In college, I took a Congolese dance course taught by two elders from the Congo. One of the things they discussed with us was how the African borders drawn by European colonial powers essentially disregard the traditional nationalities and ethnic groups in Africa. For example, the cultural region of the Congo overlaps several modern African states.

I asked one of these wise men what seemed like an obvious question. Why were the borders not re-drawn after those countries gained independence?

He squinted at me and said, “What is your name?”

I answered hesitantly, “Robin…?”

He looked at me piercingly. “Robin, you have pure heart.”

“Um, thanks, I think?”

He went on to explain that power, once held, is not easily taken away. These countries had gained independence, but re-drawing borders would mean giving up power by losing land or even whole countries. The new independent rulers were no better than the colonial powers in this regard.

For some reason, this interaction has stuck with me. I don’t want to be totally naive. But I do want to be a little naive. To view the world with a “beginner’s mind” and approach tough problems with the optimism that people are capable of doing the right thing.

“Schools are government-run and their employees are unionized; how do you expect to get anything to change?”

-Evan Miller

“Children are phenomenal agents of change.”

-Jaime Lerner (former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil; via Scientific American)

An interesting new theory on “what’s the matter with Kansas”: voters who feel they are near the bottom of the economic pyramid worry that income redistribution will help those who are even worse off (based on a study discussed by The Economist; via daringfireball.)

But this is not really so different than the idea that no one wants to admit (to themselves or anyone) that they’re amongst the worst off in America.

The nuance here is that if you suspect you’re near the bottom, your situation feels the most precarious, because a re-shuffling could easily put you at the bottom. For the middle class, that’s less of a worry. But it’s there. After all, any change to the status quo is scary.

Explorations in Math is an interesting Seattle organization that I have been learning about recently. I went to their volunteer training last week and have been discussing my thoughts with family and friends ever since. Those conversations have hugely helped to clarify my concerns. The conclusions deserve to be written down.

This is the draft of a letter to Explorations in Math:

What I Like

That’s easy — I fully share your mission to help all elementary students succeed in math. I think this is one of the most important goals there is. You are clearly making a difference and changing attitudes and that is awesome.

Concerns

These concerns are largely spurred by books I have read about education psychology. They make me nervous that some aspects of Explorations in Math’s approach could be counterproductive.

1. Losing games may perpetuate students’ assumptions that they are bad at math.

Most of the math games have winners and losers. If a student consistently loses the games, doesn’t that reinforce the notion that they are bad at math? Weaker students can be paired with other weaker students so that they do not always lose. But kids know what is going on. They know they are in the “dumb group”. Even if they still enjoy playing the games, do they gain any confidence in their math abilities? One of the success stories that Explorations in Math gives is the observation that kids start playing math games of their own accord while waiting in lines. Are all of the kids playing? Or only the ones who consistently win?

2. Sugar-coating may perpetuate the idea that real math is hard and boring.

I don’t doubt that games are a good way to teach and learn some math concepts. But I worry that it sends the underlying message that math needs to be sugar-coated in order to be fun. After all, we don’t need to resort to games to teach reading. Instead, we give students reading materials of increasing difficulty level, with content that is interesting to them, and help them progress. We can do the same in math with well-designed curricula, teaching students how to solve math problems on topics that interest them, at gradually increasing levels of difficulty as they master each concept.

3. Arithmetic is one of the least interesting parts of math.

Most of the math games center around mental math and memorizing multiplication tables. These are important building blocks. But the really interesting aspect of math is the ability to answer a wide range of questions with just a few simple tools (such as fractions and algebra). Mental math helps students understand these tools by allowing them to solve problems quickly, without a calculator. But in the real world, we use calculators and computers to do the calculations, and the important skill is being able to translate everyday problems into math problems. The further you progress in math, the more uncommon it is to see actual numbers. Instead, you work to understand abstractions and learn how to model the world and make precise predictions.

