artdiamondblog.com – Page 405 – Art Diamond's web log

We Worry Most About What We Cannot Control

(p. D7) Studies have compared Americans’ perceived ranking of dangers with the rankings of real dangers, measured either by actual accident figures or by estimated numbers of averted accidents. It turns out that we exaggerate the risks of events that are beyond our control, that cause many deaths at once or that kill in spectacular ways — crazy gunmen, terrorists, plane crashes, nuclear radiation, genetically modified crops. At the same time, we underestimate the risks of events that we can control (“That would never happen to me — I’m careful”) and of events that kill just one person in a mundane way.

For the full commentary, see:
JARED DIAMOND. “ESSAY; That Daily Shower Can Be a Killer.” The New York Times (Tues., January 28, 2013): D1 & D7.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date January 28, 2013.)

Faculty Unions Oppose MOOCs that Might Cost Them Their Jobs in Five to Seven Years

“Sebastian Thrun, a research professor at Stanford, is Udacity’s chief executive officer.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) SAN JOSE, Calif. — Dazzled by the potential of free online college classes, educators are now turning to the gritty task of harnessing online materials to meet the toughest challenges in American higher education: giving more students access to college, and helping them graduate on time.
. . .
Here at San Jose State, . . . , two pilot programs weave material from the online classes into the instructional mix and allow students to earn credit for them.
“We’re in Silicon Valley, we (p. A3) breathe that entrepreneurial air, so it makes sense that we are the first university to try this,” said Mohammad Qayoumi, the university’s president. “In academia, people are scared to fail, but we know that innovation always comes with the possibility of failure. And if it doesn’t work the first time, we’ll figure out what went wrong and do better.”
. . .
Dr. Qayoumi favors the blended model for upper-level courses, but fully online courses like Udacity’s for lower-level classes, which could be expanded to serve many more students at low cost. Traditional teaching will be disappearing in five to seven years, he predicts, as more professors come to realize that lectures are not the best route to student engagement, and cash-strapped universities continue to seek cheaper instruction.
“There may still be face-to-face classes, but they would not be in lecture halls,” he said. “And they will have not only course material developed by the instructor, but MOOC materials and labs, and content from public broadcasting or corporate sources. But just as faculty currently decide what textbook to use, they will still have the autonomy to choose what materials to include.”
. . .
Any wholesale online expansion raises the specter of professors being laid off, turned into glorified teaching assistants or relegated to second-tier status, with only academic stars giving the lectures. Indeed, the faculty unions at all three California higher education systems oppose the legislation requiring credit for MOOCs for students shut out of on-campus classes.
. . .
“Our ego always runs ahead of us, making us think we can do it better than anyone else in the world,” Dr. Ghadiri said. “But why should we invent the wheel 10,000 times? This is M.I.T., No. 1 school in the nation — why would we not want to use their material?”
There are, he said, two ways of thinking about what the MOOC revolution portends: “One is me, me, me — me comes first. The other is, we are not in this business for ourselves, we are here to educate students.”

For the full story, see:
TAMAR LEWIN. “Colleges Adapt Online Courses to Ease Burden.” The New York Times (Tues., April 30, 2013): A1 & A3.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date April 29, 2013.)

“Katie Kormanik preparing to record a statistics course at Udacity, an online classroom instruction provider in Mountain View, Calif.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

Early Societies Were Violent, Superstitious and Unfair

(p. 89) Human nature is malleable. We use our minds to change our values, expectations, and definition of ourselves. We have changed our nature since our hominin days, and once changed, we will continue to change ourselves even more. Our inventions, such as language, writing, law, and science, have ignited a level of progress that is so fundamental and embedded in the present that we now naively expect to see similar good things in the past as well. But much of what we consider “civil” or even “humane” was absent long ago. Early societies were not peaceful but rife with warfare. One of the most common causes of adult death in tribal societies was to be declared a witch or evil spirit. No rational evidence was needed for these superstitious accusations. Lethal atrocities for infractions within a clan were the norm; fairness, as we might think of it, did not extend outside the immediate tribe. Rampant inequality among genders and physical advantage for the strong guided a type of justice few modern people would want applied to them.

