Ramblings & ephemera
From Jonathan M. Gitlin’s “Does ideology trump facts? Studies say it often does” (Ars Technica: 24 September 2008):
We like to think that people will be well informed before making important decisions, such as who to vote for, but the truth is that’s not always the case. Being uninformed is one thing, but having a [...]
Posted on October 6th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: education, history, politics, science | No Comments »
From Laura Miller’s “The heretic” (Salon: 25 August 2008):
Still, the mental powers of Bruno and his fellow memory artists seem almost superhuman today. The basic principle, Rowland explains, is simple enough, “to link words with images.” Nevertheless, the structures employed were mind-boggling: vast, elaborate patterns and nested wheels within wheels (like the color wheels used [...]
Posted on September 29th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: education, history | No Comments »
From Russell L. Ackoff & Daniel Greenberg’s Turning Learning Right Side Up: Putting Education Back on Track (2008):
A classic story illustrates very well the potential cost of placing a problem in a disciplinary box. It involves a multistoried office building in New York. Occupants began complaining about the poor elevator service provided in [...]
Posted on September 18th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, True Stories, science | No Comments »
From Lisa Vaas’ “Are Campuses Flooded with Zombified Student PCs?” (eWeek: 22 October 2007):
Rather, bot herders have sophisticated technology in place that can detect how fast a bot’s connection is. If that connection changes over time - if, say, a student is poking around at her parent’s house with dial-up all summer and then comes [...]
Posted on March 31st, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Webster U: InfoSec Management, education, security | No Comments »
From Peter Norvig’s “Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years” (2001):
Researchers ([John R. Hayes, Complete Problem Solver (Lawrence Erlbaum) 1989.], [Benjamin Bloom (ed.), Developing Talent in Young People (Ballantine) 1985.]) have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition, painting, piano playing, [...]
Posted on September 30th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, Teaching, Technology, business, education | Comments Off
From Clifton Leaf’s “The Law of Unintended Consequences” (Fortune: 19 September 2005):
The Supreme Court’s decision in 1980 to allow for the patenting of living organisms opened the spigots to individual claims of ownership over everything from genes and protein receptors to biochemical pathways and processes. Soon, research scientists were swooping into patent offices around the [...]
Posted on July 30th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, business, history, law | Comments Off
From Clifton Leaf’s “The Law of Unintended Consequences” (Fortune: 19 September 2005):
For a century or more, the white-hot core of American innovation has been basic science. And the foundation of basic science has been the fluid exchange of ideas at the nation’s research universities. It has always been a surprisingly simple equation: Let scientists do [...]
Posted on July 30th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, business, history, law, politics | Comments Off
From John Taylor Gatto’s “Against School” (Harper’s Magazine: September 2003):
Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural [...]
Posted on July 28th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, education, history, politics | Comments Off
From Paul Graham’s “Undergraduation” (March 2005):
The social sciences are also fairly bogus, because they’re so much influenced by intellectual fashions. If a physicist met a colleague from 100 years ago, he could teach him some new things; if a psychologist met a colleague from 100 years ago, they’d just get into an ideological argument. Yes, [...]
Posted on July 13th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: education | Comments Off
From Paul Graham’s “Undergraduation” (March 2005):
Thomas Huxley said “Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.” Most universities aim at this ideal.
But what’s everything? To me it means, all that people learn in the course of working honestly on hard problems. …
Working on hard problems is not, by itself, enough. Medieval alchemists were [...]
Posted on July 13th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, education, history | Comments Off
From Paul Graham’s “Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas” (April 2005):
Why did so few applicants really think about what customers want? I think the problem with many, as with people in their early twenties generally, is that they’ve been trained their whole lives to jump through predefined hoops. They’ve spent 15-20 years solving problems other [...]
Posted on July 13th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, education, history | Comments Off
From Paul Graham’s “Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas” (April 2005):
This summer, as an experiment, some friends and I are giving seed funding to a bunch of new startups. It’s an experiment because we’re prepared to fund younger founders than most investors would. That’s why we’re doing it during the summer– so even college students [...]
Posted on July 13th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Uncategorized, business | Comments Off
From Nanette Asimov’s “Software glitch reveals private data for thousands of state’s students” (San Francisco Chronicle: 21 October 2005):
The personal information of tens of thousands of California children — including their names, state achievement test scores, identification numbers and status in gifted or special-needs programs — is open to public view through a security loophole [...]
Posted on July 13th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, Webster U: InfoSec Management, education, security | Comments Off
From Jon Udell’s “Open source education” (InfoWorld: 7 June 2006):
Open source software development, to a degree unmatched by any other modern profession, offers apprentices the opportunity to watch journeymen and masters at work, to interact with them, and to learn how they think, work, succeed, and fail. Transparency and accountability govern not only the production [...]
Posted on July 13th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, business | Comments Off
From Nadya Labi’s “Want Your Kid to Disappear?” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2004):
RICK STRAWN IS AN EX-COP WHO STARTED HIS COMPANY in 1988 to help police officers find off-duty work guarding construction sites. Ten years later, he was asked by a member of his United Methodist church to transport the churchgoer’s son to Tranquility Bay in [...]
Posted on June 4th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, education, law | Comments Off
From Mihaly Csiksczentmihalyi’s “Flow: The Psychology Of Optimal Experience“:
Pleasure by itself does not bring happiness. We can experience pleasure (e.g. eating, sleeping, sex) without an investment of psychic energy. Enjoyment on the other hand, happens only as a result of an unusual amount of attention. Pleasure is fleeting and, unlike enjoyment, does [...]
Posted on May 8th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, education | Comments Off
From “Unskilled and Unaware of It“:
It seems that the reason for this phenomenon is obvious: The more incompetent someone is in a particular area, the less qualified that person is to assess anyone’s skill in that space, including their own. When one fails to recognize that he or she has performed poorly, the individual is [...]
Posted on March 26th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, science | Comments Off
From “Why a Socio-Technical System?“:
You have divined by now that a socio-technical system is a mixture of people and technology. It is, in fact, a much more complex mixture. Below, we outline many of the items that may be found in an STS. In the notes, we will make the case that many of the [...]
Posted on March 3rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Social Software, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society | Comments Off
From Carl Frappaolo’s “Four basic functions” in Computerworld (23 February 1998)
The four basic functions of knowledge management are externalization, internalization, intermediation and cognition …
Externalization is capturing knowledge in an external repository and organizing it according to a classification framework or taxonomy. At the low end are technologies that simply provide a means to capture knowledge [...]
Posted on November 14th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: education | Comments Off
From EDUCAUSE Review, February 2000:
There are 3,700 institutions and 15 million students in the United States today facing the challenge of integrating the past with the present, questioning how to mold the traditional model of higher education into a form that will not become obsolete in a world awash in an information explosion driven by [...]
Posted on November 13th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, education | Comments Off