4. I don’t see any hard evidence of results.

The Explorations in Math website includes great testimonials and anecdotes. But have math test scores improved in the schools you have worked with? In particular, have scores gone up among disadvantaged and historically weaker students? I’m as disillusioned with “teaching to the test” as anyone, but the tests do measure students’ math ability. If you are improving attitudes but having no effect on test scores, what has really been accomplished? The recent documentary Waiting for Superman points out that American students score among the lowest of developed countries in math scores, but score higher than anyone in confidence. Confidence is only useful if it is backed by reality.

It may be that the real problem is that all of our hands are tied by the school board’s mandated, poor choices of math curricula. Is Explorations in Math designed to be a side-run around that very stubborn obstacle? Is it designed as the best approach given the constraints?

As a teacher, you are in the business of helping our children learn, grow and change. If you are not also willing to learn, grow, and change, then what reason do we have to believe that you will be a good teacher?

“I was on the side of righteousness, and like any fundamentalist, I could only stay there by avoiding information.”

-Lierre Keith, The Vegetarian Myth

“Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at ‘Philosophy’.”

-xkcd

It’s true. I tried it. I couldn’t resist.

“After a great technological revolution or a major economic transition, as when America changed from a nation of farmers to an urban industrial one, there is often a period of great concentration of wealth, and with it, a concentration of power in the wealthy. That’s what we saw in 1928, and that’s what we see today. At some point that power is exercised so injudiciously, and the lives of so many become so unbearable, that a period of reform ensues.”

“[There is no reform when] it is not public opinion but the opinions of the wealthy that predict the votes of the Senate.”

-Drew Westen, What Happened to Obama? (NYTimes, Aug 6, 2011)

From one of the most important slides I’ve seen on computer security:

“Security dialogs are a black box; clicking Permit or Allow maximizes the likelihood of getting work done.”

From WWDC ’11, session 203, 10:47, by Ivan Krstic.

A basic tenet of economics is that some customers are willing to pay more than others for a given product. So it’s in any company’s best interest to charge more to customers who are willing to pay more. This practice, called “price discrimination,” is illegal in its most basic form. But it is commonly practiced in many more subtle ways. One example is coupons: customers willing to find and cut out coupons tend to be willing to pay less than customers that don’t want to spend time finding the coupons.

Another prevalent example of price discrimination is first-class vs. coach-class seating on trains and planes. People willing to pay a lot of money for a plane ticket will buy a first-class seat if the experience is significantly better than in coach. I remember reading in Econ 101 that many train companies purposefully degraded the experience in coach class so that anyone who could afford first class would pay the premium. Fortunately, this trick doesn’t work well in a highly competitive marketplace because other providers can win over the low-paying customers by providing them a better coach class experience.

I’ve started to think that the same principle applies to health food. People who want organic, pesticide-free, low-calorie, whole-grain food tend to be people lucky enough to have the luxury to think about such things. In other words, they tend to be richer and have more money to spend on food. Conversely, people who have just barely enough money to get by are more interested in getting the most calories per dollar so they can eat a satisfying meal without breaking the bank. In other words, restaurants and grocery stores know they can get away with selling health foods at a premium, because they know the people most interested in those products are willing to pay more.

I think this explains why healthy food often costs so much more than junk food even when it doesn’t actually cost more to produce. Williams College, which is big enough to purchase directly from food producers, saved money by using more local, organic dining hall food.

Bill Buxton, in a presentation at CHI 2011, recommended the work of Melvin Kransberg, a pioneering historian of technology. Kransberg apparently published the definitive textbook on the subject, but that is many pages and several volumes long; instead, I read By the Sweat of Thy Brow (1975) by Kransberg and Joseph Gies.

It is worthwhile to read a decades-old book now and then to remind yourself that many of the important problems of today were also problems of the past. What’s most astonishing is how many solutions exist that were proven decades ago, yet are still not widely known, let alone widely implemented.

I found the most interesting examples of this in By the Sweat of Thy Brow to be the solutions for job satisfaction. I leave you with a series of quotes.

