- a very interesting comment by one of the 77 year old engineers who was at the event. Is this old age making a man more conservative and risk-averse? Would today's engineers in their 20s be able to devise a space program if they had to? would they get a chance to with the baby boomers still holding on to the positions of authority? I'm often amazed at how young pioneers tend to be, but perhaps it's just a statement about cutting edge fields and risk takers, I suppose the silicon valley folks in the 90s were in their 20s.
Would society trust engineers in their 20s with cutting edge high budget work these days?
Videoing decent presentations (rather than a professor messing around with a cheap web cam) also costs (equipment, recording and editing staff), so probably is more expensive to run initially than teaching lectures in big halls.
Getting people together in one space probably has other pedagogical values - though you are correct it is possible to have distance based university level education, e.g. The Open University. Even the Open University tries to find group learning spaces for its students though (online forums, residential summer schools) as it believes there is pedagogical value in students sharing a space to work and learn in.
Education as a racket that's all about money? - I suppose this depends on your philosophy. Many people believe there is more to education than just making money, e.g. the bettering of people, social value, psychological self-realisation, broader socio-economic concerns like reducing crime.
"maybe this is just the start for a class of privately run astronomical and Earth-observing facilities in space?" - If a university or a national research body (not necessarily in USA, somewhere in Europe, or India, or China or whereever) "bought" the satellite, would this be something novel? Do universities or other non-government research units own satellites? If so, it might not be big news....
On the other hand, if Google/Elsevier Publications/Microsoft buy it and start charging university researchers for access to data, maybe this would be news. Is this a likely scenario?
I'd love to hear from astronomers who work with this kind of data and might have some informed opinions on how this is likely to go....
"Why is Radio Shack not offering modern electronics courses, along with rentals of some gear too hard to afford yourself?" - because the profit margin is too low? Maybe the expensive stuff takes too long to repay if it's hired out, breakage rate, etc.?
I guess if I was one of the technical crew who had to work with this stuff and be exposed to its toxicity, I'd be welcoming my boss researching a way of making my life safer. I'm sure the technicians love working for NASA but given the choice between working with highly toxic fuels that might burn them/ give them cancer/ other nice side effect, or something less damaging, I am sure they'd be all in favour of an option that won't harm them and won't potentially leak into local water tables, get drawn up into local water supply / agriculture and end up in their kids.
My experience is the people most likely to moan about health and safety are those whose greatest risk of an industrial injury is stabbing themselves with the office stapler. Folk working in genuinely high risk environments seem quite grateful their bosses have to abide by regulations.
Given the world is trademark crazy (well the big companies and lawyers, anyway), and given that there are only 456,976 four character words (using the western 26 character alphabet) - how close are we to every four character word being owned by somebody?
Can any experts out there who work with sensors and EEG comment on 1. the efficacy of a cap mounted EEG sensor array (are there issues with making sure sensors are correctly in contact with the skin rather than hair, etc.)? 2. Challenges around correct automatic analysis of received data? What kind of accuracy is required from this kind of set up to be able to conclude successfully how fatigued an operator is? What is the permissible level of error with readings (do you need to be super-accurate or is this kind of rig very error-tolerant?)
Interested to hear whether this is likely to be a very reliable piece of equipment or something prone to error and annoying to use and will therefore be sabotaged as quickly as possible by the operators ("Gee Bob, I'd be happy to wear it but the danged thing just doesn't seem to go since I accidently dropped it in a puddle last week").
PhD's in Stanford are easy to get? I am surprised by that. His work looks fairly rigourous and he's had a few papers published. The methodology he employs in his PhD seems reasonable enough - which aspects of his thesis ("Learning and short-term retention of paired associates in relation to specific sequences of interpresentation intervals") do you have an issue with?
I also note he has a first degree in Maths, so I guess he's probably ok on this knowledge. Probably he could get by undergraduate level engineering.
