Video-wiki documentaries

Although I haven't played with it yet, now that Youtube has cloud editing, I predict that video based "wiki" documentaries will become a very cool new form of media.

I propose that a particularly good genre to start with is History. For example, start with a film of a lecture by an amateur but good historian (I as just talking to my history 7th grade history teacher Jerry Buttrey about this this morning). Others later contribute source material as it becomes availasble. For example, someone might live near a battle site and have footage of it. Someone else might live near a library where they can get images of documents and interviews with associated scholars. Someone else might have artifacts handed down from family members. It's easy to see how a strait-forward talking-head lecture could be edited over time with with more and more cuts to such external video shots with the lecture as voice-over and from there might have the narrative interrupted with other interviews -- mimicking the life-cycle of a typical wikipedia article.

A particularly good company to sponsor such activity would be the exceptionally high quality "The Teaching Company" whose lecture's I've enjoyed for a long time. They might be tempted to view such amateur media as competition to their products, but I think the opposite is true. If they would sponsored such endeavors (for example, by making a call for participation via their existing client base) I bet that they could increase their sales on related subjects as they'd tap into the social network of each project and with some clever marketing they could push their associated wares to a very receptive narrow market.

Finally, the very act of contributing to such a documentary, even if it's just going to a field and shooting a few seconds of video, would be a great way to engage pupils of all ages in history classes. I for one much more enjoyed our field trips than I did sitting in class, and had I had an active reason to collect documentation it would have been even more memorable.

Although I'm probably not going to make any of these forthcoming video-wikimentaries, I look forward to watching them.

Math Series 8 -- Velocity of rotating things

Everyone has probably dealt with velocity before, but the velocity of rotating things is a bit trickier. But, it's very important to where we're headed...

Why I hate standardized tests

Image by Peggy Monahan. Thanks Peggy!

One time my friend Bev asked me to help her with the GRE. I told her that I hate standardized tests and assured her that she didn't really want my help. She insisted that I was the only person she knew with math skills so I went over to help.

First question: If one car mechanic can fix a problem in 2 hours and another one can do it in 3 hours how long if the work together?

My head practically exploded at the absurdity of this question. First of all, if two car mechanics try to work together they'll end up drinking, smoking, and bull-shitting and nothing will get done. In the unlikely event that they actually tried to work on the same car at the same time it wouldn't get done faster because car repair is probably one of the least parallelizable tasks imaginable. I mean, what are they going to do -- both pull on a wrench at the same time and extract a nut twice as fast?

Of all the tasks in the world they could have chosen -- painting a wall, canvassing a neighborhood, etc -- they pick a nearly worst-case example. That said, understanding serializable vs. parallelizable tasks is extremely valuable knowledge so I spent 20 minutes explaining pipelining and caching strategies and then Bev understandably fired me exactly as predicted.

Here's another example from a Wonderlic sample test:


I simply abhore this questions and "puzzles" like this one -- it's completely subjective. I can make a case for all 5 of these being unique. 1 is the only one who's longest diagonal is equal to sqrt(2) of its sides. 2 is the only one that can be created by moving a single vertex from a rectangle. 3 is the only one with an anspect ratio greater than two. 4 is the only one that has regular angles greater than 90 and is also the only one with 6 sides. 5 is the only one with 2 acute angles. How is it that number of sides is somehow more important than the other features?

Questions like the two above make me feel that the author is a moron and that fact immediately makes me angry: Where does this moron get off judging me? And that gets me to why I hate standardized testing. It's a game about guessing what the author wants you to say using rules of thumb and pre-described algorithms versus demonstrating that you are capable of independent thought. And in a world full of computers that will slavishly follow endless and complicated pre-describred tasks, we don't need humans to do the same.

I don't merely reject standardized testing as a means of judging people's abilities, I reject the premise that standardized testing demonstrate anything positive -- society does not need more people who excel at slavishly following rules of thumb and formulas as those people's jobs are soon to be replaced by computers if they haven't been already. We need people who understand, who create, who invent now more than ever and this simply is not tested by standardized tests. While it is certainly the case that there are people who do well on standardized tests who are also creative, it is even more so the case that there are people who are very creative who nevertheless fail at standardized tests and unfortunately the tests tell those people "you suck" instead of "you're awesome".

Math series 7 -- complex numbers!

And now we come to one of our first major conclusions: you already understand complex numbers! (Again, if you find these helpful please leave me a note, I'd like to hear some feedback.)

Math series 6 -- radians

Finishing up with rotations before we move on to something (seemingly) completely unrelated.

Math series 5 -- Spinning wheels and waves

Math Series 4 -- rotation = multiply

And now we get to the end first of section. If you've followed along through these slides then congratulations! -- you've just learned about 12 years of math in 20 slides (Not really! -- but it does take traditional math classes 12 years to get to this point!)

Math Series 3 -- More rotations

Today, more details about rotations. I promise, it gets to a good punch line before too much longer!!

Math series 2 -- Rotations

Today we tackle rotations which are simple once you get the "trick". If you are enjoying these, please leave a note to encourage me to post more. :-)

Math series 1 - Vectors

A long time ago I started writing a book to explain complex numbers and the Fourier transform. I never got around to finishing it and my friend Matt just asked for it so I think I'll try to finish it one bite-sized chunk at a time and post it here to the blog. This is panel 1-5 of about 80. It starts off at vectors and ends at the Fourier trasform via Euler's equation. If you like it, please leave feedback to encourage me to actually finish it! :-)