The video game Jacob Asofsky is creating is simple: "Someone who is trying to take over the world and you try to stop them."
The 12-year-old from Florida is spending two weeks at a summer camp in a program that teaches programming skills to young people.
"It's about having fun, but it also gives them the tools to be able to do this at home because they don't have this in school," said Taylor Jones, director of the iD Tech Camp at Atlanta's Emory University.
So-called coding camps for children are becoming more popular amid a growing effort to expand access to computer programming and inspire more youths to seek computer science degrees and careers in technology. Their rise underscores a seeming mismatch in the U.S. economy: people like Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Tumblr founder David Karp illustrate the opportunities programming skills can create, yet universities are not graduating enough code-savvy students to meet employers' demands.
The iD Tech Camps, which have grown from 200 students in 1999 to 28,000 enrolled this year in courses at dozens of locations nationwide, use interest in gaming to build bridges to computer programming and hopefully careers in Web developing, film animation and app creation for smart phones. Courses start at $829 for a one-week course during the day with overnight students paying $1,348.
On a recent weekday, Asofsky was attending an iD Tech Camp on the campus with some 95 other youths under the age of 17. He was using the gaming software RPG Maker to create a video game in which the main character travels around the world, buys animals and armor and interacts with others along the way.
"I have to say the interface of actually making a game is just as fun as playing a game," Asofsky said. "It's a lot like playing a game inside a game."
Early courses for children starting at age 7 use the photo and illustration software Adobe Photoshop and the gaming software Multimedia Fusion to create a simple arcade-style game.
"We sit down and talk about what makes games fun," said instructor Melissa Andrews, who was working with the youngest group of campers. "We get it down to the basics so they can make their own game."
Courses for older children include designing apps, creating sophisticated, 3-D, first-person shooter games using the Unreal Developer's Kit - also known as UDK - and learning programming languages like Java and C++. The idea is to build self-confidence and spark interest in learning how computers work, all to perhaps plant the seed of a future career in programming.
There will be 1.4 million computing jobs by 2020 but only 400,000 computer science students by that time, according to Code.org, a nonprofit with a list of who's who in the tech world on its advisory board including Twitter creator Jack Dorsey and Dropbox CEO Drew Houston.
And the jobs pay well. The median annual wage for a computer programmer, for instance, was $71,380 in 2010, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Meanwhile, jobs for network and computer systems administrators are growing at double the national average, with a median annual salary of $69,160.
Yet high schools and universities seem to be out of step with the job market. Nine out of 10 high schools don't offer computer programming classes and the number of students graduating from college with a computer science degree is down from a decade ago, according to Code.org.
Earlier this year, President Barack Obama said programming should be a required course in high school, similar to foreign languages.
"Given how pervasive computers and the Internet is now and how integral it is into our economy and how fascinated kids are with it, I want to make sure they know how to actually produce stuff using computers and not just simply consume stuff," Obama said during a Google+ Hangout.
Yale Oseroff's high school back in Virginia doesn't offer programming classes. The 17-year-old is spending his fourth year at an iD Tech Camp working through C++, a popular programming language used for systems and application software, for drivers to communicate between an operating system and devices like printers and to create some video games.
"I'm learning (computer) networking, which is what I want to do in college," he said, as he worked on developing a program to capture usernames and passwords and store them in a database.
On the Georgia Tech campus, the Institute for Computing Education offers a variety of camps clustered into elementary, middle and high school groups. Courses include making apps with App Inventor, creating moving sculptures with the WeDo Robotics systems that uses rotational motion and creating animations using Alice software.
Barbara Ericson, director of computer outreach at the Institute for Computing Education at Georgia Tech, said people sometimes ask: why not wait until children are older to start teaching them how to program?
"Anything over the age of 7 is capable, they are capable of learning reasoning," she said.
During a presentation earlier this month at a technology conference in Washington, D.C., Code.org founder Hadi Partovi said less than 5 percent of U.S. high school students spend class time learning computer science while it's a graduation requirement in China. He noted that many "software" jobs are outside the tech industry such as banking, retail, government and entertainment, which makes programming skills particularly versatile.
"It could mean starting your own company," he said. "But it could mean you're a doctor and you're tired of entering the same data into a chart using paper and you want to write an app that does it for you."
Source:
Source: Christina Cassidy, Associated Press
Saturday, June 29, 2013
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
A Revolution in Basic Education
Sal
Khan has a simple mission: a free, world-class education for anyone,
anywhere. Naturally, people think he's crazy. The craziest part is not
the "world-class education" part, because plenty of people want that.
And it's not even the "for anyone, anywhere" part. It's the "free" part.
Crazy or not, it's an idea that has attracted attention from Downing Street to Washington DC. And like a lot of crazy ideas, it started by accident.
Khan – working as a financial analyst in 2004 after earning degrees from MIT and an MBA from Harvard – started remotely tutoring his cousin, Nadia, in Louisiana, who was struggling with maths. "Then the rest of the family heard there was free tutoring," he says, and more relatives started taking part. The demands got too much – until a friend suggested he could film the tutorials, post them on YouTube and let the family members view them whenever they chose.
"YouTube? YouTube was for cats playing the piano, not serious mathematics," Khan recalls thinking. "I got over the idea that it wasn't my idea and decided to give it a shot."
Since 2009, Khan has devoted himself full-time to his Khan Academy, a tutoring, mentoring and testing educational website at khanacademy.org that offers its content free to anyone with internet access willing to work through its exercises and pithy videos, the majority narrated by Khan himself.
"It's no exaggeration to say that there's a revolution coming in education, sparked by Sal Khan," says Rohan Silva, a Downing Street senior adviser on technology.
Using the internet to widen access to education is not itself revolutionary. The success of iTunes U applications from Apple and the rise of the massive open online courses – nicknamed Moocs – at institutions such as Stanford University show the appetite is there.
But the Khan Academy is different. Although it also carries tutorials in arts, computing and science, its core remains secondary school maths, in which it couples hand-holding video instruction with online exercises, from basic addition and multiplication to the farther reaches of algebra and calculus. There's no accredited qualifications, just a self-paced course combined with sophisticated software that charts progress and highlights weaknesses, making it simple for a parent to use to help a child with homework without knowing the finer points of algebra.
A tutorial from the Khan Academy website called Why Distance is Area under Velocity-Time Line There's an easy way to see what the fuss is about: the website allows anyone to sign up and start viewing tutorials and taking the interactive tests that are at the heart of the academy's method.