You note "Let's see how long he'll last": reading his curriculum vitae I'd say probably a little while longer, seeing as he completed his PhD in 1966 and has been producing papers and been employed since then, that's about 45 years so far...
Very little "natural beauty" anywhere where people have lived for the last 10,000 years... a continuing debate in environmental circles as there is little 'untouched' land anywhere in the world, and certainly not near population centres.
Many wild and beautiful windswept moors are only so in the UK because our ancestors deforested these areas.
See also the debate about whether to re-introduce wolves to Scotland.
Lots of beautiful English countryside south of Manchester. Also lots of stockbrokers / rich city types who don't want their countryside fantasy shattered by noisy development work. A bit like the rich lords and ladies 150 years ago who complained about their views being ruined the first time they put railway lines across the land.
Though to be fair there are ecological concerns to be taken into account this time round seeing as we've got less countryside left.
Nice idea, but are you going to find X thousand teachers capable of teaching programming by September? or be able to *properly* train the current ones?
I assume if they are working up the new curriculum now, it will be ready in a couple of months (if you're lucky), which gives you about 3 months to distribute the curriculum to schools before they all go off on their summer holidays. 12 weeks then to get the teachers up to speed on the new courses.
I am not saying it's impossible - teachers are amazing, and incredibly dedicated. But declaring you're going to teach something which isn't currently being taught has a lead in time to get the schools up to speed. Or expect the teachers to work their evenings and weekends on an extra unpaid task (which will mean you will get highly variable results).
Unless of course you throw a major company like Microsoft or Google a blank cheque, tell em to take as much money as they want and give you a bunch of passwords to some website (probably based on a foreign country's curriculum, e.g. USA, which might not align with the UK curricula) and get your students to drag themselves through some automated lessons.
I think its political rhetoric. It can be done, and it would be cool to give some students programming skills, but I think it will take more than a few months to change the education system for a whole country and retrain the teachers.
I am suspicious of the term "traditional". I believe it was an ancient Greek philosopher who said that the golden age for any people was their grandfather's generation - so for a 20 year old this might mean education in the 1960s, for a 40 year old, perhaps the 1940's. When do you define "traditional" education as having started, and finished? My little research into the education of the 19th century doesn't suggest "critical" and "agile", more like basic literacy and numeracy backed up by physical punishment. Or did you mean the 17th century? In the early colonial period in the USA, education meant basic literacy, learning the Scriptures by rote, and some maths basic knowledge. Or perhaps you meant another period in time?
Not sure what you mean by "traditional" - perhaps you could give some examples?
MIT has discovered distance higher education learning? Welcome to 1969! Over here in the UK we've had high quality university level distance education since then and distance learning offered online since the 1980s. Currently it has over 200,000 distance learning students, many of whom use online environments as part of their learning. Perhaps though the concept of distance learning is not as advanced in the USA as in Europe?
Can any US folks comment? what is the perception of distance and online learning in the US? Over here in the UK, and I believe Europe generally, the idea of doing an online degree is considered a valid method for people to undertake higher education if they cannot get to a university campus (work, family commitments, etc). The Open University is considered to be a high quality degree offering institution and regularly comes high in student satisfaction ratings. This institution offers different media for taking courses, but some of them are offered completely online and have done for some years. I"m suprised that "university offers online teaching' makes news.
Curious - though I suppose it is newsworthy as MIT is such an august educational establishment. Interested to hear a US perspective on how distance and online higher education learning is perceived...
People like the conceptual idea of encrypting their email so it's really really private and no bad people on the internet can intercept and read their information - Bletchley Park and code breaking, James Bond, spies, secret communications - people are exposed to these ideas and get them, even think they are cool and clever. People get codes and code breaking as an idea. They'd really like to be able to send private details to their friends and feel really secure that nobody can read the details apart from the intended recipients. As somebody who helps a lot of friends and neighbours and elderly relatives with their online activities, this fear of intercepted private communications is one of the most frequently voiced: "I'd never do online shopping because somebody might steal my credit card details" "give me a phone and I'll tell you my bank details, I'd be scared to put them in an email to you in case a hacker read my email and stole those details" etc.
