Letters Remain

  • The Future of Education

    Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics, talks to The Telegraph about his views on the future of learning.

    The old-fashioned model of education still prevalent in today’s schools, involving remembering facts ‘off pat’, was designed for the industrial age. […] This might have been good for the mass production economy, but it doesn’t deliver for the challenges of the digital economy, or for the ‘net gen’ mind.

    Children are going to have to reinvent their knowledge base multiple times. So for them memorising facts and figures is a waste of time.

    This quote brought to mind the following statement from Shift Happens, winner of SlideShare’s World’s Best Presentation Contest in 2007:

    According to former [US] Secretary of Education Richard Riley, the top ten in–demand jobs in 2010 did not exist in 2004. We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t exist yet, using technologies that haven’t been invented, in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet.

    This reminds me further of another quote on education from an unrelated article; that “universities have forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not careers.”

    These are important points; ones that cannot be overlooked when policy-makers look at evolving our education system.

    via Seed

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Google Interviews

    Stories abound of bloggers going for interviews at Google and writing up their experiences (as a cursory search will show), but I’ve never felt the need to bookmark or share any of them: they’re all rather lacklustre affairs.

    However, Peteris Krumins’ account of his interview at Google is informative, indepth and unflinching. In short: worth a read even if you’re half considering an application. As a bonus he also links to some great resources.

    (As is the norm when discussing Google interviews, here’s the obligatory link to Steve Yegge’s blog.)

    Lloyd Morgan

  • On Wealth

    When the Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Zweig was accused of being “a coddled member of the silver-spoon generation” he decided to confront the accusation by retelling tales from his less-than-privileged upbringing. In doing so, however, he made some poignant remarks about wealth:

    The most important lesson that I learned, I believe, is that money is not wealth. Benjamin Graham once wrote that the secret to happiness is learning to live well within your means. Did he mean to “live well” within your means, or to live “well within” your means? I think he intentionally left the sentence ambiguous.

    Money should never be taken for granted. Its uses are limited, but it is not a renewable resource; it is finite. And finite resources — love, water, the Earth and, yes, money — are meant to be stewarded and treated with care.

    via Kottke

    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Age of High Culture

    The cover story for this quarter’s Intelligent Life is an article arguing that, contrary to most recent opinions, the population isn’t, in fact, becoming dumber and we are at the dawn of an ‘age of mass intelligence’.

    This quote from Ira Glass, the creator of This American Life, gets to the core of the argument quite succinctly.

    “When people talk and write about culture, […] it’s apocalyptic. We tell ourselves that everything is in bad shape. But the opposite is true. There’s an abundance of really interesting things going on all around us.”

    It’s an interesting article and one worth reading, but I do have some qualms. The argument itself—that we are in an age of mass intelligence—is essentially unsatisfying and left me hungry for something a bit more… substantial. The article is, as the above quote alludes, first and foremost about culture; not intelligence. And can we really equate high culture with high intelligence?

    To (ab)use an example used in the article: when the Oprah Book Club (or any other book club, for that matter) recommends Anna Karenina and sales of the book consequently flourish, does this necessarily mean that the purchasers understand the book? Are the masses interpreting the novel as a parable of inner conflict and are they sympathising with Tolstoy’s disdain for his Russian aristocratic peers? Or are they reading it as just a tragic love story—a Russian Romeo and Juliet, so to speak? Essentially: do they really understand the novel, or are they just enjoying it? (Both are very fine reasons to read any book, but are vastly different.)

    Disclosure: I didn’t enjoy Anna Karenina; the above statements may contain gross generalisations; and I don’t believe that the popuation is getting dumber, but would hesitate just as much to say it’s getting more intelligent. Rather, ‘high’ culture has been commodified and is now available to a much wider audience. This, in itself, is not a bad thing.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • A German View on Tackling the Recession

    Bertrand Benoit, the Financial Times‘ Berlin bureau chief, discusses why the US, French and British don’t understand Germany’s “refusal to tackle the recession head-on”.

    What is happening is a classic clash of cultures, and anyone puzzling to grasp Germany’s anaemic reaction to the financial crisis and its economic fallout could do worse than take a stroll through its inhabitants’ mental landscape. Much of the economic thinking taking place in German political circles is guided by what Otto Friedrich Bollnow, a mathematician-cum-philosopher, once described as “economic virtues” – frugality, diligence, industry and so on. One widespread notion is that one should not borrow without being in a position to pay back.

