Week 48

What is this sign saying? Be careful not to touch your penis to your head or something?

Debt, First 5000 Years, Graeber: "For most of the Middle Ages, the economic nerve center of the world economy and the source of its most dramatic financial innovations was neither China nor India, but the West, which, from the perspective of the rest of the world, meant the world of Islam. During most of this period, Christendom, lodged in the declining empire of Byzantium and the obscure semi-barbarous principalities of Europe, was largely insig­nificant.

Since people who live in Western Europe have so long been in the habit of thinking of Islam as the very definition of "the East," it's easy to forget that, from the perspective of any other great tradi­tion, the difference between Christianity and Islam is almost negligible. One need only pick up a book on, say, Medieval Islamic philosophy to discover disputes between the Baghdad Aristoteleans and the neo­-Pythagoreans in Basra, or Persian Neo-Platonists-essentially, scholars doing the same work of trying to square the revealed religion tradi­tion beginning with Abraham and Moses with the categories of Greek philosophy, and doing so in a larger context of mercantile capitalism, universalistic missionary religion, scientific rationalism, poetic celebra­tions of romantic love, and periodic waves of fascination with mystical wisdom from the East.

From a world-historical perspective, it seems much more sensible to see Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as three different manifestations of the same great Western intellectual tradition, which for most of human history has centered on Mesopotamia and the Levant, extend­ing into Europe as far as Greece and into Africa as far as Egypt, and sometimes farther west across the Mediterranean or down the Nile"

Wrong. Average teacher who is only expert at pedagogy should disappear, researchers record and distribute online videos. This means replacing teachers (except a few), and is a major change in how schools are organized. So noone is being "transformed" here -- quality teachers teach as they did before, but their reach, in terms of students will now be in millions. On the other hand, average teachers get zero access.

This is not a slam against regular teachers as individuals. Maybe all of these people can be stellar educators in a topic they know really well. But the system is pushing them towards standardized topics, giving them only basic pedagogy and expect to create wonders on topics that change faster than the seasons in a year.

I'll give you an example: In mathematics / linear algebra, the topic of "determinants" used to be a big deal. I mean big. People used to write books about this shit; that's how big it was. But research changed direction, all of a sudden that part of math contracted a little. Now, Gilbert Strang at MIT can reflect that in his video courses immediately. He knows the research, makes a decision, snap -- millions get the new content. How long would it take for this change to reach "schools" using the old process? Textbooks, teachers, .. A long time.

That's why I keep saying, everyone gets first-hand access to quality content through the Net. No exceptions.

"Instead of replacing teachers, technology has the potential to transform [..] teaching."

Wrong - Access is still problem #1, in US and especially in the developing world. If a student is willing to learn, the biggest hurdle they face is access, not lack of pretty animations. These students should get access to quality content from quality researchers. My position is "no transformation, only transmission" of teaching, and the transmission part should be measured in millions, hopefully in an open-access, open-source form where people vote up and down of content they like / dislike, and crowdsourcing around such content should be possible, i.e. providing translations, code examples in different languages, answers to questions, forums etc. There is amazing potential here.

From my experience technological solutions work best when they are based on previous established technologies. Unix is based on C. iPhone is based on Unix. Apps are based on iPhone. And on and on. There is nothing wrong with teaching as it has been pursued for centuries. Now we take that "technology" and scale it up to millions, and willing kids will suck that in like a sponge. Others.. won't. But I am not going to waste time to provide "Learn Calculus with Sponge Bob" animation to such kids who have zero interest in learning such subjects. You cannot save everyone. But we should provide to everyone who is willing.

In other words, my focus is on the researcher, whatever they are willing to part with, I'll take it. I'll drink that shit like it's Kool-Aid. The infrastructure should be built around such people and it should only worry about to scaling up their content, period. If said system can incentivize more people to publish more content, even better.

"However, [video distribution] efforts continue to fail to make a positive change in education because each fails to recognize that the problem lies not the distribution and availability of lectures, but in lecturing itself [..] [W]hile I agree completely with Khan's recommendation that instructors move away from the podium and into the role of coach, there are more and better ways to flip the classroom [..]"

