Your contribution to science: Link to this post

November 28, 2006

Really.

A psychology grad student is doing a paper on the speed with which a meme will spread through Bloggerland.  Scott Eric Kaufman is testing a hypothesis that posts and ideas are skyhooked by high-traffic sites (this is a low-traffic site, Millard Fillmore being dead all these years and all; I got the post from Pharyngula, who gets as many hits in a day as I would get in a year at this rate — the hypothesis might be right.

Your role?  You need to link to the original post at Acephalous from your blog, and then ask others to do the same.  Here is the link at Acephalous:  http://acephalous.typepad.com/acephalous/2006/11/measuring_the_s.html.

Well, Acephalous is a much better writer than I, so here’s how he explains it:

  1. Write a post linking to this one in which you explain the experiment.  (All blogs count, be they TypePad, Blogger, MySpace, Facebook, &c.)
  2. Ask your readers to do the same.  Beg them.  Relate sob stories about poor graduate students in desperate circumstances.  Imply I’m one of them.  (Do whatever you have to.  If that fails, try whatever it takes.)
  3. Ping Techorati.

It’s all in the name of research.  Honest.

Think of all the poor graduate students in desperate circumstances.  Oh!  The humanity!

Leave a Comment » | Education blogs, Science, Technology | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Quirks of history: Customer service circa 1909

November 24, 2006

Interesting correspondence with a railroad regarding a misapprehended hat, in 1909.

1. Can you imagine any common carrier institution taking such care with a customer today?

2. Can you imagine any such chain of correspondence in e-mail, or by telephone?

3. Can you build a lesson plan for a history class around this correspondence?

Further thoughts: This story puts me in mind of two others that turned out quite differently. The first is the (possibly apocryphal) story of Abraham Lincoln’s borrowing a book to read, and stashing it between the logs of the cabin when he put out the candle. After a nighttime rain in which the water ran down the side of the cabin and soaked the book, Lincoln returned the book to its owner and at great personal expense replaced it, the story goes — meriting the the “Honest Abe” moniker. The book was reputed to have been a biography of George Washington.

The second story is that of American businessman William Boyce, lost in a London fog and late for a business appointment in 1909. Out of the fog came a boy in uniform who offered to guide Boyce to his appointment, and did — and then refused a tip because, as he explained, he was a Scout, and Scouts did not take payment for good deeds. The legend is that Boyce later met with the founder of Scouting in Britain, Lord Baden-Powell, and then carried Scouting to the United States, incorporating the Boy Scouts of America on February 8, 1910. The Scout was never identified, but is instead honored in Scout lore as the “unknown Scout.”

Buffalo tribute to unknown Scout at Gilwell ParkStatue of an American Bison, erected at Scouting’s training center in Gilwell Park, England, in honor of the unknown Scout who helped businessman William D. Boyce find his way, and thereby played a key role in the founding of Boy Scouting in the U.S.

1 Comment | Abraham Lincoln, Boy Scouts of America, George Washington, History, Lesson plans, Technology | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

RIP: VHS

November 21, 2006

VHS logoWe can still read the Gutenberg Bible. It was printed in 1455, 551 years ago. I have a few books in my library older than 80 years, and they are still quite usable. I have books from my undergraduate days that I consult regularly — though more than 25 years old, they work fine.

So while books carry on, it’s a bit of a shock, to me, to see that VHS is dead. Daily Variety carried the obituary last week, but I just heard this morning, “VHS, 30, dies of loneliness”:

After a long illness, the groundbreaking home-entertainment format VHS has died of natural causes in the United States. The format was 30 years old.

No services are planned.

The format had been expected to survive until January, but high-def formats and next-generation vidgame consoles hastened its final decline.

“It’s pretty much over,” concurred Buena Vista Home Entertainment general manager North America Lori MacPherson on Tuesday.