…the classic (1932) British motivational study of girl workers threading embroidery needles…. The girls were told first that they had to thread a hundred dozen needles a day instead of the seventy-five dozen they had been threading. The announcement produced consternation that turned into delight when it was added that on finishing the hundred dozen they could go home. They got through the new quota in time to leave at 2:30 in the afternoon.

•

At [a Bell Telephone Company plant], phone directories were formerly compiled by women employees each of whom performed only one of the 17 operations necessary in compiling a directory…. Management found itself endlessly hiring and training new workers. Under the job enrichment ideology, each worker was given an entire directory to compile, performing all 17 steps, from scheduling to proofreading. Turnover dropped substantially.

  •

Frederick Herzberg, a prominent industrial psychologist, has identified [in 1966] five factors as strong determinants of job satisfaction—achievement, recognition, work itself, responsibility, and advancement…

 •

‘Perhaps the most consistent complaint reported to our task force,’ said the Work in America study, ‘has been the failure of bosses to listen to workers who wish to propose better ways of doing their jobs.’

That seems like a simple enough question.  If you asked a selection of teachers, parents, and psychologists to answer it, I wonder how their answers would differ from each other.  Is it a solved problem? Or a complex mystery on the frontier of science? Or somewhere in between?

“Historically, societies have always been divided by myths of difference: between peasants and nobility, slaves and slave owners, or minorities and majorities. Today, the most pervasive and enduring of those myths — the myth of ability — is being challenged.”

-John Mighton (The Myth of Ability)

John Mighton writes in The Myth of Ability:

As far as I am aware, no program in mathematics was ever developed with the expectation that every child in the program would excel. To most educators, the idea of an entire class doing well in any subject seems absurd.

That was published in 2003, but today it is still widely assumed that the “curve” in test scores is a “natural” result of innate differences in human intelligence.

Through a tutoring program that he later extended to classroom teaching, Mighton showed that in fact every child could excel. And he found that such a result requires only two essential ingredients (which match my definition of profound: obvious only in retrospect). They are:

1. The teacher must actually believe that every student can excel.

2. The curriculum and teaching methods must be designed, tested, and refined in a way that treats any student’s failure to learn as being a failure of the curriculum and teaching methods.

This is entirely analogous to creating usable software. Instead of blaming problems on “user error,” you blame the software — and, critically, use that knowledge as an opportunity to improve the design. Creating great software is not easy, but it’s also not rocket science.

Mighton has experimented with various best practices in teaching, many of which have been well documented elsewhere in the psychology literature (and popular literature by authors such as the Heath brothers, Malcom Gladwell, Carol Dweck, Martin Seligman, etc.). For example, he neatly sums up the research on the importance of flow:

Nothing focuses the attention of children more sharply than the feeling that they are meeting a series of challenges and succeeding brilliantly.

But the crucial thing that John Mighton has shown is not in the particulars of his curriculum or philosophy. Rather, it is the simple, incontrovertible fact that he made every single student succeed in math — without requiring extra money or super-human energy or even teachers who previously knew anything about math.

It is an existence proof.

And it means that all of the excuses are bogus. “They can’t focus.” “They don’t care.” “There’s not enough time or money to get through to them.” Every student brought to him as “unteachable” was in fact taught to excel. And it was not even particularly difficult. It was certainly not rocket science.

But if we know how to teach in such a way that every child succeeds, why are we not doing it? Mighton says,

I believe the answer lies in the profound inertia of human thought: when an entire society believes something is impossible, it suppresses, by its very way of life, the evidence that would contradict that belief.

I think it’s harder than that, and a good analogy is racism or sexism. When injustice is ingrained — when “that’s the way it has always been” — elaborate excuses and rationales must be crafted to avoid the conclusion that well-meaning people are perpetuating discrimination (in this case, discrimination against the very students they purport to help). It’s a terrible conclusion to come to. To accept it means admitting that for decades we have been undermining the potential of millions of eager young students.