The concept is simple: watch a video in which Khan explains the subject being learned, and then take the online tests that follow. The software times answers as well as noting missteps, offers encouragement for doing well or even just persevering. Then, when satisfied you have mastered the topic, it invites you to move on to a related topic.
In a classroom setting, students can move at their own pace, and make repeated viewings of tutorials if they don't understand first time around. The teacher can track progress on their own laptop, and intervene to give an explanation when they see a student struggling.
"I started this out as a hobby," Khan, 36, told a packed theatre at the London School of Economics last week, after the inevitable question about his academy's not-for-profit status. "Although my friends in Silicon Valley were quick to ask me: 'What's your business model?' I said: 'I don't have a business model.'"
A slight figure dressed in American smart-casual that belies teenage years playing heavy metal, the 36-year-old owes a lot to the transformative power of education. The child of Bangladeshi and Indian immigrants, he was born in America's deep south. "Louisiana was as close to south Asia as the United States could get: it had spicy food, humidity, giant cockroaches and a corrupt government," Khan writes in his book, The One World Schoolhouse.
Business model or not, what the Khan Academy does have is a lot of fans, and about 6 million regular users a month, not to mention tens of millions of viewings of its 4,000 online tutorials. When Khan asks the audience at the LSE how many use his site, perhaps half raise their hands, some sheepishly
.
From the beginning Khan made a deliberate decision to stay out of camera, and in the early days used relatively crude drawing software on a black background to mimic a blackboard. Khan's cordial tone and mellifluous voice combine to make the tutorials approachable and, thanks to a 10-minute time-limit initially imposed by YouTube, concise.
Word spread that there were tutorials in basic maths freely available. Khan began to notice appreciative comments appearing under his videos. Then letters started arriving. One that grabbed his attention was from a woman with two disabled children who had used the videos. "She said that her entire family prays for my family every night," Khan relates. "To put that into context, at the time I was working for a hedge fund."
More importantly, the US educational establishment was taking note, starting with the Los Altos school district in California, which began a pilot programme using the Khan Academy's tools. The initial results were spectacular, in Khan's telling, and since then the movement has spread. With backing from supporters the academy has been training teachers to use its tools and methods in places such as Idaho and Kansas.
Has he had any discussions about the Khan Academy partnering with schools in the UK? "Nothing formal now but we would like to," Khan replies.
By 2009 Khan decided to leave the hedge fund for what he describes as a closet in his house in Mountain View, California – although American ideas of what constitutes a closet are more generous than in Europe. Paying the bills was a problem until a local philanthropist, Ann Doerr, made the first significant donation, first of $10,000 (£7,000) and then $100,000, after she realised Khan was in effect working for nothing.
It was Doerr who tipped Khan off about a turning point for the academy. At the Aspen Ideas Festival – a US version of Davos – in 2010, Bill Gates told an audience that he had been using Khan's videos to teach his own child. "It actually made me a little nervous," says Khan. "It was a video made for Nadia, not Bill Gates."
Soon a call came from Seattle for a meeting with Gates himself, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation became one of the academy's biggest supporters. "I've used Khan Academy with my kids, and I'm amazed at the breadth of Sal's subject expertise and his ability to make complicated topics understandable," Gates wrote in tribute to Khan being named one of Time's 100 most influential people of 2012. Gates concluded: "He started by posting a math lesson, but his impact on education might truly be incalculable."
Google and others have since got on board, as the honours mounted up for Khan. Earlier this year the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim – said to be the world's richest man – announced his foundation was funding the translation of the academy's work into Spanish, and the academy says its material is used in classrooms around the world, including Mongolia.
There are critics who have challenged the Khan Academy's content and Khan's approach. Some have posted detailed criticisms of his tutorials, although Khan says he is happy for the scrutiny. "It'd piss me off too if I had been teaching for 30 years and suddenly this ex-hedge-fund guy is hailed as the world's teacher," he told Time last year.
Khan is no fan of traditional education, which he derides as "lecture, homework, lecture, homework". "The real problem is that the process is broken," he tells his LSE audience, to nods of approval. "We identify the gaps [in children's knowledge], then we ignore them."
(From: Richard Adams of Guardian Newspaper in London)
Crazy or not, it's an idea that has attracted attention from Downing Street to Washington DC. And like a lot of crazy ideas, it started by accident.
Khan – working as a financial analyst in 2004 after earning degrees from MIT and an MBA from Harvard – started remotely tutoring his cousin, Nadia, in Louisiana, who was struggling with maths. "Then the rest of the family heard there was free tutoring," he says, and more relatives started taking part. The demands got too much – until a friend suggested he could film the tutorials, post them on YouTube and let the family members view them whenever they chose.
"YouTube? YouTube was for cats playing the piano, not serious mathematics," Khan recalls thinking. "I got over the idea that it wasn't my idea and decided to give it a shot."
Since 2009, Khan has devoted himself full-time to his Khan Academy, a tutoring, mentoring and testing educational website at khanacademy.org that offers its content free to anyone with internet access willing to work through its exercises and pithy videos, the majority narrated by Khan himself.
"It's no exaggeration to say that there's a revolution coming in education, sparked by Sal Khan," says Rohan Silva, a Downing Street senior adviser on technology.
Using the internet to widen access to education is not itself revolutionary. The success of iTunes U applications from Apple and the rise of the massive open online courses – nicknamed Moocs – at institutions such as Stanford University show the appetite is there.
But the Khan Academy is different. Although it also carries tutorials in arts, computing and science, its core remains secondary school maths, in which it couples hand-holding video instruction with online exercises, from basic addition and multiplication to the farther reaches of algebra and calculus. There's no accredited qualifications, just a self-paced course combined with sophisticated software that charts progress and highlights weaknesses, making it simple for a parent to use to help a child with homework without knowing the finer points of algebra.
A tutorial from the Khan Academy website called Why Distance is Area under Velocity-Time Line There's an easy way to see what the fuss is about: the website allows anyone to sign up and start viewing tutorials and taking the interactive tests that are at the heart of the academy's method.
The concept is simple: watch a video in which Khan explains the subject being learned, and then take the online tests that follow. The software times answers as well as noting missteps, offers encouragement for doing well or even just persevering. Then, when satisfied you have mastered the topic, it invites you to move on to a related topic.
In a classroom setting, students can move at their own pace, and make repeated viewings of tutorials if they don't understand first time around. The teacher can track progress on their own laptop, and intervene to give an explanation when they see a student struggling.