VHS is survived by a child, DVD, and by Tivo, VOD and DirecTV. It was preceded in death by Betamax, Divx, mini-discs and laserdiscs.

Although it had been ailing, the format’s death became official in this, the video biz’s all-important fourth quarter. Retailers decided to pull the plug, saying there was no longer shelf space.

VHS is an acronym for “vertical helical scan,” which means little to most people. It’s obscure enough that when some advertising writer suggested it stands instead for “video home system,” that explanation replaced the truth in many histories of the format.

Wikipedia says the format was launched in September 1976, the month that Orrin Hatch won an upset victory over Jack Carlson in the Utah Republican primary on the strength of the only endorsement then-former-presidential candidate Ronald Reagan gave to anyone. Hatch went on to defeat three-term incumbent Ted Moss with a vastly underpaid press secretary. On November 7, 2006, 72-year-old Orrin Hatch won a sixth six-year term to the U.S. Senate. But VHS is dead. Hatch’s career in the U.S. Senate will outlast VHS.

In late 1978 I purchased a high-end cassette tape recorder to convert my vinyl records to a format that could play in my car. I had avoided the 8-track boom, and I thought cassettes would be the format for a long time to come. That cassette recorder wore out; I have two other high-end machines I use only occasionally. I have a few hundred cassette tapes that are too decayed to play. It turns out that magnetic recording tape only lasts about a decade before it becomes unusable. Fortunately I kept the vinyl records, and now I have software to convert them to digital, for conversion to CD or MP3 formats. It is difficult to find needles for the record players these days. Cassette players still show up in autos. VHS, on the other hand, joins Generalissimo Francisco Franco in the “seriously dead” column.

I delayed purchase of VHS player until about 1989, when stereo versions were reasonably inexpensive, and when most of the war with Sony Betamax was over. In schools today VHS is almost ubiquitous, finally. My principal had to argue hard to purchase DVD players just two years ago. New VHS machines were installed in many schools in the Dallas area just a year ago.

DVDs launched in the late 1990s, according to Wikipedia. DVD sales surpassed VHS sales in June 2003. Three years later, movie studios announced they would no longer put new movies on VHS for commercial sales, in July 2006.

I may be missing something, or perhaps digital other-than-DVD formats are already eclipsing DVD, but I do not think there is a core of DVD recorders and players available to allow home recording to the extent VHS recorders were used. Or, perhaps TIVO has filled the void.

Remember all the litigation about copyright protection and VHS? Remember the fight GO Video had to make a two-head, reproducing VHS machine? All mooted now.

Alvin Toffler was right.*

VHS is dead, but will any format live long any more?

Tip of the old scrub brush to Tombrarian.

* Among other things, Toffler said: “The illiterate of the 21st Century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.”

He also wrote: “Future shock is the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future.”

Leave a Comment » | Blu-ray, Classroom technology, Movies, Technology | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

The mighty pen

October 29, 2006

2006 is the 100th anniversary of the Mont Blanc company, the company that made fountain pens a luxury item even while fountain pens were still the state of the art of pens.

Today is the 61st anniversary (according to CBS “Sunday Morning”) or 62nd anniversary (see Wikipedia) of the introduction of the ballpoint pen in the U.S., at Gimbel’s Department Store, in New York City. It was based on a design devised in 1938 by a journalist named László Bíró. Biro produced his pen in Europe, and then in Argentina. But in the U.S., a businessman named Reynolds set up the Reynolds International Pen Company and rushed to market in the U.S. a pen based on several Biros he had purchased in Buenos Aires.

On October 29, 1945 (or 1946), you could purchase a “Reynolds Rocket” at Gimbel’s for $12.50 — about $130 today, adjusted for inflation.

