Cramping Our Children’s Creativity

The other day, I was helping my girlfriend with her calculus homework and there was a true/false question about the chain rule:

          

TRUE/FALSE: To apply the chain rule to sin(x^2) we select f(x)=x^2 and

g(x)=sin(x).

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My initial reaction was “True! Obviously! g(f(x))=sin(x^2) where g(x)=sin(x) and f(x)=x^2”…..but, she quickly pointed out to me that it was false because her teacher had taught her that it was always f(g(x)), which would mean that the question implies sin^2(x) not sin(x^2). And therein lies the problem; we give homeworks with trick questions to check if students have memorized formulas rather than harboring creativity.



We focus so much on making tough subjects like math accessible to every student that we make them actually more difficult to understand. Why do we need to explain the chain rule in terms of d/dx[f(g(x))]= g’(x)(f’(g(x))) when we could much more simply explain it as the derivative of the inside multiplied by the derivative of the outside, e.g. f(x)= sin(x^2); f’(x)= 2xcos(x^2)? A formula list is far more difficult to understand than learning the concepts behind them. We need to make concepts relatable and engaging. A sequence of numbers and letters falls out of our heads as soon as the exam is finished, but remembering that velocity is the derivative of position is something we never forget.  Understanding how it works is far more important than just worrying about being able to solve it.



It reminds me of when I was in middle school and was learning algebra. My teacher got mad at me for skipping steps when solving simple problems. She would remind me “the x stands alone!!” even though I knew how to solve the problem and was saving myself some work and writing. I am 100% for teaching people how to solve problems so that they have a template, especially if they are struggling with a concept. I struggled with integration by parts last fall and the quick formula int(vdu)=vu-int(udv) saved me on several quizzes.



However, when those helpful templates begin being taught in place of understanding, I have a problem.  We shouldn’t punish students for not following the pre-prescribed template, because this conditions them not to dare to try different methods for problem solving. What this could lead to is a country of calculators rather than innovators. I hope that, in a few decades, when I have children they will be taught to use formulas as a tool for quick problem solving, but not to ruin their ability to think creatively and effectively, because that is what STEM is all about! Thanks for reading!

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Hazards of Cell Phone Use

Do cell phones cause cancer? This question is one that has been put on the back burner of many people and researcher’s minds for decades. Maybe our dependency on our electronic devices is causing us to push off the inevitable truth. With all of the other carcinogens that are present in the world it makes it hard to determine the root cause of our cancers. All of these dilemmasare ones that are striking through scientists and interested consumer’s minds.

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According to the World Health Organization cell phones have now been placed in the carcinogenic hazard group. To put this into perspective, this category contains lead, engine exhaust, and chloroform. There are no definite effects that will lead researchers into claiming that cell phone use leads to cancer, as of now. Glioma and acoustic neuroma brain cancer have showed a link with cellular devices, but there is not enough evidence to prove anything for sure. Drawing conclusions for cancers will take decades in order to collect enough data.

The type of radiation that a cell phone gives off is one like a microwave. This radiation is called non-ionizing. Dr. Black refers to the use of cell phone by describing it as “cooking the brain”, just as a microwave cooks food. This effect could cause a loss of cognitive memory function as well as cancers and tumors. This is because the temporal lobes are located in close proximity of where we hold our phones.

The reason for the delay in answers is due to the fact that brain cancers generally grow slowly.  Cell phones have not been around and used by the general population for very long. A study did show that those who have used cell phones for ten years have doubled their rate to get brain glioma. Another study showed that using a phone for just 50 minutes artificially stimulates the brain. Scientists have yet to discover the consequences of this stimulation.

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Summer Science – A Blast!

As my second week of my 6 week long Summer Institute for Training in Biostatistics at Boston University comes to an end, I really cannot even begin to process how much I’ve learned in such a short amount of time.

Being part of a program with only 22 people is a great opportunity to make connections as well as get one on one time with the professors, all of whom are incredibly dedicated to making sure we are all prepared for whatever the future holds. Some days we even get to attend a lecture by a guest speaker and then sit with them at lunch picking their brain. As far as I’ve been able to tell so far, it is incredibly wise to follow the saying,  “hang out with people smarter than you.”

Okay, now it’s time to talk about math. As anyone that has ever talked to me for 30 seconds knows, I am crazy about math, so my favorite part of the program so far has clearly been the math! In the first (almost) 2 weeks we have covered basically a semester’s worth of biostatistics in the mornings, followed by instruction in SAS (a statistically software used by most large companies and by many statisticians such as those working on the Framingham Heart Study). After lunch, we work on projects in SAS using data from the Framingham Heart Study (one of the most influential studies in the history of medicine), the Jackson Heart Study, and other miscellaneous studies.  It is a real honor to get to work with data from the Framingham Heart Study, for any statistician, especially for a rising junior in college.

*For anyone confused by what the distinction between biostatistics and statistics is (I was too): Biostatistics is basically statistics for medical and public health research. It is essentially a specific subset of statistics.

I can’t wait to see what else I can learn in the coming weeks and more importantly, how it will help me with future research! It’s safe to say that curious mathematically-oriented kids never grow up, we just go to math camp for adults! Be sure to check out the MAS blogs for more updates!  Next time I’ll talk about our upcoming visit to the Framingham Heart Study (which does not normally allow visitors)!

Thanks for reading!

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Tobacco Control Science Deteriorating to an All-Time Low

Just days after Stan Glantz told the public that his cross-sectional study, which was unable to determine whether youths who use e-cigarettes go on to start smoking or whether smokers are more likely to try e-cigarettes, proves that e-cigarettes are a gateway to a lifetime of smoking addiction, researchers from elsewhere at the University of California are telling the public, based solely on mouse studies, that thirdhand smoke is as harmful as active smoking.

