Nov 2 2012: It's clear that democracy is a good unto itself, not for what it creates. Furthermore, a healthy democracy is more dependent on an equitable distribution of wealth and education than the converse. There is certainly more room for discussion, though, on how to make that process more reflective of the needs of the general public (like compulsory voting, as practiced in Australia).
Recent democracies will undoubtedly have "buyer's remorse". This explains Iraqi's preference for a Dubai-like government or Russia's inexplicable love-affair with authoritarianism. Almost anyone in a war-torn impoverished country will look fondly toward a benign dictatorship - *that* is democracies greatest challenge.
As for the "malaise" experienced in mature democracies like Britain or the US, it revolves around the seemly intractable nature of national party politics. This is largely in part due to the troubling trend of their electorate's shift toward "self-confirming hypotheses" from biased media outlets. This occurs on both the left and the right, though the right-wing in the US has arguable been more effective with their base.
So, it's unrealistic and foolish to expect the media to give politicians "more room". First, almost all public officials need to be held to a *higher* standard, not lower. As well, national dialogs are all-too-often shaped by political consultants rather than the general public. In short, we have are having a "crisis in faith" with democracy because we've had a "crisis in faith" with objective media - the culprit here depends almost entirely on your political stripe.
Finally, I wonder how it is that a country like the US can (with radically changing issues, economy, demographics, technology, etc.) *consistently* end up a within only few percentage points from a dead draw *every* election cycle?
Oct 1 2012: I think your list of subjects (finance, entrepreneurship, phys ed and health) is spot on!
I (half) jokingly share with my students that "health" class and driver's ed are the two most important classes they'll take in high school. What makes this humorous is that they are (usually) taught by the *least* inspired teachers in the school. There are exceptions, however - I've seen an *excellent* and inspired heath teacher (Joan Stear at Glen Este High School, for instance) work hard to innovate health instruction.
What makes these courses very difficult to teach are their adolescent attitudes toward these subjects. The more immediate the topic (especially as it pertains to risk-taking) the more defensive teens are towards it. It's as though they have to defend their mental "limitations" to risk-aversion. Viewed this way, it's easy to understand a teen's eye-rolling on subjects like safe-sex and defensive driving.
I find it shocking how little adolescent student know about finance. Part of this stems from their inability to see themselves retiring. For a group that thinks they'll "live forever", they have very little idea on *how* they'll finance that option.
Financial literacy, however, is an area ripe for education because it is one of the few domains that:
1) teen find inherently interesting
2) adults can demonstrate a clear mastery
This gives teachers a powerful - though small - window of opportunity to to have a relevant dialogue with their students.
One exercise I use when starting a unit on finance is to take a student's picture and digitally "age" it:
(http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/age-my-face-pro-make-yourself/id422704707?mt=8)
I then have them paste a copy on their folder and tell them:
"This is *you* in 50 years."
"This is the person who you're working for."
"This is the person who you're saving for."
Maybe because of this (more than in any class I've taught) students have told me "This class has changed the way I think about the world."
Jun 27 2012: I also agree. As a techie secondary educator, I've seen both ignorance ("Let's buy laptops that sit in closets all year.") and apathy ("Why bother to invest in tech at all?") on the part of public school systems. Not too sure which is worse...
I've recently worked with at-risk students in a one-to-one laptop environment. Guess what? There's still very little difference. Even when provided "flipped" interactive video content, "just-in-time" self-paced assessments, and one-on-one tutoring, the results were mediocre.
I think Norvig's final point about education being more about motivation and determination than information is crucial. For many low-income students, the question is not how to learn, but why? This is the riddle that only a rare few educators have solved. I'd love to see Jaime Escalante (of "Stand and Deliver" fame) give a TED talk!
In closing, for the sake of low income-students everywhere, I'd love to see courses like this offered for topics that require technical certification (like Microsoft, A+, Java, etc.) Then, students would have a direct economic incentive for success.