After seeing how children flourish with even a modest amount of attention, I have come to believe that when a child fails a test it should be regarded as a failure of our system of education. And when millions of children, year after year, fail tests they could easily pass, it should be regarded as the failure of an entire society to care for its young.

Supporting change implies acceptance of this terrible conclusion: that for generations we have been letting students fail, letting poverty persist, and letting the economy correspondingly sink — and that there is no excuse for it. How can we live with that guilt? Especially as a student or teacher in the system that is perpetuating the injustice — someone who has the power to make change?

I think that Dweck’s “growth mindset” is a good place to start. It helps us accept the truth as a learning opportunity to do better.

Because the fact is, we already know how to do better. And putting it off is only making the situation worse. As Matt Wilka and I concluded, “just do it!”

I found out today that IBM Research was working on scenarios for computers in education as early as the 1960′s (when programming meant feeding stacks of punched cards into a machine the size of a building).

“Where once workers enjoyed their work but were unable to produce enough to give themselves leisure and material satisfactions, now they are gaining the leisure and material satisfactions while losing the enjoyment of work.”

-Melvin Kransberg & Joseph Gies, By the Sweat of Thy Brow (1975)

“Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you are as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?”

-Brian Kernighan

“Our job is not to reinvent the world; it’s to take stuff that we know exists already — but hardly anyone’s got it — and get it out to them.”

-Steve Jobs, 1997 [link]

When I was working on a natural language processing system at Johns Hopkins during the summer of 2005, I remember having a minor epiphany: I realized that the strategy our research team was using was essentially just a way of converting an intractably complex problem into a series of computable smaller problems. It didn’t take me long to make the jump to realizing that this is an essential part of all science and engineering.

I was reminded of this when watching a Steve Jobs video recording from 1997 (via daringfireball). Steve is talking about why he thinks better developer tools and APIs are so important to progress (around 25 minutes into the video):

It’s all about managing complexity. It’s like scaffolding, right? You erect some scaffolding and if you keep going up and up and up, eventually the scaffolding collapses of its own weight. That’s what building software is. It’s how much scaffolding you can erect before the whole thing collapses of its own weight. It doesn’t matter how many people you have working on it — doesn’t matter if you’re Microsoft, with 500 people on a team — it will collapse under its own weight.… These [new developer tools] allow you to not have to worry about 90% of the stuff you worry about, so that you can erect your 5 stories of scaffolding, but starting at story number 23 instead of starting at story number 6. You can get a lot higher.

This is related to the fundamental notion of abstraction, and to “the mythical man-month” (which Steve also references). It’s a good reminder.

In a related section, Steve responds to a question asking about how visual programming tools might fit into this. His answer (around 42 minutes in):

Here’s the deal. The way you get programmer productivity is not by increasing the lines of code per programmer per day. That doesn’t work. The way you get programmer productivity is by eliminating lines of code you have to write. The line of code that’s fastest to write, that never breaks, that doesn’t need maintenance, is the line you never had to write! So the goal here is to eliminate 80% of the code that you have to write for your app. That’s the goal. So along the way, if we can provide vizi-this and vizi-that and visual this and visual that, well that’s fine, but the high-order bit is to eliminate 80% of the code. When you ‘draw the line’ in interface builder, you’re eliminating code of one form. But that only goes so far. Maybe we can go further. I’ve seen a lot of demos of things that try to take it all the way back into the algorithmic part of the codebase, and none of them have ever been any good. If there are any good ones out there, show them to me — I’d love to see them.

In other words, abstraction is far more important to productivity than whether a language is visual or textual. Making languages visual is only a win if it can help solve the “higher order” issues: bugs, maintenance, and complexity. Steve’s 1997 claim is that he has not seen compelling demos of this in the visual programming space.

I think this is crucially important to keep in mind when thinking about visual programming languages that could be generally adopted. They have to provide an advantage in terms of abstraction. It seems that so far the opposite has been true: abstraction has been the main weakness of visual programming systems.

“Creativity isn’t magic. It happens by applying ordinary tools of thought to existing materials…. These are the basic elements of creativity: copy, transform, and combine.”

