ThunderSnow.us

Tuesday’s Boston Globe has a nifty article about what we know (and don’t know!) about cortical folding - how all those wrinkles on the surface of the brain develop. Turns out that fetuses in the first and second trimesters have basically smooth brains; all the folding happens late in neonatal development.

…because so much of the folding takes place during the latter weeks of fetal development, premature infants arrive with much of their cortical development yet to be completed. And the folding patterns of preemies relegated to the neonatal intensive care unit don’t match those of their counterparts who spend their full nine months in the womb. New research from Van Essen’s lab shows that even when preemies reach their originally forecasted due dates, their brains are not as large or as folded as those of full-term newborns.

“That means there’s something different in how those brains are organized and in the connections that have formed,’’ Grant said. Perhaps some extra environmental influence in the hospital is disrupting folding or preemies are missing out on some vital influence that their counterparts get in the uterus, though researchers haven’t yet narrowed down what these influences may be.

Trailer for Fantastic Mr. Fox. Includes “Based on the book by the author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory“. Seriously? Does nobody know who Roald Dahl is? Seriously? I’m worried.

Notes for future reference, as this was a rather ad-libbed recipe.

Combine chicken, 2 T cornstarch, 1 T soy sauce, and 1 T orange juice in a bowl. (The marinade should basically all stick to the chicken - if it is too liquid, add a pinch more cornstarch). Let the chicken and marinade sit for 20-30 minutes.

Heat oil in a wok or large skillet over fairly high heat until it’s almost smoking. Add the garlic, ginger, and cayenne; let sizzle 30 seconds or so. Scoot the aromatics over to the sides, and lay the chicken down in a single layer in the middle of the pan. Let it get good and brown on the bottom (at least a minute. Seriously. Find something to distract yourself with) before stirfrying. Add orange zest and slower-cooking veggies.

Add soy sauce, chicken broth, and about half the remaining orange juice. Scrape the browned bits off the bottom of the pan. Add brown sugar. Taste and add more juice as seems appropriate. Add quick-cooking veggies when chicken is almost done.

Let the whole mess bubble until the sauce thickens up and the chicken and veggies are done. Serve over rice. Yum.

NASA has recently turned up a pile of meticulous notebooks kept by Werner von Braun during the fifties and sixties Space Race projects. They’re seeking ideas from the public about how best to digitize and catalog them.

From a comment here

When I have students who suggest that they’ll never use the basic algebra I teach them, I first ask them a question: when will they use the material they learned in biology in their lives? When will they use what they learned in their history class in their careers? What percent of the things they learned in school will they directly use in the workplace?

Then I explain one of my philosophies about math classes. The fact of the matter is that most people don’t retain all of the math that they’ve ever learned. For someone in a developmental math course it might be something like 50%. For a grad student, it might be something like 80% (as a former math grad student, I can tell you that I retained significantly less than that). So if we need someone to be very comfortable with arithmetic to function in society, stopping at the end of arithmetic won’t be enough for them to retain it. They’ll need a bit more in order to retain everything.

Since math does build on itself, we can start teaching these students algebra. In using algebra, students will be challenged to use their arithmetic skills in many different ways, forcing them to actually own arithmetic. It will give them the practice of not only performing arithmetic, but also knowing when it’s appropriate to use different operations.

Finally, the problem solving and even logic skills one employs in an algebra class are really a dimension higher than that in an arithmetic class. Being introduced to a different way of thinking (using variables to represent unknown quantities, as well as using symbolic manipulation) is immensely helpful in any sort of problem solving arena, whether or not it involves math. Everyone needs problem solving skills: if jobs didn’t require them, everything would be run 100% by computers.

After explaining this to the few argumentative students I get, they generally stop complaining. And they’re art students. Sure, they might not ever need to solve an optimization problem involving a system of inequalities, but learning how to do it reinforces many of the more basic skills they will use and improves the problem solving skills they will need.

