February 2003 Archives
I was at my local philosophy club last night for a discussion of 'the meaning of power.' One of the common descriptions of power that seemed to come up in our discussions was the 'power' of defiance or renunciation. Examples were given from the Holocaust of Jews surviving no matter what happened to them phyisically because of their mental refusal to surrender their personal dignity. Despite how appealing this picture of internal power and dignity seems I now think this morning that there is something flawed in the whole logic. It is based on a denial of the reality of power. If someone has a gun pointed at your head and is about to pull the trigger then saying that you are not afraid to die seems like no power at all. You may have a resiliant personality, or freedom from fear, but power? At the beginning of the discussion someone defined power as the ability to exert your will upon the world. Someone who is at the point of a gun or trapped in a prisoner of war camp has no ability to exert their will upon the world, other people exert their will upon the captive or the prisoner.
At its base this view of power seems comfortable because it allows us to believe that no one could ever completely destroy our personal dignity. It is a vision of power propounded by idealists or possibly those without much actual power in the world. And it is a vision of power that is promoted and mythologized in a lot of our entertainment, especially the movies. Two epic examples come to mind "Braveheart" and "Spartacus." Both are essentially the same story of the slave who rebels, becomes free for a brief moment, is captured, and is then killed without losing their dignity. William Wallace cries out for freedom as he's being disembowelled, Spartacus sees his child ride away into the sunset as he is crucified. What kind of strange distorted image of power is this? Aren't these both examples of real, political power brutally destroying its opposition? Hollywood, our current myth factory, never tires of stories about the lone individual who triumphs over the odds or is defeated but still maintains their individuality. When are they going to catch up with the rest of the world and realize that power is much more insidious today?
How many of us actually feel any power in the world today and what kinds of power could we possibly exercise? I can choose what kind of clothes I want to wear, or what food I want to live, but my choices are constrained by the options offered by the market. A few months ago I tried to find some cheap banded-collar shirts and had absolutely no luck at any of the major retailers in the local mall or on the interenet. A few years ago I shopped for the same item and found many more choices. Has my power been eroded? Did I really have any power over my fashion choices before? One could always respond that I have the power to make my own clothes or reject the options presented by the market and create my own market of one. But the cost of pursuing that path is incredibly high. The time it takes me to learn how to make my own clothes and then do that on a regular basis is time that I could have used to write to my congressmen or learned a new programming language. Everywhere I look my choices are constrained by culture and the world around me. And most of those constraints are good things. I don't want to live in a primitive world where I have to grow or hunt for all of my own food.
So where is power today for most of the people in the industrialized world? Those in the third world are still vulnerable to the brutality of civil war and genocide. The Holocaust showed that genocide is a real possibility in the modernized world, and can be even more horrific then it was before. But there are still a lot of things to be grateful for in the modern world. The computer and the internet have fostered dreams of power among those who did not have much power in the past. I hope that some of those dreams will come true, but the recent events and books like Lawrence Lessig's The Future of Ideas make it clear that technology is not enough. The political world can still constrain us in ways it seems hard for the average individual to escape. What then to do?
Up early this morning, before the dawn, and unable to get back to sleep. By inclination I'm a night person. On weekends I sleep in late, sometimes into the afternoon. Today I was to bed early and up early as well. And the dawn was beautiful.
I've often thought that an essay or book in praise of the dark would be interesting to write. Most of the synonyms and connotations of the dark are bad, but to me the night seems like the best time of the day. The rest of the world is usually quiet. The hubbub of the daytime senses is muted, edges are softened. Some things are hidden and others are revealed. I wonder if people who appreciate the night have any less fear of the unknown than average. Those who align light with the truth may be correct but the interesting times of my life are when I'm able to look into the unknown, when I have a problem or idea to unravel.
One of the best parts of the night is waiting for the dawn. I remember walking the streets of New Haven after an all-nighter or two in college. I'd be going out to breakfast, usually after a night of intense concentration on a paper, and everything truly did look impressive.