-Kirby Ferguson, Everything is a Remix

I finally finished reading the NYTimes article about the likely negative effects of eating too much sugar. People eat a crazy amount of sugar from an evolutionary perspective. The conclusion of the piece is that the science is still not conclusive, but the scientists say, “Sugar scares me.” There are likely links not just to diabetes but to many forms of cancer. And the story has the makings of a credible conspiracy because so many huge food industries would be devastated by sugar being labeled as a toxin.

Anyway. We’ll see what happens. In the meantime, I’ll aim for moderation, as usual.

It is worth remembering that artificial intelligence will not arrive suddenly and dramatically as it sometimes does in science fiction, but rather will happen gradually over time. It is unlikely that a computer program will on a specific day pass a Turing test as if it’s a black and white distinction; instead, programs will gradually pass the Turing test with an increasingly higher success rate.

It has long been noted that the trouble with being a researcher in artificial intelligence is that whenever a task becomes well understood enough to automate on a computer (such as playing chess or recognizing human faces), the task no longer seems so intelligent. This will continue to be the case as artificial intelligence progresses. For example, driving a car or taking a good photograph will no longer be judged to require cleverness or sentience.

After all, humans are just one data point along a spectrum of intelligence and intelligences. Computers will surpass our various capabilities at different times and with varying price tags. When artificial intelligence does arrive, it is likely that we will fully realize it only in retrospect, in history (e)books.

With so many people now watching for Apple information leaks and rumors, their big announcements rarely contain big surprises anymore. However, there is usually a twist or two that no one foresaw, because few are as good as Apple at radically simplifying their products and services.

For me, the twist today was that the cloud is not some separate thing that you have to manage and think about. Instead, it is simply a feature of an app.

Because existing cloud providers offer third-party services that are sold separately, these providers have no choice but to emphasize the cloud as a separate thing. For example, Dropbox—probably the most elegant user experience out there—gives you a special folder on your file system that you can drag files into to tell Dropbox to sync them with the cloud. All files that live in that folder are automatically synced. Because of this, Steve Jobs told us, ”Some people think the cloud is just a hard disk in the sky.”

Alternatively, some cloud services are integrated with web applications. For example, Google Docs stores your documents in the cloud and lets you view and edit them using a web browser. (Indeed, Google’s general goal seems to be to move all computing into the web browser, so not just your data but also the apps themselves live in the cloud. I’ve written previously about why I think that is shortsighted.)

Apple’s new “iCloud” offering brings to native apps the cloud integration that we’ve previously only seen with web applications. Moreover, it does this so seamlessly that the user is not really supposed to think about it at all. At Omni we spent a long time wondering how Apple was going to solve the problem of document sync in their iWork apps on the iPad. Then, last week, they shipped updates to those apps with no sign of cloud sync. What we didn’t realize was: that conspicuous absence was the whole point. The synchronization happens automatically, invisibly. There is no need for any user interface at all. Any file updated on one device is updated on all devices within seconds.

To make iCloud even more invisible, it’s free. There need be no user interface associated with paying. There need be no decisions about value and purchasing. You log in once when setting up the device, and that’s it. From then on, your various devices simply feel more like different views onto a single device. The automatic syncing makes it easier to operate the devices, not more complicated. You can spend less time managing the device and more time thinking about your content, your work, your friends.

There are bound to be remaining issues with sync conflicts, offline access, data plan limits, etc. But fast internet access is becoming widespread enough that this seamlessness does not seem out of the question.

The cloud is part of the app. The app is part of the cloud. If an app is cloud-enabled, that just means all devices automatically stay up to date.

“When teachers are judging them, students will sabotage the teacher by not trying. But when students understand that school is for them—a way for them to grow their minds—they do not insist on sabotaging themselves.

“In my work, I have seen tough guys shed tears when they realize they can become smarter. It’s common for students to… adopt an air of indifference, but we make a mistake if we think any student stops caring.”

-Carol Dweck (Mindset, p.201)