Perverse Incentives in Academia

|Incentive|Intended Effect|Actual Effect| |----------|----------------|--------------| |Researchers rewarded for increased number of publications.| Improve research productivity. |Avalanche of crappy, incremental papers.| |Researchers rewarded for increased number of citations.| Researchers do work that is relevant and influential.| H-index obsession; list of references no longer included in page limit at many conferences.| |Researchers rewarded for increased grant funding.| Ensure that research programs are funded, promote growth, generate overhead $$.| Time wasted writing proposals, inefficient use of public $$.| |Maximum of two proposals submitted to an NSF program.| Discourage over-submission. | You’d have to be crazy to not meet your quota these days.| |Teachers rewarded for increased student evaluation scores.| Improved accountability; ensure customer satisfaction.| Easy courses, inflated grades.| |Teachers rewarded for increased student test scores.| Improve teacher effectiveness.| Teaching to the tests; emphasis on short-term learning.| |Departments rewarded for increasing US News ranking.| Stronger departments.| Resources squandered trying to influence rankings.| |Departments rewarded for increasing numbers of BS, MS, and PhD degrees granted.| Promote efficiency; stop students from being trapped in over-long degree programs; impress the state legislature.| Class sizes increase; entrance requirements watered down; graduation requirements watered down.| |Departments rewarded for increasing student credit/contact hours (SCH).| The university’s teaching mission is fulfilled.| SCH-maximization games are played: classes are duplicated, turf wars occur over service courses.|

"Lessons from Hamilton

[..] Hamilton — the nation's first Treasury secretary — began pushing to pay off the Revolutionary War debts of the federal government, as well as the states. Congress owed its creditors about $54 million, and the 13 states collectively owed about $25 million, [..]. Creditors feared the young Congress and states would not be able to pay the combined $79 million, a staggering sum in those days. [US was] in worse shape than Greece. This debt threatened to crush the government.

But Hamilton, with the strong backing of President Washington, refused to consider default. Hamilton consolidated debts and promised that Congress would raise taxes high enough to pay them off. Persuading lawmakers to go along wasn't easy. It was very, very tempting to repudiate the debt to avoid raising taxes.

But Hamilton and Washington insisted. They wanted the United States to be taken seriously as a grown-up country. They repudiated the idea that we would be a Third World country. And paying off debt became the basis of US's success. because investors came to see the United States as a stable place to do business"

In parallel / sci computing world, I hear words like "x many parallel solver", "multiblah multishabang .. doer" and whatnot.. This begs the question: how many computers is enough for a certain problem? A hundred? A thousand? Or a million?

How'bout infinite computers ?

Has anyone heard of continiuum mechanics? There is a way to prepare equations -using pure algebra- and once these eqns are setup properly, you push the entire thing to infinity (using the black art of limits) then you sit back and watch entire terms cancel out, disappear, as a result you are left with the simplest formula which can be computed in linear time. How many computers are needed for this? Zero. We only had to use our representational, algebraic brain, as a result, we obtain a shortcut that allows us to bypass hours of computation with a single statement.

Harvard Entrance Exam 1899

"Ever since Johannes Kepler traipsed over half of Europe wooing aristocratic patrons, scientists have grumbled about money. But their complaints these days go beyond the familiar griping about being underpaid and underappreciated. They amount to a powerful case that the system for funding science is broken—that it hinders scientific progress and fails to deliver the most bang for the buck. Fixing the system can no longer be put off.

Most scientists finance their laboratories (and often even their own salaries) by applying to government agencies and private foundations for grants. The process has become a major time sink. In 2007 a U.S. government study found that university faculty members spend about 40 percent of their research time navigating the bureaucratic labyrinth, and the situation is no better in Europe [..].

A vicious cycle has developed. With more and more people applying for each grant, an individual’s chances of winning decrease, so scientists must submit ever more proposals to stay even. Between 1997 and 2006 the National Science Foundation found that the average applicant had to submit 30 percent more proposals to garner the same number of awards. Younger scientists are especially hard-pressed: the success rate for first-time National Science Foundation applications fell from 22 percent in 2000 to 15 percent in 2006.

Not only does the current system make inefficient use of scientists’ time, it discourages precisely the kind of research that can most advance our knowledge. Many politicians go so far as to accuse scientists—particularly in politically contentious areas such as climate science—of cooking data to win government grants. They have yet to produce any evidence to support these claims, however. The real problem is more subtle. Inundated with proposals, agencies tend to favor worthy but incremental research over risky but potentially transformative work. Nobelist Mario R. Capecchi and other prominent scientists say they had trouble getting grants to make their breakthroughs. In 2009 a New York Times article quoted leading cancer researchers who said the war on cancer would make more progress if funders took more risks"

Excellent article. In scifi, ideas matter, and most of these ideas, if bright enough, do not require much CGI at all. For example in Who universe there are the "quantum locked" monster / statue beings that stay put if they are looked at, but move toward their victim when not. So in order to shoot them the only "camera effect" you will ever need is between takes someone literally moving the statue. And it's a brilliant idea, it makes great scifi. It is ideas like these that make Dr. Who different and as the article suggests, a breath of fresh air in the scifi land.

Scott Brown: "Bargain-basement BBC production values? Alien monsters made from trash cans and toilet plungers? Anachronous kibitzing with Shakespeare and Dickens? That’s my flavor, mate. It’s the sort of thing that’s hard to find on this side of the pond [..]. I suppose US culture simply isn’t advanced enough to appreciate the longest-running, most successful (and, yes, also the cheesiest and chintziest) science fiction series in television history. And by advanced, I mean defeated. Luckily, that may be changing [..].