Can't sleep, mind is working overtime on some work thoughts. Technical support shop talk ahead.
One of the major problems we face at work is getting information out of the call tracking system we use. In two years we've generated almost 60,000 tickets but trying to find trends or related incidents inside of that lump is almost impossible. In part it may be because of the system we are using, Magic. I'm not sure if there are any other call tracking systems in the market that actually do a better job of tracking related issues. Actually I'm sure there are better systems, I'm sure Magic could be improved, if we only had the money to buy professional consulting or a more expensive system. So given the constraint that we can't spend any money how can I address the problem?
Two possibilities are raging in my head tonight. One, create a simple form that runs an SQL query against a small number of fields: customer name, company, problem description. Two, create a script that translates the same information into plain text files and then use an open source project such as Lucene to index them and perform latent semantic searches on the whole set. The SQL option is likely to be computationally expensive and inefficient but how much of a difference would there really be.
This is but one of the heretical open source ideas that is going through my head to make our support operation better. Getting money to invest in infrastructure and support is hard in good times, getting it in the current economy seems impossible. So given the constraints how can I build or provide direction for a cheap and easy system that will get us some of the way toward our goals. And given how many times people have implemented calendaring systems, surely it would be possible to use one of these for change control. Or use a wiki for knowledge management.
I was at volunteer training for the Experiment Gallery at the Science Museum of Minnesota tonight. We went through a series of demonstrations and experiments about optics. To cap it off I thought I might collect some links on optics for future reference.
- Google Directory on Physics and Optics
- Optics topic at Wikipedia. This has some nice diagrams and outlines of all the common lens shapes.
- Physics Web Education Resources on Optics
- Optics.org the online photonics resource.
Volunteering at SMM is a hell of a lot of fun. I volunteered for a few years in high school and returned in the late 1990s. Last summer I worked in the Playing with Time exhibit which was wicked cool. We had some CCD video cameras that could record up to 1000 frames per second. One was setup to record the pop of a piece of popcorn (only a single frame at 1000 fps) and another was setup to record people's faces. Watching yourself in slow motion is one of those strange, almost out of body experiences. It's hard to believe that the strange body on the television is really you. The web site above has some very cool demonstrations and videos to play with.
The only bad part about the Playing with Time exhibit was that there wasn't a lot of room to do demonstrations. The equipment was really cool. I even found mysely wishing for my own high-speed video camera, though I have no idea what I would do with it. Now I'm back in the Experiment Gallery, which is basically a table that you can run demonstrations on - such as the optics ones we did today and the materials science ones from last week.
From Chronicle of Higher Education comes this intriguing piece: Getting Emotional
The study of feelings, once the province of psychology, is now spreading to history, literature, and other fields.
Mr. Miller's [author of Humiliation and The Anatomy of Disgust] more general point is that we are accustomed to understanding emotion as an essentially personal experience -- something that occurs "inside" someone and that may or may not be expressed to others. But there are cultures in which emotion is overwhelmingly a social matter, not a private one. The early use of "humiliation" referred not to an inner state but to being made humble in the presence of those higher on the social scale. Only in the 18th century, he says, did it become normal to say "I feel humiliated" rather than "I am humiliated."As social mobility became more common, there was a greater emphasis on using emotional language to describe the inner world of an individual as something more or less self-contained. What we gained in expressiveness about feeling, Mr. Miller implies, we lost in candor about the normal cruelty of social hierarchy. A Viking at an academic conference would be bewildered by a lot of things, but at least he would understand that life is a battlefield.
Julian Baggini writes about "Information Age Intelligence." He raises a couple of the objections made by critics of technological society. First that we are losing our memory for information and becoming dependent on the ability to search for information and..
