Graham Glass, etc.

Super-cute Kitten Video

EDU 2.0 for School and Business: Philippines

While I'm in the Philippines I'm going to be giving several presentations about EDU 2.0. If you're interested in learning more, one such free event is going to be 8:00 - noon on Dec 3, Room 209 Asia Pacific College, Makati City. If you live in the Philippines and want to learn more, you're very welcome to attend!

Here's the poster:

 

TEDxManila

I'm looking forward to presenting my ideas about "The Future of Education" at TEDxManila, which is an independently organized event that's part of the TED brand.

The presentations are recorded for posterity, so I'll post my video as soon as it's available.

 

New Desktop Background

My latest desktop background was taken from Atlantis. Click on the picture for the high-resolution version, which is located here.

 

EDU 2.0 for Business has launched

We just launched EDU 2.0 for Business!

EDU 2.0 for business is an easy-to-use, low-cost way for businesses to deliver online training to their employees and customers. It supports instructor-led and self-paced classes, and includes all the features that have made EDU 2.0 for school a runaway success.

EDU 2.0 for business is free for signup and setup; you only need to pay when you enroll students. The base price is about $1/student enrollment, which decreases as you enroll more students. 10% of all revenues from EDU 2.0 for business will be donated to EDU 2.0 for school, thereby helping teachers and students around the world.

We expect that the growth curve of EDU 2.0 for business will mirror that of EDU 2.0 for school, which is doubling in size every 6 months and already has over 100,000 members. 

Here's a screenshot of the new site (click for a full-size version):

Beautiful story of a Dog/Orangutan friendship

Symphony of Science

This video is about as inspirational as it gets!

Imogen Heap: Official First Train Home Video

I'm going to see Imogen Heap in concert at the Fillmore tomorrow. This video is in anticipation of a great event!

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!