But their eyes glaze over at the process you need to undertake to carry out secure encryption and easy decryption.
It will take off when you can operationalise it for people for whom shopping through amazon is the limit for complexity in online activity.
Makes sense to me. Huge software industry in India, some of them not so good, but definitely there will be some trying to improve their practice. More companies will send employees if it's a local conference rather than an international one: cheaper, more accessible. India's a big enough place to have the demand.
Back up your data so if your laptop does get stolen it's an inconvenience rather than irreplaceable loss.
Make sure you always lock your car, so many people "jump out for just two minutes to buy something from a shop" and come back to find their car has been emptied. Always lock your car. This will put off opportunistic thieves who are looking for a quick easy target. How many of the break -ins were on unlocked rather than locked cars? If somebody has to break into your car, they might leave evidence, which means at least you might be able to claim on insurance.
Thieves aren't going to sit in your car and try and open locked bags, they will just walk off with them and open them at their leisure elsewhere. So wire mesh laptop bags? these seem like a waste of time for this situation, unless you are also D-locking your bag to a steel mounting point in your car. Easy enough for thieves to get some wire cutters when they've got your bag back at their house and take their time opening it up.
The EU has a wide spread of countries, and development levels. Rural Romania has a different level of wealth and technology infrastructure than urban Finland, for example.
You make a good point about trust as an issue why some people might not take up internet use. My 77 year old father here in the UK does not go shopping online. I think part of this is lack of trust with the novel (to him) environment. Also, he doesn't need to go online. All his local services are within a few kilometres and he likes doing business in person. He is retired, so he can go to the bank and shops during quiet times of the day. Some people don't need the internet, or if they have access to it, choose not to use it.
For some people in Europe it is technical infrastructure. Check out a map of Europe and you will find that there are large areas where there is low speed or little access to the internet - modem speed access or maybe no access to fixed line telephones or mobile coverage. In Scotland, there is better coverage for 3G phones in the seas around the country than on the surface area of the land (internet is usually ok up to 2Mbs via land line in this country).
For quite a number of people in Europe, they cannot afford the cost of an internet connection. Check out prices in some of the lower developed European countries compared to state pension levels for example. For the young, employed, urban Europeans in highly developed countries internet costs are low compared to income, but for many others this is not the case.
So - that looks like something like 40 ipads lost in the last 3 years. 400 dollars each? total 16,000 dollars replacement costs?
How does that compare with how much your education area previously paid in replacing books in a similar time period?
I have to admit though I am very impressed that you've deployed approx 4000 devices and had approx 40 losses, 1% loss over three years, 99% continued use of original devices is very impressive.
I'm surprised that students are allowed calculators to work out these problems, particularly the eighth grade students. I think mental arithmetic is a useful skill even in the age of calculators/computers/mobile phones with built in calculators.... the ability to estimate an approximate answer is sometimes more useful than the ability to provide a specific answer.
It's not really about whether this jetman set up can compete with jets, my friend. It's showing that his set up is reliable enough they can take on a stunt like this.... which means it's probably interesting for military special forces for getting their people into places they couldn't get to otherwise.
- it sells expensive watches, rich people want to believe they are part of the dream, just like kids do when they buy their nikes or adidas - it sells the technology to military, who wouldn't really expect it to be used to catch up with real jets and open them up with can openers, they will have other ideas...
Slashdot Mirror
- a very interesting comment by one of the 77 year old engineers who was at the event. Is this old age making a man more conservative and risk-averse? Would today's engineers in their 20s be able to devise a space program if they had to? would they get a chance to with the baby boomers still holding on to the positions of authority? I'm often amazed at how young pioneers tend to be, but perhaps it's just a statement about cutting edge fields and risk takers, I suppose the silicon valley folks in the 90s were in their 20s.