1. Even with the delayed onset of true summer weather, I’ve been wanting to be outdoors and doing stuff more than indoors and doing stuff. This has been good for the yard work, but less good for the work work.
2. Yard work: The massive bittersweet invasion is being slowly pushed back, and a former vegetable garden being reclaimed from underneath it. We may have space to grow things next year. Also, I keep discovering berry bushes. If they do in fact produce berries, I’m going to be thrilled.
3. Work work these days is full of writing up a project into some sort of coherent manuscript. I am very excited about this. I am also very frustrated by this - it’s yet another case of something that I think I should be efficient at and yet am not. I understand that figuring out a workflow and stuff is going to have a learning curve. But I should be special enough to not need such a thing, right? *headdesk*
4. Other-work is full of planning for the summer class. I’m super excited about this. It was a blast last year.
5. There is knitting going on, but only a little bit. Classes being out for the summer leads to reduced time to knit. Writing and graph-making requires my hands.

Don Tapscott has a career based in thinking about how the technology of the modern net is going to have broad effects on society. Most of his work has been discussing how the business landscape is changed by these tools - massive collaboration, greater transparency, and such will (he argues) have substantial effects. He’s also thinking about what this means for education, and what exactly that education should consist of.

In the Telegraph (UK, not Nashua) today:

But for today’s youngsters, tedious rote learning is pointless because such basic facts are only a mouse click away via Google, Wikipedia and online libraries, according to writer and businessman Don Tapscott.

Tapscott, author of the best-selling book Wikinomics and a champion of the “net generation”, suggests a better approach would be to teach children to think creatively so they could learn to interpret and apply the knowledge available online.

The Canadian business executive said: “Teachers are no longer the fountain of knowledge; the internet is.

“Kids should learn about history to understand the world and why things are the way they are. But they don’t need to know all the dates.

“It is enough that they know about the Battle of Hastings, without having to memorise that it was in 1066. They can look that up and position it in history with a click on Google.”

This is an interesting assertion, but a bit more extreme than I’m comfortable with. I agree that it’s probably not necessary (and maybe never was) to memorize every piece of information I could ever need. But one of the things I keep becoming more aware of is how hard it is to synthesize large ideas without some of these bits already stored. Knowing about the Battle of Hastings without knowing when it was is not terribly useful.

I think what Tapscott is really getting at (I hope, anyway) is that it is more important to see the broad trends than to memorize every last date. But it’s also harder to fit new pieces of information into your model if you don’t have at least the important details to anchor new ideas to. In this case, knowing that the Battle of Hastings was around AD 1000 is probably sufficient accuracy… until you learn about something else that happened in 1066 and would get more out of it if you could make the temporal connection.

I know that over the last five-odd years my understanding of twentieth-century history has gotten miles better, and I think that part of this is that I finally have enough of a framework to actually synthesize new pieces of information. Not just “This happened in year X,” but “This happened just after this other thing, and that’s probably part of what fed into this other thing that happened shortly afterward.” Being able to abstract patterns from individual data points is a big chunk of understanding history, and it requires knowing these details that Tapscott is disparaging.

(Tapscott goes on to claim that the brains of members of “the net generation” are different than those of people a few generations older. I am, ah, dubious. Not getting into that today.)

I feel like this is in some ways equivalent to the “Why should I learn my times tables? I can use a calculator!” argument, that seems to bite people in the ass when they want to learn calculus, and struggle with the quick arithmetic involved in transforming and simplifying equations. And sure, there are calculators that can do integrals, but I should hope that the future engineers of the world have a grasp of what exactly is happening in their equations. And the way to get that is, I think, to actually walk through the steps. And to be able to walk through the steps you need to know your times tables.

There was a discussion of these ideas at Making Light a while ago. (Google found that link for me.) Several commenters pointed out that one piece of learning that’s very much facilitated by Google and Wikipedia is the jump from suspecting that there’s a connection between two events/people/inventions/etc to following up on that idea and getting relevant details. A couple decades ago, you’d’ve had to find a book, or several books, and actually read through lots of text to find the data you wanted. It would’ve been an entire research project, and more work for many people than idle curiosity warrants.