1) There are no ETIs
The Drake equation attempts to predict the number of possible forms of intelligent life in the universe ( defined as life that can broadcast radio waves). Unfortunately, it gives wildly ranging estimates, mostly depending on variable of "probability that intelligence wipes itself out". Intelligent life might just be an inherently unstable phenomenon: when life is able to broadcast radio waves, perhaps it's already getting close to self-destruction. A lot of evidence from human civilization points towards this hypothesis.
2) There are ETIs, but we'll never find them
SETI is very limited in their scope: search for evidence of ET intelligence from radio waves. This seems to me a very limited paradigm. Some have suggested this is like ants saying there is no other intelligent life on the Earth because they have found nothing else that uses their pheromones to communicate. What's more, why would an intelligent life form "broadcast" for interstellar communication? Would a coherent beam technology (like a maser) work much better? finally, any advanced radio telecommunication would likely be digitally "compressed" (to maximize bandwidth). This means those signals look "random" to someone eavesdropping. In short, all that random background noise in the galaxy could be compressed interstellar chatter, but unless we have the right decompression algorithm, we'd never notice it.
3) There are ETIs, but they'll never let us find them
Perhaps, there is a "prime directive" that prohibits communication with an emerging (and potentially self-destructive) intelligence. This may be Gene Roddenberry's most prescient idea.
Put together, these points make it very unlikely that *we* will discover ETI, if any exists. More likely, we will be "tapped" for acceptance into some form interstellar civilization, but only after showing enough "wisdom" (lack of self-destructive impulses) to warrant inclusion.
They're essential for graphing BIG ranges of data. For instance, if you wanted to graph the distribution of wealth in the US. and someone made $25,000,000,00, how can you compare someone making the median US income ($25,000) on a linear scale that ends with "$25,000,000,000"? Note - it wold be far less than the width of the *border* of the graph!
2) Jean-Baptiste Michel is trying to think about war *differently*. He's using a clear mathematical pattern (see log-log graphs, above) to show what mathematicians called a "power-relationship" (power as in exponent, not governance). His theory a) assumes that military loses are proportional to the number of troops *committed* to a conflict and b) there are only a very few people ultimately deciding on the number of troops committed to a conflict. From these two assumptions, the thought processes of *how* military commanders escalate a conflict is crucial. He argues that escalations might be exponential. I think it's a pretty compelling explanation.
You could use this idea to also analyze spending patterns - why is it that a $20,000 college tuition bill seems extravagant, but a $20,000 kitchen remodeling seems cheap? It's based on our proportional way of committing resources: college tuition is a drastic increase in spending from public high school (x100) but a kitchen remodeling is only a fraction (1/10) of the cost of a house.
May 14 2012: For those who object to intellectual property on principle, I encourage you to spend a few years of your life and thousands/millions of dollars of your capital to develop a marketable idea and give it away for free. While open-source developers are noble, most of them have day-jobs that are supported by protected intellectual property. I don't think we can demand the innovators of the world to completely give up their intellectual property with no expectation of remuneration.
While I do agree that the pendulum has swung too far towards the side of big business, it's VERY difficult to tweak the system to encourage more innovation without denying valid protections for the rest of the development community.
The ultimate "copyright", though, is trade-craft and market-share. Take military technology: there are always races for military technologies (nuclear, biological, cyber-attacks, etc.) You either beat your "competitors" with trade-craft (continually develop better technology) or market-share (have so much of it to render opposition useless). US aerospace engineering is a good example of both.
The same is true in the business world. Anyone can try to compete with iTunes, for instance - many have, in fact. But what "protects" iTunes is trade-craft (a pretty slick delivery system) and market-share (nuff said).
