MN bikes can turn left on red http://bit.ly/9inRKR
Due to a newly-passed law, MN cyclists can now turn left on an unchanging red signal. Other states have apparently had laws to that effect.
http://www.havefunbiking.com/news/newsarticle.php?id=680
Stream of conscience |
more than consciousness |
Due to a newly-passed law, MN cyclists can now turn left on an unchanging red signal. Other states have apparently had laws to that effect.
Interesting point about Apple's change to iPhone/iPad developer agreement, the now-infamous Section 3.3.1 (from http://www.devwhy.com/blog/2010/4/12/its-all-about-the-framework.html):
> Letting any of these secondary runtimes develop a significant base of applications in the store risks putting Apple in a position where the company that controls that runtime can cause delays in Apple’s release schedule, or worse, demand specific engineering decisions from Apple, under the threat of withholding the information necessary to keep their runtime working. Apple has given developers a path to write apps that will be robust over upgrades to the iPhone/iPad OS. That's why they already prohibited use of private APIs. This new language is an extension of the same concept. Setting aside all the other ethical and political issues with the App Store, Apple is not the new Microsoft, seeking to establish a monopoly over a market sector that's just finding its legs. Consider the Microsoft of the '80s and '90s—the company that gained and solidified its monopoly by capriciously and, many would say, intentionally breaking major third-party apps (WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, ...) that competed with its own Office suite when new versions of Windows were released. There was no clear distinction made between public and private APIs, no way for developers to be sure that the libraries they depended on would be stable across releases. (I agree with my freshman Comp Sci prof who argued that USDOJ went after MS for the wrong product—IE instead of Office). Apple's App Store approval process is capricious, rejecting or letting languish silently in purgatory apps that for whatever reason they don't want in, approving other apps that seemingly shouldn't be there. But rejecting Flash- and other interpreter-based apps is just consistent with Apple's policy of telling developers to use the public APIs, the whole public APIs, and nothing but the public APIs. pacem in terris / mir / shanti / salaam / heiwa
A few weeks ago, a story on slashdot mentioned a radical educational experiment done in 1929 (psychologytoday.com seems to be down, cached here). Children who were taught no math until sixth grade matched their peers in calculation and outstripped them in mathematical reasoning, after just one year of instruction:
In 1929, the superintendent of schools in Ithaca, New York, sent out a challenge to his colleagues in other cities. "What," he asked, "can we drop from the elementary school curriculum?" He complained that [...] the school day was packed with too many subjects and there was little time [for students] to reflect seriously on anything.
One of the recipients of this challenge was L. P. Benezet, superintendent of schools in Manchester, New Hampshire, who responded with this outrageous proposal: We should drop arithmetic! [...] All that drill, he claimed, had divorced the whole realm of numbers [...] from common sense [...] they could do the calculations as taught to them, but didn't understand what they were doing and couldn't apply the calculations to real life problems.
He chose schools in the poorest neighborhoods because he knew that if he tried this in the wealthier neighborhoods [...] the parents would rebel. [...] Benezet decided on a plan in which arithmetic would be introduced in sixth grade.
As part of the plan, he asked the teachers of the earlier grades to devote some of the time that they would normally spend on arithmetic to the new third R—recitation. By "recitation" he meant, "speaking the English language." He did "not mean giving back, verbatim, the words of the teacher or the textbook." The children would be asked to talk about topics that interested them--experiences they had had, movies they had seen, or anything that would lead to genuine, lively communication and discussion. This, he thought, would improve their abilities to reason and communicate logically. He also asked the teachers to give their pupils some practice in measuring and counting things, to assure that they would have some practical experience with numbers.
Benezet arranged for a graduate student from Boston University to come up and test the Manchester children at various times in the sixth grade. The results were remarkable. At the beginning of their sixth grade year, the children in the experimental classes, who had not been taught any arithmetic, performed much better than those in the traditional classes on story problems that could be solved by common sense and a general understanding of numbers and measurement. Of course, at the beginning of sixth grade, those in the experimental classes performed worse on the standard school arithmetic tests, where the problems were set up in the usual school manner and could be solved simply by applying the rote-learned algorithms. But by the end of sixth grade those in the experimental classes had completely caught up on this and were still way ahead of the others on story problems.
[Emphasis mine.] This resonated with me—I have a minor in math, despite having spent most of my school career thinking I couldn't really do math, and I've pondered long about why my math education was such a struggle. So this article got me started on one of those wandering Internet tangents about math education, in which I discovered that not only is multiplication not repeated addition (or it actually is, or it's a subset... wait, what is it now?), which confused even me who has a math minor.
