Graham Glass, etc.

News Channels: Pathetic

Here is a great example of why the US News Channels are utterly pathetic. They take a simple, straightforward quote from Wesley Clark and twist it into a big deal. What a bunch of incompetent fools.

Update: here's a good post about the issue over at the Huffington

IT Revolutions in Venice

I just accepted an invitation to be the theme-chair for education at the IT Revolutions conference this year. It's going to be held in Venice, Italy on Dec 17-19, so it will be a little cool but without the crowds.

Here's a description of the education theme, taken from their web site:

From school to the virtual classroom, eLearning is fueling one of the most radical revolutions in education, replacing the traditional teacher-driven supervised learning environment by the self-directed web-based individualized content. By 2020 almost all the knowledge will be available on-line. Several issues arise, which need to be addressed if we want to unleash the power of eLearning: Is school as a physical place important or, shall we regard learning as a universal right, thus make all the content available online to enable access to everyone from everywhere - with self-imposed limits dictated strictly by individual interest? What can governments do to sponsor such efforts?

Should be fun!

Cat By Computer

This is my kind of Pair-Programming:

BBC Knowledge

I'm a big fan of the New Scientist and The Economist, so I was happy to read about the launch of yet another British magazine for the intellectually curious. BBC Knowledge will cover a broad range of topics and has just been launched in the US; I subscribed today.

Eliasson’s New York Waterfalls

I'm a big fan of Olafur Eliasson's artwork, so I was happy to see that he's just installed 4 cool waterfalls in New York City. It's being billed as the city's biggest such project since "The Gates," the $20 million effort by the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude that I visited in 2005.

Uncle Albert in the Car

I've done this many times:

Disrupting Education

In the article "How do we Transform our schools?", Clayton M. Christensen and Michael B. Horn look at how computers are currently being used in the education system and how they could be used in the future.

The bottom line: computers are currently being used to support the current teacher-in-classroom model of learning whereas in the future they will likely be able to deliver personalized instruction directly.

I agree with this completely, and it's the focus of my new "Pirate Math" initiative on edu2.0.

New Desktop Background

Here's my latest desktop background; an awesome shot of the International Space Station.

Lanterns

I recently purchased a couple of fun solar-powered lanterns for my balcony. They charge up during the day and turn on automatically at night. Here's a picture of them glowing this evening:

Smile at Matt

I dare you to watch this and not smile. And in the final analysis, isn't that really what life is about?

Hilarious Japanese Game Show

I'm a huge fan of Japan. I think their sense of humor is just great, as demonstrated by this clip from a game show:

Hot Cat

This is what my cat looks like on a very hot San Francisco day:

Rails Performance

We've spent most of the last 2 weeks trying to fix a difficult-to-find bug in the edu2.0 site. Every now and again, after a few hours of running, occasional page requests freeze. It's frustrating, because the rest of the time the site works fine.

So far, we've tried a bunch of things, each of which has improved the site performance but none have fixed the bug. Improvements include:

• lowering the debug level of our production servers to reduce the amount of logfile output
• changing from the Apache2 prefork model to the threading model
• adding 2GB memory to the mongrel servers
• increasing the possible number of open connections to the database
• upgrading to the latest version of all gems
• upgrading to Rails 1.6
• doing more fragment caching using memcached

We also plan on moving to an evented mongrel, adding more mongrel servers, and upgrading to Rails 2.1 soon, but none of those things will fix the bug.

Today, we noticed that a couple of the mongrels had frozen with timeout error messages, and our production log indicated a couple of timeouts blocked on a session write to memcached. So my best guess right now is that the memcached clients are somehow freezing.

According to the blogs here and here, others have noticed the same thing. So we're going to experiment with adding the timeout code to see if this fixes the issue.

For the record, this is an area that Rails could do with some improvements; it seems like some of the standard libraries are still a little immature. As long as we can fix this bug soon, I will remain happy with our choice of Ruby on Rails.

With a Little Luck

One of my favorite Wings songs:

Amazing Domino Trick

Check out this video, courtesy of Reddit:

Learn Magic Tricks at 5min

Pirate Math, Part 2

In a previous post I mentioned that I'm working on a new way to learn Math based on a Pirate Game. The plot of the game is beginning to form.

The player (a boy for the purposes of this post) finds a piece of a treasure map while hunting around in their attic. A closer inspection reveals that the treasure is buried on an island someone in the Caribbean. The boy excitedly tells his parents but they laugh and ignore him. Frustrated, the boy decides to stowaway on a liner and try to find the island on his own. But after a few days at sea, the liner is attacked and boarded by some pirates. The pirates capture the boy and decide to use him as a cabin boy on their pirate ship. The boy keeps the treasure map a secret and hopes that his travels with the pirates will allow him to solve the mystery.