According to an article at Liberty Voice, thirdhand smoke is as deadly as smoking. In other words, if you sit in a room where people have smoked, you might as well be a smoker yourself.

This conclusion comes, by the way, purely from mouse studies in which mice treated with thirdhand smoke in controlled experiments experienced impaired wound healing and other forms of cell damage. Not a single human, clinical study was performed by these researchers to support their conclusion that thirdhand smoke exposure is every bit as bad as active smoking.

According to the article: "Studies are now showing the dangers of smoking, not just that of first and second-hand smoke, but the dangers presented by third-hand smoke. It is that sticky substance that is left behind on the walls, furniture, toys and surfaces after someone smokes indoors. ... The latest research, funded by the Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program, was published by the American Chemical Society on March 16. It states that young children are at high risk when they put toys in their mouth that have been exposed to third-hand smoke. It actually causes DNA damage and poses a risk for developing cancer." ...

"In another recent study, conducted by the University of California and published in PLOS ONE, researchers found that third-hand smoke is dangerous to the lungs and liver, possibly due to inflammation. They also found that it leads to type II diabetes, even when patients are not overweight or obese. Furthermore, they discovered that, while studying mice in a controlled environment, wounds on the skin did not heal as quickly. They determined that the collagen had been damaged. The study claims that third-hand smoke is as big a danger and just as deadly as smoking itself."

The Rest of the Story

The rest of the story is that this is complete garbage.

It is truly depressing to me to watch this - day in and day out.

When the tobacco industry decided - sometime back around 2000 or so - to stop monitoring tobacco control science and to just let us say anything we wanted to - I thought they had made a poor decision. But in retrospect, I think it may have been brilliant. They apparently knew that before long, without the restraints of having to answer to Big Tobacco's public questioning, our science would deteriorate and we would just start saying anything we wanted to. Unrestrained, the tobacco control movement's scientific rigor would fall to such a low level that we would end up discrediting ourselves and undermining our own credibility.

Well, we're there. We're officially there.

I'm sure I'll have more to say about this later. But for now, I'm just too damn depressed.

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Science-Fictional News -- some dark and some hopeful

Shall we start with something positive?  In a world of media flattened by cowardly sameness and copycat repetition, the Syfy Channel  apparently intends to keep the faith and offer us some challenging material, next year. Two
ringworldminiseries will join the previously-announced adaptation of Philip K. Dick's "The Man in the High Castle"-- Larry Niven's "Ringworld" and Arthur C. Clarke's "Childhood's End."  Some other projects sound above-average, as well.  Will a renaissance of creative boldness arise out of …SyFy?

I'll give this to SyFy. They produce a lot of schlock but they also have guts! One result is a ratio of good (and sometimes great) stuff compared to fails that is way above Sturgeon's law.

But our field has also suffered blows, of late. Awful news: the plight and fight of my colleague, the brilliant science fiction author Iain Banks against cancer.  This, piled onto the similar battle of Jay Lake, reminds me of how I felt when we lost -- so prematurely -- Charles Sheffield… and Octavia Butler and Robert Forward and others who have passed beyond our view in this strange, transitional age, when possibilities can seem so bright but the grinding fate of our cave ancestors still rules our path.

== Sci fi miscellany ==

Book People - Austin's best book store - tallied their top ten list for this year's Hugos. Ah well. Late, but flattering. Thanks!  "In his usual fashion David Brin has written an understated masterpiece that is a truly amazing complex piece of literature.  Brin is a fantastic writer who has gone back to the well and delivered an absolute gem..."  Ah well, it is a year crowded with wonders!  Nominees for the 2013 Hugo Award for best in science fiction include novels by John Scalzi, Kim Stanley Robinson, Mira Grant, Lois McMaster Bujold and Saladin Ahmed -- to be awarded at the World Science Fiction Convention in San Antonio in August.

Back to indie media… "New" looks like it could be a terrific short sci fi film with tons of heart. Indie screenwriter and producer John Harden is trying to finance it kickstarter style and has created a really sweet intro-preview-pitch you may enjoy.  This is the path that may take us to a realm of bold new (even sometimes optimistic) stories that aren't tired rehashes.

StandOnZanzibarA terrific retrospective review of John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar (1969) re-introduces

 that epochal and stunning science fiction novel to new clades of younger sf readers.  Without question, it is one of the great literary achievements of our field and possibly of any and all genres.  I deliberately modeled both EARTH and EXISTENCE after Brunner's masterpiece, emulating his vividly broad-canvas approach and his ethos, while avoiding a few small mistakes… (and inventing my own, I am sure.) Lately, similar credit was acknowledged by Kim Stanley Robinson. If you haven't read Stand on Zanzibar, do so.  Put aside any other recreational reading.  You will thank me.

The conspiracy theory behind the destruction of the Death Star. Was it an inside job? Watch a hilarious (and

Confused by the state of publishing, with the last major national bookstore chain in decline and e-books rapidly taking over?  Have a look at a fascinating article about our new world by the bright young SF author (and my sometime collaborator) Jeff Carlson.  Insights galore.

empireAnother bright young SF writer, Adrian Tchaikovsky has a series of quasi-fantasy novels set in a

B007JL6IYU.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_SL300_Then ponder news about Chinese Science Fiction: The Political
Schism between Chinese Science Fiction and Fantasy. It's important, get used to it.  Especially, get ready for the debut, next year, of "The Three Body Problem," a huge science fiction hit in China, by the towering new talent over there, Liu Cixin. I am reading the English translation by our own Ken Liu and enjoying it immensely. No... I mean seriously-immensely. I consider Liu Cixin to be much more than the top science fiction author in China.  When you read him, you'll agree he's one of the best in the world.

smith-people-fell3Meanwhile, is SF finally getting respect in its heartland?  Astonishing. this is the second time in a year that Atlantic has published an essay that is at  least somewhat favorably inclined toward science fiction.  For decades they ran a vendetta against SF, commissioning execrable hit pieces like clockwork.  But this article about the great stylist Cordwainer Smith -- one of my favorite short story writers -- is insightful and should lead many curious minds to our field. 

