pain existed, in a social sense, and the fact that people needed something to help them deal with it was indicative of a real problem that needed to be addressed. In other words, the statement isn't a commentary on the merits of religion, but rather on the state of society.
(side note: if I recall correctly, I first encountered this interpretation in a book by Edward Hays)
I remember when I was in high school and some of my friends decided to up the ante by getting these things. My solution was to get a deck sprayer and blow them away- nothing like _real_ hardware to do the job!
However, keep in mind that the IDE internals that are currently being shipped can be obtained by the rest of us. If you do a quick search on pricewatch you'll find a few places on the web that have them for individual purchase.