Week 40

Are you kidding me?

Well, I guess the election season is in full swing now.. Gotta cozy up to those pro-Israel lobbies! Dont miss your chance! $9.99 if you call now! Hurry up!

Washingtonpost: UNESCO votes to admit Palestine; U.S. cuts off funding.. The U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) voted Monday to admit Palestine into the organization as its newest member, and the United States promptly responded by cutting off funding for the agency"

Darin Gibby: "Rewind patent laws to fast-forward innovation... The patent market, like financial markets, thrives on certainty. When inventors are sure their products will be protected, more people invest in patents and, more importantly, in the technologies they protect. But when patents cannot be understood, are difficult to obtain, or become nearly impossible to enforce, much of the money that would go toward research and development is spent on lawyers. These legal fees drastically increase the barriers to investment for a promising new idea, dulling America’s technological edge. The modern trend of bundling patents into large portfolios for sale on the open market further demonstrates how the patent market currently favors large corporations over the individual entrepreneur.

As a patent attorney, I am constantly meeting hopeful inventors who dream of securing a patent to protect their ideas. They have been told by potential investors that they need a patent before they are willing to invest in their technology. When I explain that a patent will cost upwards of $30,000 and take around five years to obtain, their hopes are dashed. The news only gets worse when I inform them that enforcing a patent is a multi-million dollar proposition. At that point, most simply give up.

In an effort to remedy this problem, President Barack Obama signed into law the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act (AIA) on Sept. 16, under the auspices that it would “speed up the patent process so that innovators and entrepreneurs can turn a new invention into a business as quickly as possible.” This law, in fact, does the opposite"

The hacker culture always hated the closed nature of iPod and iPhone. They hacked it many times, and continue to do so because when people purchase a device, they believe they have purchased the right to do whatever they want to their device, and when they are blocked, they get really pissed. I tend to agree with their view. In any case, here are Stallman's views [link]:

Stallman is against many things, he is also against centralized services of any kind, including Google and Facebook. Instead, he advocates services such as Diaspora that give users complete control of their data and services, and are completely decentralized. Since all Internet services are inherently distributed, all requests could get propagated between users' "rented" services that carry Diaspora decentralized nodes, and by way of constant propagation, they reach their destination. Services such as email already get propagated between many big nodes, Diaspora aims a future where every single person's service can act as a delegator.

Stallman: "Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died.

As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, "I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone." Nobody deserves to have to die - not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs' malign influence on people's computing.

Unfortunately, that influence continues despite his absence. We can only hope his successors, as they attempt to carry on his legacy, will be less effective"

I think education’s current stance, encouraging memorization as little as possible is the right one [1]. If a student can memorize however, good for him / her, they can go ahead and do that. But curricula, especially math curricula needs to be about deriving things, showing how pieces connect, how to move from one concept to another, so students understand how things are in relation to eachother, and that kind of comparative ability is what makes science tick.

In your story, you and your friend could not remember Theorem X or Y, so what? You had considerable skill in guessing where the answer would be, and you researched it, connected the pieces, and reached the conclusion. How is this not a success story?

Directing curricula can only be done in blunt moves, supporting memorization is one of those blunt moves, but once started, the details that follow can lead you in some dark places. Feynman saw this up close when he taught for a while in Brasil, and after he came back to US, he found the same thing in US curricula.

But I agree that having more things in memory (especially if they were understood first) can make a difference in research.

"I have to say that I liked [a research problem] immediately. Dick and I continued talking about it in his office right after lunch, where we reduced a proof to a simple fact about Markov chains. We needed to know the expected return time of a certain random walk. Unfortunately Dick had to go teach class, so I told him I would search the library, which was downstairs from his office, while he was in class. I hoped that I could find a formula for the expected return time.

Recall this was in 1979 and there was no Google, no search engines, no Internet, so one actually looked things up by hand. I went into the math library and began a quick linear search of all journals that seemed like they had anything to do with random walks. After about an hour I found the formula we were looking for: the expected return time was just the reciprocal of the probability of being in that state.

As soon as Dick returned from his class I showed him the formula. We both were a bit embarrassed, since the formula was easy to prove. But worse, it was something that we had no doubt seen before, but forgotten. If we’d had better memory we would have proved the theorem instantly. In any event the conjecture became a theorem, and we all wrote up a paper together [..].

Should we stress more memorization in teaching and learning math [..]?"

Stiglitz: "[..] Pluralism and competition, often associated with openness, are vital to innovation and the growth of knowledge. The structure of economic and political institutions powerfully affect which ideas, innovations, or projects are selected to be financed and implemented [..]

Some years ago, I explored one aspect of this, in contrasting two opposing extremes in project selection: a hierarchical system, where a proposal must pass a series of hurdles to be accepted, or a decentralized system of alternative decision centers, where a proposal can be accepted by any one of them (and can get a second chance if turned down). The hierarchical system would tend to err on the side of rejecting many good projects while the decentralized system would err on the side of accepting many bad projects. The advisability of the two systems (and various mixtures) would depend on the relative cost of accepting a project that turns out to be bad versus the opportunity cost of rejecting a project that turned out to be good. The hierarchical system would be best for a decision where accepting a bad project might be fatal–as in the decision to go to war. But where accepted bad projects are not fatal and only expend resources, the clear verdict of history is in favor of a more decentralized system of pluralistic political or economic units.