The second concerns the actual way we deal intellectually with problems. Jason L Frand in his seminal paper “The Information Age Mindset” captures this in the memorable phrase “Nintendo over logic”. Frand argues that for those growing up in the information age, the most natural way to deal with a problem is through trial and error, not by logical analysis. You get good at computer games by having plenty of goes, not by spending a lot of time cognising about the best strategy.You can tell if someone has the information age mindset by seeing what they do when you give them some new device or piece of software. While the old-fashioned read the manual and follow the instructions, the children of the information age simply turn it on and start fiddling about until they figure out how it works. And you can be sure that they’ll get things working first.
Baggini demolishes both of these objections quite well. Pointing out that memorizing does not equal intelligence and that deductive logic is not the only way to think.
IT certainly is changing our world. But those who argue that it is fundamentally changing the way we think are, I have argued, overstating their case. It is true that the ability to retain information in memory has become less important now that retrieving it from the world has become easier. But intelligence was never simply about memory and understanding requires more than the ability to get hold of facts. It is true that the use of computers, particularly games, requires more induction than deduction, but induction is a vital part of rationality not some rival to it. And it is just not true that logical thinking as a whole has been sidelined by the information age: logic is used explicitly by programmers and implicitly by those who understand that logic rules govern the games and applications they use. If the information age is changing the way we think it is by shifting the emphases, not by introducing a radical new paradigm of rationality.
Trial and error are certainly becoming more prominent today. The weblog is a perfect example as people write for shorter forms over a compressed timeline and depend on others for feedback to improve the process. Hopefully this will continue to be a benefit to all.
Simon Brunning pointed me to this essay by Paul Graham "Why Nerds are Unpopular." There were a lot of passages that seemed familiar but this one particularly struck home:
Because I didn't fit into this world, I thought that something must be wrong with me. I didn't realize that the reason we nerds didn't fit in was that we were a step ahead. We were already thinking about the kind of things that matter in the real world, instead of spending all our time playing an exacting but mostly pointless game like the others.We were a bit like an adult would be if he were thrust back into middle school. He wouldn't know the right clothes to wear, the right music to like, the right slang to use. He'd seem to the kids a complete alien. The thing is, he'd know enough not to care what they thought. We had no such confidence.
A lot of people seem to think it's good for smart kids to be thrown together with "normal" kids at this stage of their lives. Perhaps. But in at least some cases the reason the nerds don't fit in actually is that everyone else is crazy. I remember sitting in the audience at a "pep rally" at my high school, watching as the cheerleaders threw an effigy of an opposing player into the audience to be torn to pieces. I felt like an explorer witnessing some bizarre tribal ritual.
I can relate to this a lot and from a very early age. One of my favorite early teachers in third grade was Mrs. Schline. She, my friend Joe, and I used to spend recess periods walking around the playground talking about current events in the world. In fifth grade I read Watership Down and remember the surprise my teacher expressed when I told her what I was reading. At parties with my parents I spent most of the time talking to the adults instead of playing with the other children.
Throughout junior high and high school I lived most of my life inside of books. I would carry three or four of my own books from class to class in addition to the books that were assigned. When I look back on the events of that time I can remember the books I was reading more than I can remember the actual events or people I was interacting with. I know others must have had difficulty in that world but to me the escape mechanism of books was so good that everything from that time seems hidden behind a fog of intellect. Fifteen years later I still measure my life by books instead of by people, social events and relationships go by in a fog.
Graham continues:
I lost more than books. I mistrusted words like "character" and "integrity" because they had been so debased by adults. As they were used then, these words all seemed to mean the same thing: obedience. The kids who got praised for these qualities tended to be at best dull-witted prize bulls, and at worse facile schmoozers. If that was what character and integrity were, I wanted no part of them.The word I most misunderstood was "tact." As used by adults, it seemed to mean keeping your mouth shut. Based on this I made up an etymology for it. I assumed it was derived from the same root as "tacit" and "taciturn," and that it literally meant being quiet. I vowed that I would never be tactful; they were never going to shut me up. In fact, it's derived from the same root as "tactile," and what it means is to have a deft touch. Tactful is the opposite of clumsy. I don't think I learned this until college.