Source:
Kelly, Kevin. What Technology Wants. New York: Viking Adult, 2010.

Edison, Not Muybridge, Remains the Father of Hollywood

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. A13) Wish it though we might, this strangely off-center Briton isn’t really the Father of Hollywood, nor even a distant progenitor of “Avatar.” The famous time-lapse images that he took for Stanford, proving that a horse does take all four hoofs off the ground while galloping–and the tens of thousands of photographs that he went on to make of birds flying and people sneezing or bending over and picking things up–were soon so comprehensively overtaken by newer technologies (lenses, shutters, celluloid) that his stature as a proto-movie-maker was soon reduced to a way-station. His contribution was technically interesting but hardly seminal at all. The tragic reality is that Thomas Edison, with whom Muybridge was friendly enough to propose collaboration, retains the laurels–though, as Mr. Ball points out with restrained politeness, Muybridge might have fared better had he been aware of Edison’s reputation for “borrowing the work of others and not returning it.”

For the full review, see:
SIMON WINCHESTER. “BOOKSHELF; Lights, Camera, Murder; The time-lapse photos Muybridge took in the 19th century were technically innovative, but they didn’t make him the Father of Hollywood.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., February 6, 2013): A13.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date February 6, 2013.)

The book under review is:
Ball, Edward. The Inventor and the Tycoon: A Gilded Age Murder and the Birth of Moving Pictures. New York: Doubleday, 2013.

World Population Growth Rate “Expected to Hit Zero Around 2070”

(p. C4) In the 1960s, some experts feared an exponentially accelerating population explosion, and in 1969, the State Department envisaged 7.5 billion people by the year 2000. In 1994, the United Nations’ medium estimate expected the seven-billion milestone to arrive around 2009. Compared with most population forecasts made in the past half century, the world keeps undershooting.

The growth rate of world population has halved since the ’60s and is now expected to hit zero around 2070, with population around 10 billion, though some news outlets prefer to focus on the U.N.’s “high” estimate that it “could” reach 15 billion. The truth is, nobody can know, but if it’s below 10 billion in 2100, we will have only increased in numbers by 1.5 times in the 21st century, compared with a fourfold increase in the 20th.

For the full commentary, see:
MATT RIDLEY. “MIND & MATTER; Who’s Afraid of Seven Billion People?” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., October 29, 2011): C4.

Tesla CTO Straubel Likes Biography of Tesla

J.B. Straubel, Chief Technology Officer of Tesla Motors. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 2) J. B. Straubel is a founder and the chief technical officer of Tesla Motors in Palo Alto, Calif. The company makes electric vehicles that some compare to Apple products in terms of obsessive attention to design, intuitive user interface and expense.

READING I like to read biographies of interesting people, mostly scientists and engineers. Right now, it’s “Steve Jobs,” by Walter Isaacson. One of my favorites biographies was “Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla,” by Marc Seifer, which I read even before Tesla Motors started.
. . .
WATCHING I really like the movie “October Sky.” It’s about a guy who grew up in a little coal-mining town around the time of Sputnik. He fell in love with the idea of building rockets and the movie follows him through his high school years when he’s building rockets and eventually he ends up becoming an engineer at NASA. I watch it every year or so. It’s inspirational. I always come out of it wanting to work harder.

For the full interview, see:
KATE MURPHY. “DOWNLOAD; J. B. Straubel.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., April 7, 2013): 2.
(Note: ellipsis added; bold in original.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date April 6, 2013.)

Cities Provide Children “Options for Their Future”