An added note: Smith (aka Paul Linebarger) was among those who - along with Pierre Boulle and H.G. Wells) pioneered tales about what I have called the "uplift" of higher animals, bestowing upon them the mixed-promethean-mephistofelian gifts of speech and logical thought. My main innovation was not to portray humanity doing this stupidly and cruelly. But I stand on giant shoulders.

== And more sci fi miscellany ==

Language derivation, the tracing of linguistic roots, has finally entered the 21st Century. Computer program finds root words of modern languages.

washapprovedAccording to newflashes popping up around the web, the Washington Academy of Sciences has created a seal of approval for the scientific accuracy of novels. Alas, as my colleague - the sharp Nancy Fulda - points out, there is less here than meets the eye. Kinda disappointing execution of what I (naturally) took to be a very good idea.

Despite being harried by fans of the Most Interesting Man in the World -- (Hey guys, I am the BALD interesting guy) -- I really love that ad campaign.  Now it turns out that the actor who plays the MIMITW - Jonathan Goldsmith - played a red shirt in the original Star Trek series… and lived!  You can imagine the lines.  Or read them on iO9.  My favorite? The Borg want to be assimilated by HIM.

BraveNewWorldThe 1950s radio dramatization of BRAVE NEW WORLD, introduced by Aldous Huxley, is available online.

The High Frontier, Human Colonies in Space, by Gerald K. O'Neill, now free on Kindle.

Choose your next author based on the genre and how he or she looks?  I wish they chose a better picture of me!  The URL seems to say Find...MEAN... author!

How to porpoise like a dolphin...  Water-jet booties that solve all the jet-pack problems. What a great idea... and like the best - obvious in retrospect.

Eric S. Raymond is a personality of some note in the hacker community. His essay on the political movements in science fiction -- while incomplete and two-dimensional - nevertheless is well-balanced and thoughtful.  I went "huh!" a couple of times.

Finally, Bruce Sterling talks a lot about how new media and methods kill older ones: e.g. the death of both bookstores and the personal computer, and he makes some interesting metaphor-parallels with the cliff dwellers in the eleventh century American southwest.  He does this sort of thing very well and I'm glad he is in the world.  I agree with most of it and find the rest interesting, and can shrug aside the preening.  In the end, however, after a very long Chautauqua meal, I think back upon what I had read and ask: what do I know now that I did not know before reading Bruce's speech? That Sergey Brin is brilliant and useful?

I knew that already.

==Looking to the Future==

starshipcentury-300x297Want to spent a few days contemplating the our future in space? Attend the StarShip Century Symposium May 21 and 22 at UCSD. Speakers include Gregory Benford, Neal Stephenson, Freeman Dyson, Vernor Vinge, David Brin, Geoffrey Landis, Allen Steele, Paul Davies, John Cramer, Jill Tarter, Robert Zubrin, Joe Haldeman, and others, as part of the opening ceremonies for the new Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination. Be sure to register to attend.

The ideas of a 100 year program to create a starship will be explored – from the development of an interplanetary economic infrastructure, to the structural requirements, the human factors and speculations on what we might find.

Come, contribute...and find inspiration!

incredibly on-target) satire of conspiracy theory videos in general… that also skewers the childish illogic of the Lucas universe, with its chain of self-indulgent coincidences.  Of course, every point in the video is lifted from one of my riffs in STAR WARS ON TRIAL. (Which is even more on-target and funny, Brin assures you, with a perfectly straight face.)

world containing a huge diversity of  societies, both insect and human. His essay about this diversity of social experiments (on the Tor site) is fascinating.  He also addresses the perennial question: why do so many fantasy tales obsess on inherited oligarchy and kingdoms as a model of governance, which history shows to have been an extremely dumb and unsuccessful pattern, ruining freedom and hopes for most of our ancestors, most of the time. Till we wised up. Very interesting.  Give Adrian a try! 

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ADoctors, Health Systems Experts

The Aspen Institute has announced the first 12-member class of the New Voices Fellowship, a groundbreaking new program designed to amplify expert voices from the developing world in the global development discussion. The 2013-2014 fellows come from 10 countries in Africa: Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, Somalia and Tanzania.


They include the founder of an organization which promotes African-focused children’s literature; a Somali civil war refugee turned youth leader; a primary care expert from Ethiopia; a Cameroonian activist campaigning for women’s rights;  a Malawian health systems expert helping to implement Swaziland’s universal HIV treatment program; the Ghanaian CEO of a technology company addressing social issues in West Africa; a physician working on preventing mother-to-child transmission of HIV in Tanzania; a nonprofit leader from Mali spearheading efforts to boost small-scale farmer income; two activists from Nairobi’s Kibera and Korogocho slums; a doctor and helicopter pilot from Nigeria; and an expert from the Democratic Republic of Congo on health care in Africa’s most remote regions.

These Fellows will undertake a program of intensive media training and mentorship to help them reach a broader global audience through both traditional and new media and speaking engagements.