That wasn't the worst trick high school played on me, though. Since everyone in my school seemed to view college as a form of job training, I decided to major in the most impractical subject I could imagine: philosophy.
Graham criticizes the current American education system pretty harshly and I think a lot of it is deserved. Education still is a holding pattern for most kids, without a challenge or a real practical purpose.
Clay Shirky started the ball rolling recently when he wrote about Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality, saying that the the more popular sites such as Instapundit and Andrew Sullivan get the largest proportion of the traffic today and the gap will probably continue to widen in the future. The best reactions I've seen so far are by Steven Johnson and Liz Lawley. Johnson says:
But the most interesting thing to me about Clay's essay -- and the subsequent response -- is that the active participants in the power law system are having a conversation about the distribution and what it means, and whether they want their little ecosystem to look like that.Most systems that display this kind of behavior 1) don't have component parts with that level of self-awareness, and 2) don't have the opportunity to change the dynamics of the system if they choose.
And Lawley quotes some of her own work on Discourse and Distortion in Computer-Mediated Communication
The idea of a reflexive nature of social life--referring to the way in which the structure of activity is created and recreated by the very activities constituting it--was put forth by Giddens (1984) in his discussions of social theory. This image has particular applicability in the context of CMC. We cannot study the effects of CMC upon the participants without at the same time studying the role of the participants in shaping and reshaping the context. Because the actors in this process are self-aware, theories developed and disseminated through the study of the medium can result in the use of that theory by the participants to further modify their communicative environment. As Giddens says, "Reflections on social processes (theories, and observations about them) continually enter into, become disentangled with and re-enter the universe of events they describe."
I particularly liked the reference to Giddens. I cited this same example in the Fall of 2001 when I was taking a class at the University of Minnesota. I was presenting my own ideas about the whole internet phenomenon - the intersection of computer mediated communications and changing audiences, with a particular focus on how that will effect creativity.
Giddens is absolutely essential to this whole discussion because the reflexivity he talks about can be seen over time. Most of the analysis I've seen of the weblog world so far has focused on a single snapshot in time during which the number of connections between blogs are measured. What will happen when these measurements are made over time? Projects like Blogdex and Daypop track the conversation on blogs over time. But imagine what we can learn when we can see the dynamics of influence over time. What would we learn if we were able to analyze the growth of Instapundit over time? After that we need to transfer those same tools to individuals so I or anyone else can see how our own social universe is changing over time.
I found this interesting book via a link that is too hazy to describe earlier this morning. I think it involved moving from Flemming Funch to Kieran Healy and Elizabeth Lane Lawley.
The book, Tied Knowledge: Power in Higher Education by Brian Martin, is about the power structures of academic life and reminds me of one of the an interesting essay I read by Phil Agre on 'Networking on the Network.' The following quote from the introduction seemed particularly interesting.
Finally, my focus in all this is on knowledge, specifically on how knowledge is used in power struggles. Tied knowledge is knowledge that is selectively useful for particular purposes or groups. One of the basic strategies of academics is to tie knowledge which they create or use both to themselves and to other powerful groups. This idea is a continuing theme.
In the business world one of the hardest barriers to overcome is the sharing of information between different groups. How does the development group transfer support to the operations group? It's my guess that the structures that encourage people to use tied knowledge in the academic world are also found in the "real world."
One of the funny things about my surfing on the internet is that too often I forget the connections that got me from one page to another. When I keep moving back and forth between my browser, news aggregator, text editor, and bookmark manager. Although a lot of people are working on integrating these applications my biggest complaint is with the one that seems to be most moribund in today's world: the browser. Surely there has got to be a better way to manage the history displayed by browsers. All of the major ones out there just plain suck IMHO.
The best hope seems to be some of the local, proxy like, solutions that are being worked on by a couple of people: Les Orchard and Agent Frank, Zoe, and HEP by Abe Fettig.
