roybot

Clay Shirky - "You're gonna miss us when we're gone has never been much of a business model"

So today must be a day to write about the newspaper business. Here is another good post from another favorite author, Clay Shirky.

It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem....

...When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to....

Last year Clay Shirky wrote Here Comes Everybody a book about how online collaboration has changed different areas of society. One of my favorite examples of this is Consumerist.com now owned by Consumer Reports.

The Future of News

So the newspapers it seems are going to die (and from what I have been reading lately perhaps a shorter than expected death) but in this new piece Steven Johnson (a favorite writer) argues that perhaps the future isn't so bleak for news in general

"What’s more: the ecosystem of political news also included information coming directly from the candidates. Think about the Philadelphia race speech, arguably one of the two or three most important events in the whole campaign. Eight million people watched it on YouTube alone. Now, what would have happened to that speech had it been delivered in 1992?"

You can read the rest here. I can completely identify with Steven when he talks about stalking the college bookstore to get the new copy of MacWorld. I used to spend Sunday mornings beside the radio so I could record American Top 40 and know which songs were popular. (And this data was 2 weeks old by the time it aired) Now I can click on the Mediabase website and get accurate chart information updated hourly. I definitely feel much more in touch with the news I want to read more than ever before. Living in India today is a completely different experience than living in Morocco when I was in high school, much because of the access I have to news and other information on the internet. Its amazing. More soon.

Exeter Math

So I just discovered tonight that Phillips Exeter has all of their homegrown math texts in downloadable PDF form on their website. I downloaded them all and have been really enjoying them. Great reading and lots of stuff I can use. It was hard to head off for my dinner plans. More soon.

Here is the link: Exeter Web Site

The Formula That Killed Wall Street

So Wired has another mathy article for next month's issue "The Formula That Killed Wall Street" Its about a probability formula that banks were using to determine risk. It talks about probability, conditional probability, correlation, regression, and more. I think I will use it the next time I teach probability or just whenever. I am always using articles about gambling when I teach probability but this, and the Netflix article I posted about recently are nice additions.

The Netflix Contest

So  this New York Times Magazine article by Clive Thompson is the second I've read about the Netflix, algorithm contest, Wired magazine also wrote about the contest here last February. Here's a bit I particularly like from Clive's piece:

When someone makes a breakthrough, pretty soon every other team is aware of it and starts using it, too. Piotte and Chabbert soon learned the major mathematical tricks that had propelled the leading teams into the Top 10.
The first major breakthrough came less than a month into the competition. A team named Simon Funk vaulted from nowhere into the No. 4 position, improving upon Cinematch by 3.88 percent in one fell swoop. Its secret was a mathematical technique called singular value decomposition. It isn’t new; mathematicians have used it for years to make sense of prodigious chunks of information. But Netflix never thought to try it on movies.
Singular value decomposition works by uncovering “factors” that Netflix customers like or don’t like. Say, for example, that “Sleepless in Seattle” has been rated by 200,000 Netflix users. In one sense, this is just a huge list of numbers — user No. 452 gave it two stars; No. 985 gave it five stars; and so on. But you could also think of those ratings as individual reactions to various aspects of the movie. “Sleepless in Seattle” is a “chick flick,” a comedy, a star vehicle for Tom Hanks; each customer is reacting to how much — or how little — he or she likes “chick flicks,” comedies and Tom Hanks. Singular value decomposition takes the mass of Netflix data — 17,770 movies, ratings by 480,189 users — and automatically sorts the films.

I will probably share this with my students in the next few days. It reminds me not only that mathematics is cool, but perhaps most importantly that when folks find something interesting to do, they will learn the necessary mathematics (or other skill set) involved with both eagerness and pleasure. More soon.