I also discovered, apropos of the above article, that preschoolers are capable of understanding math earlier than cognitive psychologists thought, a fact that apparently Montessori teachers have known for a century. This would apparently contradict the aforequoted article, but I think there's a fairly obvious synthesis of the two findings. The way Montessori teaches math is not with notation and algorithms, it's by physically interacting with quantities in various ways. Note that the 1929 experiment gave the elementary students "practice in measuring and counting things, to assure that they would have some practical experience with numbers." It would seem (and I've long thought) that the disconnected, all-abstract way we teach math makes it such that only those who have an intuitive sense for it can learn math.
It also seems to ensure that most people can only do calculations by processes they've been told, hinted at in the article and poignantly demonstrated here. The children in the experiment, like Montessori kids, had no trouble picking up the notation and processes quickly and intuitively, because the formal math only codified what they already knew intuitively. But that intuitive knowledge had to be hard-won; if no one tells you the shortcuts, you discover them for yourself naturally. Kids who grow up drilling particular types of math problems are actually stymied in their attempts to understand what's going on. I remember even in high school being told by my math teacher that the reasons behind what we were doing were over my head and that if I studied on, I'd eventually get to them. I was incredibly frustrated by that.
What got me back on this topic today was this article (via @timoreilly). Even before Maria Montessori developed her method, even before the modern industrial style of education became entrenched, the problems with how children were educated were known. A flurry of turn-of-the-last-century study and method development gave us real solutions to these problems. Yet what has changed?
As I think about it, the aforementioned problems with rote-process math education are really the same as the problems that frustrate me with people's computer education. I've long bemoaned the fact that "computer education" generally consists of learning the process to do a particular task in a given Microsoft product. This only serves to entrench the unnecessary division between computer experts (those of us who do it for a living) and the general "computer illiterate" population. What's so sad about this is that ever since GUIs came into common usage, computers are made to be discoverable. Knowing the basic concepts, you should be able to sit down at any computer running any operating system or software package, and be able to figure out how to copy files around, how to format a letter, how to send an e-mail. Those of us whom our families and friends look to for random computer help, invariably provide that help by engaging our intuition, which in most people, where computers are concerned, has been quashed by either fear or "education".
the intellectual spillovers that drive innovation and employment drop off dramatically as firms and people move more than a mile apart.
[Tweeted a link to this earlier today as well—another post trying out posterous for raw, unedited, but longer-than-a-tweet reactions to things that pop up in my world.]
Bruce Schneier nails it (http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/04/privacy_and_con.html):
In January, Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg declared the age of privacy to be over. A month earlier, Google Chief Eric Schmidt expressed a similar sentiment. Add Scott McNealy's and Larry Ellison's comments from a few years earlier, and you've got a whole lot of tech CEOs proclaiming the death of privacy—especially when it comes to young people.
It's just not true. People, including the younger generation, still care about privacy. Yes, they're far more public on the Internet than their parents [...] But they take steps to protect their privacy and vociferously complain when they feel it violated. [...]
We may not mind sharing our personal lives and thoughts, but we want to control how, where and with whom. [...]
Here's the problem: The very companies whose CEOs eulogize privacy make their money by controlling vast amounts of their users' information.
All you who are over the age of 25 (I'm in that group myself), who fret and frown about the seeming lack of concern for privacy among "teenagers these days," take good note. Those of us who have younger friends (or children) can help them figure out how to establish their own privacy boundaries, but only if we acknowledge the degree to which it is in fact still possible, and insist as we use such sites that it remain possible. And we can allow ourselves to engage more fully, so that different generations can communicate on the same media.
Update: Video of Bruce Schneier giving an extended talk on this topic.
[I'm trying out the use of posterous for publishing things longer than a tweet, but more raw and immediate than a full blog posting. This is meant to be rough and raw, and I might later expand it into a real blog post on my real blog (http://kbullock.ringworld.org/).]
Earlier today I tweeted this from Donald Schell+ (http://www.episcopalcafe.com/daily/parish_life/by_donald_schell_with_my.php):
Christian faith and practice have a future, possibly even a rich future. But boomers’ habits of leadership have broken the natural flow that gives real authority and autonomy to a next generation.
[Emphasis mine.] As a high schooler in the Church, I was (and continue to be!) treated as the token youth (more recently the token young adult, newly a token new parent). "Yay, we have the young people involved! Y'know, you all are the future of the Church." That's great, but what role do we get right now?
Schell+ himself and Marshall Scott+, the first commenter on the story, both boomers themselves, hint at aspects of that generation's outlook that I have long observed from the outside, and been frustrated by as I work with those in leadership positions in the Church:
I don't claim to understand the complexities of the boomer perspective, if there is such a thing, nor are younger generations without their unhelpful tendencies. But the fact that both of these priests identified in their own generation the same habits I have seen makes me think there's something to it. Now what do we do with this?
...before another Kevin Bullock does! :)
Pacem in terris / Mir / Shanti / Salaam / Heiwa