"I started this out as a hobby," Khan, 36, told a packed theatre at the London School of Economics last week, after the inevitable question about his academy's not-for-profit status. "Although my friends in Silicon Valley were quick to ask me: 'What's your business model?' I said: 'I don't have a business model.'"
A slight figure dressed in American smart-casual that belies teenage years playing heavy metal, the 36-year-old owes a lot to the transformative power of education. The child of Bangladeshi and Indian immigrants, he was born in America's deep south. "Louisiana was as close to south Asia as the United States could get: it had spicy food, humidity, giant cockroaches and a corrupt government," Khan writes in his book, The One World Schoolhouse.
Business model or not, what the Khan Academy does have is a lot of fans, and about 6 million regular users a month, not to mention tens of millions of viewings of its 4,000 online tutorials. When Khan asks the audience at the LSE how many use his site, perhaps half raise their hands, some sheepishly
.
From the beginning Khan made a deliberate decision to stay out of camera, and in the early days used relatively crude drawing software on a black background to mimic a blackboard. Khan's cordial tone and mellifluous voice combine to make the tutorials approachable and, thanks to a 10-minute time-limit initially imposed by YouTube, concise.
Word spread that there were tutorials in basic maths freely available. Khan began to notice appreciative comments appearing under his videos. Then letters started arriving. One that grabbed his attention was from a woman with two disabled children who had used the videos. "She said that her entire family prays for my family every night," Khan relates. "To put that into context, at the time I was working for a hedge fund."
More importantly, the US educational establishment was taking note, starting with the Los Altos school district in California, which began a pilot programme using the Khan Academy's tools. The initial results were spectacular, in Khan's telling, and since then the movement has spread. With backing from supporters the academy has been training teachers to use its tools and methods in places such as Idaho and Kansas.
Has he had any discussions about the Khan Academy partnering with schools in the UK? "Nothing formal now but we would like to," Khan replies.
By 2009 Khan decided to leave the hedge fund for what he describes as a closet in his house in Mountain View, California – although American ideas of what constitutes a closet are more generous than in Europe. Paying the bills was a problem until a local philanthropist, Ann Doerr, made the first significant donation, first of $10,000 (£7,000) and then $100,000, after she realised Khan was in effect working for nothing.
It was Doerr who tipped Khan off about a turning point for the academy. At the Aspen Ideas Festival – a US version of Davos – in 2010, Bill Gates told an audience that he had been using Khan's videos to teach his own child. "It actually made me a little nervous," says Khan. "It was a video made for Nadia, not Bill Gates."
Soon a call came from Seattle for a meeting with Gates himself, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation became one of the academy's biggest supporters. "I've used Khan Academy with my kids, and I'm amazed at the breadth of Sal's subject expertise and his ability to make complicated topics understandable," Gates wrote in tribute to Khan being named one of Time's 100 most influential people of 2012. Gates concluded: "He started by posting a math lesson, but his impact on education might truly be incalculable."
Google and others have since got on board, as the honours mounted up for Khan. Earlier this year the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim – said to be the world's richest man – announced his foundation was funding the translation of the academy's work into Spanish, and the academy says its material is used in classrooms around the world, including Mongolia.
There are critics who have challenged the Khan Academy's content and Khan's approach. Some have posted detailed criticisms of his tutorials, although Khan says he is happy for the scrutiny. "It'd piss me off too if I had been teaching for 30 years and suddenly this ex-hedge-fund guy is hailed as the world's teacher," he told Time last year.
Khan is no fan of traditional education, which he derides as "lecture, homework, lecture, homework". "The real problem is that the process is broken," he tells his LSE audience, to nods of approval. "We identify the gaps [in children's knowledge], then we ignore them."
(From: Richard Adams of Guardian Newspaper in London)
Thursday, April 18, 2013
Data Scientist: Best Job Opportunity in the Future
HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW calls data science “the sexiest job in the 21st century,” and by most accounts this hot new field promises to revolutionize industries from business to government, health care to academia.
The field has been spawned by the enormous amounts of data that modern technologies create — be it the online behavior of Facebook users, tissue samples of cancer patients, purchasing habits of grocery shoppers or crime statistics of cities. Data scientists are the magicians of the Big Data era. They crunch the data, use mathematical models to analyze it and create narratives or visualizations to explain it, then suggest how to use the information to make decisions.
In the last few years, dozens of programs under a variety of names have sprung up in response to the excitement about Big Data, not to mention the six-figure salaries for some recent graduates.
In the fall, Columbia will offer new master’s and certificate programs heavy on data. The University of San Francisco will soon graduate its charter class of students with a master’s in analytics. Other institutions teaching data science include New York University, Stanford, Northwestern, George Mason, Syracuse, University of California at Irvine and Indiana University.
Rachel Schutt, a senior research scientist at Johnson Research Labs, taught “Introduction to Data Science” last semester at Columbia (its first course with “data science” in the title). She described the data scientist this way: “a hybrid computer scientist software engineer statistician.” And added: “The best tend to be really curious people, thinkers who ask good questions and are O.K. dealing with unstructured situations and trying to find structure in them.”
Eurry Kim, a 30-year-old “wannabe data scientist,” is studying at Columbia for a master’s in quantitative methods in the social sciences and plans to use her degree for government service. She discovered the possibilities while working as a corporate tax analyst at the Internal Revenue Service. She might, for example, analyze tax return data to develop algorithms that flag fraudulent filings, or cull national security databases to spot suspicious activity.
Some of her classmates are hoping to apply their skills to e-commerce, where data about users’ browsing history is gold.
“This is a generation of kids that grew up with data science around them — Netflix telling them what movies they should watch, Amazon telling them what books they should read — so this is an academic interest with real-world applications,” said Chris Wiggins, a professor of applied mathematics at Columbia who is involved in its new Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering. “And,” he added, “they know it will make them employable.”
Universities can hardly turn out data scientists fast enough. To meet demand from employers, the United States will need to increase the number of graduates with skills handling large amounts of data by as much as 60 percent, according to a report by McKinsey Global Institute. There will be almost half a million jobs in five years, and a shortage of up to 190,000 qualified data scientists, plus a need for 1.5 million executives and support staff who have an understanding of data.
North Carolina State University introduced a master’s in analytics in 2007. All 84 of last year’s graduates in the field had job offers, according to Michael Rappa, who conceived and directs the university’s Institute for Advanced Analytics. The average salary was $89,100, and more than $100,000 for those with prior work experience.