Of course, the place where formal intellectual property (patents, copyright, trademark) is important is fields with *developing* markets (the web, bio-tech, nano-materials, etc.) As mentioned, this reality can (and is) abused with overly-litigious and monopolistic practices (see Montsanto, et al) But these issues (like patent-trolling) CAN be resolved with ingenuity and hard work:
May 14 2012: I guess I'm not being clear. A message board is not really ideal for responding to questions from a test. In educational assessment (or businesses billing, for that matter) the responses usually need to be secure (private) and easily collated.
I'm not looking for the "YouTube of assessment". Sites like Quia.com provide 3rd party assessment services, but the ultimate problem there is lack of "ownership" which leads to several other issues (the ultimate need for monetization, intellectual property rights, lack of portability, etc.).
What I'm interested in is something in the "architecture" of the web that allows for simple and secure user input without direct server-side access. For instance, can user-inputs be stored in an applet?
May 12 2012: As an educator, I think Bowen's final comments on schools are very interesting - for education to break out of its old model, it needs to become (more) digital (like books, art, music, video, games etc). While HTML is the default format for delivering digital content (text, graphics, audio, video, simulations, etc.), to "complete the loop" of assessment, educators need to ask their students *questions*. What will be the default format of the online *question*?
Put differently, almost anyone can can post content freely and easily. But how will I freely, securely, and easily get information *back* from users (in my case, students) on the internet?
Feb 16 2012: "The way to deal with non-violence is non-violently."
I think that was exactly my point. The issue is police "tools" and culture are limited. Too often, they lead to a violent outcome, regardless of how well-intentioned the protesters or the police.
"Why is anyone "worried" about the "problem" with non-violent protestors? By definition they aren't hurting anyone."
Not true - protest, non-violent or not, is inherently disruptive. If it's not, it's not really doing much. Did you hear that millions of New Yorkers took to the streets today? No, you didn't...
If I chain myself "peacefully" across the freeway to protest the use of di-hydrogen oxide, it's disruptive. People are being hurt - just ask the thousands of people for which I've just created a 2-hour traffic delay or, more seriously, anyone who needed an ambulance. The problem is that everyone thinks *their* disruption, non-violent or not, is the worthy exception.
"And if you can't keep your temper in check, you shouldn't be a policeman."
Or a protester? I applaud those who choose non-violence. But it takes years of work and steadfast commitment to work, often times in the face of brutal reprisal. That's what made the civil right movement so powerful - self-discipline.
Non-violent protesting, unfortunately, is like non-sexual kissing - without significant discipline, both tend to escalate. It just takes one broken window to turn a in a march into a "mob".
"We can't possibly expect the sacred police to do something to justify their salaries once in awhile."
Really? Try riding with a cop for a day - just one day. I think you might see that the police actually "do something" (an extraordinary amount, in fact) "to justify their salaries".
I agree that it's too easy to find incidents of undisciplined police brutality. Unfortunately, no one's keeping score of the vast number of times the police do their job perfectly. Since you seem to like video, however, here's one:
Feb 15 2012: This talk reminds me of one of my favorite aphorisms:
"When all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
We are tool users - give us tools, we find ways to use them - usually at the cost of mental effort. What I take from the talk is that the use of non-lethal weapons is certainly no exception.
I see the problem with non-lethal weapons as one of acculturation - while there is now a relative high threshold for use of lethal force, the threshold for non-lethal force is not as evolved. Hopefully that will improve as time goes on - I think it would be very interesting to look back at the introduction of revolvers to police forces and and estimate how long it took to get us out of the days of the "Old West" attitude of "ready, fire, aim".
So, if the new tools are making matters worse (at least for the time being) how can we give the police/military personnel better tools?
Since a strong theme in the comments below (and the headlines in general) has been responses to non-violent protest, one idea might be to develop specialized personnel on par with hostage negotiators - let's call them "non-compliance liaisons".
They would ideally act as a buffer between regular police/military personnel and extreme "non-compliers" (organized non-violent protesters, uppity grandmothers, etc.) that will have (hopefully) a better developed "toolbox" of techniques to minimize negative outcomes. Sort of like "SWAT without the swatting".