I suspect that one of the most interesting discussions in education in the next decade will be trying to figure out how much framework is required in order to be able to make use of new information, or to know what you need to look up. Google and Wikipedia do very little good unless you know that a piece of information exists. The change in how available basic facts are will, I expect, change our standards for what everyone memorizes in school, but by a lot less than Tapscott seems to think.

Some photos (all yoinked from Dan) and notes. I was Events Head for this con, which was a new and interesting piece of responsibility. Usually I work tech, which is mostly a question of showing up and doing as I’m told. I like this more responsibility thing, I think. (As I told Dan a few weeks ago, I mostly just like knowing what’s going on. Being in charge of it is just the best way to know what’s happening.)

Anyway. Friday morning, Dan went up to my folks to borrow the whale big van, and to pick up Nathan. They returned with the van full of Nathan’s videogame gear, and we proceeded to add tech gear (borrowed from MCFI) and camera gear and various con paraphernalia. Left about 12:30, hit traffic on the Pike, but nothing like last year (thank goodness).

Friday was pretty low-key - brought our gear in, the folks handling tech started setting up. I ended up hanging out at the One Desk helping run registration, as I didn’t have anything to run until late in the evening.

First event bring run by Events (aka me) was the White Elephant Burlesque Society performance. These are folks that Jeff Mach knows, and invited to come, and they were amazing. Very very good at what they do.

Lessons learned: Performers need dressing-room space before and after performing. Shoulda been obvious to us. Will be next year.

After White Elephant was the local Rocky Horror cast, the Come Again Players, who are a Pi-Con fixture by now. Many of them are involved in other aspects of the con, and they’ve performed every year. I didn’t see their show, sadly - once I made sure they were good to go I went to hang out with some friends.

LED plus coin battery plus small magnet plus electrical tape = LEDs that stick to metal things. (The MIT Ubuntu Evangelization guys brought them.) Like the screws of the speaker grate in the ceiling. Randall got them up there, being Very Talented and far more coordinated than I am, and the rest of us cheered him on.

Saturday I was up bright and early to go across Springfield to pick up dry ice for what I was told was the “best 10am panel ever” (thanks Shadesong and Elayna!).

Again, spent a lot of time when I wasn’t officially “on” at the One Desk, as a clueful staff member who knows lots of different answers. I hung out in the videogame room a bit, played MarioKart on the Wii (fun!), and grabbed snacks in the Con Suite. Saturday afternoon was the Belly Dance Cabaret (coordinated by Tegan, who did a great job), followed by a beginners’ lesson.

There were two different boffing groups holding events. Some Realms members were doing their thing. (I am not a LARPer. I do not know their details.)

And the Historical Boffing Association (which is mostly my friend Mercutio) hosted a tournament.

Saturday night we had a Masquerade Ball, which was a small success. Mark and Stacey from the UMass Lowell Ballroom Dance Team taught dances.

And Sara Harvey gave costume prizes (and a spontaneous costuming class, which was one of the highlights of my con).

There was some staying up Way Too Gosh Darned Late, due to helping a friend, and then a hotel screw-up of epic proportions.

Sunday morning there was an emergency pants run, thanks to Sylvari, and a truly excellent panel with Cory and Randall that everyone seems to’ve already discussed in great detail.

I hosted a showing of some short films made by various folk in the community - two by Hugh Casey (that’s a link to his youtube page, in case you want to see them), and one from someone I don’t actually know (whoops). And then my responsibilities to the con were over and I skipped up and down the hallway several times. That adrenaline rush of having pulled off something difficult and stressful? It’s the best. It’s the adrenaline rush as the curtain comes down on opening night of a show. I loves it.

Wanderlust shows the routes of twenty-three historic journeys, with info and photos for each. I’d love to see more depth for each, but nifty nonetheless (via What I Learned Today).