“This has become relevant to every company,” said Michael Chui, a principal at McKinsey who has studied the field. “There’s a war for this type of talent.”
Because data science is so new, universities are scrambling to define it and develop curriculums. As an academic field, it cuts across disciplines, with courses in statistics, analytics, computer science and math, coupled with the specialty a student wants to analyze, from patterns in marine life to historical texts.
With the sheer volume, variety and speed of data today, as well as developing technologies, programs are more than a repackaging of existing courses. “Data science is emerging as an academic discipline, defined not by a mere amalgamation of interdisciplinary fields but as a body of knowledge, a set of professional practices, a professional organization and a set of ethical responsibilities,” said Christopher Starr, chairman of the computer science department at the College of Charleston, one of a few institutions offering data science at the undergraduate level.
Most master’s degree programs in data science require basic programming skills. They start with what Ms. Schutt describes as the “boring” part — scraping and cleaning raw data and “getting it into a nice table where you can actually analyze it.” Many use data sets provided by businesses or government, and pass back their results. Some host competitions to see which student can come up with the best solution to a company’s problem.
University of San Francisco students have used data from General Electric to predict how much energy windmills could create. At North Carolina State, with data from the Postal Service, students have analyzed response rates to junk mail to find ways to improve its effectiveness.
Studying a Web user’s data has privacy implications. Using data to decide someone’s eligibility for a line of credit or health insurance, or even recommending who they friend on Facebook, can affect their lives. “We’re building these models that have impact on human life,” Ms. Schutt said. “How can we do that carefully?” Ethics classes address these questions.
Finally, students have to learn to communicate their findings, visually and orally, and they need business know-how, perhaps to develop new products.
“That’s one of the challenges,” said Terence Parr, program director of the analytics and computer science programs at the University of San Francisco. “To be successful, you need to have a wide range of skills that doesn’t fit in one department.”
The question, said Bill Howe, who teaches data science at the University of Washington, is whether it is even possible to instill in a single person all the skills needed, from statistics to predictive modeling to business strategy. The university’s offerings range from a free online course on Coursera to a nine-month certificate program to a Ph.D. track in Big Data.
“It remains to be seen,” he said, “but we’re still of the mind that a curriculum that aims to train data scientists is feasible.” He added: “What employers want is someone who can do it all.”
(From Claire Cain Miller, New York Times)
The field has been spawned by the enormous amounts of data that modern technologies create — be it the online behavior of Facebook users, tissue samples of cancer patients, purchasing habits of grocery shoppers or crime statistics of cities. Data scientists are the magicians of the Big Data era. They crunch the data, use mathematical models to analyze it and create narratives or visualizations to explain it, then suggest how to use the information to make decisions.
In the last few years, dozens of programs under a variety of names have sprung up in response to the excitement about Big Data, not to mention the six-figure salaries for some recent graduates.
In the fall, Columbia will offer new master’s and certificate programs heavy on data. The University of San Francisco will soon graduate its charter class of students with a master’s in analytics. Other institutions teaching data science include New York University, Stanford, Northwestern, George Mason, Syracuse, University of California at Irvine and Indiana University.
Rachel Schutt, a senior research scientist at Johnson Research Labs, taught “Introduction to Data Science” last semester at Columbia (its first course with “data science” in the title). She described the data scientist this way: “a hybrid computer scientist software engineer statistician.” And added: “The best tend to be really curious people, thinkers who ask good questions and are O.K. dealing with unstructured situations and trying to find structure in them.”
Eurry Kim, a 30-year-old “wannabe data scientist,” is studying at Columbia for a master’s in quantitative methods in the social sciences and plans to use her degree for government service. She discovered the possibilities while working as a corporate tax analyst at the Internal Revenue Service. She might, for example, analyze tax return data to develop algorithms that flag fraudulent filings, or cull national security databases to spot suspicious activity.
Some of her classmates are hoping to apply their skills to e-commerce, where data about users’ browsing history is gold.
“This is a generation of kids that grew up with data science around them — Netflix telling them what movies they should watch, Amazon telling them what books they should read — so this is an academic interest with real-world applications,” said Chris Wiggins, a professor of applied mathematics at Columbia who is involved in its new Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering. “And,” he added, “they know it will make them employable.”
Universities can hardly turn out data scientists fast enough. To meet demand from employers, the United States will need to increase the number of graduates with skills handling large amounts of data by as much as 60 percent, according to a report by McKinsey Global Institute. There will be almost half a million jobs in five years, and a shortage of up to 190,000 qualified data scientists, plus a need for 1.5 million executives and support staff who have an understanding of data.
North Carolina State University introduced a master’s in analytics in 2007. All 84 of last year’s graduates in the field had job offers, according to Michael Rappa, who conceived and directs the university’s Institute for Advanced Analytics. The average salary was $89,100, and more than $100,000 for those with prior work experience.
“This has become relevant to every company,” said Michael Chui, a principal at McKinsey who has studied the field. “There’s a war for this type of talent.”
Because data science is so new, universities are scrambling to define it and develop curriculums. As an academic field, it cuts across disciplines, with courses in statistics, analytics, computer science and math, coupled with the specialty a student wants to analyze, from patterns in marine life to historical texts.
With the sheer volume, variety and speed of data today, as well as developing technologies, programs are more than a repackaging of existing courses. “Data science is emerging as an academic discipline, defined not by a mere amalgamation of interdisciplinary fields but as a body of knowledge, a set of professional practices, a professional organization and a set of ethical responsibilities,” said Christopher Starr, chairman of the computer science department at the College of Charleston, one of a few institutions offering data science at the undergraduate level.
Most master’s degree programs in data science require basic programming skills. They start with what Ms. Schutt describes as the “boring” part — scraping and cleaning raw data and “getting it into a nice table where you can actually analyze it.” Many use data sets provided by businesses or government, and pass back their results. Some host competitions to see which student can come up with the best solution to a company’s problem.
University of San Francisco students have used data from General Electric to predict how much energy windmills could create. At North Carolina State, with data from the Postal Service, students have analyzed response rates to junk mail to find ways to improve its effectiveness.
Studying a Web user’s data has privacy implications. Using data to decide someone’s eligibility for a line of credit or health insurance, or even recommending who they friend on Facebook, can affect their lives. “We’re building these models that have impact on human life,” Ms. Schutt said. “How can we do that carefully?” Ethics classes address these questions.
Finally, students have to learn to communicate their findings, visually and orally, and they need business know-how, perhaps to develop new products.