Off-duty, they could serve as trainers for police to develop a better culture of response to non-compliance - procedures that could be developed, tested and shared as best-practices between departments. That's not to say they would always save the day, but it's a step in the right direction.
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A comment on Talk: Rory Stewart: Why democracy matters
Recent democracies will undoubtedly have "buyer's remorse". This explains Iraqi's preference for a Dubai-like government or Russia's inexplicable love-affair with authoritarianism. Almost anyone in a war-torn impoverished country will look fondly toward a benign dictatorship - *that* is democracies greatest challenge.
As for the "malaise" experienced in mature democracies like Britain or the US, it revolves around the seemly intractable nature of national party politics. This is largely in part due to the troubling trend of their electorate's shift toward "self-confirming hypotheses" from biased media outlets. This occurs on both the left and the right, though the right-wing in the US has arguable been more effective with their base.
So, it's unrealistic and foolish to expect the media to give politicians "more room". First, almost all public officials need to be held to a *higher* standard, not lower. As well, national dialogs are all-too-often shaped by political consultants rather than the general public. In short, we have are having a "crisis in faith" with democracy because we've had a "crisis in faith" with objective media - the culprit here depends almost entirely on your political stripe.
Finally, I wonder how it is that a country like the US can (with radically changing issues, economy, demographics, technology, etc.) *consistently* end up a within only few percentage points from a dead draw *every* election cycle?
*That* would be an "idea worth sharing"...
A comment on Conversation: What was not taught in school that you realize, REALLY should have been? (Why?)
I (half) jokingly share with my students that "health" class and driver's ed are the two most important classes they'll take in high school. What makes this humorous is that they are (usually) taught by the *least* inspired teachers in the school. There are exceptions, however - I've seen an *excellent* and inspired heath teacher (Joan Stear at Glen Este High School, for instance) work hard to innovate health instruction.
What makes these courses very difficult to teach are their adolescent attitudes toward these subjects. The more immediate the topic (especially as it pertains to risk-taking) the more defensive teens are towards it. It's as though they have to defend their mental "limitations" to risk-aversion. Viewed this way, it's easy to understand a teen's eye-rolling on subjects like safe-sex and defensive driving.
I find it shocking how little adolescent student know about finance. Part of this stems from their inability to see themselves retiring. For a group that thinks they'll "live forever", they have very little idea on *how* they'll finance that option.
Financial literacy, however, is an area ripe for education because it is one of the few domains that:
1) teen find inherently interesting
2) adults can demonstrate a clear mastery
This gives teachers a powerful - though small - window of opportunity to to have a relevant dialogue with their students.
One exercise I use when starting a unit on finance is to take a student's picture and digitally "age" it:
(http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/age-my-face-pro-make-yourself/id422704707?mt=8)
I then have them paste a copy on their folder and tell them:
"This is *you* in 50 years."
"This is the person who you're working for."
"This is the person who you're saving for."
Maybe because of this (more than in any class I've taught) students have told me "This class has changed the way I think about the world."
A reply on Talk: Peter Norvig: The 100,000-student classroom
I've recently worked with at-risk students in a one-to-one laptop environment. Guess what? There's still very little difference. Even when provided "flipped" interactive video content, "just-in-time" self-paced assessments, and one-on-one tutoring, the results were mediocre.
I think Norvig's final point about education being more about motivation and determination than information is crucial. For many low-income students, the question is not how to learn, but why? This is the riddle that only a rare few educators have solved. I'd love to see Jaime Escalante (of "Stand and Deliver" fame) give a TED talk!
In closing, for the sake of low income-students everywhere, I'd love to see courses like this offered for topics that require technical certification (like Microsoft, A+, Java, etc.) Then, students would have a direct economic incentive for success.