Jon Udell is one of the most interesting technology columnists out there. He's writing about a lot of the items I find most interesting in the technology world today: the importance of networks, giving people the ability to do their own programming. In 'Refactoring the Business' he discusses the confluence of scripitng languages and business processes.
Some of the recent challenges I've been trying to deal with work seem like they would be perfect opportunities for scripting languages. The problem I face personally and seems to be present in so many businesses is connecting the information that comes from one system with the information from another. How do you connect the user activity from an e-commerce site with the help desk activity of the very same user? If the tools already in place don't connect out of the box then you need to build a system to connect them and scripting languages seem to be the best hope. Although the programming languages may get more respect the scripting langugages are what really makes the business work, because the business becomes more intelligent and more efficient by learning about the interconnections between the systems.
What they are, increasingly, is business processes. And here we run into a major disconnect. To the enterprise, scripted solutions look like one-offs, not strategic systems designed to high standards of quality and able to evolve along with the business. What the enterprise folks don't get is that scripted systems can be engineered to meet these requirements. So they lean toward C++ and Java, and then rely on powerful integrated development environments, like Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA, to make fluid refactoring possible. These tools can work very well. "They're complicated," observes Ward, "and you have to learn how to work them -- but boy, when you do, they make those languages start to feel like scripting languages." On the other hand, he asks, "Why should we need heroics in the IDE to correct for misguidedness in the language design?" It's a question of suitability for purpose. "If the purpose is to continuously evolve programs for business, then what's suitable is to have clean object models that are easy to read."
The business processes that Udell talks about are the interconnections. In my own experience it's incredibly difficult to convince business to spend money on the interconnections because they don't produce immediate revenue. The customers only see the final e-commerce site and don't care to know how much marketing knows about tech support. But for the company to succeed that internal knowledge must be passed as efficiently as possible. Scripting languages seem to be the best choice for these projects precisely because they seem like non-strategic systems, they're relatively simple and quickly implemented.
More information visualization tools found via iaslash. Permanent entry refers to programs such as GraphViz, Tulip, and more.
The New York Times reports that NASA has released a detailed map of the Columbia reentry process. Immediately I go over to NASA.gov and download the map onto my own computer. What amazes me is how easily I can get from the reported story to the real source thanks to the internet. How different this flood of information is from the Challenger explosion staggers me.
As I drove into work this morning I listened to the people on the radio discussing how to prepare for terrorism and I was struck by how similar the fears expressed by people today match the fears I felt during the early 1980s regarding the threat of nuclear war. There were many nights during junior high school when I stayed awake waiting for the brilliant flash of light that would signal the end of the world. It seemed like Ronald Reagan was bent on pushing the Soviet Union into war regardless of the cost. I even wrote an essay about B-52 bomber bases and sent it off to Newsweek to be published. It never was. And I remember having nightmares for weeks after watching "The Day After" on television. I still remember the images of the missiles taking off over the fields of the Midwest - the white exhaust trails pointing toward oblivion.
My reaction to the threat of terrorism is completely different today. I would never go to the hardware store to buy plastic and duct tape. Nor am I planning on investing in a gas mask anytime soon. So what makes the terror today so much more manageable, at least for me, than the fear of nuclear war in the past. Obviously I'm older now then I was in 1983. But age alone isn't enough.
I can't claim that the terrorists are any more rational about choosing to go to war than the Soviets were during the cold war. In fact one of the best arguments for Bush's preemptive strategy of action is the irrationality and fanaticism of the terrorists. The Soviets didn't want to die any more than I did, so I could comfort myself with the sentiments expressed by Sting. Today the attitudes of the suicide bombers are impossible for me to understand; they don't even seem rational.
