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Re: What Your Old Graphing Calculator Tells Us About Technological Change - Alexis Madrigal - Technology - The Atlantic

Richard Klancer — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 12:05:43 -0000

For that matter, how are calculators "vital" for intro calculus? You shouldn't have to deal with "messy" numbers yet, not like in physics lab; and you ought to be developing an eye for functions by graphing them on paper and in your head, just like you learn number sense by forgoing the calculator for arithmetic until the basics are internalized.

Admittedly I took calc after graphing calculators were common, but before they were issued en masse to all students; and used my late, belated HP-32S. (Developing an inordinate fondness for Reverse Polish Notation is one peril of being raised by an engineer.) But learning to graph on paper by plotting a couple suggestive points, sketching the derivatives at those points, and finding zero crossings was an invaluable training exercise, like doing your scales. And I still remember how to draw perfect circles and arcs by pivoting the paper around my index finger...

Re: When Will Educators Get Serious About Gaming?

Richard Klancer — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 16:09:09 -0000

Mark,

Do you have a reference for the 'game bolt' product you mention? Perhaps the name is something else? (Googling for 'game bolt' doesn't turn up anything obviously related.)

From your description, it sounds like an product that could be very interesting if used correctly. However, I would worry about it doing more harm than good: (1) by training kids to think of the puzzle as nothing more than a parent-induced irritation that just gets in the way of their gameplay, and (2) by modeling the idea that learning is something you have to be bribed to do.

Re: When Will Educators Get Serious About Gaming?

Richard Klancer — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 12:23:31 -0000

Some conservatism about game-based learning may be justified simply because it is surprisingly hard to get students to generalize what they learn in a game to other contexts. It often turns out that students learn a grab bag of non-transferable "tricks" to master a given game, even when it appears that the game is cleverly designed to require actual subject-matter mastery by revealing some inherently game-like quality of the subject itself.

A senior scientist at The Concord Consortium posted about "How Not to Learn From Games" the other day: http://blog.concord.org/how...

That post comes despite the fact that we (Concord Consortium) have a long track record of developing models, simulations, and sensor-based activities for science learning in schools, and we're enthusiastic proponents of the ability of technology to make major improvements to education. Moreover we're founded on the idea that students should not simply learn the explicit subject matter we are trying to teach, but should internalize the habit of inquiry.

So naturally we're very interested in educational games. But it's part of our design process to interrupt the flow of any game or activity we make and force students to stop, reflect about what they have learned, and articulate it for someone else.

In fact, we are building a successor to the GenScope project described in the post right now, and it is structured like a game, but it carefully incorporates elements that require students to stop and reflect.

All of this suggests that, yes, games are powerful and, yes, they're designed by an industry that is very good at enticing people to learn (to play the game); but getting useful subject-matter learning to happen using games is going to require quite a significant investment of time, money, and effort.

Re: The F-35: A Weapon that Costs More than Australia - Dominic Tierney - Politics - The Atlantic

Richard Klancer — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 09:34:33 -0000

You know, I'm sympathetic to the author's premise. But I refuse to read it: comparing the _total_ cost of the F-35 program to Australia's _yearly_ GDP is mind-numbingly innumerate. Dollars and Dollars/Year are just not comparable units.

Re: The Incompetence of American Airlines and the Fate of Mr. X

Richard Klancer — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 12:27:20 -0000

On reflection, Joe's reply above would make perfect sense to the airline mindset. As I understand it, the traditional carriers have for years engaged in basically a trench warfare/zero sum mindset. They're constantly playing little games with their prices in order to steal a little bit of the marketshare from the other guy, and having the other guy know your moves in advance would be a strategic disaster. (At least, I think this is what happens between bouts of price fixing, bankruptcy, and government bailout.)

So I imagine there's quite a strong mindset of paranoia in the traditional airlines about having any of their competitors find out anything about their trade secrets.

No wonder the JetBlues and Southwests are eating their lunch. They have a different set of costs, a different culture, and therefore the luxury of focusing on their customers instead of their competitors.

The lesson for the rest of us? Watch who you work for, I guess. The culture of the place where you work will affect you...

Re: The Incompetence of American Airlines and the Fate of Mr. X

Richard Klancer — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 12:05:26 -0000

I blame business schools and the MBA/management consultant mindset. Afer all, having your mid-level professionals reach out to their colleagues and to help do a good job is a disaster. They aren't part of the club! Who knows what crazy things they might say--without even knowing it they might even leak the Brilliant Strategy For Certain Success That Only We Are Strategically Brilliant Enough To Have Strategically Thought Of! (TM)

Brilliant, un-guessable things like, oh, having a separate sales and promotions team or going to an airier layout.

You'd think it would be a little more important to focus on *doing a good job*. But to b-schoolers (some of whom are genuinely smart people) they're not showing their manly Brilliant Strategic Thinkerness if they're not out there trying to out-strategize the other guy.

Re: Sell bgood on twitter ?

Richard Klancer — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 11:27:00 -0000

If you work something out, make sure it involves at least a few free burgers--they *are* pretty, well, good! (And here I speak as someone who has mostly sworn off burgers) Plus, you have to love a restaurant that grows its own veggies on the roof: http://www.wickedlocal.com/...

Re: Is this the Future of Lifestreaming Interactions and Data Visualizations?