“All too frequently, the most powerful leaders and practitioners in the developing world do not have access to global communications platforms to tell their stories in their own words,” said Peggy Clark, executive director of Aspen Global Health and Development, and also vice president of policy programs at the Aspen Institute.

“The New Voices Fellows will give us insights into the most critical programs, solutions and innovations based on their own experiences and research.”

Supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the New Voices Fellowship was established in 2013 to bring the essential perspectives of committed development champions from Africa and other parts of the developing world into the global development debate.

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Particle Physics and Cosmology in Auckland

As I mentioned in my last post, I’m now in Auckland. Richard Easther, a repatriated Kiwi who came here from Yale last year to head up the physics department, has organized a workshop on “The LHC, Particle Physics and the Cosmos“, at which I gave a talk this morning.


This is a very different affair to ICHEP. In Melbourne there were 800 or so participants, filling a gigantic conference hall for the plenary talks, whereas there are something like 30 44 participants at this workshop, roughly split between New Zealand academics (faculty, postdocs and students), and those of us from abroad. ICHEP was a terrific conference, but more usually I strongly prefer these small, intimate workshops to huge meetings. They tend to be more focused and I typically seem to leave having learned more from the talks.

This meeting kicked off with a public lecture on Thursday evening, at which Mark Kruse from Duke University gave a skilled account of “Why do we care about the Large Hadron Collider”.

There were something like 400 people at his talk, and the thing that struck me was the quality of the questions that people asked at the end. There was even a question that was essentially about triggers, and the risk that one might miss important physics due to them. As you’ll have seen discussed before, the sheer volume of data produced by each collision at the LHC, combined with the frequency of these collisions means that it is just impossible to save each individual event. Instead, a decision has to be made extremely rapidly whether to save a given event, understanding that doing this means that many other events will then be missed. This decision is based on the expectations we have of the kind of signals that we expect the new physics to exhibit. Of course, a consequence is that there exist possible signals of new physics that will evade these triggers. This is a subtle question and one that I’m surprised to hear asked in a public lecture.

Yesterday the research talks began. The topics have spanned quite a number of topics, including talks from people on ATLAS and CMS on their Higgs, and other results. There have been talks on dark matter, neutrinos, variance in the Hubble flow in cosmology, and a number of other topics, including one on the Phenomenological Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model from Tom Rizzo from SLAC. I particularly enjoyed a talk from Pat Scott, who is a postdoc at McGill, about cosmology with ultracompact minihalos of dark matter. These potentially provide a way to probe the extent to which the statistics of structure formation deviates from that expected from gaussian primordial seeds. As such, it seems that it may provide another way to look at non-gaussianity beyond that we usually think of in the microwave background, and about which we hope to see interesting results from the Planck mission.


This morning Tom Appelquist (Yale) and Jay Wacker (SLAC/Stanford) gave interesting theory talks, and our own JoAnne spoke about the physics that may be probed through a program of physics at the intensity frontier. This afternoon Michele Redi from CERN gave an interesting talk on the implications of a light Higgs for composite models. It is one thing to find the object that breaks the electroweak symmetry, but another to pin down whether it is a fundamental or composite particle. Compositeness is attractive in some ways, since it may provide a way to tackle the hierarchy problem, but finding the Higgs at the rather light mass announced last week presents particular challenges to models in which the Higgs is composite, and leads to some specific predictions. Michele is interested in models in which the Higgs is a pseudo-Goldstone boson and showed that in many such models, naturalness, coupled with a 125 GeV Higgs implies that there should also be new fermions in the model that are quite light, and may be within the reach of the LHC.
Well I’m off to have tea and then chair a parallel session in which there will be a lot of theory talks, about which I may

report soon.
source http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2012/07/13/particle-physics-and-cosmology-in-auckland/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CosmicVarianceBlog+%28Cosmic+Variance%29

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Stars draw atoms closer together

Magnetism may be the secret to a strong marriage between atoms in the atmospheres of stars. Computer simulations show that a previously unknown type of powerful chemical bond should be induced by the stars’ ferocious magnetic fields. If the effect can be harnessed in the lab, ‘magnetized matter’ could be exploited for quantum computing.
Chemists identify two classes of strong molecular bonds: ionic bonds, in which electrons from one atom hop over to another, and covalent bonds, in which electrons are shared between atoms. But Trygve Helgaker, a quantum chemist at the University of Oslo, and his colleagues accidentally discovered a third bonding mechanism when they simulated how atoms should behave under magnetic fields of about 105 tesla — 10,000 times the biggest fields that can be generated on Earth. Their results are


published in Science today1.

White-dwarf stars have huge magnetic fields that could force molecular bonds into powerful new modes.
NASA/ESA/H. Bond (STScI)/M. Barstow (Univ. Leicester)

The team first examined how the lowest energy state, or ground state, of a two-atom hydrogen molecule was distorted by the magnetic field. The dumb-bell-shaped molecule oriented itself parallel to the direction of the field and the bond became shorter and more stable, says Helgaker. When one of the electrons was boosted to an energy level that would normally break the bond, the molecule simply flipped so that it was perpendicular to the field and stayed together.
“We always teach students that when an electron is excited like this, the molecule falls apart,” says Helgaker. “But here we see a new type of bond keeps the atoms hanging together.” The team also reports that a similar effect should occur between helium atoms, which normally don't bond at all.
The atoms are held together by the way their electrons dance around the magnetic-field lines, explains Helgaker. “The way electrons move relative to the field, and their kinetic energy, can become as important for chemical bonding as the electrostatic attraction between the electrons and the nuclei,” he says. Depending on their geometry, molecules will turn to allow electrons to rotate around the direction of the magnetic field.


