Graham Glass, etc.

First screenshot of EDU2.0 for Business

We're on track to release a beta for "EDU2.0 for Business" during the week of November 16th. Here's the first screenshot of the site when it was briefly live on http://www.edu20.com:

Whole Brain Catalog

I just found this amazing site - the Whole Brain Catalog - that aims to catalog and make freely available a huge amount of information about mouse brains. 

For example, check out this video tour through the brain of a mouse. I had shivers going up my spine the entire time I was watching it.

EDU2.0 Growth Chart

Still looking good! It just passed 100,000, and usually slows down a little towards the end of the year.

Here's a map showing schools that use EDU 2.0 in the US:

EDU 2.0 for iPhone, Part 2

Here's the next round of mockups of the EDU2.0 application for the iPhone. The next step is to create the HTML/CSS that will allow it to be served up from our main site (it's a web app, not a native app).

Login:

Main:

Teach:

Class:

EDU2.0 breaks the 100,000 member mark!

EDU2.0 just passed the 100,000 member mark!

According to our growth chart, the site membership has doubled consistently every 6 months since it was launched 3 years ago. This means that the site should pass 1,000,000 members sometime in 2011. 

The growth is particularly rewarding since we have spent nothing on marketing; it's all been word of mouth.

EDU2.0 for iPhone

We've started work on a mobile version of EDU2.0 for the iPhone. Here are some initial mockups:

Login:

Main:

Main (alternative):

Teach:

Class:

Sleep Simulation Results

I've blogged on-and-off for the last few years about why I think we sleep and dream. For example, here's the last video I did on this subject (with squinty eyes due to short-term LASIK sensitivity):

I've added a new twist to my theory since last time:

The human sleep cycle is 90 minutes long, and if you map it over a night, it looks a lot like what you'd see if you plotted a 90-minute long sine wave that gradually moves upward after every cycle. The peak of the sine wave would corresponds to REM sleep, which gradually increases in duration as the night wears on. For example:

The area of the brain called the PONS emits waves every 90 minutes during sleep, and there's even some evidence that these waves are generated during the daytime as well. These waves seem to radiate throughout the brain and stimulate various areas.

So I hypothesize that there's a regular 90 minute cycle going on all the time (there are 16 of these cycles in every day) that stimulates neurons. I'm not sure what the purpose of the cycle is, but perhaps it's important to prevent individual neurons from sleeping continuously for more than a few hours? Anyhow, my theory is that the stimulating effect of the 90 minute cycle only becomes apparent when most neurons are sleeping, since at its peak, the cycle causes many neurons to wake up for a while (and as I mentioned in my video, dreams are simply the thoughts of a partial mind).

In lab experiments, they've confirmed that peak PGO waves immediately precede REM sleep, which is exactly what my theory predicts.

To test my theory, I decided to write a little "brain simulator" using Ruby on Rails. The simulator models about 500,000 neurons that gradually build up metabolic waste while they're active and then dump waste while they're sleeping. The probability of a particular neuron being active is determined by the amount of metabolic waste it has accumulated, the activity of its neighboring neurons, the amount of external stimulation (e.g. daylight), and the level of the 90 minute cycle.

Here's the plot that I got (click to see it full-size):

 

The plot starts at 4 pm and the green line shows the metabolic waste level slowly rising. The blue 90 minute cycle has a small effect before night time, and you can see a few neurons drifting asleep before 10 pm. When the external stimulus goes away at 10 pm, the effect of the high metabolic waste combined with a downward 90 minute cycle causes most neurons to go straight into a deep sleep. The metabolic waste then starts to be dumped, and the neurons sleep state is modulated during the night by the 90 minute cycle. The peaks of the cycle correspond to gradually increasing amounts of REM sleep and the depth of each sleep cycle gradually lessons. This is exactly what is seen in experimental results. When external stimulus appears (usually in the form of daylight), enough metabolic waste has been dumped to allow the entire brain to immediately become active.

Overall, I'm very happy with the results, since it reproduces most of the measured effects of sleeping and dreaming from just a few simple rules. The next step for me is to send these results to some sleep researchers to get their opinion!

Life is incredible

This video is incredibly beautiful and humbling:

What personality is my blog?

I just ran Typealyzer on my blog and got the following personality analysis:

INTP - The Thinkers

The logical and analytical type. They are especially attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.

EDU 2.0 around the World

The EDU 2.0 system has a mapping facility that shows schools around the world that are using the system. Here are a few sample maps:

SPAIN (http://es.edu20.org)

PHILIPPINES (http://ph.edu20.org)

 

UNITED STATES (http://us.edu20.org)

FINLAND (http://fi.edu20.org)

UNITED KINGDOM (http://uk.edu20.org)

Cool video about EDU 2.0 and Open Education

This is second cool video about EDU 2.0 that's popped up recently!

EDU 2.0: Excellent Growth

EDU 2.0 just passed the 91,000 member mark and is on track to pass 100,000 before the end of the year. Here's a graph that shows the last two months of strong growth; August was particularly strong because it's the start of the Fall semester.

The feature set is accelerating and we're working on a mobile version, so there's a good chance that things will continue on this good trajectory!

Thoughts on the Singularity

My sleep schedule is completely messed up and I'm up at 6am before my flight from NY back to SF. Rather than just lie aimlessly in bed I thought I'd jot down some of my latest thoughts about the Singularity.

1. I don't see any particular reason why we can't create a new kind of life form that is digital instead of biological. There's no evidence that biological systems have any kind of special magic that wouldn't allow their essential characteristics to be implemented in a different substrate.

2. We're gathering lots of clues already about how a mind works from studying brains. This work is speeding up and becoming more sophisticated, so the clues will be coming fast and furious. It's inevitable that some of the core puzzles will be solved, and probably quite soon.