A comment on Talk: Christoph Adami: Finding life we can't imagine
1) There are no ETIs
The Drake equation attempts to predict the number of possible forms of intelligent life in the universe ( defined as life that can broadcast radio waves). Unfortunately, it gives wildly ranging estimates, mostly depending on variable of "probability that intelligence wipes itself out". Intelligent life might just be an inherently unstable phenomenon: when life is able to broadcast radio waves, perhaps it's already getting close to self-destruction. A lot of evidence from human civilization points towards this hypothesis.
2) There are ETIs, but we'll never find them
SETI is very limited in their scope: search for evidence of ET intelligence from radio waves. This seems to me a very limited paradigm. Some have suggested this is like ants saying there is no other intelligent life on the Earth because they have found nothing else that uses their pheromones to communicate. What's more, why would an intelligent life form "broadcast" for interstellar communication? Would a coherent beam technology (like a maser) work much better? finally, any advanced radio telecommunication would likely be digitally "compressed" (to maximize bandwidth). This means those signals look "random" to someone eavesdropping. In short, all that random background noise in the galaxy could be compressed interstellar chatter, but unless we have the right decompression algorithm, we'd never notice it.
3) There are ETIs, but they'll never let us find them
Perhaps, there is a "prime directive" that prohibits communication with an emerging (and potentially self-destructive) intelligence. This may be Gene Roddenberry's most prescient idea.
Put together, these points make it very unlikely that *we* will discover ETI, if any exists. More likely, we will be "tapped" for acceptance into some form interstellar civilization, but only after showing enough "wisdom" (lack of self-destructive impulses) to warrant inclusion.
Either way, I don't see that happening soon..
A reply on Talk: Jean-Baptiste Michel: The mathematics of history
http://www.khanacademy.org/math/algebra/logarithms/v/logarithmic-scale
They're essential for graphing BIG ranges of data. For instance, if you wanted to graph the distribution of wealth in the US. and someone made $25,000,000,00, how can you compare someone making the median US income ($25,000) on a linear scale that ends with "$25,000,000,000"? Note - it wold be far less than the width of the *border* of the graph!
2) Jean-Baptiste Michel is trying to think about war *differently*. He's using a clear mathematical pattern (see log-log graphs, above) to show what mathematicians called a "power-relationship" (power as in exponent, not governance). His theory a) assumes that military loses are proportional to the number of troops *committed* to a conflict and b) there are only a very few people ultimately deciding on the number of troops committed to a conflict. From these two assumptions, the thought processes of *how* military commanders escalate a conflict is crucial. He argues that escalations might be exponential. I think it's a pretty compelling explanation.
You could use this idea to also analyze spending patterns - why is it that a $20,000 college tuition bill seems extravagant, but a $20,000 kitchen remodeling seems cheap? It's based on our proportional way of committing resources: college tuition is a drastic increase in spending from public high school (x100) but a kitchen remodeling is only a fraction (1/10) of the cost of a house.
A reply on Talk: José Bowen: Beethoven the businessman
While I do agree that the pendulum has swung too far towards the side of big business, it's VERY difficult to tweak the system to encourage more innovation without denying valid protections for the rest of the development community.
The ultimate "copyright", though, is trade-craft and market-share. Take military technology: there are always races for military technologies (nuclear, biological, cyber-attacks, etc.) You either beat your "competitors" with trade-craft (continually develop better technology) or market-share (have so much of it to render opposition useless). US aerospace engineering is a good example of both.
The same is true in the business world. Anyone can try to compete with iTunes, for instance - many have, in fact. But what "protects" iTunes is trade-craft (a pretty slick delivery system) and market-share (nuff said).
Of course, the place where formal intellectual property (patents, copyright, trademark) is important is fields with *developing* markets (the web, bio-tech, nano-materials, etc.) As mentioned, this reality can (and is) abused with overly-litigious and monopolistic practices (see Montsanto, et al) But these issues (like patent-trolling) CAN be resolved with ingenuity and hard work:
www.ted.com/talks/drew_curtis_how_i_beat_a_patent_troll.html
In closing, our current system of intellectual property may not be ideal, but it's evolving and, currently, is the best one we have so far.