Today I continue my search for a ballpoint or rollerball that will write in green, reliably. I use a Waterman Phileas ballpoint, a Cross Radiance fountain pen, a Cross Radiance rollerball (Radiance was discontinued about a year ago), a full set of Cross Century writing implements, a lot of Sanford Uniballs in various colors, and a lot of Pentel Hybrid K-178 gel-rollers, and some Pilot G-2 gel pens (though the green ink versions are unreliable). I also keep several Marvy calligraphic pens for signing things with a flourish. I have a box of $0.10 ballpoints in a briefcase for students who fail to bring a writing utensil.

Jefferson probably wrote the Declaration of Independence with quills he trimmed himself. Lincoln probably used a form of fountain pen to write the Gettysburg Address, but he had no writing utensil with him when he was assassinated at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865. President Johnson made famous the practice of using many pens to sign important documents, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964; he made gifts of the pens to people who supported the legislation and worked to get it made into law.

And who said it? (Brace yourself)

Beneath the rule of men entirely great,

The pen is mightier than the sword.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Baron Lytton, in Richelieu, act II, scene ii, a play he wrote in 1839. Yes, he is the same Bulwer-Lytton who wrote the novel Paul Clifford in 1840, whose opening line is, “It was a dark and stormy night.”

1 Comment | First Amendment, History, Technology | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Chalk it up to art in the name of science

October 26, 2006

 

 

Owl, by Chrys Rodrigue

You should read this post. It demonstrates why P. Z. Myers is one of the most-read bloggers in the world — he writes so well, on topics that are so dramatically interesting.

Myers tells an interesting vignette of a professor of gross anatomy who was a wizard of illustration in colored chalk.

Visuals, especially spectacular visuals in color, contribute to the ability of students to learn the material illustrated. Drawing is rapidly becoming a lost art, a victim of too-easy-to-use clipart and Bush’s dour view of education that excludes music, dancing, painting and drawing, anything that might distinguish us from lower animals or otherwise bring delight and insight into human existence (and other factors). How could PowerPoint seriously compare to live art in a classroom?

 

Presentations are always made better with specific, relevant illustrations. Most people are at least partly visual learners, with about four times as much information going through eyes on illustrations than going through ears hearing a lecture, or eyes reading text. I use a simple tree to illustrate the Constitution, its roots in the consent of the people, its three branches of government, and fruits of liberty and freedom. Students — whether budding lawyers, eager Boy Scouts, or complacent high school kids — get the point, and do well on the exams.

Myers’ tribute to Professor Snider is touching, informative, and inspiring. Where is Professor Snider today?

3 Comments | Brain learning, Education, Pedagogy, Science, Technology | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

An MIT education, on-line

September 26, 2006

Occasionally we visit the use of technology in education. It seems to me that our technical acumen far outstrips our serious application of technology to learning, and we should be trying to close the gap.

MIT offers OpenCourseWare, which is a large catalog of offerings, on line. It is a step towards realizing the potential of on-line learning:

a free and open educational resource (OER) for educators, students, and self-learners around the world. It is true to MIT’s values of excellence, innovation, and leadership.

MIT OCW:

  • Is a publication of MIT course materials
  • Does not require any registration
  • Is not a degree-granting or certificate-granting activity
  • Does not provide access to MIT faculty

Historians, especially teachers wishing to crib for great syllabi, will want to look at offerings like the courses from Pauline Maier. Economists should explore offerings in economics, too.

Leave a Comment » | Economics, History, On-line education, On-line learning, Teaching, Technology | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

World changing presentations

September 24, 2006

Before the proliferation of video projectors and computers, and the proliferation of Microsoft PowerPoint and similar programs, lectures with visual aids usually meant a few phrases on a chalk board, or a few select phrases on flip charts. Sometimes visual aids meant overhead projector slides, which offer the advantage of the lecturer’s being able to write on the slide as the lecture progresses.