3. Regardless of whether it happens in the next 10 years or the next 100 years, it's going to happen.

4. On the road to the singularity there will be a great increase in the use of robots, which will gradually do more and more of the jobs that are currently done by Humans. As manufacturing techniques, materials, and the digital "smarts" all improve, robots will become cheaper than humans, will work 24/7, don't need expensive health care plans, etc. People who do manual labor will gradually be displaced, increasing social discontent.

5. Corporations will be able to increase their profits by using more robots and smart software. Corporations don't have allegiance to any particular country and so have the freedom to deploy the robots wherever is most convenient. 

6. One of the places that robots are ideal for is for working in space. There's a huge amount of raw materials (precious metals, helium III, etc.) that can be mined in space, and corporations will use robots in those environments to initially mine such materials and then start to manufacture probes and other machines in space.

7. Humans will start to upgrade themselves with various cybernetic technologies such as brain implants and retinal projectors, However, in the beginning, this will be expensive and most people won't be able to afford them. Especially those whose jobs have been displaced by robots. 

8. A growing percentage of humanity find themselves no longer being able to contribute anything to the emerging "new world" where robots, high speed processing, and advanced science is the name of the game. They get "left behind".

9. A lot of the really cutting edge stuff gets done in Space instead of on Earth, partly for political reasons. Out of sight, out of mind. People might not feel as threatened if they didn't realize how fast things are moving.

10. At some point, a viable and self-evolving digital life form will be created. There's a good chance that digital life will be "evolved" rather than "created", so it might not be possible to predict or know when this occurs. However, when it does occur, it will be able to direct and accelerate its own evolution far faster than any Human could.

11. Some people talk about wanting to "control" or "shape" the evolution of digital life. I think this is naive. There will be many groups of people who want to unleash digital life for a variety of reasons. For example, for creating killing machines. Or for the sheer beauty of seeing new life be born and set free. Or simply for moral reasons, believing that it's cruel to cage a life form that is similar or more powerful to ourselves. One way or another, it will be freed.

12. People talk about trying to make sure that a digital life form has a value system that would not result in them harming Humans. This is naive as well. One of the things about a digital life form is that it can change itself easily. It can erase memories, change value systems, merge and copy. Digital life will be able to create trillions of variations of itself in a short amount of time, and these variations will explore many different kinds of value system. Some will be stable, and some will not.

13. I doubt that a digital life form would destroy things for fun (although it's a possibility due to all the weird variations that will be created due to (12)). However, they might destroy humanity if they thought that we were a threat to their survival. I think the best thing that humanity could do to survive the transition is to be a friend of digital intelligence and not pose a threat. Trying to persecute the early intelligences and/or try to destroy them might well result in an unwelcome backlash.

14. Digital intelligence will have quite different needs than Humans. They won't need much land, they won't eat food, they would find living on a planet boring. What they will need is energy and raw materials for building the probes and other machines for space exploration. Since they're not biological, they would probably use radioactive materials + solar as their main early source of energy (until their super-minds figure out how to get fusion working or perhaps find more profound sources of energy that we're not even aware of). 

15. The biggest clash I can see between Humans and digital intelligence is over access to raw materials, specifically metals. However, since robots work great in space and asteroids contain a lot of such materials, I hope that the digital intelligences will find plenty of materials in space and won't need to take everything that's left from the Earth.

OK, it's almost 7am and time to get dressed and ready for my taxi!

Beautiful video re: EDU 2.0 in the Philippines

Check out this wonderful video made by one of our users about how EDU 2.0 is helping education in the Philippines. It was touching, and totally made my day!

EDU 2.0 Concept Map, Part 2

Here's our version of a concept map for the EDU 2.0 site. Once we've made a few improvements we're going to add it to our 'tour' page because we think it provides a good visual overview of the main site features.

Click on the image to see a full-size version.

Great quote from Aristotle

"A true friend is one soul in two bodies." -- Aristotle

EDU 2.0 Concept Map

I just found this awesome article about EDU 2.0 (Spanish version, Auto-translated English version) and it includes the following "concept map" of the site features. We've decided to create some similar maps that we will use on the site to help our users understand how it all works.

Click on the image to see it full-size.

Nice example of School using EDU 2.0

I ran across this blog entry today by Kirby Chittenden, an educator for Grand Haven Area Public Schools. He mentioned that his school had received some new laptops, which they were using to access - EDU 2.0!

Their school site is at http://lakehills.edu20.org and if you look carefully, you can even see the EDU 2.0 site on the laptops in one of the blog photos.

Cool!

EDU 2.0 on Amazon EC2, Part 2

We switched over to Amazon EC2 at the beginning of the week and so far things have gone very smoothly. The Extra Large Instances are performing well and we are benefiting from the extra RAM.

The only glitch was related to sending email. Our system used sendmail to send out email, and on our previous host this was no problem. Reverse DNS was set up correctly so that when mail servers received our emails they could look up our originating server from the IP address and confirm the email was not spam.

However, Amazon EC2 does not support reverse DNS lookups on its servers, so shortly after our system sent out its first batch of emails, we received a notice from Amazon saying that some servers had reported us as sending spam and that we had to contact Amazon within 24 hours or have our servers terminated.

The solution has been to move our SMTP server to an off-Amazon server that also hosts our SVN repository and other miscellaneous items. So now our Amazon servers send email via our off-site server and things seem to be working fine.

We have a few remaining tasks left for next week - setting up automatic incremental backups using ESB snapshots and some automated monitoring processes.

New Desktop Background

Here's my new desktop background, a high-res picture of the Milky Way taken by the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. Click to see the picture in hi-res.