Would society trust engineers in their 20s with cutting edge high budget work these days?
>>Do we actually need all those agriculture products?
>Yes, we do.
What if we reduced our meat consumption, and reduced consumption of other water-hungry foods?
You are of course very correct about being more efficient about water use, as proved by many people in many desert and semi-desert areas.
Cost is a main reason for teaching one to many.
Videoing decent presentations (rather than a professor messing around with a cheap web cam) also costs (equipment, recording and editing staff), so probably is more expensive to run initially than teaching lectures in big halls.
Getting people together in one space probably has other pedagogical values - though you are correct it is possible to have distance based university level education, e.g. The Open University. Even the Open University tries to find group learning spaces for its students though (online forums, residential summer schools) as it believes there is pedagogical value in students sharing a space to work and learn in.
Education as a racket that's all about money? - I suppose this depends on your philosophy. Many people believe there is more to education than just making money, e.g. the bettering of people, social value, psychological self-realisation, broader socio-economic concerns like reducing crime.
"maybe this is just the start for a class of privately run astronomical and Earth-observing facilities in space?"
- If a university or a national research body (not necessarily in USA, somewhere in Europe, or India, or China or whereever) "bought" the satellite, would this be something novel? Do universities or other non-government research units own satellites? If so, it might not be big news....
On the other hand, if Google/Elsevier Publications/Microsoft buy it and start charging university researchers for access to data, maybe this would be news. Is this a likely scenario?
I'd love to hear from astronomers who work with this kind of data and might have some informed opinions on how this is likely to go....
"Why is Radio Shack not offering modern electronics courses, along with rentals of some gear too hard to afford yourself?" - because the profit margin is too low? Maybe the expensive stuff takes too long to repay if it's hired out, breakage rate, etc.?
I guess if I was one of the technical crew who had to work with this stuff and be exposed to its toxicity, I'd be welcoming my boss researching a way of making my life safer. I'm sure the technicians love working for NASA but given the choice between working with highly toxic fuels that might burn them/ give them cancer/ other nice side effect, or something less damaging, I am sure they'd be all in favour of an option that won't harm them and won't potentially leak into local water tables, get drawn up into local water supply / agriculture and end up in their kids.
My experience is the people most likely to moan about health and safety are those whose greatest risk of an industrial injury is stabbing themselves with the office stapler. Folk working in genuinely high risk environments seem quite grateful their bosses have to abide by regulations.
Given the world is trademark crazy (well the big companies and lawyers, anyway), and given that there are only 456,976 four character words (using the western 26 character alphabet) - how close are we to every four character word being owned by somebody?
Can any experts out there who work with sensors and EEG comment on 1. the efficacy of a cap mounted EEG sensor array (are there issues with making sure sensors are correctly in contact with the skin rather than hair, etc.)? 2. Challenges around correct automatic analysis of received data? What kind of accuracy is required from this kind of set up to be able to conclude successfully how fatigued an operator is? What is the permissible level of error with readings (do you need to be super-accurate or is this kind of rig very error-tolerant?)
Interested to hear whether this is likely to be a very reliable piece of equipment or something prone to error and annoying to use and will therefore be sabotaged as quickly as possible by the operators ("Gee Bob, I'd be happy to wear it but the danged thing just doesn't seem to go since I accidently dropped it in a puddle last week").
PhD's in Stanford are easy to get? I am surprised by that. His work looks fairly rigourous and he's had a few papers published. The methodology he employs in his PhD seems reasonable enough - which aspects of his thesis ("Learning and short-term retention of paired associates in relation to specific sequences of interpresentation intervals") do you have an issue with?
I also note he has a first degree in Maths, so I guess he's probably ok on this knowledge. Probably he could get by undergraduate level engineering.