Star field


If the new states remain bound at very high temperatures, they could well exist in the atmospheres of some white dwarfs and neutron stars, where the magnetic fields are similar to those simulated by the team. But it will be difficult to spot them, says Dong Lai, an astrophysicist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. The team will need to extend its model to see whether the unusual bonding states would modify the spectra of light coming from the stars in a way that can be detected, he says. The simulation of the states “is an important step, but several more are needed to see how relevant this is in astrophysics”.
Closer to home, it is virtually impossible to generate such high magnetic fields, because they are accompanied by drastic changes in the chemistry of everything affected by them. The bond length between atoms can shrink by around 25% under such high fields, says Helgaker. “The experimental apparatus would cease to be an apparatus in these extreme conditions!”


Related stories


Nevertheless, the findings boost hopes that ‘magnetized matter’ in the lab could have properties that may be exploited.
In 2009, physicists created a weakly bound state called a Rydberg molecule2, which some people have suggested could be used to carry information in a quantum computer. Rydberg molecules are highly sensitive to magnetic effects, says Chris Greene, an atomic physicist at the University of Colorado Boulder, who was one of the first people to posit the molecules' existence3. “That means we could use magnetic fields as a knob to tightly control the strength of the binding, to manipulate them to store and erase quantum memory as needed.”

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Recruiting for Computer Science - the AP Potential Report

For many high schools it is recruiting season. If you school has an AP program there is a little kown report, called the AP Readiness Potential, that can help you in attracting kids to your classes. This is an especially helpful way of identifying girls and other groups that may not already be taking your Computer Science classes.




Basically this report takes students' PSAT scores and predicts the AP tests they are statistically likely to score well on. It is based on a past correlation between past PSATs and AP exams.

While we do not yet have this for APCS Principles, since no AP tests have been given yet, we do have it for the current APCS class.

A new feature is teachers can now log in to see the reports. To access the report you will need an access code. You can get this code from the person in your building that coordinates the AP exams. I find that person often doesn't know about the report, or have any idea of how to find the code.

You can call to get your school's code. The number is 866-630-9305. You just have to identify yourself and your school.

The login for the site is here. You'll need an account for AP Central. Once you pull the report the site even has sample letters to send home to parents. I have found letters directly to parents to be a powerful way to attract kids to computer science.

Long term I am very curious to see how this test correlates for the new APCS Principles class. Since much of the assessment for this course will be written it will be interesting to see if a correlation with the writing section of the PSAT.

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Human Computer Interaction Oops

 Today I was researching Human Computer Interaction as a part of a side project, and I came accross this gem:



The error message is cracking me up - do all the .gov pages use this?

And in case you are wondering THIS is not a professional website.

Which is why it has been so far in few between on posts lately. Several projects are winding down, and big deadlines leave little time for posting.

The biggest of these has been CodeVA, a non-profit to support computer science education in Virginia.

And of course the AP Computer Science MOOC is nearing the end of the first year. We are doing AP prep right now, with a diagnostic exam and live webinars, so if you students need AP review feel free to use what is posted there.

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female computer scientist

This article by Peter Welch, "Programming Sucks",  is probably the best description of our profession I have ever read. Those of you who are computer scientists will read it and say, YES, EXACTLY; those of you who are not computer scientists but think we are mystical beasts from mordor will realize we are not actually mystical beasts. (Though may indeed come from mordor).

Peter's article is so good, I am loathe to quote the clever, funny bits because they're so much better in context; but I have to at least post some some teasers:

    Not a single living person knows how everything in your five-year-old MacBook actually works. Why do we tell you to turn it off and on again? Because we don't have the slightest clue what's wrong with it, and it's really easy to induce coma in computers and have their built-in team of automatic doctors try to figure it out for us. The only reason coders' computers work better than non-coders' computers is coders know computers are schizophrenic little children with auto-immune diseases and we don't beat them when they're bad.

    ...

    Most people don't even know what sysadmins do, but trust me, if they all took a lunch break at the same time they wouldn't make it to the deli before you ran out of bullets protecting your canned goods from roving bands of mutants.

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Is Coding the New Literacy? What does learning to code buy you?

The article posted below is a carefully-considered (not a “Rah! Rah! Let’s Code!”) and intriguing consideration of the role of coding in modern notion of literacy.  I particularly liked the idea below.  Is Annettee Vee right?  Does knowing about coding inform your ability to think about things to code?

  I suspect that’s true, but it’s an empirical question.  It’s much nearer transfer, and is not as much of a stretch as looking for evidence of general problem-solving skills from programming (which is very rare) or applying a computational framework for understanding the world (i.e., computational thinking). happy truth is, if you get the fundamentals about how computers think, and how humans can talk to them in a language the machines understand, you can imagine a project that a computer could do, and discuss it in a way that will make sense to an actual programmer. Because as programmers will tell you, the building part is often not the hardest part: It’s figuring out what to build. “Unless you can think about the ways computers can solve problems, you can’t even know how to ask the questions that need to be answered,” says Annette Vee, a University of Pittsburgh professor who studies the spread of computer science literacy.

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Growing respect for Research around Computational Learning and Thinking

Shriram and I had an email correspondence around the blog posts aboutrenaming the field and gaining respect for the study of how people learn and think about computation. He suggested a path forward that was about re-connecting to the fields that the CSEd community broke away from. I invited him to prepare a guest post that conveyed these ideas. Thanks to him for this!

Let me suggest you are probably trying to achieve two very different things here.

    1. Create an actual community. There is real value to having all the interesting people from one area in one room. (This is why, despite the trouble it is to get there and back, I almost never say no to a Dagstuhl invitation.)