Richard Klancer — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 16:48:57 -0000

A) I love the '20 year' perspective.

B) I think it's impossible not to watch the (shorter, Youtube) video without thinking: "And now on Sprockets we listen to the dissonance of the flute as Emily places her lover in a space of forgetting"

Re: semantic dissonance in uniprot

Richard Klancer — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 11:56:25 -0000

Should they have used the predicate rdfs:subClassOf instead? (I don't claim to know; I'm just beginning to learn about RDFS and OWL.)

Naively, I would think this would be correct -- the concept 'plant embryo' is a subclass of the general concept 'embryo' -- but I'm sure the curator at Uniprot thought, equally naively, 'hey, this term and that term are the same'.

A quick google for owl:sameAs surfaces the suggestion that, even though sameAs is a symmetrical property, we should check that owners of both terms agree with the sameAs assertion: "Granted, from a pure logical viewpoint, those assertions are strictly equivalent since owl:sameAs is a symmetrical property, but from a social/trust viewpoint, having each side declaring it in a specific direction could be interpreted as a formal proof of agreement. It's what have been done e.g. between DBpedia and GeoNames. " -- http://universimmedia.blogs...

Re: Doorbells - StimulusWatch.org

Richard Klancer — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 18:29:49 -0000

windrider, I think you're right on both counts,

It *is* dangerous to give government permission to go out and spend like drunken sailors. Apparently, there was a time when government did believe in controlling the strings of the economy by raising spending when needed. Eventually it was discovered that it's much better to have the Fed control the strings by adjusting interest rates, etc -- much less danger of having politicians say, "You mean we can fix this recession by spending money? All right!"

Keynesian stimulus is the option of last resort. Unfortunately, it seems to be what we need now (the Fed's fresh out of mojo.)

From what I understand, there really was a good faith effort by the drafters of the bill to see to it that the money wouldn't be spent to create big new programs that would be difficult to cut back -- they apparently did try hard to find the places where they could put a big injection of cash that would only last a few years and would go right back out into the economy in terms of demand for goods and services.

Also, regarding training, you're absolutely, absolutely right -- that's probably the best way to get the biggest *long term* boost from the spending we're hopefully about to embark on. Making sure that some of the money that goes to public works projects also goes to training the workers who do those projects, and also that some of the rest of the stimulus money goes to upgrading schools, fellowships and lab facilities for scientists in training, etc, is really important.

Re: Doorbells - StimulusWatch.org

Richard Klancer — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 13:10:44 -0000

Hey LeBeau, I like your thinking about church groups ... but let me throw you a curve ball: believe it or not, trying to save the taxpayer $100K totally, exactly misses the point of the stimulus legislation.

Yes--believe it or not, the point here is not to replace some doorbells, it's to find an excuse to hire two people to do it! I'll make the more outrageous point that this is a legitimate thing to want to do, even though you don't get a nice, new bridge or the like at the end. Here's why, as I understand it so far:

In normal times, you don't want taxpayers on the hook for that $100K. Probably the doorbells aren't that important; or, maybe you could get church groups to do it for free, I get it. As I say, I actually like your thinking that way. And I'm certainly not voting "yes" on this project.

But right now _the point is exactly to borrow a TON of money and firehose it into the economy_. Right now, everybody's freaked out that they'll lose their job, and that their house is worth much less than they thought--so they cut back on their spending. But that means businesses cut back too, because they know people won't be buying their stuff--and that cutting back only freaks customers out *worse*. And so on, and so on ... it's a downward spiral. Which is dangerous.

We really, really don't want to find out where the bottom is. The trick that's worked for the last few decades (cutting interest rates) isn't working now. The tax rebate checks didn't help much last year, and economists don't think tax cuts would do much now.

So what we want to do is make a lot of jobs basically out of thin air. The people with those jobs will buy stuff, and businesses will gradually feel comfortable investing again, expanding again, and hiring again--because they see people buying their stuff. Then, gradually, we'll be on an *upward* spiral, aka normal, healthy economic growth, and we won't need those "out of thin air" jobs anymore.

We need to make something like $1 to $2 trillion "worth" of jobs to prevent that downward spiral (or so mainstream economists say). *Some* of those jobs will be for things that we all agree are super useful. But there's a limit to how many of those we can find in a couple years' time, and if we don't find enough of them, we'll still be in danger of that downward spiral.

("Giving money away is not as easy as it may seem": http://www.nytimes.com/2009...

So, as I have heard economists say, it's *also* legitimate stimulus to hire people to dig ditches and fill them back up again! Of course, that would be politically stupid (I can't imagine the fits of apoplexy we would see if someone proposed it...) Moreover the workers would end up feeling pretty cynical about their new fake-ass job, however much they liked having the paycheck. But when we run out of highways and rail lines to build, or schools to renovate, or scientific research to fund (or when we run out of trained workers to do those things) we need to start finding whatever random jobs we can hire people to do, that might have some tangential benefit of any kind at all, until we've spent that $1T-$2T that we need to spend.

Like, maybe, the two jobs installing doorbells. Maybe.

OK, I know this goes against everybody's intuitions about how things are supposed to work; after all, debt and wasted money are bad, scary things, so of course it's natural to think that in bad, scary times we need to run even harder away from them. But our intuitions can lead us off the cliff if we're not careful...