Over the past few years I have entirely neglected the book review section of this site, and the truth is that I have hardly had time to read in the past year until a couple of weeks ago, but I’m going to make an effort to revive the site, beginning with a lengthy Attributing Authorship by Harold Love, reproduced below for your convenience.
Alternate Browser
After hearing some positive feedback, I’ve decided to try out the Opera browser for the next week. I’ve been using Firefox, and I loooooove tabbed browsing, but it leaks memory like a sieve, at least for me. Opera, at first glance, seems to have many of the same nice features, plus it has a built-in setting that you can close your browser and have it reopen to the same set of tabs – it is possible there is a plug-in for Firefox that does this, but I haven’t seen it yet. Opera is acting a little sluggish for me, but Iit’s possible that’s just my wireless connection being cranky tonight.
Expect to hear back from me next week about my thoughts after a week of use. I will say that I really like how easy all of the browsers make it to transfer your bookmarks back and forth between them – way nicer than the bad old days….
Prehistoric Crafting
The latest issue of Knitty featured an adorable pattern for stuffed nautiloids, and I couldn’t resist. It’s a suitable pattern for using up scrap yarn, and it is very easy. I liked that you stuff the shell as you go along, because it leaves very little finishing to do at the end. You can even get away with just shoving your loose ends inside after you knot them off. I had a bit of a struggle deciding on the placement for the tentacles, but in the end I’m pleased with how this little guy turned out.
For this particular nautiloid, I used Red Heart worsted weight acrylic leftovers, with a dark green head and alternating rows of red and orange for the body. I wasn’t sure how the alternated color rows would look – they’re sort of hard to see even in the pattern images, but it really adds to the spiral effect. The biggest tip I have for making the pattern is to make sure you knit fairly tight as you go along, so that the stuffing doesn’t show through, and then to stuff firmly, so the spiral shape really holds up.
Lesson Marketplace
There are so many interesting things about the lesson plan marketplace site described in this article. Absolutely, teachers getting tips from other teachers instead of textbook publishers and other major corporations is a smart idea. At the college level, the mailing lists I am on for computing education often field requests for class activities of a certain style or around a certain topic, and they have some associated web repositories. But there are some things that strike me as odd about the auction model.
First, I’m just surprised that there isn’t already a free website doing this – whether ad supported or maintained by a teacher’s organization. Discussion boards have been around forever, and would allow interactive development as well as outright sharing.
Now, a discussion board model wouldn’t have teachers getting paid for the lesson plans they offered. But it seems that, given the sign-up fee and the very low prices teachiers are offering their plans for, most people will just make back their sign-up fee. In a weird way, offering these plans for one or two dollars seems to actually devalue the teacher’s work. If it is something clever enough that someone else would want to buy it, I’m sure it took some time to create and write up. Suppose the idea sold for $1 only took an hour to create – even if we figure the teacher has used the plan themselves so doesn’t expect to be paid for the full value of their time in development, they are also saving the other teachier an hour of their time (at least, since presumably they are looking for a plan because they are having trouble coming up with something on their own for that particular topic). Either way you look at it, you get a radical devaluing of the time and effort to develop a lesson. The article quotes one teacher as projecting he may make enough to eat out an extra time each month – if so, that may be enough money to be worth while. But there’s a value at which I think there is gerater value in having the support of a community where one can share freely and borrow freely – the gap between giving the plan away and charging $1 for it isn’t that large, but freely sharing doesn’t place any market value on the item being shared.
I’m also curious, and really don’t know the answer to this – do schools consider the lesson plans a teacher develoips while working for them to be their property, or does the teacher really maintain absolute control over them, as suggested by this new site? Because I would have thought that schools might have intellectual property rights on work produced for use at a school while in that school’s employ. I would certainly imagine that schools would decline to pursue those rights for the small amounts of money being exchanged here, but wonder if that is another force in keeping the prices down – having them low enough that schools don’t feel it is worthwhile to get involved.
Convolutions in Informal Math
A mathematics instructor makes an attempt to explain why 0.999… = 1 in their blog, and tackles some of the classic explanations as well as many arguments in the comments [via Clicked]. What interested me most was that the writer was frustrated that people can’t accept the arguments, buit buries the real proof of this fact at the end. Instead of laying out from the start the question of what does it mean to say that a repeating decimal is equal to an integer, point out that it has to do with computing a limit, and going from there, the explanation starts with multiplying x=0.9… by 10 to get 10x = 9.9… and subtracting the one equation from the other to find that x=1.
This approach feel vaguely like the kind of argument that actually leads people not to believe the fact is true – it feels like a “trick”. And there is a catch-22 in play. On the one hand, we have the desire to educate people with an innacurate mathematical intuition. However, if we show them the proof involving a limit, there is the real risk that they will zone out, feeling that they don’t “get” math and limits are hard and so on. So, one falls back on an “intuitive” argument, or in fact here a number of different intuitive arguments. And I suspect the average person feels that sure, these magical calculations show that 0.9…=1, but probably some other magical calculations show that they aren’t the same, and there is no real convincing happening, in addition to people becoming even more cynical about “numbers lying”.