When I did a lot more lecturing for corporations and professional groups, I carried 35-millimeter photo slides, professionally produced. Some of them showed just the cover of a book. I favored black or very dark backgrounds with one word on a slide. With just one word, I could edit the presentation more easily, shuffling the order of the key words I wanted to use literally up to the last moment. Laying out a three-hour presentation using just single-word slides, with a few photos or other illustrations, served to focus me on the outline of the speech, on the pacing and timing of the presentation, and focus especially on just what the message was to be — what I wanted the audience to leave the auditorium humming.

PowerPoint changed all of that, and not necessarily for the better. Oh, I use PowerPoint myself, though I tend to favor single, high-impact historical photographs, rather than the thousand-word essays some people put up on the single slides. I still edit to get pictures that are spare in presentation, but rich in thought, and rich in potential for edifying talk. I have seen a few PowerPoint masters — perhaps you have, too — who can dispense an enormous amount of information and inspiration with a minimum of words and slides. Read the rest of this entry »

2 Comments | Abraham Lincoln, Business, Education, Teaching, Technology | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

One-room schools and national memory

September 13, 2006

Speaking of Jim Bencivenga — I did, here — he was the education reporter for the Christian Science Monitor prior to his time at the U.S. Department of Education, where he was my predecessor as director of Information Services in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) (a long title that means “the office that’s looking for good stuff and new stuff”).

A Google search revealed that Bencivenga is cited in a book of quotations for an article he wrote on one-room schools.

The single-room worlds remain strong icons at the heart of our national memory, permanent as any church spire piercing the New England sky.

On country schools, Christian Science Monitor 13 Feb 85

In my family, childbearing has been put off to later than average for a couple of generations. So I heard stories of the old one-room schools from those who experienced them. The memory of one-room schools was with my parents, and my maternal grandparents (I did not get a chance to meet my paternal grandparents). There are, in 2006, a few one-room schoolhouses remaining — in Maine, California, Nebraska, Hawaii, and other places. NPR featured a series on them this past year.

One-room schools seem awfully quaint, and perhaps wholly obsolete in times when some school districts give every student a laptop computer to get schoolwork done. The values taught in those schools should be preserved, however: Love of education, seeking of wisdom, cross-generational learning, respect for people of differing ages, and a reliance on living the golden rule, among other things.

The U.S was once a nation of mostly one-room schoolhouses. Change isn’t always completely for the better, even when it is mostly so. We struggle to keep good values in changing times.

We still don’t have a magic formula for how people learn, or how education should work; it remains true that in education, one-size fits few.

1 Comment | Good Quotes, History, Pedagogy, Public education, Teaching, Technology | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

The flood tide of technology

September 2, 2006

When we were setting up the computers for the President’s Commission on Americans Outdoors in 1985, Ted the Computer Guy from Interior told us the ITT machines were the latest, greatest, and that the 10 megabyte hard-drives were all that anyone would probably ever need. 

We used Macs borrowed from staffers’ homes to do serious graphical layouts, and with the cooperation of Commission Vice Chairman Gilbert Grosvenor, then head of the National Geographic Society, much of the serious word-, photo- and chart-crunching was done by NGS employees, as donations.  The report was published in its most-accessible form in 1987 by Island Press, who had better typesetting and editing capabilities than the Government Printing Office (GPO).  My hard drive began to seriously bog down after four months — pre-Windows, it actually limped over the finish line, complete with a 5,000 member database of media contacts and their publications about the commission and it work.  ITT got out of desktop computing shortly after that big government contract.  My current computer strains with just more than 30 times the capacity of that old ITT machine — in RAM alone. 

From the President’s Commission I moved to the Department of Education’s Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) — one of my charges was a technology demonstration office that had an IBM desktop loaded with amazing features, like a dictionary, and a GUI interface (we couldn’t use such machines in our offices, of course).  Checker Finn was Assistant Secretary of Education for Research — stuck in bed for a few weeks with a back injury, he demonstrated how tyrannical useful e-mail could be, with several dozen e-mails a day between him and those of us with management responsibilities.  We used a 600-baud telephone connection.