You note "Let's see how long he'll last": reading his curriculum vitae I'd say probably a little while longer, seeing as he completed his PhD in 1966 and has been producing papers and been employed since then, that's about 45 years so far...
One man's weeds, another man's area of natural beauty......
It's when parent poster says they taste good we gotta worry!
Very little "natural beauty" anywhere where people have lived for the last 10,000 years... a continuing debate in environmental circles as there is little 'untouched' land anywhere in the world, and certainly not near population centres.
Many wild and beautiful windswept moors are only so in the UK because our ancestors deforested these areas.
See also the debate about whether to re-introduce wolves to Scotland.
Lots of beautiful English countryside south of Manchester. Also lots of stockbrokers / rich city types who don't want their countryside fantasy shattered by noisy development work. A bit like the rich lords and ladies 150 years ago who complained about their views being ruined the first time they put railway lines across the land.
Though to be fair there are ecological concerns to be taken into account this time round seeing as we've got less countryside left.
Nice idea, but are you going to find X thousand teachers capable of teaching programming by September? or be able to *properly* train the current ones?
I assume if they are working up the new curriculum now, it will be ready in a couple of months (if you're lucky), which gives you about 3 months to distribute the curriculum to schools before they all go off on their summer holidays. 12 weeks then to get the teachers up to speed on the new courses.
I am not saying it's impossible - teachers are amazing, and incredibly dedicated. But declaring you're going to teach something which isn't currently being taught has a lead in time to get the schools up to speed. Or expect the teachers to work their evenings and weekends on an extra unpaid task (which will mean you will get highly variable results).
Unless of course you throw a major company like Microsoft or Google a blank cheque, tell em to take as much money as they want and give you a bunch of passwords to some website (probably based on a foreign country's curriculum, e.g. USA, which might not align with the UK curricula) and get your students to drag themselves through some automated lessons.
I think its political rhetoric. It can be done, and it would be cool to give some students programming skills, but I think it will take more than a few months to change the education system for a whole country and retrain the teachers.
I am suspicious of the term "traditional". I believe it was an ancient Greek philosopher who said that the golden age for any people was their grandfather's generation - so for a 20 year old this might mean education in the 1960s, for a 40 year old, perhaps the 1940's. When do you define "traditional" education as having started, and finished? My little research into the education of the 19th century doesn't suggest "critical" and "agile", more like basic literacy and numeracy backed up by physical punishment. Or did you mean the 17th century? In the early colonial period in the USA, education meant basic literacy, learning the Scriptures by rote, and some maths basic knowledge. Or perhaps you meant another period in time?
Not sure what you mean by "traditional" - perhaps you could give some examples?
MIT has discovered distance higher education learning? Welcome to 1969! Over here in the UK we've had high quality university level distance education since then and distance learning offered online since the 1980s. Currently it has over 200,000 distance learning students, many of whom use online environments as part of their learning. Perhaps though the concept of distance learning is not as advanced in the USA as in Europe?
Can any US folks comment? what is the perception of distance and online learning in the US? Over here in the UK, and I believe Europe generally, the idea of doing an online degree is considered a valid method for people to undertake higher education if they cannot get to a university campus (work, family commitments, etc). The Open University is considered to be a high quality degree offering institution and regularly comes high in student satisfaction ratings. This institution offers different media for taking courses, but some of them are offered completely online and have done for some years. I"m suprised that "university offers online teaching' makes news.
Curious - though I suppose it is newsworthy as MIT is such an august educational establishment. Interested to hear a US perspective on how distance and online higher education learning is perceived...
My experience is the reverse.