I begin to wonder if what I feel is fatalism. If there's no way to respond to an irrational threat then maybe I don't have to worry about it. If the planes, bombs, or biological weapons start coming my way there's not much I can do about it. Having enough duct tape or plastic on hand isn't going to save my life if I can't get home or need to stay in a shelter for longer than a few hours. So I just go on living my life as though nothing much has changed. And in most ways nothing has changed for me. The pronouncements of how the world was altered by September 11 seemed flat when they were made on the anniversary and, as time passes, the minimal changes get further away.
I strive to have a view of the world that is broad, but about terrorism I seem to be falling into the same selfishness that affects everyone else - it just doesn't matter until it actually affects me, personally. During the first Gulf War I was afraid of getting drafted. The chances of that happening now seem really remote.
One of the unifying themes I've observed in media coverage of preparing for terrorism, the shuttle disaster, and other recent events is the ridiculous, verging on the absurd, risks we are willing to accept and refuse. I'm more worried about being in a car crash then being the target of terrorism, and even more concerned that it will be an SUV that hits me on the driver's side. I'm more worried about surveillance by my own government than I am by a biological attack. How have we gotten to such an absurd state where people don't even seem to have a basic grasp of statistics and risk? A lot of things need reforming in the world but it feels like this would be one of the most effective.
From the New York Times: Assessing the Odds of Catastrophe.
But a rapidly evolving set of conceptual and computing tools allow mathematicians, engineers and insurance executives to assess the risk of what are euphemistically known as low-probability, high-consequence events.The field, known in professional jargon as probabilistic risk assessment, helps companies and government agencies decide whether they are prepared to take the chances involved.
I've been reading Tomorrow Now, the new non-fiction book by Bruce Sterling. It's seven chapters organized around the seven ages of man from Shakespeare's "all the world's a stage" speech. In it Sterling tries to suggests possibilities for the future. Two recent articles reinforced some of the points he made.
Robert Kuttner sounded off today in The American Prospect about the unseemly media frenzy surrounding the crash of the Columbia space shuttle over the weekend. Kuttner's critique is two fold, first that the value of manned space exploration goes unchallenged and second that the media are prone to overblow a tragedy. He's right on with the second point:
Here is the broader concern: We live in an era when democracy is eroding, when dialogue between leaders and citizens is closer to one-way spectacle than the deliberation of a free people. The extreme valorization of the space shuttle and the choreographed pageantry of, say, the recent State of the Union speech seem disconcertingly of a piece.
Sterling describes much the same thing when he talks about politics in the future falling into three categories: technocratic, nostalgic and bizarre. The feeding frenzy of the media over these instant tragedies (Columbia, the Washington sniper, 9-11) are exmples of the bizarre. The actual business of governing continues to be technocratic and basically boring according to Sterling and the only thing that can keep us entertained are the sportlike tragedies occasionally thrown up by the vagaries of history.
In another chapter Sterling talks about economic power and jobs moving away from the United States and into the third world. Business Week has a major story on this trend this week. Overseas operations in India, Hong Kong and the rest of Asia are on a mad growth path. Globalization may have sent blue collar jobs overseas first but the white collar, knowledge worker, jobs don't seem far behind if you believe this story. Personally I think this is a good thing. America can safely share some of its prosperity with others and, at least for now, I'm not worrying about losing my own job.
The folks at CAIDA, the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis, have posted a very intriguing analysis of the Sapphire SQL Server worm that overran the internet a few weekends ago. Basically they say this is the first confirmed example of a rapidly spreading worm, it infected 90% of the hosts within 10 minutes of being released. What was previously a theoretical possibility is now a potential reality: the internet could be seriously damaged by a worm before any person would have a chance to react. The Spread of the Sapphire/Slammer Worm
Working on security policies for an IT organization has convinced me that the biggest threat to computer security remains the people who manage the systems. If they don't have the processes or the resources to patch the servers they administer such worms will become more frequent.
On a side note the CAIDA web site has some of best large scale visualizations of the internet available.
Since the decision on Eldred v. Ashcroft there has been a lot of discussion on the web about the failure to find an appropriate metaphor for intellectual property. Doc Searles wrote about this after the recent decision.