Generation gap, hell!  This is revolutionary:  TDK Develops 200 GB Blu-ray Disc.

TDK announced Thursday that it had reached a new milestone in data storage on Blu-ray discs, revealing a prototype that can hold 200GB. The disc doubles TDK’s previous 100GB prototype and is possible by creating six distinct layers of data, each capable of holding 33.6GB.

The prototype, like all Blu-ray media, is single sided. “The ultra-ambitious technology roadmap for Blu-ray has now been confirmed as realistic, with landmarks such as this proving the long-term value of the format against its rivals,” said TD vice president Bruce Youmans. TDK said such high-capacity discs could be commercially available in several months.

The most revolutionary thing about it:  It’s not even small news.  Your newspaper won’t mention it.  Readers of this blog may not even know what Blu-ray is. 

In my classroom, I have a chalk board.   The eraser is old and works poorly.  I’m supposed to prepare the next generation.  Dick Feynman was a prophet.

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin’.
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’.
(copyright 1963 and 1991, Bob Dylan)

Leave a Comment » | Blu-ray, Current History, History, Technology | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Brilliant news about dark matter

August 23, 2006

No, not “dark matters,” nor even “a dark matter.”  Dark matter.  The stuff that we can’t see that may make up three quarters of the matter in the universe.

And with news this big, it still took a couple of days to get to me, courtesy of P. Z. Myers at Pharyngula.  Why wasn’t this on the front page of every newspaper on the planet?

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced they have direct evidence of dark matter.  Here’s the photograph:

X-ray/Optical Composite of 1E 0657-56

Caption:  This composite image shows the galaxy cluster 1E 0657-56, also known as the “bullet cluster.” This cluster was formed after the collision of two large clusters of galaxies, the most energetic event known in the universe since the Big Bang.

Hot gas detected by Chandra in X-rays is seen as two pink clumps in the image and contains most of the “normal,” or baryonic, matter in the two clusters. The bullet-shaped clump on the right is the hot gas from one cluster, which passed through the hot gas from the other larger cluster during the collision. An optical image from Magellan and the Hubble Space Telescope shows the galaxies in orange and white. The blue areas in this image show where astronomers find most of the mass in the clusters. The concentration of mass is determined using the effect of so-called gravitational lensing, where light from the distant objects is distorted by intervening matter. Most of the matter in the clusters (blue) is clearly separate from the normal matter (pink), giving direct evidence that nearly all of the matter in the clusters is dark.

I am old enough to be able to recall that the news of Wilson and Penzias’ confirmation of the Big Bang, and consequent disproof of Steady State, also was not front page news.

All of which suggests newspapers have their priorities wrong.

NASA’s press release was headlined simply, but importantly:  NASA Finds Direct Proof of Dark Matter.  Go to the NASA site and look at the great animations.

Scientists usually have a few beers after such news.  It may be a good time to purchase stock in breweries.

1 Comment | Astronomy, History, Physics, Science, Technology | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

E-learning courtesy

August 21, 2006

Setting up the on-line portion of a college course is rather new.  I found this ancient-by-internet-terms Michael Leddy at Orange Crate Art suggests students need to show manners and sense in e-mailing professors, in a well-crafted post, How to e-mail a professor. 

The comments provide good advice for professors, too.

Leave a Comment » | Education, On-line education, On-line learning, Teaching, Technology | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

A plagiarism how-to

August 16, 2006

Back in May, Alex Halavais at A Thaumaturgical Compendium offered advice on how to plagiarize to avoid detection.  Of course, it also lets the cat out of the bag on how to detect such plagiarism, which was his tongue-in-cheek intention all along.  Halavais has some other stuff worth reading, and a very impressive resume.  Any teacher grading essays should read the plagiarism post.

(Tip of the backscrub brush to but she’s a girl . . .)

1 Comment | Accuracy, Education, Plagiarism, Technology | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Atomic anniversaries

August 7, 2006

This week marks the 61st anniversaries of the U.S. dropping atom bombs on Hiroshima (August 6) and Nagasaki (August 9).