There’s a fix I just don’t get from mainstream American science fiction, perhaps because of its grinding obsession with the imperialistic (and its depressive sibling, the dystopic), not to mention its wearisome push for ever-shinier effects. Like its not-so-distant cousin American religion, American sci-fi is fixated on final battles, ultimate judgment (particularly on questions of control and leadership), and an up-or-down vote on the whole good/evil issue. Even the most morally restless imaginings — the Losts and Battlestars — eventually prolapse into Bruckheimer-esque excerpts from the Book of Revelation. As an antidote, I turn to the Doctor — a fussy 900-year-old neurotic who’s part Ancient Mariner, part Oxford don, with a whimsical fashion sense, a close acquaintance with defeat and futility, and a tendency to rattle on. He subscribes to no Force-like creed. No enlightened military Federation stands behind him, photon torpedoes at the ready — indeed, his race, the Time Lords, is more or less extinct. His signature gizmo isn’t a blaster or a phaser but a souped-up screwdriver. His Millennium Falcon? The Tardis, which looks to the unschooled like an old telephone booth. It’s actually a police call box, a relic from the ’50s, and the ship’s most spectacular feature isn’t artillery; it’s feng shui: It’s bigger on the inside.The Doctor is courageous and heroic, sure, but in the Mèdecins Sans Frontiéres vein. Oh so Euro! [..]

Sound familiar, America? [..] Fair enough: Enjoy your Transformers and the baby-faced club kids of the new Enterprise. But I’d highly recommend a field trip to Whoville."

Death Knell for the Lecture

Daphne Koller: "Our education system is in a state of crisis. [..] As a society, we can and should invest more money in education. But that is only part of the solution. [..] We need to significantly reduce those costs while at the same time improving quality [..].

How can we improve performance in education, while cutting costs at the same time? In 1984, Benjamin Bloom showed that individual tutoring had a huge advantage over standard lecture environments: The average tutored student performed better than 98 percent of the students in the standard class.

Until now, it has been hard to see how to make individualized education affordable. But I argue that technology may provide a path to this goal [..].

At Stanford, we recently placed three computer science courses online, using a similar format. Remarkably, in the first four weeks, 300,000 students registered for these courses, with millions of video views and hundreds of thousands of submitted assignments.

What can we learn from these successes? First, we see that video content is engaging to students — many of whom grew up on YouTube — and easy for instructors to produce"

Creeping Fascism

"Among other provisions that seek to control the sharing of copyrighted material on the Internet, SOPA, if enacted, would call upon the U.S. government to require that Internet service providers remove from their DNS servers the names of any sites that either infringe copyright directly or merely “facilitate” copyright infringement. So, for example, the government could require that ISPs remove the name “twitter.com” from their DNS servers if twitter.com was not being sufficiently aggressive in preventing its users from tweeting information about places to download copyrighted materials. This practice is known as DNS filtering. DNS filtering is one of the most common modes of Internet-based censorship. As we and our collaborators in the OpenNet Initiative have shown over the past decade, practices of this sort are used extensively in autocratic countries, including China and Iran, to prevent access to a range of sites offensive to the governments of those countries."

"As I was getting an article ready for final publication through the journal publisher website, I was given the option of offering the article as “Open Access”: I acknowledge that publishing my article with open access costs €2000 / US $3000 and that this choice is final and cannot be cancelled later. Whoa. First, any normal publishing industry pays the authors! Second, as the person who authored the work (and is giving it away for free) I am quite frankly appalled by the fact that I would be paying a large sum for free distribution. Sure, I have no beef with a for-profit firm providing a service for a fee, but the crazy price indicates that they are exploiting a monopoly that we have voluntarily given them. In a world with cheap self-publishing alternatives, this is not tolerable. Until we actively come up with an alternative, publishers will continue these extreme pricing practices"

BTW, this book is all about the accomplishments of Germans in history which the author thinks are widely underrated. I found this passage interesting because it points out how opposite Hitler was to all that, while at the same time, using all these accomplishments for his propaganda.

The German Genius, Peter Watson, pg. 620: "During the Weimer years [in Germany..] there was a continual battle between the rationalists -the scientists and the academics- and the nationalists, the pan-Germans, who remained convinced there was something special about Germany, her history, the "instinctive superiority" of her heroes. In The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler had stressed how Germany was different from France, the US, and Britain, and this view [..] gained ground among Nazis as they edged closer to power. From time to time Hitler attacked modern art [..] but, like other leading Nazis, he was by temperament an anti-intellectual; for him, most great men of history had been doers, not thinkers"