“That’s one of the challenges,” said Terence Parr, program director of the analytics and computer science programs at the University of San Francisco. “To be successful, you need to have a wide range of skills that doesn’t fit in one department.”
The question, said Bill Howe, who teaches data science at the University of Washington, is whether it is even possible to instill in a single person all the skills needed, from statistics to predictive modeling to business strategy. The university’s offerings range from a free online course on Coursera to a nine-month certificate program to a Ph.D. track in Big Data.
“It remains to be seen,” he said, “but we’re still of the mind that a curriculum that aims to train data scientists is feasible.” He added: “What employers want is someone who can do it all.”
(From Claire Cain Miller, New York Times)
Thursday, April 11, 2013
Learning Java thru a Video Game
Computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego, have developed an immersive, first-person player video game designed to teach students in elementary to high school how to program in Java, one of the most common programming languages in use today.
The researchers tested the game on a group of 40 girls, ages 10 to 12, who had never been exposed to programming before. They detailed their findings in a paper they presented at the SIGCSE conference in March in Denver. Computer scientists found that within just one hour of play, the girls had mastered some of Java’s basic components and were able to use the language to create new ways of playing with the game.
“CodeSpells is the only video game that completely immerses programming into the game play,” said William Griswold, a computer scientist at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego.
The UC San Diego computer scientists plan to release the game for free and make it available to any educational institution that requests it. Researchers are currently conducting further case studies in San Diego elementary schools.
Teaching computer science below the college level is difficult, mainly because it is hard to find qualified instructors for students in elementary to high school, Griswold said. So he and his graduate students set out to find a way to reach these students outside the classroom. They designed the game to keep children engaged while they are coping with the difficulties of programming, which could otherwise be frustrating and discouraging.
Teaching children how to program must be a priority in a society where technology is becoming more and more important, said Sarah Esper, one of the lead graduate students on the development of CodeSpells. Programming also teaches logical thinking, said Stephen Foster, another lead student.
“We’re hoping that they will get as addicted to learning programming as they get addicted to video games,” Foster said.
How CodeSpells works
CodeSpells’ story line is simple: the player is a wizard arriving in a land populated by gnomes. The gnomes used to have magic, but lost it at some point. The wizard must help them. She (or he) writes spells in Java. Players have seven spells available to them, including levitating objects within the game, flying and making fire.
Players can also earn badges by undertaking simple quests, which help them master the game’s spells. One quest entails crossing a river. Another entails rescuing a gnome from the roof of his cottage, where he got stuck. Yet another entails starting a large bonfire. By the time players complete the game’s first level, they have learned the main components of the Java programming language, such as parameters, for if statements, for loops and while loops, among other skills.
Testing the game
Researchers tested the game on a group of 40 girls ages 10 to 12 in San Diego. They gave the students a brief overview of the game’s mechanics, including how to write and edit code within the game’s user interface. The girls were divided in groups of two or three. Researchers encouraged them to explore the game and see what they could do. “We were purposefully vague,” they wrote, “as we hoped to encourage a largely unstructured learning environment.”
The students were disappointed when they had to stop playing because the test was over. Their interest in the game didn’t wane when they made mistakes while writing code. Instead, they used the mistakes as a stepping stone to explore the game’s possibilities. For example, one group made the mistake of levitating an object so high into the air that their wizard couldn’t reach it. So the girls made their wizard jump onto another object and levitated it high enough to reach the object they were after. The girls also reported feeling empowered. When they encountered a difficulty, they tried different spells and made changes to the code until they solved it.
Computer science learning theory
CodeSpells was influenced by research that Esper and Foster conducted on how successful programmers learn their trade. They surveyed 30 computer scientists and identified five characteristics that are key to learn programming outside a classroom setting: activities must be structured by the person who is trying to learn; learning must be creative and exploratory; programming is empowering; learners have difficulty stopping once they start; and learners spend countless hours on the activity.
Researchers summarized these findings in their SIGCSE 2013 paper, humorously titled “On the Nature of Fires and How to Spark Them When You’re Not There.”
Esper will present her CodeSpells work April 18 at Research Expo at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego.
(From University of California - San Diego Website)
The researchers tested the game on a group of 40 girls, ages 10 to 12, who had never been exposed to programming before. They detailed their findings in a paper they presented at the SIGCSE conference in March in Denver. Computer scientists found that within just one hour of play, the girls had mastered some of Java’s basic components and were able to use the language to create new ways of playing with the game.
“CodeSpells is the only video game that completely immerses programming into the game play,” said William Griswold, a computer scientist at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego.
The UC San Diego computer scientists plan to release the game for free and make it available to any educational institution that requests it. Researchers are currently conducting further case studies in San Diego elementary schools.
Teaching computer science below the college level is difficult, mainly because it is hard to find qualified instructors for students in elementary to high school, Griswold said. So he and his graduate students set out to find a way to reach these students outside the classroom. They designed the game to keep children engaged while they are coping with the difficulties of programming, which could otherwise be frustrating and discouraging.
Teaching children how to program must be a priority in a society where technology is becoming more and more important, said Sarah Esper, one of the lead graduate students on the development of CodeSpells. Programming also teaches logical thinking, said Stephen Foster, another lead student.
“We’re hoping that they will get as addicted to learning programming as they get addicted to video games,” Foster said.
How CodeSpells works
CodeSpells’ story line is simple: the player is a wizard arriving in a land populated by gnomes. The gnomes used to have magic, but lost it at some point. The wizard must help them. She (or he) writes spells in Java. Players have seven spells available to them, including levitating objects within the game, flying and making fire.
Players can also earn badges by undertaking simple quests, which help them master the game’s spells. One quest entails crossing a river. Another entails rescuing a gnome from the roof of his cottage, where he got stuck. Yet another entails starting a large bonfire. By the time players complete the game’s first level, they have learned the main components of the Java programming language, such as parameters, for if statements, for loops and while loops, among other skills.
Testing the game
Researchers tested the game on a group of 40 girls ages 10 to 12 in San Diego. They gave the students a brief overview of the game’s mechanics, including how to write and edit code within the game’s user interface. The girls were divided in groups of two or three. Researchers encouraged them to explore the game and see what they could do. “We were purposefully vague,” they wrote, “as we hoped to encourage a largely unstructured learning environment.”