In a decentralized system, decision-makers compete against one another to find good projects. With centralized or monopoly project selection, there is no fear that a rejected innovation will be adopted by a competitor and an accepted innovation might have an uncertain effect on the monopoly. Thus hierarchical centralization has been a recipe for uniform and essentially static societies from ancient Egypt to the Soviet Union. In contrast, Columbus was turned down by the King of Portugal and two Spanish dukes before submitting his proposal to Ferdinand and Isabella. After a four year wait, he was again turned down, but the decision was reversed two years later in 1492. In this manner, the pluralistic and competing channels of selection foster innovation"

We talked about father SJ son SP pairing, the reverse is also possible, and in most cases if it's not tragic, a lot funnier. Imagine a poor SJ kid who wants to be rooted, take things slow, but there is a half-mad father running circles around him.

The most interesting example I have for this is from a Turkish businessman; He now owns / operates a successful transportation business, starting with a few vehicles, he built up this whole empire. He talks about all of that, and during the interview he also keeps mentioning his father. But he does this once, twice, .. and in fact, so many times (by my rough count, at least twenty) that I started probing little more. And boy, did that guy (his father) take this poor kid for a wild ride.

The father apparently was a flim flam man who lived fast and loose, conned some people, including his own son. The son now owns a fleet of buses, as we said before, and he managed this feat not once, but twice; his first fleet being completely taken away from him by his beligerent father. He started from scratch after this mishap -again- and rebuilding his business from nothing. So this poor guy actually seems a bit confused by his childhood, he shows signs of of utter disbelief at times for the hand he had been dealt with in life. But seeing the success he is enjoying now I guess it is safe to laugh at it -- which I did a lot during this interview.

So here it is, an example of an SP father - SJ child relationship at its most extreme. It is extreme but it is possible, and only possible with an SP father, or mother. Artisans like to live in the moment, move tactically, love shiny things, drawn to adventure, might also demonstrate a complete lack of morals, and / or ideals. I am not being judgemental about this, SPs approach to life is simply a strategy, it works well in some cases, and not so well in others.

Anyway, now this transportation magnate is nurturing, growing his business, raising his own sons, one of whom comes to work with him. When his son puts his feet up on a table at the office, he is gently warned by his father to "not to act disrespectful in the workplace".

The joke is now on the grandson.

We talked about the Leave the Child Behind pysch type; interestingly both Sarkozy and Merkel are LCBs. I hear lots of complaints about both for not being quick enough on responding to the recent EU crises, not taking responsibility to save the European economy, etc.. Well; how much of that can be attributed to general slowness of EU institutions, how much is their LCB type's fault is debatable. Yet another question is if it is even possible to have any gigantic mechanism such as the EU (or the US) to survive the tectonic shifts caused by the 3rd Wave. Anyhow; maybe some of the slowness has to do with their LCB.

"Developer of the programming language C and contributer to the famous OS Unix system Dennis Ritchie has passed away. I talked my history with the language a little bit here, and the book I was given in that story was Ritchie's book!BTW, Unix, C and their derivaties are inside many mobile devices, including iPhone, iPad and Android. It's funny actually, there are some big words written on Steve Jobs these days, such as he changed the way we live. But an equal appreciation (if not more) needs to go to the unseen genius' whose inventions power the devices that people hold in their hands. Unix may not be shiny, but it is the thing that runs in the background when users click on those buttons, and slide those icons"

"AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable."

Slow down cowboy.. How the hell did you jump from online education to Ender's Game? It's really sneaky what he did there actually, "online stuff, pah, there are lots of charlatans there", he than immediately moves on to scifi which was not "fi" enough sadly, and uses this backward fi, with its classroom concept, to demonstrate "we already have that!"

You bloody idiot: Everything about postmodernity is scale-free, that is, a single video can reach millions, in an instant, because you are not limited to phsyical medium's copying, distributing hassles utilizing physical paper. On an Internet-based medium, if there are good classes, and there are many, they will reach millions, in an instant, without the cost of copying, and distribution.

Will there be snake-oil salesman? Yes. But quality will also be available, and because we have a scale-free medium, that quality will be able to reach the eyes who are starved for knowledge. And the fact that Internet medium is so open to newcomers, the chances of quality content being made available are much higher.

Will professors be obsolete? Researchers wont be, and I dont care what label these people carry, professor, master educator, savant, whatever. They can make their lectures available online, for whoever is interested.

They can even offer certification, either 1-on-1, over video, or using automated process maybe which is prepared by them personally. Students then acquire certification for different classes, from multiple researchers, in different locations even, or universities. "I have Group Theory certification from Dr. X, Linear Algebra certification from Dr. Y, ..". How cool would that be?

If any profession is to be obsolete, that is the dumb transmitter, the repeater, the weakest link in the chain, which is the average teacher.

""Educational institutions are under stress worldwide both from economic and technological factors. [..] The online education boom is producing the usual mix of stunning innovation and snake-oil charlatans. [..] What does science fiction have to say about the future of education? [..] Consider Battle School in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, the concents in Neal Stephenson's Anathem [..]"