A reply on Talk: José Bowen: Beethoven the businessman
I'm not looking for the "YouTube of assessment". Sites like Quia.com provide 3rd party assessment services, but the ultimate problem there is lack of "ownership" which leads to several other issues (the ultimate need for monetization, intellectual property rights, lack of portability, etc.).
What I'm interested in is something in the "architecture" of the web that allows for simple and secure user input without direct server-side access. For instance, can user-inputs be stored in an applet?
A comment on Talk: José Bowen: Beethoven the businessman
Put differently, almost anyone can can post content freely and easily. But how will I freely, securely, and easily get information *back* from users (in my case, students) on the internet?
A reply on Talk: Stephen Coleman: The moral dangers of non-lethal weapons
I think that was exactly my point. The issue is police "tools" and culture are limited. Too often, they lead to a violent outcome, regardless of how well-intentioned the protesters or the police.
"Why is anyone "worried" about the "problem" with non-violent protestors? By definition they aren't hurting anyone."
Not true - protest, non-violent or not, is inherently disruptive. If it's not, it's not really doing much. Did you hear that millions of New Yorkers took to the streets today? No, you didn't...
If I chain myself "peacefully" across the freeway to protest the use of di-hydrogen oxide, it's disruptive. People are being hurt - just ask the thousands of people for which I've just created a 2-hour traffic delay or, more seriously, anyone who needed an ambulance. The problem is that everyone thinks *their* disruption, non-violent or not, is the worthy exception.
"And if you can't keep your temper in check, you shouldn't be a policeman."
Or a protester? I applaud those who choose non-violence. But it takes years of work and steadfast commitment to work, often times in the face of brutal reprisal. That's what made the civil right movement so powerful - self-discipline.
Non-violent protesting, unfortunately, is like non-sexual kissing - without significant discipline, both tend to escalate. It just takes one broken window to turn a in a march into a "mob".
"We can't possibly expect the sacred police to do something to justify their salaries once in awhile."
Really? Try riding with a cop for a day - just one day. I think you might see that the police actually "do something" (an extraordinary amount, in fact) "to justify their salaries".
I agree that it's too easy to find incidents of undisciplined police brutality. Unfortunately, no one's keeping score of the vast number of times the police do their job perfectly. Since you seem to like video, however, here's one:
http://www.wimp.com/policeofficer/
A comment on Talk: Stephen Coleman: The moral dangers of non-lethal weapons
"When all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
We are tool users - give us tools, we find ways to use them - usually at the cost of mental effort. What I take from the talk is that the use of non-lethal weapons is certainly no exception.
I see the problem with non-lethal weapons as one of acculturation - while there is now a relative high threshold for use of lethal force, the threshold for non-lethal force is not as evolved. Hopefully that will improve as time goes on - I think it would be very interesting to look back at the introduction of revolvers to police forces and and estimate how long it took to get us out of the days of the "Old West" attitude of "ready, fire, aim".
So, if the new tools are making matters worse (at least for the time being) how can we give the police/military personnel better tools?
Since a strong theme in the comments below (and the headlines in general) has been responses to non-violent protest, one idea might be to develop specialized personnel on par with hostage negotiators - let's call them "non-compliance liaisons".
They would ideally act as a buffer between regular police/military personnel and extreme "non-compliers" (organized non-violent protesters, uppity grandmothers, etc.) that will have (hopefully) a better developed "toolbox" of techniques to minimize negative outcomes. Sort of like "SWAT without the swatting".
Off-duty, they could serve as trainers for police to develop a better culture of response to non-compliance - procedures that could be developed, tested and shared as best-practices between departments. That's not to say they would always save the day, but it's a step in the right direction.