    I feel this sentence, found in the introductory section of the article, is the most penetrating:

    The notion that families should finance everyday purchases on credit, the [German radio presenter] commented, “suggests Washington has still to understand what brought us there in the first place”.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Global Baby Trade

    Foreign Policy looks at the international adoption trade and the corruption that has made it a lucrative industry.

    Westerners have been sold the myth of a world orphan crisis. We are told that millions of children are waiting for their “forever families” to rescue them from lives of abandonment and abuse. But many of the infants and toddlers being adopted by Western parents today are not orphans at all. Yes, hundreds of thousands of children around the world do need loving homes. But more often than not, the neediest children are sick, disabled, traumatized, or older than 5. They are not the healthy babies that, quite understandably, most Westerners hope to adopt. There are simply not enough healthy, adoptable infants to meet Western demand—and there’s too much Western money in search of children. As a result, many international adoption agencies work not to find homes for needy children but to find children for Western homes.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Counterfactual Thinking and the First Instinct Fallacy

    Counterfactual Thinking and the First Instinct Fallacy (pdf); a research paper on whether or not it’s better to change your answer when taking multiple-choice tests. The abstract:

    Most people believe that they should avoid changing their answer when taking multiple-choice tests. Virtually all research on this topic, however, suggests that this strategy is ill-founded: most answer changes are from incorrect to correct, and people who change their answers usually improve their test scores. Why do people believe in this strategy if the data so strongly refute it? We argue that the belief is in part a product of counterfactual thinking. Changing an answer when one should have stuck with one’s original answer leads to more “if only…” self-recriminations than does sticking with one’s first instinct when one should have switched. As a consequence, instances of the former are more memorable than instances of the latter.

    via Overcoming Bias

    (As a sidenote, I really do like seeing the word ‘data’ used correctly.)

    Lloyd Morgan

  • If a HDD’s Read/Write Head Were a Boeing 747

    From an article discussing Seagate’s plant in Ireland (where 80% of the company’s read/write heads are produced): an impressive analogy of a HDD’s read/write head.

    The dimensions of the head are impressive. With a width of less than a hundred nanometers and a thickness of about ten, it flies above the platter at a speed of up to 15,000 RPM, at a height that’s the equivalent of 40 atoms. If you start multiplying these infinitesimally small numbers, you begin to get an idea of their significance.

    Consider this little comparison: if the read/write head were a Boeing 747, and the hard-disk platter were the surface of the Earth:

    – The head would fly at Mach 800
    – At less than one centimeter from the ground
    – And count every blade of grass
    – Making fewer than 10 unrecoverable counting errors in an area equivalent to all of Ireland.

    via Kottke

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Raising Smart Children: Concentrate on Effort, not Ability

    An old Scientific American article looks at the findings from three decades of research into how to raise intelligent children.

    Our society worships talent, and many people assume that possessing superior intelligence or ability—along with confidence in that ability—is a recipe for success. In fact, however, more than 30 years of scientific investigation suggests that an overemphasis on intellect or talent leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unwilling to remedy their shortcomings.

    The result plays out in children […] who coast through the early grades under the dangerous notion that no-effort academic achievement defines them as smart or gifted. Such children hold an implicit belief that intelligence is innate and fixed, making striving to learn seem far less important than being (or looking) smart. This belief also makes them see challenges, mistakes and even the need to exert effort as threats to their ego rather than as opportunities to improve. And it causes them to lose confidence and motivation when the work is no longer easy for them.

    The crux of the issue: don’t reward or praise children for being smart; save your rewards and praise effort.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Anthropological Divide

    Times Higher Education discusses the divide between evolutionary and social anthropologists. 

    On one side are the evolutionary anthropologists. “(They believe) our behaviour is based on things that we did to find mates in our years of evolution,” says Alex Bentley, a lecturer in anthropology at Durham University. “Then we have the social anthropologists. Some of them really strongly reject this kind of thinking. They consider it reductionist. They are focused on the specifics of culture.”

    Put crudely, social anthropologists describe and compare the development of human cultures and societies, while evolutionary anthropologists seek to explain it by reference to our biological evolution. The two sides of the one discipline are struggling to unite.

    The comments are worth browsing, too.

    via Seed

    Lloyd Morgan