Today I found another longer essay by Robert A. Baron that appears to be worth further reading. It includes this bit about falling into the public domain.
While "to fall into the public domain" is a common enough expression, sensitivity to its implied meaning is now causing some speakers to be wary of its use. On its face, one would think that the use of the word "fall" would not be so significant; after all, we say, "fall into the public domain" so automatically that one must pay special attention to avoid it. However, if we examine this word just a bit, we'll come to realize that the word "fall," when used this way, encapsulates a host of mythic and morally charged ideas that, by implication, serve to disparage the public domain, to undermine its perceived value, and thereby to certify the comparatively favorable disposition our civilization extends toward works that exist and remain under copyright. Our society favors the state of ownership – a colonial inheritance that mandates that possession should overtake that which is not yet held by anyone. We are taught that the legal status of being "under" copyright (like being "under" that protective umbrella used to sell insurance) is good and safe, and the "loss" or abandonment of copyright is unfortunate, precarious, and even to some degree, unethical or at least indicative of a moral fault within us. When copyright protection has been lost, we sometimes say that a work has been "cast" (like refuse) into the public domain.
Needless to say the language we use to describe the process of creativity often becomes as important as the actual creative process because the language creates its own boundaries and its own assumptions.
Via OLDaily comes this article on creating metrics for knowledge management. Metrics for knowledge management and content management by James Robertson.
Here's an interesting summary article on efforts to visualize the social interactions mediated by computers and technology from infovis.net.
I particularly like the links through to resources at IBM : the Social Computing Group and work by Bonnie Nardi. I commented briefly on her book "A Small Matter of Programming" here.
Steven Pinker has this to say in the New York Times about "How to Get Inside a Student's Head!"
The sciences of the mind can also provide a sounder conception of what the mind of a child is inherently good and bad at. Our minds are impressively competent at problems that were challenges to our evolutionary ancestors: speaking and listening, reading emotions and intentions, making friends and influencing people. They are not so good at problems that are far simpler (as gauged by what a computer can do) but which are posed by modern life: reading and writing, calculation, understanding how complex societies work. We should not assume that children can learn to write as easily as they learn to speak, or that children in groups will learn science as readily as they learn to exchange gossip. Educators must figure out how to co-opt the faculties that work effortlessly and to get children to apply them to problems at which they lack natural competence.
I was particularly impressed by the idea of co-opting the faculties that are common to all of us to improve our skills in areas that are not so easily mastered. But what Pinker thinks we are really good at: emotions, speaking, making friends, are the things that current technology seems relatively poor at. Which is where the recent work and interest in 'social software' seems most promising.
Pinker goes onto cite one of my favorite stalking horses of recent days: the importance of a basic knowledge of statistics and probability.
But there are only 24 hours in a day, and a decision to teach one subject is a decision not to teach another. The question is not whether trigonometry is important — it is — but whether it is more important than probability; not whether an educated person should know the classics, but whether it is more important to know the classics than elementary economics.
Clearly there needs to be more education about probability and statistics throughout the world. From 19% of Americans believing they are in the top one percent of the income distribution to assessing the risks of spaceflight most of the conversations I hear today could use some solid statistical knowledge.
via elearningpost
There's nothing quite so fun as seeing other people on a rant against PowerPoint. Julia Keller gives a blow-by-blow account of how PowerPoint can destroy your thinking and put creativity into boxes.
But PowerPoint has a dark side. It squeezes ideas into a preconceived format, organizing and condensing not only your material but - inevitably, it seems - your way of thinking about and looking at that material. A complicated, nuanced issue invariably is reduced to headings and bullets. And if that doesn't stultify your thinking about the subject, it may have that effect on your audience - which is at the mercy of your presentation.
Luckily I was in college before the ubiquitous rise of Powerpoint and laptops. I graduated in 1994 and don't remember any of my lectures being delivered with PowerPoint.