This is the only event that occasionally causes me to wish for school in early August. Marking the anniversaries in a U.S. history class could be a useful exercise. Texas’ TEKS require students to know a bit about President Harry Truman’s decision to drop the bomb, and especially his reasoning behind the decision. To get there in an orderly fashion, and to keep kids captivated by this most interesting part of recent history, I think a class needs to lay the background with the end of the war in Europe (especially D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge) with troops hoping to go home to the U.S. and being diverted to the Pacific, the background of the U.S.’s “island-hopping” strategy, especially the invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa and the carnage that was required to take the islands, and the background of the Manhattan Project, from Einstein’s letter to Roosevelt through the secret cities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee and Los Alamos, New Mexico, the Trinity Project at White Sands, the training of the bombers at Wells Wendover, Nevada, and the World War I service of Harry Truman himself. It’s a fascinating history that, the Texas tests show and my classroom experience confirms, students know very little about.

As with the misinformation on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq which I reported earlier today, this history of atom bombs informs us of policy choices available and necessary in our current dealings with North Korea, Iran, Ukraine and Russia, among other nations.

Japanese foundations sponsor trips to Hiroshima and Nagasaki for U.S. reporters, and there used to be one for high school teachers, too. It’s a history I lived with for a decade trying to get a compensation bill for downwind victims of fallout from our atmospheric nuclear tests in Nevada. I wish more people knew the stories.

5 Comments | Atomic Bomb, Curricula, Harry Truman, History, Nuclear weapons, Science, TAKS, Technology, TEKS, World War II | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

1984: History of technology

August 3, 2006

A nicely-written blog, “I Had an Idea This Morning,” had a piece by Anne from Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, New York in the past week about just how far off the mark was George Orwell’s novel 1984 in its portrayal of the use of information devices, “1984 vs. the Blog: Orwell’s Big Blooper.” Instead of the government having a monopoly on the publication of news to be used to suppress the people, the people have fractured such distribution especially with the use of the internet. I find especially thought-provoking the last two paragraphs of Anne’s piece:

Looking back, it almost seems like the totalitarian regimes in Germany and the Soviet Union were the fruit of a never-to-be-repeated phase in the evolution of communications technology. For a brief, horrific period, governments had total control over powerful tools—television and radio—that they could use to communicate with their citizens. The internet, by design, makes such centralized control impossible.

But does that make us safe from groups of super evil mean crazy people? It’s been widely observed that new technologies—from gunpowder to nuclear fusion—have historically been harnessed to serve malevolent ends. Why should communications technology be any different? While mass communication technology helped enable the rise of totalitarian regimes that laid down the law, the internet is pretty good at empowering destructive entities that work outside the law—terrorists, for one. Just as the new technology has given us a billion little blogs and news sites and tv channels and video streams, it’s also giving us thousands of new, super organized hate-based groups to worry about.

The actual year 1984 is a generation gone, and we don’t see exactly the evils that Orwell wrote about. Read the rest of this entry »

5 Comments | Economics, History, Lesson plans, TAKS, Technology, TEKS | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

History of Resisting Technology

July 6, 2006

techdirt has this wonderful short compilation of bad predictions about new technologies ruining entertainment industries — print the page and put it in your copy of Christopher Cerf’s and Victor Navasky’s The Experts Speak.

I attended a presentation of education guru Harry Wong two weeks ago. He had probably a dozen slides featuring quotations from the experts from this book and other sources, and each comment was met with “oohs” and “ahhs.” My first use of these wrongway predictions was in 1988 and 1989 in the “Committing to Leadership” program at AMR (American Airlines). It’s amazing to me that they still seem new to so many — but they are funny, and thought provoking, even if they are not new.

1 Comment | Future, Good Quotes, Pedagogy, Technology | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

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