(p. 85) As Suketu Mehta, author of Maximum City (about Mumbai), says, “Why would anyone leave a brick house in the village with its two mango trees and its view of small hills in the East to come here?” Then he answers: “So that someday the eldest son can buy two rooms in Mira Road, at the northern edges of the city. And the younger one can move beyond that, to New Jersey. Discomfort is an investment.”
Then Mehta continues: “For the young person in an Indian village, the call of Mumbai isn’t just about money. It’s also about freedom.” Stewart Brand recounts this summation of the magnetic pull of cities by activist Kavita Ramdas: “In the village, all there is for a woman is to obey her husband and relatives, pound millet, and sing. If she moves to town, she can get a job, start a business, and get education for her children.” The Bedouin of Arabia were once seemingly the freest people on Earth, roaming the great Empty Quarter at will, under a tent of stars and no one’s thumb. But they are rapidly quitting their nomadic life and (p. 86) hustling into drab, concrete-block apartments in exploding Gulf-state ghettos. As reported by Donovan Webster in National Geographic, they stable their camels and goats in their ancestral village, because the bounty and attraction of the herder’s life still remain for them. The Bedouin are lured, not pushed, to the city because, in their own words: “We can always go into the desert to taste the old life. But this [new] life is better than the old way. Before there was no medical care, no schools for our children.” An eighty-year-old Bedouin chief sums it up better than I could: “The children will have more options for their future.”

Source:
Kelly, Kevin. What Technology Wants. New York: Viking Adult, 2010.
(Note: italics, an bracketed “new,” in original.)

Paul Allen’s Account of the Founding of Microsoft

Source of book image: http://www.entrepreneur.com/dbimages/slideshow/idea-man-paul-allen.jpg

(p. C6) The first half of “Idea Man” sets forth Mr. Allen’s version of the Microsoft creation myth, depicting Mr. Gates as a petulant, ambitious and money-minded mogul-to-be and Mr. Allen as an underappreciated visionary. Pictures of them from the 1970s and early ’80s also tell this story, making Mr. Allen look like a hirsute, powerful older brother and Mr. Gates like a kid.
. . .
“Idea Man” is long overdue. It turns out to be as remote, yet as surpassingly strange, as its author, whose receipt of a diagnosis of Stage 4 non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2009 has made it that much more important for him to tell his story. Though it is written in the smoothly proficient style of many a collaborator-assisted memoir, it is a book filled with wild extremes: breakthrough, breakup, power, indulgence, blue-sky innovation. And it winds up offering Mr. Allen’s guarded, partial answer to a universal question: what if you could make your wildest dreams come true?

For the full review, see:
JANET MASLIN. “BOOKS OF THE TIMES; The Reclusive Other Half of Microsoft’s Odd Couple Breaks His Silence.” The New York Times (Tues., April 19, 2011): C6.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date April 18, 2011.)

The book under review is:
Allen, Paul. Idea Man: A Memoir by the Cofounder of Microsoft. New York: Portfolio, 2011.

MOOCs “Will Really Scale” Once Credible Credentialing Process Is Mastered

A “MOOC” is a “massive open online course.”

(p. 1) Last May I wrote about Coursera — co-founded by the Stanford computer scientists Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng — just after it opened. Two weeks ago, I went back out to Palo Alto to check in on them. When I visited last May, about 300,000 people were taking 38 courses taught by Stanford professors and a few other elite universities. Today, they have 2.4 million students, taking 214 courses from 33 universities, including eight international ones.

Anant Agarwal, the former director of M.I.T.’s artificial intelligence lab, is now president of edX, a nonprofit MOOC that M.I.T. and Harvard are jointly building. Agarwal told me that since May, some 155,000 students from around the world have taken edX’s first course: an M.I.T. intro class on circuits. “That is greater than the total number of M.I.T. alumni in its 150-year history,” he said.
. . .
(p. 11) As we look to the future of higher education, said the M.I.T. president, L. Rafael Reif, something that we now call a “degree” will be a concept “connected with bricks and mortar” — and traditional on-campus experiences that will increasingly leverage technology and the Internet to enhance classroom and laboratory work. Alongside that, though, said Reif, many universities will offer online courses to students anywhere in the world, in which they will earn “credentials” — certificates that testify that they have done the work and passed all the exams. The process of developing credible credentials that verify that the student has adequately mastered the subject — and did not cheat — and can be counted on by employers is still being perfected by all the MOOCs. But once it is, this phenomenon will really scale.
I can see a day soon where you’ll create your own college degree by taking the best online courses from the best professors from around the world — some computing from Stanford, some entrepreneurship from Wharton, some ethics from Brandeis, some literature from Edinburgh — paying only the nominal fee for the certificates of completion. It will change teaching, learning and the pathway to employment. “There is a new world unfolding,” said Reif, “and everyone will have to adapt.”