The students were disappointed when they had to stop playing because the test was over. Their interest in the game didn’t wane when they made mistakes while writing code. Instead, they used the mistakes as a stepping stone to explore the game’s possibilities. For example, one group made the mistake of levitating an object so high into the air that their wizard couldn’t reach it. So the girls made their wizard jump onto another object and levitated it high enough to reach the object they were after. The girls also reported feeling empowered. When they encountered a difficulty, they tried different spells and made changes to the code until they solved it.
Computer science learning theory
CodeSpells was influenced by research that Esper and Foster conducted on how successful programmers learn their trade. They surveyed 30 computer scientists and identified five characteristics that are key to learn programming outside a classroom setting: activities must be structured by the person who is trying to learn; learning must be creative and exploratory; programming is empowering; learners have difficulty stopping once they start; and learners spend countless hours on the activity.
Researchers summarized these findings in their SIGCSE 2013 paper, humorously titled “On the Nature of Fires and How to Spark Them When You’re Not There.”
Esper will present her CodeSpells work April 18 at Research Expo at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego.
(From University of California - San Diego Website)
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
Free Software Developer School in Paris
French internet mogul Xavier Niel will open a new school in Paris just for software developers. Niel — who previously founded France’s first entrepreneurship school — is even putting up 20 million euros to keep tuition free. Known as 42, the school will focus on project-based learning and will allow students to set their own pace for learning, the French startup blog Rude Baguette reports. It’s expected to open in November.
In the late ’90s, Neil co-founded the first internet service provider in France, Worldnet, and in 2000, he sold the company for $50 million. By then, he had already founded Free, which is now the second-largest ISP in France. Last year, the company launched Free Mobile, which offers unlimited calls, texts and data for just $27 a month, about half the price of incumbent competitors, according to Forbes.
But Niel is very much the maverick, and controversy tends to follow him. When he was 19, he started an “erotic chat” service for Minitel, the French proto-internet that shut down just last year. In 1999, Free’s parent company, Iliad, was accused by France Télécom of pirating its reverse number look-up database — the companies settled out of court — and in 2005, Niel was arrested in relation to a prostitution scandal at some sex shops that he had invested in. He was cleared of the prostitution charges, but landed a two-year suspended sentence for failing to disclose income, Forbes reported. Free also caused a stir earlier this year when the company began blocking all web ads. The French government ended up stepping in and forcing Free to end the block, according to the Economist.
Niel is a self-taught programmer who never went to college, so it’s no surprise that 42 won’t be your ordinary school. There will be no lectures, according to the school’s FAQ. All the learning will be project-based, with an emphasis on “peer to peer” learning. And the school will teach not just programming skills, but also the habits that companies are looking for in programmers: productivity, collaboration and lifelong learning and self-investment, according to the school’s website. 42 won’t be an officially accredited school. Instead, Niel is banking on the school developing a reputation for itself.
The school will accept 1,000 students per year. Applicants must be between the ages of 18 and 30, but there will be no requirement for any sort of degree prior to enrollment. To apply, students will attempt to complete a series of games on the school’s website. Those who are able to complete the games will move on to a one-day “try out” at the school. Up to 1,000 students will be admitted per year. According to the FAQ, the students need not already know how to program to be selected.
The school echoes some U.S. educational initiatives, such as Code.org and Dev Bootcamp. Code.org — backed by the likes of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg — is attempting to expand and improve computer science education in public schools in the United States. Dev Bootcamp offers a nine-week intensive training in programming and, like 42, it focuses on project-based learning and peer-to-peer education.
In the late ’90s, Neil co-founded the first internet service provider in France, Worldnet, and in 2000, he sold the company for $50 million. By then, he had already founded Free, which is now the second-largest ISP in France. Last year, the company launched Free Mobile, which offers unlimited calls, texts and data for just $27 a month, about half the price of incumbent competitors, according to Forbes.
But Niel is very much the maverick, and controversy tends to follow him. When he was 19, he started an “erotic chat” service for Minitel, the French proto-internet that shut down just last year. In 1999, Free’s parent company, Iliad, was accused by France Télécom of pirating its reverse number look-up database — the companies settled out of court — and in 2005, Niel was arrested in relation to a prostitution scandal at some sex shops that he had invested in. He was cleared of the prostitution charges, but landed a two-year suspended sentence for failing to disclose income, Forbes reported. Free also caused a stir earlier this year when the company began blocking all web ads. The French government ended up stepping in and forcing Free to end the block, according to the Economist.
Niel is a self-taught programmer who never went to college, so it’s no surprise that 42 won’t be your ordinary school. There will be no lectures, according to the school’s FAQ. All the learning will be project-based, with an emphasis on “peer to peer” learning. And the school will teach not just programming skills, but also the habits that companies are looking for in programmers: productivity, collaboration and lifelong learning and self-investment, according to the school’s website. 42 won’t be an officially accredited school. Instead, Niel is banking on the school developing a reputation for itself.
The school will accept 1,000 students per year. Applicants must be between the ages of 18 and 30, but there will be no requirement for any sort of degree prior to enrollment. To apply, students will attempt to complete a series of games on the school’s website. Those who are able to complete the games will move on to a one-day “try out” at the school. Up to 1,000 students will be admitted per year. According to the FAQ, the students need not already know how to program to be selected.
The school echoes some U.S. educational initiatives, such as Code.org and Dev Bootcamp. Code.org — backed by the likes of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg — is attempting to expand and improve computer science education in public schools in the United States. Dev Bootcamp offers a nine-week intensive training in programming and, like 42, it focuses on project-based learning and peer-to-peer education.
Monday, March 4, 2013
New Technology for Animation
New technology for animation film experts
Movie heroes are soon to be transferred to virtual worlds more easily and realistically
CEBIT 2013. Germany. February 27, 2013
Whenever computer-animated characters roam through wild landscapes, such a Gollum in Lord of the Rings, there were real actors at work. Film studios usually use a procedure called 'motion capture'. The actors wear skin-tight suits with markers attached to them reflecting beams of infrared light that are sent out and received by a special camera system. In this way, the movements of a real actor are recorded and can later be transferred to a virtual character, using animation software. “However, the suits are very uncomfortable for the actors, and the markers interfere with their movements”, says Nils Hasler from the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken. For this reason, the Computer Graphics researchers there have developed a method that eliminates the need for markers but captures the movements quickly and realistically.