    2. Have your students publish in venues such that, when they go out onto the job market, research universities such as yours (Georgia Tech) and mine (Brown) will notice and respect them, interview them, and make them tenure-track offers so they can have students of their own.

Unfortunately, I believe that right now these are fundamentally conflicting goals. SIGCSE, ITiCSE, and ICER address the former but not really the latter.

One, unrealistic, option is for 1 and 2 to merge. For this to happen, these venues need to become a whole lot better. I hear great things about the structure of ICER, but some of the papers are great while others are at best so-so. Changing the other two is harder than turning around an aircraft carrier. It may be possible to make ICER a stronger conference, but one small conference cannot really a whole area make. Plus, you still need to convince people to pay attention to it.

The only other option I see is to do both. Attend whatever conferences you need to to form a community. But get your students to publish at really good venues outside the area. That way, they can write a gung-ho application: “Look, I’m perfectly capable of holding my own in the open competition of conferences you respect”. People like Andy Ko—who published his work in conferences like ICSE—or my colleague Jeff Huang—an HCI person with strong publications in information retrieval—are examplars whose technical chops can’t be questioned.

In other words, this is a long response that could be abbreviated to “Yes, you should grow CSEd by sending it to more respected venues”, but I’m also showing you some of my thinking (because a good teacher grades the work, not just the answer!). A student who publishes a few papers in some conference already recognized as respectable technical CS is going to stand a far better chance. Once a dozen of those populate good departments and start producing students of their own, you’ve pretty much gotten over any prejudice and can then reset your standards. (Though I would still say it’s unhealthy to drop ties to these other areas and retreat into a CSEd shell.)

Which conferences, of course, depend on the student. For students doing HCI work, it might be SIGCHI; for those doing software engineering, it might be ICSE; for machine learning, ICML; for information retrieval, SIGIR; and so on. One good bit of advice to a young CSEd PhD student might be, “Find another area of CS in which you can demonstrate enough depth to publish papers in its good conferences and be able to hold your own in conversations with an expert in that field”.

Here are three other things to consider.

    1. Being able to hold one’s own in another field creates natural allies in a department. A non-CSEd faculty member who realizes there will not be hires in their own area is likely to become an advocate for a CSEd candidate who has at least some presence in their area.

    2. I feel the CSEd community has let itself be put into the “liberal arts ghetto” or, at the research university level, “instructor ghetto”. The leaders of “research” are tenured professors, but the leaders of “education” are Instructors, Professors of Practice, and so forth. This is a self-perpetuating cycle. For instance, who is the CSEd applicant going to get letters from? Getting a letter from an Instructor naturally makes the tenured faculty think, “Hmm, why should we take this person seriously?”

    3. Finally, candidates need to be able to demonstrate a growth path. When I look at a candidate we’ve decided to interview, I’m only so interested in what they did before: their past achievements got them their interview, so now I’m interested in what lies ahead. I care to see what kind of agenda they have mapped out—is it interesting, is it hard, could someone else do it, etc.—and what skills they bring to the table (can they do it, and can they do it better than others).

    I imagine this step is hard for some CSEd candidates. If you got a PhD studying some population, it may or may not be interesting to keep studying that population or to study the next such population or whatever. At the very least, then, if you intervened, showed an N% improvement, and have good plans to get to much more, and then show a path to bigger and more interesting problems, now you’ve got my interest. Put differently, think in terms of active interventions that demonstrate impact. Now you become comparable to students who are building or verifying software, deriving inferences from datasets, and so on. I don’t know whether CSEd students are getting advice in terms of presenting themselves this way.

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“Disruptive Innovation” in Universities is not as important as Value

The below-linked article by Jill Lepore is remarkable for its careful dissection of Christensen’s theory of “disruptive innovation.” (Thanks to Shriram Krishnamurthi for the link.)  As Lepore points out, Christensen’s theories were referenced often by those promoting MOOCs.  I know I was told many times (vehemently, ferociously) that my emphasis on learning, retention, diversity was old-fashioned, and that disrupting the university was important for its own sake, for the sake of innovation.  As Lepore says in the quote below, there may be good arguments for MOOCs, but Christensen’s argument from a historical perspective just doesn’t work.  (Ian Bogost shared this other critical analysis of Christensen’s theory.)



I just finished reading Michael Lewis’s The Big Short, and I see similarities between how Lepore describes reactions to Christensen’s theory of “disruptive innovation” and how Lewis describes the market around synthetic subprime mortgage bond-backed financial instruments.  There’s a lot of groupthink going on (and the Wikipedia description is worth reading), with the party line saying, “This is all so great!  This is a great way to get rich!  We can’t imagine being wrong!”  What Lewis points out (most often through the words of Dr. Michael Burry) is that markets work when there is a logic to them and real value underneath.  Building financial instruments on top of loans that would never be repaid is ludicrous — it’s literally value-less.  Lepore is saying something similar — innovation for its own sake is not necessarily valuable or a path to success, and companies that don’t disruptively innovate can still be valuable and successful.

I don’t know enough to critique either Lewis or Lepore, but I do see how the lesson of value over groupthink applies to higher-education.  Moving education onto MOOCs just to be disruptive isn’t valuable.  We can choose what value proposition for education we want to promote.  If we’re choosing that we want to value reaching students who don’t normally get access higher education, that’s a reasonable goal — but if we’re not reaching that goal via MOOCs (as all the evidence suggests), then MOOCs offer no value.  If we’re choosing that we want students to learn more, or to improve retention, or to get networking opportunities with fellow students (future leaders), or to provide remedial help to students without good preparation, those are all good value propositions, but MOOCs help with none of them.