World Class Potty Training

Scott' latest post on Dangerously Irrelevant is a great one:

Our middle school - arguably one of the state's finest - issues laminated punch cards to students at the beginning of each trimester. Each time a student needs to leave the classroom to go to the bathroom, visit her locker, etc., it costs one of the 12 punches.
Sorry, student, that it’s week 7 and you’re out of punches. No going to the bathroom for you.
Inhumane? Degrading? Illegal? What are your thoughts regarding this practice? Anyone else’s school doing this?
Oh, and did I mention that unused punches can be used for extra academic credit in some teachers’ classes?

This is, of course, completely ridiculous. These guys need to read Alfie Kohn's Beyond Discipline and then Seth Godin's Tribes.

I tell my students if they need to go somewhere (bathroom, locker, nurse, wherever) during class then they should just go.

If my class is as engaging as it should be nobody will even think about leaving (When is the last time I left a great movie to go to the bathroom?) And if students are leaving then I know there is a problem. 

This is really not that different from the whole laptop issue and students surfing facebook etc. during class.

Imaginary Friends

So the cartoon blog xkcd.com is often hilarious and today's post is no exception.

Cube Cards v1.2

So, since I am presenting on the Rubik's Cube at the NESA conference in Bangkok later this week, I found some time to revise my cube cards. You can download version 1.2 here

Changes

• fixed a few spelling errors and rewrote text for clarity in a few spots
• reworked the layout of the cube diagrams on cards 5, 6, and 9
• corrected an error my mom spotted on card 5
• rearranged the pdf file so that they could conceivably be printed front to back

Incidentally, these cards along with everything else on this blog are published under the creative commons license, click on the CC Badge for more information. Feel free to edit the master files, remix, and rework anything as much as you want. If you come up with something clever I would love to see it. It would also be great if you could join the mix too, consider posting a great lesson or other activity you have developed for everyone to share.

Why You Need A Manual for Wikipedia

There is a great new article in the new issue of The New York Review of Books on Wikipedia (1), The article is also, ostensibly, a review of O'Reilly's new Wikipedia The Missing Manual Book. Its amazing to read about all the bureaucracy that has developed inside Wikipedia, how the site has evolved over time from a wild-west to an ordered system -a system so complex that you now need to buy a book if you want to fully participate in it.

(1) Wikipedia remains my go to site for quick, reliable information. On Friday for example after school we were reviewing for the IB Math HL exam when Akshay wanted to know exactly how many points he needed to pass the IB (this sort of plan, while initially very attractive I warned him, with personal experience from Calculus III, is generally not a good strategy for exam success). His instinct was to go to the IBO website where he searched in vain for the details for about 10 minutes. I launched wikipedia and found the answer almost immediately.

A New Math Study

So a new study is forthcoming from the government on the state of math education in the US. You can read an interesting article about it in the NY Times here. It suggests that common ground must be found between constructivist and more traditional direct instruction approaches. This is no surprise, I like to think I am pretty constructivist, but I still find myself at the board sometimes helping the students get their heads around what we have been learning or solidifying connections between the different areas of a topic we have been studying. My current batch of students are surprisingly eager to learn how to do everything by hand (1) so sometimes I will also get up front and show them how to do certain problems on their calculators and encourage them to try these approaches.
These math wars have been going on for a long time. I fondly remember my first year teaching at John Stark in NH. Right out of college and gung-ho I had all my kids write weekly math journals (2). The best outcome of this was a long dialog I had back and forth with one of my students, Matt Corsetti. Matt had found some articles from the California group Mathematically Correct on the internet and was wondering what was up since we were doing some of this "bad" stuff they talked about in our class. It was cool to discover how fruitful discussions could be with students. I find these conversations, whether about learning, the classroom environment, or whatever, keep me connected, inform my teaching, and improve my practice. This is something I try to do as much as possible now, even though I am not currently doing it through journals.

(1) This is probably because the IB has changed and now includes includes a non-calculator part so none of us are completely sure exactly what kinds of questions we need to be ready to do by hand.

(2) This, by the way, was not the most popular set of assignments I ever came up with and not one I would necessarily recommend for first year teachers -although now the lugging of journals could be done away with and kids could write blogs which teachers could evaluate painlessly with an RSS reader