This method allows actors in their normal clothing to be filmed with ordinary cameras. The movements are then analysed with special computer software and transferred to a virtual character in the form of a skeleton. “We require only a few cameras instead of the several dozen cameras needed for the special effects in Hollywood. The movements are computed so quickly that we can transfer them directly to the animated character without time delay,” Hasler explains. The meanwhile patented computation method has been further refined in the past months. It can now deal with scenes in which several participants are simultaneously active and body parts overlap. “The system even detects a person’s movements when they are covered up by other objects or when there are disturbances in the background. This will allow us to shoot visual effects outside of the studio in the future, for example, out in open nature,” the Saarbrücken-based researcher reckons.
The computer scientists in Christian Theobalt’s “Graphics, Vision & Video” team were able to solve yet another problem in the past few months, as Hasler explains proudly: “It was difficult for our software to reconstruct the body movements of actors wearing big coats or women entering a scene in long ballroom dresses. Our new computation method enables us to capture surfaces in such precise detail that, e.g., the draping folds of clothing can be reproduced realistically.” The new technology is also useful in areas outside the film and game industry. Athletes could use it to analyse specific, individual body movements without bothersome markers. Sports journalists would be able to comment on motion sequences, like in pole vault and discus competitions, in live television broadcasts.
“The field of medicine would also profit. It would be easier for doctors to depict and track the degree of recovery after operations on joints,” Hasler explains. The researcher from the Max Planck Institute for Informatics wants to establish a company together with Professor Christian Theobalt and his research colleague, Carsten Stoll, in order to offer their software as a commercial product. “We have already had quite a few inquiries from companies in the film and sports marketing industries,” Hasler reveals.
Technical Background
The technology used in this method is quite affordable. Anywhere from five to twelve ordinary video cameras are needed. The computer scientists use their software to produce a 3-D model of the depicted person from a skeleton with 58 joints. In order to capture the movements, the computation method continuously works on overlaying the two-dimensional image from the video camera and the 3-D model as exactly as possible. The researchers can solve the necessary equations for this task efficiently and quickly. With this method, they capture filmed movements and visualize them in the virtual characters within just a few milliseconds.
Computer Science on Saarland University Campus
Movie heroes are soon to be transferred to virtual worlds more easily and realistically
CEBIT 2013. Germany. February 27, 2013
Whenever computer-animated characters roam through wild landscapes, such a Gollum in Lord of the Rings, there were real actors at work. Film studios usually use a procedure called 'motion capture'. The actors wear skin-tight suits with markers attached to them reflecting beams of infrared light that are sent out and received by a special camera system. In this way, the movements of a real actor are recorded and can later be transferred to a virtual character, using animation software. “However, the suits are very uncomfortable for the actors, and the markers interfere with their movements”, says Nils Hasler from the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken. For this reason, the Computer Graphics researchers there have developed a method that eliminates the need for markers but captures the movements quickly and realistically.
This method allows actors in their normal clothing to be filmed with ordinary cameras. The movements are then analysed with special computer software and transferred to a virtual character in the form of a skeleton. “We require only a few cameras instead of the several dozen cameras needed for the special effects in Hollywood. The movements are computed so quickly that we can transfer them directly to the animated character without time delay,” Hasler explains. The meanwhile patented computation method has been further refined in the past months. It can now deal with scenes in which several participants are simultaneously active and body parts overlap. “The system even detects a person’s movements when they are covered up by other objects or when there are disturbances in the background. This will allow us to shoot visual effects outside of the studio in the future, for example, out in open nature,” the Saarbrücken-based researcher reckons.
The computer scientists in Christian Theobalt’s “Graphics, Vision & Video” team were able to solve yet another problem in the past few months, as Hasler explains proudly: “It was difficult for our software to reconstruct the body movements of actors wearing big coats or women entering a scene in long ballroom dresses. Our new computation method enables us to capture surfaces in such precise detail that, e.g., the draping folds of clothing can be reproduced realistically.” The new technology is also useful in areas outside the film and game industry. Athletes could use it to analyse specific, individual body movements without bothersome markers. Sports journalists would be able to comment on motion sequences, like in pole vault and discus competitions, in live television broadcasts.
“The field of medicine would also profit. It would be easier for doctors to depict and track the degree of recovery after operations on joints,” Hasler explains. The researcher from the Max Planck Institute for Informatics wants to establish a company together with Professor Christian Theobalt and his research colleague, Carsten Stoll, in order to offer their software as a commercial product. “We have already had quite a few inquiries from companies in the film and sports marketing industries,” Hasler reveals.
Technical Background
The technology used in this method is quite affordable. Anywhere from five to twelve ordinary video cameras are needed. The computer scientists use their software to produce a 3-D model of the depicted person from a skeleton with 58 joints. In order to capture the movements, the computation method continuously works on overlaying the two-dimensional image from the video camera and the 3-D model as exactly as possible. The researchers can solve the necessary equations for this task efficiently and quickly. With this method, they capture filmed movements and visualize them in the virtual characters within just a few milliseconds.
Computer Science on Saarland University Campus
Saturday, March 2, 2013
The Learning Virtues
The Learning Virtues
By DAVID BROOKS
New York Times, February 28, 2013
Jin Li grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution. When the madness was over, the Chinese awoke to discover that far from overleaping the West, they were “economically destitute and culturally barren.” This inspired an arduous catch-up campaign. Students were recruited to learn what the West had to offer.
Li was one of the students. In university, she abandoned Confucian values, which were then blamed for Chinese backwardness, and embraced German culture. In her book, “Cultural Foundations of Learning: East and West,” she writes that Chinese students at that time were aflame — excited by the sudden openness and the desire to catch up.
Li wound up marrying an American, moved to the States and became a teacher. She was stunned. American high school students had great facilities but didn’t seem much interested in learning. They giggled in class and goofed around.
This contrast between the Chinese superstudent and the American slacker could be described with the usual tired stereotypes. The Chinese are robots who unimaginatively memorize facts to score well on tests. The Americans are spoiled brats who love TV but don’t know how to work. But Li wasn’t satisfied with those clichés. She has spent her career, first at Harvard and now at Brown, trying to understand how Asians and Westerners think about learning.
The simplest way to summarize her findings is that Westerners tend to define learning cognitively while Asians tend to define it morally. Westerners tend to see learning as something people do in order to understand and master the external world. Asians tend to see learning as an arduous process they undertake in order to cultivate virtues inside the self.
You can look at the slogans on university crests to get a glimpse of the difference. Western mottos emphasize knowledge acquisition. Harvard’s motto is “Truth.” Yale’s is “Light and truth.” The University of Chicago’s is “Let knowledge grow from more to more; and so be human life enriched.”