Both Lewis and Lepore are telling us that Universities will only succeed if they are providing value. MOOCs can only disrupt them if they can provide that value better.  No matter what the groupthink says, we should promote those models for higher-education that we can argue (logically and with evidence) support our value proposition.

    In “The Innovative University,” written with Henry J. Eyring, who used to work at the Monitor Group, a consulting firm co-founded by Michael Porter, Christensen subjected Harvard, a college founded by seventeenth-century theocrats, to his case-study analysis. “Studying the university’s history,” Christensen and Eyring wrote, “will allow us to move beyond the forlorn language of crisis to hopeful and practical strategies for success.” … That doesn’t mean good arguments can’t be made for online education. But there’s nothing factually persuasive in this account of its historical urgency and even inevitability, which relies on a method well outside anything resembling plausible historical analysis.

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Supporting computer science education with the 2014 RISE Awards

"We need more kids falling in love with science and math.” That's what Larry Page said at last year's I/O, and it's a feeling shared by all of us. We want to inspire young people around the world not just to use technology, but to create it. Unfortunately, many kids don’t have access to either the education or encouragement they need to pursue computer science. So five years ago we created the Google RISE (Roots in Science and Engineering) Awards, which provide funding to organizations around the world that engage girls and underrepresented students in extracurricular computer science programs.

This year, the RISE Awards are providing $1.5 million to 42 organizations in 19 countries that provide students with the resources they need to succeed in the field. For example, Generating Genius in the U.K. provides after-school computer science programs and mentoring to prepare high-achieving students from disadvantaged communities for admission into top universities. Another awardee, North Carolina-based STARS Computer Corps, helps schools in low-income communities gain access to computing resources for their students to use. Visit our site for a full list of our RISE Award recipients.
Created in 2007, the Children’s University Foundation has been carrying out educational programs for more than 20,000 children aged 6-13. Click on the photo to learn more about this and other RISE Awardees.


This year we’re also expanding the program with the RISE Partnership Awards. These awards aim to encourage collaboration across organizations in pursuit of a shared goal of increasing global participation in computer science. For example, more than 5,000 girls in sub-Saharan Africa will learn computer science as a result of a partnership between the Harlem based program ELITE and the WAAW Foundation in Nigeria.

We’re proud to help these organizations inspire the next generation of computer scientists.

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A skill-based approach to creating open online courses

Google has offered a number of open online courses in the past two years, and some of our recent research highlights the importance of having effective and relevant activities in these courses. Over the past decade, the Open Learning Initiative (OLI) at Carnegie Mellon, and now at Stanford, has successfully offered free open online courses that are centered around goal-directed activities that provide students with targeted feedback on their work. In order to improve understanding about how to design online courses based around effective activities, Google and OLI recently collaborated on a white paper that outlines the skill-based approach that OLI uses to create its courses.

OLI courses are focused around a set of learning objectives which identify what students should be able to do by the time they have completed a course module. These learning objectives are broken down into skills, and individual activities in the course are aimed towards developing students’ mastery with these skills. A typical activity from the Engineering Statics course is shown below:


During the course, students’ attempts at questions related to a particular skill are then fed as inputs into a probabilistic model which treats the degrees of mastery for each skill as mathematically independent variables. This model estimates how likely a student is to have mastered individual skills, and its output can help instructors determine which students are struggling and take appropriate interventions, as well as inform the design of future versions of the same course. The paper also outlines the advantages and limitations of the existing system, which could be useful starting points for further research.

We hope that this white paper provides useful insight for creators of online courses and course platforms, and that it stimulates further discussion about how to help people learn online more effectively.

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2014 Google PhD Fellowships: Supporting the Future of Computer Science

Nurturing and maintaining strong relations with the academic community is a top priority at Google. Today, we’re announcing the 2014 Google PhD Fellowship recipients. These students, recognized for their incredible creativity, knowledge and skills, represent some of the most outstanding graduate researchers in computer science across the globe. We’re excited to support them, and we extend our warmest congratulations.

The Google PhD Fellowship program supports PhD students in computer science or closely related fields and reflects our commitment to building strong relations with the global academic community. Now in its sixth year, the program covers North America, Europe, China, India and Australia. To date we’ve awarded 193 Fellowships in 72 universities across 17 countries.

As we welcome the 2014 PhD Fellows, we hear from two past recipients, Cynthia Liem and Ian Goodfellow. Cynthia studies at the Delft University of Technology, and was awarded a Fellowship in Multimedia. Ian is about to complete his PhD at the Université de Montréal in Québec, and was awarded a Fellowship in Deep Learning. Recently interviewed on the Google Student blog, they expressed their views on how the Fellowship affected their careers.

Cynthia has combined her dual passions of music and computing to pursue a PhD in music information retrieval. She speaks about the fellowship and her links with Google:

“Through the Google European Doctoral Fellowship, I was assigned a Google mentor who works on topics related to my PhD interests. In my case, this was Dr. Douglas Eck in Mountain View, who is part of Google Research and leads a team focusing on music recommendation. Doug has been encouraging me in several of my academic activities, most notably the initiation of the ACM MIRUM Workshop, which managed to successfully bring music retrieval into the spotlight of the prestigious ACM Multimedia conference.”

Ian is about to start as a research scientist on Jeff Dean’s deep learning infrastructure team. He was also an intern at Google, and contributed to the development of a neural network capable of transcribing the address numbers on houses from Google Street View photos. He describes the connection between this intern project and his PhD study supported by the Fellowship:

“The project I worked on during my internship was the basis for a publication at the International Conference on Learning Representations …. my advisor let me include this paper in my PhD thesis since there was a close connection to the subject area.… I can show that some of the work developed early in the thesis has had a real impact.“

We’re proud to have supported Cynthia, Ian, and all the other recipients of the Google PhD Fellowship. We continue to look forward to working with, and learning from, the academic community with great excitement and high expectations.