For the full commentary, see:
THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN. “Revolution Hits the Universities.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., January 27, 2013): 1 & 11.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date January 26, 2013.)

When Howard Phillips Was Told He Could Not Dismantle His Agency, He Resigned

“Mr. Phillips [on left] was named the head of the Office of Economic Opportunity in 1973 during President Richard M. Nixon’s administration.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT obituary quoted and cited below.

(p. A24) Howard J. Phillips, a pillar of conservative activism who ran for president three times on the ticket of a political party he helped found, died . . . at his home in Vienna, Va. He was 72.

. . .
Mr. Phillips’s integrity as a conservative was on display in President Richard M. Nixon’s administration. In early 1973, the president signaled his intention to withhold financing from the Office of Economic Opportunity, an antipoverty agency with roots in President Lyndon B. Johnson’s war on poverty. The president named Mr. Phillips acting director and charged him with dismantling it.
“I believe Richard Nixon epitomizes the American dream and represents all that is great in America,” Mr. Phillips said at the time.
Nixon was unable to carry out his plans, however, after Democrats successfully sued to prevent him from starving an agency that Congress had authorized. And when Nixon yielded and continued to finance Johnson’s Great Society programs, Mr. Phillips considered the president to have broken his word and resigned.

For the full obituary, see:
BRUCE WEBER. “Howard J. Phillips, Stalwart Conservative, Dies at 72.” The New York Times (Thurs., April 25, 2013): A24.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed words in caption, added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date April 23, 2013.)

Modern Cities Are “Successful Former Slums” that Allowed “Vibrant Economic Activity”

(p. 82) Babylon, London, and New York all had teeming ghettos of unwanted settlers erecting shoddy shelters with inadequate hygiene and engaging in dodgy dealings. Historian Bronislaw Geremek states that “slums constituted a large part of the urban landscape” of Paris in the Middle Ages. Even by the 1780s, when Paris was at its peak, nearly 20 percent of its residents did not have a “fixed abode”–that is, they lived in shacks. In a familiar complaint about medieval French cities, a gentleman from that time noted: “Several families inhabit one house. A (p. 83) weaver’s family may be crowded into a single room, where they huddle around a fireplace.” That refrain is repeated throughout history. A century ago Manhattan was home to 20,000 squatters in self-made housing. Slab City alone, in Brooklyn (named after the use of planks stolen from lumber mills), contained 10,000 residents in its slum at its peak in the 1880s. In the New York slums, reported the New York Times in 1858, “nine out of ten of the shanties have only one room, which does not average over twelve feet square, and this serves all the purposes of the family.”
San Francisco was built by squatters. As Rob Neuwirth recounts in his eye-opening book Shadow Cities, one survey in 1855 estimated that “95 percent of the property holders in [San Francisco] would not be able to produce a bona fide legal title to their land.” Squatters were everywhere, in the marshes, sand dunes, military bases. One eyewitness said, “Where there was a vacant piece of ground one day, the next saw it covered with half a dozen tents or shanties.” Philadelphia was largely settled by what local papers called “squatlers.” As late as 1940, one in five citizens in Shanghai was a squatter. Those one million squatters stayed and kept upgrading their slum so that within one generation their shantytown became one of the first twenty-first-century cities.
That’s how it works. This is how all technology works. A gadget begins as a junky prototype and then progresses to something that barely works. The ad hoc shelters in slums are upgraded over time, infrastructure is extended, and eventually makeshift services become official. What was once the home of poor hustlers becomes, over the span of generations, the home of rich hustlers. Propagating slums is what cities do, and living in slums is how cities grow. The majority of neighborhoods in almost every modern city are merely successful former slums. The squatter cities of today will become the blue-blood neighborhoods of tomorrow. This is already happening in Rio and Mumbai today.
Slums of the past and slums of today follow the same description. The first impression is and was one of filth and overcrowding. In a ghetto a thousand years ago and in a slum today shelters are haphazard and dilapidated. The smells are overwhelming. But there is vibrant economic activity.

Source:
Kelly, Kevin. What Technology Wants. New York: Viking Adult, 2010.
(Note: italics, and bracketed “San Francisco” in original.)