People like the conceptual idea of encrypting their email so it's really really private and no bad people on the internet can intercept and read their information - Bletchley Park and code breaking, James Bond, spies, secret communications - people are exposed to these ideas and get them, even think they are cool and clever. People get codes and code breaking as an idea. They'd really like to be able to send private details to their friends and feel really secure that nobody can read the details apart from the intended recipients. As somebody who helps a lot of friends and neighbours and elderly relatives with their online activities, this fear of intercepted private communications is one of the most frequently voiced: "I'd never do online shopping because somebody might steal my credit card details" "give me a phone and I'll tell you my bank details, I'd be scared to put them in an email to you in case a hacker read my email and stole those details" etc.
But their eyes glaze over at the process you need to undertake to carry out secure encryption and easy decryption.
It will take off when you can operationalise it for people for whom shopping through amazon is the limit for complexity in online activity.
Looks like GLONASS now has full global coverage as of October 2011.
Makes sense to me. Huge software industry in India, some of them not so good, but definitely there will be some trying to improve their practice. More companies will send employees if it's a local conference rather than an international one: cheaper, more accessible. India's a big enough place to have the demand.
Back up your data so if your laptop does get stolen it's an inconvenience rather than irreplaceable loss.
Make sure you always lock your car, so many people "jump out for just two minutes to buy something from a shop" and come back to find their car has been emptied. Always lock your car. This will put off opportunistic thieves who are looking for a quick easy target. How many of the break -ins were on unlocked rather than locked cars? If somebody has to break into your car, they might leave evidence, which means at least you might be able to claim on insurance.
Thieves aren't going to sit in your car and try and open locked bags, they will just walk off with them and open them at their leisure elsewhere. So wire mesh laptop bags? these seem like a waste of time for this situation, unless you are also D-locking your bag to a steel mounting point in your car. Easy enough for thieves to get some wire cutters when they've got your bag back at their house and take their time opening it up.
Mark your laptop so it can be traced.
The EU has a wide spread of countries, and development levels. Rural Romania has a different level of wealth and technology infrastructure than urban Finland, for example.
You make a good point about trust as an issue why some people might not take up internet use. My 77 year old father here in the UK does not go shopping online. I think part of this is lack of trust with the novel (to him) environment. Also, he doesn't need to go online. All his local services are within a few kilometres and he likes doing business in person. He is retired, so he can go to the bank and shops during quiet times of the day. Some people don't need the internet, or if they have access to it, choose not to use it.
For some people in Europe it is technical infrastructure. Check out a map of Europe and you will find that there are large areas where there is low speed or little access to the internet - modem speed access or maybe no access to fixed line telephones or mobile coverage. In Scotland, there is better coverage for 3G phones in the seas around the country than on the surface area of the land (internet is usually ok up to 2Mbs via land line in this country).
For quite a number of people in Europe, they cannot afford the cost of an internet connection. Check out prices in some of the lower developed European countries compared to state pension levels for example. For the young, employed, urban Europeans in highly developed countries internet costs are low compared to income, but for many others this is not the case.
So - that looks like something like 40 ipads lost in the last 3 years. 400 dollars each? total 16,000 dollars replacement costs?
How does that compare with how much your education area previously paid in replacing books in a similar time period?
I have to admit though I am very impressed that you've deployed approx 4000 devices and had approx 40 losses, 1% loss over three years, 99% continued use of original devices is very impressive.
News at 11! Young people alter their behaviour to follow the fashions led by pop stars! Shocking news....
I'm surprised that students are allowed calculators to work out these problems, particularly the eighth grade students. I think mental arithmetic is a useful skill even in the age of calculators/computers/mobile phones with built in calculators.... the ability to estimate an approximate answer is sometimes more useful than the ability to provide a specific answer.
It's not really about whether this jetman set up can compete with jets, my friend. It's showing that his set up is reliable enough they can take on a stunt like this.... which means it's probably interesting for military special forces for getting their people into places they couldn't get to otherwise.
- it sells expensive watches, rich people want to believe they are part of the dream, just like kids do when they buy their nikes or adidas
- it sells the technology to military, who wouldn't really expect it to be used to catch up with real jets and open them up with can openers, they will have other ideas...