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Computer Science Education Recharged

A few days ago, I attended the annual SIGCSE (Special Interest Group, Computer Science Education) conference in Atlanta, GA. Google has been a platinum sponsor of SIGCSE for many years now, and the conference provides an opportunity for thousands of CS educators to come together, share ideas and engage in the resurgence of activity and interest in CS education.

Seven years ago, the number of CS majors at the undergraduate level hit an all time low; the number of students taking the Advanced Placement CS exam fell 15% between 2001 and 2007, and the number of college freshmen intending to major in CS plummeted more than 70% during the same period. This was a concern for CS educators, as advancing U.S. students' understanding of the principles and practices of computing is critical to developing a globally competitive workforce for the 21st century.

Since 2007, though, many significant things have happened. First, a commission of ten secondary and higher education faculty came together to design a new Advanced Placement CS course called CS Principles. This reinvention of AP CS not only introduces students to programming, but also gives them an understanding of the fundamental concepts of computing, its breadth of application and its potential for transforming the world. Additionally, since 2007 the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA), a community that plays a key role in professional development, CS standards definition (another critical stake in the ground), and scaling of the new AP CS, has grown to 16,000+ members.

Finally, late last year, code.org launched Hour of Code with over 29 million students participating, which is an unprecedented scale in CS education. This event raised awareness and provided enormous opportunity for follow-on with teachers and students who realized that coding is not only accessible, but fun. Their next step is to scale Exploring Computer Science this fall to 30 school districts (and counting) including some of the biggest districts in the country, in addition to developing K-5 and middle school curriculum.

Last week at SIGCSE, Google had an opportunity to present two new programs and a transition of an existing program:

    CS First is a pilot program in South Carolina introducing students to CS in a social, collaborative after-school environment. The focus is on raising awareness and helping students understand their potential in the field.
    Engage CS Edu will provide curriculum resources for introductory CS1/CS2 courses that are engaging to both women and men.
    CS4HS continues to experiment this year with online professional development opportunities for teachers. We still support face-to-face CS4HS workshops, but given the success of our MOOC experiments last year, we’d like to continue to see how we might scale to more and more teachers.


The growth in awareness and activity in CS education over the past two years has been amazing and it continues to grow rapidly, thanks to the hard work of many. Google is proud to work with the many organizations in CS education to support and scale their work, through programs and funding. We strive to develop new programs where there are gaps, utilizing our technical infrastructure, our experience with scale, and a deep understanding of the potential of CS to transform the world in positive ways. This has been core to Google’s philosophy since we started 16 years ago.

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GMO mosquitoes to stop mosquitoes (and all the diseases they carry)

Holy crap! This is so clever!!

    A synthetic sex ratio distortion system for the control of the human malaria mosquito

Component #1– Anopheles gambiae, the kind of mosquito that is notorious for spreading malaria.

Component #2– I-PpoI, a protein that ‘sees’ a specific DNA sequence, and cuts it. aka, a homing endonuclease. It was originally found in slime mold.   :-D

It might seem as if there is no way these two components could come together in any meaningful way.

But when you are an evil scientist, anything is possible!!

It turns out that there is a DNA sequence on the X-chromosome of the mosquito that the homing endonuclease recognizes. Unlike restriction enzymes, where the DNA match has to be (pretty much) perfect, there is some wiggle-room with homing endonucleases (the mosquito DNA isnt a *perfect* match, but its good enough).

So, if this enzyme was present in mosquito cells, it would slice the X-chromosome in two.

That is not overly helpful.

If you start slicing up the X-chromosome, the mosquitoes would be non-viable. Male and female. The point isnt to kill mosquitoes, here.

So, the researchers genetically modified the enzyme so it would only be expressed during spermatogenesis, and it would have a really short half-life (it would break-down and become non-functional relatively quickly).

Translation: Male mosquitoes that had this gene engineered into their genomes would only make sperm with Y chromosomes. Very few or no X chromosomes. Meaning mostly all of their offspring would be male. The enzyme would be degraded by the time fertilization occurred, so it shouldnt accidentally slice up the necessary X-chromosome from mom-mosquito.

Lots and lots of viable baby male mosquitoes.

Male mosquitoes do not feed off of humans, meaning they dont transmit malaria or other pathogens.

And, having males dominate the progeny means that the mosquito population would go down (whereas having mostly females would cause the population to boom). The idea to mess around with mosquito population sex ratios to control population size has been around since 1966. This is just the first time in history we have had the technology to carry it out.



Of course there are concerns about ‘resistance’ (the mosquito populations evolving around the genetic modification), which this paper addresses. And they didnt address the impact a smaller mosquito population would have on the populations of other organisms (somebody has to eat them, right?). But considering the number of people who get sick and die from malaria every year (not including all the other mosquito-born pathogens!), this might be a great first-step in a positive direction.

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Why We Need to Tame Our Algorithms Like Dogs

 Why We Need to Tame Our Algorithms Like Dogs

Algorithms control our daily lives, wether we're aware
 of it or not. Algorithms run riot in financial markes;

they predict the weather and electricity demand; they price insurance and decide how many doctors to schedule to the emergency room on any given night.


 They even decide what groceries to stock in your local supermarket. Given algorithms' (hidden) importance it therefore makes sense that they work for  us. An interesting article in Wired makes the point that our algorithms need to evolve alongside us, much as dogs have, to become useful servants.

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