The plot is just in the early stages and I'd like the boy to stumble upon a greater mystery while looking for the treasure.

Of course, the whole point of the game is to allow players to learn Math in a fun and natural setting, so the first part of the Game will introduce money, counting, addition and subtraction. The boy earns copper coins for the work he does on the ship, and he can see the number of coins increase as the days go by on the ship (addition). When the ship docks at the first port, the boy goes to the market to buy some pirate clothes. Each item costs a certain number of copper coins, and the player can see the number of coins drop as he buys each item (subtraction).

Rather than require the player to perform arithmetic drills, I hope to introduce natural uses of arithmetic throughout the game at various intervals. This should reduce the boredom factor as well as allowing the complexity to be gradually increased.

More on the Pirate Math game soon.

Swedish Education

I wrote the post Education Vouchers Work about how private schools are becoming very popular and successful in Sweden. So I was very interested to read this recent article in The Economist which provides more information about how the private schools actually go about teaching.

Here are the rules associated with starting and running a private school in Sweden:

• Anyone who meets basic standards can open a school and educate students at the state's expense.
• The state pays private schools the same amount per student as it pays public schools.
• Private schools must accept students on a first-come, first-served basis and cannot have any religious requirements or entrance exams.

Here are some ways that Kunskapsskolan (Knowledge Schools), a chain of private schools, have innovated:

• The entire syllabus and all materials are on their web portal.
• Each child spends 15 minutes a week with a tutor reviewing their progress and setting goals.
• Learning takes place in a mix of lectures, classes, independent and group study.
• Each student can work at his/her own level and spend time on subjects based on their interest.
• Each subject is divided into 35 steps; 25 steps earns a pass, 30 steps earns a merit, and 35 steps earns a distinction.
• Teachers get 7 weeks of vacation a year, and are expected to create lesson plans, etc. outside of the school semester in order to spend more face time with students.
• The school rents fields for sports and facilities for arts and crafts.

About 10% of Swedish children now go to a private school, up from a fraction of a percent 14 years ago. It's clearly working. I wish this kind of innovation was taking place in more countries.

Pirate Math

I mentioned in a previous post that I'm working on a new way for people to learn Math. I've decided to use an online Pirate game as the delivery mechanism because it provides plenty of opportunities to introduce Math concepts in a natural and fun way.

For example, following a map to find buried treasure introduces the concept of 3D Cartesian coordinates, playing a game of cards below deck introduces probability, and steering a ship between islands introduces geometry.

I'm only in the planning stages right now, but it feels promising. I'll blog regularly about the evolution of the Pirate Math game. Arrrrrrrr!

Impeachment

The US President and members of Congress all take an oath to defend the Constitution:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.

One of the ways that Congress defends the Constitution is to monitor the actions of the President and remove him/her from office if the President violates the constitution. This is done via the process of impeachment and was designed into the US Constitution by the founding fathers as one of many checks and balances in the US political system.

It's clear from the 35 articles of impeachment that have recently been presented by Dennis Kucinich that the President violated his oath. It's also clear from the inaction of Congress in the face of overwhelming evidence that they have also violated their oaths. Here's a great video that covers this topic.

I think the founding fathers would be very disappointed to see how the US has lost its way. I know I am.

New ways to learn

I believe that education in the US will only improve significantly when we challenge some of the fundamental assumptions about learning, such as:

• students should learn the same subjects at the same pace
• students should learn primarily in 8 hour blocks of time
• students should learn subjects in 50-minute blocks of time according to a schedule
• students should not be systematically taught useful topics such as critical thinking and finance
• students should learn primarily from teachers in a lecture-style setting

I've decided to focus some of my time and energy on a new edu2.0 initiative that will experiment with some new learning approaches and initially focus on Math.

It's only in the planning phase, but the main goals are:

• use a self-paced game as the learning vehicle
• introduce most of the key concepts in K-9 Math (5-14 years old)
• avoid getting bogged down in formalism and nomenclature
• introduce students to the big picture early on
• make it fun and intuitive whenever possible

If it goes well, I think that the approach could be applied to more advanced Math as well as other topics such as science.

I'm going to blog regularly about the development of my Math game. If you're interested in being an active participant, join the Curriculum Design group on edu2.0 where we're using wikis and forums to share ideas.