Which, I guess my point is that I kind of like the Ask Dr. Math approach (linked in the comments of the original post) which just tackles the limit proof head on, in fairly clear terms I think. It would be nice if it said more about a repeating decimal equaling the limit than just it “is understood to mean”, because that is the crux of the problem – first understand what it means for the equation to be true or false,and then the truth or falseness falls into place fairly quickly.
Play nice, Apple
This Slate dissection of the new Apple ad campaign says pretty much what I was starting to think about the ads. They’re funny and I enjoy them, but over the past few times I have seen them, I’ve started to feel sorry for the PC guy. I want him to point out, in the ad about having fun, that he’s going to play the latest shiny new computer games that aren’t yet out on the Mac. Or that at least when the cable modem guy shows up to turn on his internet, he’ll know how to get the IP address on a PC.
I mean, I’m actually partial to the Apple side of the argument, and have seen many examples recently of the same task going smoother on a Mac than a PC. But I think that some portion of the “wow, it’s all so easy all of a sudden” factor people have when the move to a Mac is that they are moving to a new computer.
Damn it Apple – Macs are good geek computers too! You can build databases and write code on them! Give the geek guy some love!
Nerdvana
The editing is a little bit shakey, but Star Trek vs. Star Wars is still good Friday fun [via Vidiotbox]. Of course, about half the geek community would prefer a version with Kirk – it certainly would end differently. We probably ought to start placing bets about which franchise will sic their lawyers on this first….
Soccer Spin
In a bit of timeliness, I share Why Goalies Hate the New World Cup Soccer Ball [via Clicked]. I have to admit that the physics behind how a ball spins is one of those things that has just never made intuitive sense to me, and it surprises me that people are able to actually think out the correct degree and speed of spin for a particular situation on the fly, when I struggle to do so with a pencil and paper. At least in hockey there is only one axis of rotation to worry about!
Robot Safety and Ethics
Perhaps most surprising to me is that the latest discussion I’ve come across about ethical concerns with introducing robots into non-industrial settings is from someplace as mainstream as the Economist, but it’s actually a nice summary of upcoming concerns [via Slashdot]. The article indicates that there have been many (in the 100s?) industrial robot accidents in the past 25 years, but the concern discussed at a recent European Robotics Symposium is what happens when robots move out of the industrial setting and interact with the general population. Major questions the aticle pulls out include:
Should robots that are strong enough or heavy enough to crush people be allowed into homes? Is “system malfunction” a justifiable defence for a robotic fighter plane that contravenes the Geneva Convention and mistakenly fires on innocent civilians? And should robotic sex dolls resembling children be legally allowed?
These are, obviously, very different questions. The first one is, I think, mostly prompted by efforts to build living-assistant robots that will “live” with elderly people and help them around the house, make sure they take medications, and offer companionship. It’s that last piece that raises another, important question which isn’t mentioned here – what happens to society if we bring robots into it in a personal way? If people bemoan the negative impact of the internet on community, what will the impact of personal companion robots be? Is it worth it, or are these robots a crutch for us not taking responsibility, as a community, for taking care of each other?
What I particularly like about this article, as compared to others I have read, is that after all of the slightly-hysterical talk of what will happen when we have robots around us, and the ubiquitous mention of Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, the article ends with a very level-headed discussion of why these issues are not that different from safety concerns raised with other appliances we already have in the home. AI hasn’t gotten close to building a robot that would really require this type of concern. Robots today may be autonomous but they are not intelligent, so we are far from worrying that they might act of their own volition instead of ours.
Bank Hacking
This is a great story of social engineering, wherein USB drives are “dropped” around a bank and employees pick them up and plug them into bank computers [via Slashdot]. This was done as part of a security audit, and what is particuarly interesting is that the employees knew a security audit was being done and knew that social engineering attacks were going to be attempted. The results:
Of the 20 USB drives we planted, 15 were found by employees, and all had been plugged into company computers. The data we obtained helped us to compromise additional systems, and the best part of the whole scheme was its convenience. We never broke a sweat. Everything that needed to happen did, and in a way it was completely transparent to the users, the network, and credit union management.
This is reminiscent of a similar social engineering test I read about maybe a year ago, where free CDs were given out on the street. The lure of free stuff is hard to combat. And, thinking about it, if I found a USB drive left in my classroom, I very well might put it in my computer to see if I could identify who it belonged to. It’s the old tension between perfect security requiring people to eliminate their instincts for trust and helpfulness.
I wonder what would happen if you tried the experiment with something dropped around a place that might be biologically contaminated – pieces of candy, say. How many people would take it and eat it?