Chinese universities usually take Confucian sayings that emphasize personal elevation. Tsinghua’s motto is “Strengthen self ceaselessly and cultivate virtue to nurture the world.” Nanjing’s motto is “Be sincere and hold high aspirations, learn diligently and practice earnestly.”
When Li asked Americans to randomly talk about learning they used words like: thinking, school, brain, discovery, understand and information. Chinese, on the other hand, tended to use phrases common in their culture: learn assiduously, study as if thirsting or hungering, be diligent in one’s learning.
In the Western understanding, students come to school with levels of innate intelligence and curiosity. Teachers try to further arouse that curiosity in specific subjects. There’s a lot of active learning — going on field trips, building things. There’s great emphasis on questioning authority, critical inquiry and sharing ideas in classroom discussion.
In the Chinese understanding, there’s less emphasis on innate curiosity or even on specific subject matter. Instead, the learning process itself is the crucial thing. The idea is to perfect the learning virtues in order to become, ultimately, a sage, which is equally a moral and intellectual state. These virtues include: sincerity (an authentic commitment to the task) as well as diligence, perseverance, concentration and respect for teachers.
In Chinese culture, the heroic scholar may possess less innate intelligence but triumphs over hardship. Li cites the story of the scholar who tied his hair to a ceiling beam so he could study through the night. Every time his head dropped from fatigue, the yank of his hair kept him awake.
Li argues that Westerners emphasize the Aha moment of sudden insight, while Chinese are more likely to emphasize the arduous accumulation of understanding. American high school students tease nerds, while there is no such concept in the Chinese vocabulary. Western schools want students to be proud of their achievements, while the Chinese emphasize that humility enables self-examination. Western students often work harder after you praise them, while Asian students sometimes work harder after you criticize them.
These cultures are surprisingly enduring, Li notes, even with all the cross-pollination that goes on in the world today. Each has its advantages. I’m mostly struck by the way the intellectual and moral impulses are fused in the Chinese culture and separated in the West.
It’s easy to see historically why this came about. Hellenic culture emphasized skeptical scientific inquiry. With us, religion and science have often been at odds. We’re a diverse society, so it’s easier to teach our common academic standards in the classroom and relegate our diverse moralities to the privacy of the home.
I’d just note that cultures that do fuse the academic and the moral, like Confucianism or Jewish Torah study, produce these awesome motivation explosions. It might be possible to champion other moral/academic codes to boost motivation in places where it is absent.
By DAVID BROOKS
New York Times, February 28, 2013
Jin Li grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution. When the madness was over, the Chinese awoke to discover that far from overleaping the West, they were “economically destitute and culturally barren.” This inspired an arduous catch-up campaign. Students were recruited to learn what the West had to offer.
Li was one of the students. In university, she abandoned Confucian values, which were then blamed for Chinese backwardness, and embraced German culture. In her book, “Cultural Foundations of Learning: East and West,” she writes that Chinese students at that time were aflame — excited by the sudden openness and the desire to catch up.
Li wound up marrying an American, moved to the States and became a teacher. She was stunned. American high school students had great facilities but didn’t seem much interested in learning. They giggled in class and goofed around.
This contrast between the Chinese superstudent and the American slacker could be described with the usual tired stereotypes. The Chinese are robots who unimaginatively memorize facts to score well on tests. The Americans are spoiled brats who love TV but don’t know how to work. But Li wasn’t satisfied with those clichés. She has spent her career, first at Harvard and now at Brown, trying to understand how Asians and Westerners think about learning.
The simplest way to summarize her findings is that Westerners tend to define learning cognitively while Asians tend to define it morally. Westerners tend to see learning as something people do in order to understand and master the external world. Asians tend to see learning as an arduous process they undertake in order to cultivate virtues inside the self.
You can look at the slogans on university crests to get a glimpse of the difference. Western mottos emphasize knowledge acquisition. Harvard’s motto is “Truth.” Yale’s is “Light and truth.” The University of Chicago’s is “Let knowledge grow from more to more; and so be human life enriched.”
Chinese universities usually take Confucian sayings that emphasize personal elevation. Tsinghua’s motto is “Strengthen self ceaselessly and cultivate virtue to nurture the world.” Nanjing’s motto is “Be sincere and hold high aspirations, learn diligently and practice earnestly.”
When Li asked Americans to randomly talk about learning they used words like: thinking, school, brain, discovery, understand and information. Chinese, on the other hand, tended to use phrases common in their culture: learn assiduously, study as if thirsting or hungering, be diligent in one’s learning.
In the Western understanding, students come to school with levels of innate intelligence and curiosity. Teachers try to further arouse that curiosity in specific subjects. There’s a lot of active learning — going on field trips, building things. There’s great emphasis on questioning authority, critical inquiry and sharing ideas in classroom discussion.
In the Chinese understanding, there’s less emphasis on innate curiosity or even on specific subject matter. Instead, the learning process itself is the crucial thing. The idea is to perfect the learning virtues in order to become, ultimately, a sage, which is equally a moral and intellectual state. These virtues include: sincerity (an authentic commitment to the task) as well as diligence, perseverance, concentration and respect for teachers.
In Chinese culture, the heroic scholar may possess less innate intelligence but triumphs over hardship. Li cites the story of the scholar who tied his hair to a ceiling beam so he could study through the night. Every time his head dropped from fatigue, the yank of his hair kept him awake.
Li argues that Westerners emphasize the Aha moment of sudden insight, while Chinese are more likely to emphasize the arduous accumulation of understanding. American high school students tease nerds, while there is no such concept in the Chinese vocabulary. Western schools want students to be proud of their achievements, while the Chinese emphasize that humility enables self-examination. Western students often work harder after you praise them, while Asian students sometimes work harder after you criticize them.
These cultures are surprisingly enduring, Li notes, even with all the cross-pollination that goes on in the world today. Each has its advantages. I’m mostly struck by the way the intellectual and moral impulses are fused in the Chinese culture and separated in the West.
It’s easy to see historically why this came about. Hellenic culture emphasized skeptical scientific inquiry. With us, religion and science have often been at odds. We’re a diverse society, so it’s easier to teach our common academic standards in the classroom and relegate our diverse moralities to the privacy of the home.
I’d just note that cultures that do fuse the academic and the moral, like Confucianism or Jewish Torah study, produce these awesome motivation explosions. It might be possible to champion other moral/academic codes to boost motivation in places where it is absent.
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