Category: Technology

My Memory is in the Ether

The experience of losing our Internet connection becomes more and more like losing a friend.

— Sparrow et al., 2011: Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips (pdf).

Internet on the brain. Image creating using internet map by Matt Britt (via Wikipedia).

Last year, my students informed me that humans have a fundamental need for electronics. And I was forced to agree. We’re becoming more inseparable from our devices, practically all of which are connected to the internet. So much so, that people aren’t spending the time memorizing all the stuff they used to memorize, and are instead just remembering where to find it (or what search terms to google).

The results of four studies suggest that when faced with difficult questions, people are primed to think about computers and that when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it. The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves.

— Sparrow et al., 2011: Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips (pdf).

Since one of the prime reasons for this blog was to help me remember all the stuff I usually forget (and where to find all the stuff I usually forget), I have to say that these results have the scent of truth. Our cyborgization continues.

So, given this shift to outsourcing our memories, it seems even more imperative that students learn how to think and solve problems, and where to look to find good information they can use in their problem solving, rather than work more on memorization of facts. There are fast becoming too many fact to memorize, and they’re almost all accessible on the internet.

Setting up a Computer with Free Software

[Updated: 7/22/17] The open-source and free-software movements have matured to the point where a teacher or student can reliably outfit a new computer with software that is free and compatible with their proprietary cousins.

The first place to look for free software for whatever purpose you need should probably be SourceForge. It feels odd having to say this, but it’s legal, free software. Mind you, it has a lot of programs that are still in development, many are not terribly polished, and not everything will be available for your operating system. Add in a few other pieces, like Firefox and OpenOffice, and you have all the basics you need for a basic loadout. I typically find these to be most useful.

  • LibreOffice or OpenOffice: Free, but not as powerful alternatives to MicroSoft Office. They can open and save MS Office files, but also has some of the irritating auto-formatting issues as Office. So for text editing I usually prefer Smultron (on Mac) or Atom (on Windows). Also, Gnumeric is an excellent alternative to Excel.
  • Atom (Windows and Linux): An extremely versatile text editor that a lot of my students like for coding.
  • Smultron (Mac): for writing text and only text, forget the formatting (and also useful for writing computer programs).
  • Firefox: For web browsing.
  • GIMP: instead of PhotoShop for editing images.
  • Inkscape: For drawing diagrams (like this one).
  • VUE: For mindmaps (like this) and flow charts.
  • Audacity: works well for sound editing (I’ve only used it a little for trimming sound files when I was trying to create sound effects). Unlike SOX (see below) Audacity has a user interface.
  • OpenSCAD: For creating 3d models using basic shapes (spheres, boxes etc.) for 3d printing.
  • VPython: I usually introduce my students to programming with VPython, which is a Pythno library for creating 3d visualizations. The VPython downloads pages include instructions for installing Python.

There are other odds and ends that you’ll find on my computer, like vlc for playing DVD’s, Combine PDF for rearranging pages in pdf documents, and TexShop for really nice typsetting, but there are a lot of good, free alternatives out there. Not a whole lot of games however.

Command Line Programs

If you’re comfortable using the Linux command line there are a number of programs, most of which have been ported to the major operating systems (and you can use the Cygwin program to use a lot of Linux commands if you’re on Windows), that can also be very useful:

  • SoX: For generating sound tones and notes (e.g.),
  • ImageMagick: the convert command is particularly useful for working with images (their example page is excellent). The GIMP is based on this program.
  • gifsicle: for help making animated gifs (particularly for optimizing them).

$25 computer

Here’s a real computer, the Raspberry Pi, for only $25. It has only two ports, one for a monitor and another for a keyboard. I’d suggest it needs one more USB port so you could hook it up to external devices (like robots), if you can’t split the single USB.

Its intention is to bring computer hardware and programming into schools. I’d love to get hold of one.

(Articles from BBC and geek.com).

Power Down and Disconnected

Like addicts racing to get their overdue fix, my students raced to the computers this afternoon after having had to survive all day without power and without the internet. I’ll confess that I felt the same urge, but was able to restrain it. Until now.

We usually don’t have internet access during our immersions, but then it’s expected and students are not inside needing to refer to the study guides to figure out their assignments. At the beginning of the year I gave everyone paper copies of the study guides, but now there are just a core few who request them.

Fortunately, we had a couple of smart-phones so one student would look up the reading assignment and post the page numbers on the whiteboard. Fortunately, the reading assignments were out of the book.

We weren’t quite surviving without technology, but it was close, and students were getting innovative.

We’ve had storms every few days for the last couple of weeks, which is typical for Memphis at this time of year. Over the last few days a frontal system has just been pushing back and forth over us. When it pushes south we get a cold front with thunderstorms and rain, but clear skies afterward. When the front pushes north it gets warm and humid, and the sky goes overcast for most of the day.

Weather map for Wednesday, April 20th. The blue and red line passing through the southeastern U.S. show the mixed warm and cold fronts that have been oscillating past Memphis for days. Image from the National Weather Service.

This line of fronts marks the general location of the sub-polar low, which is moving north with the spring. But more on that tomorrow.

Art and Science: Flow Paths

Butterfly.

I’ve been helping my wife model the fluid flow through her apparatus, and she has some really neat results from some experiments where two chemicals react and block off the regular, symmetrical flow.

The streamlines look a bit like butterfly wings to me, so I modified the image a little. The original flow paths through the circular apparatus are below. I’m not sure which image I like better.

Flow paths through a circular cell. Mineral precipitates (not shown) are blocking flow through the middle.

P.S. The other thing I learned from this little exercise is how to write Scalable Vector Graphics (svg) files (W3C has an excellent reference). With svg’s, like other vector graphics formats, no matter how big you blow them up you never loose resolution like you would do with a regular, rasterized image. Unfortunately, I still have to figure out how to include the svg files on this blog, so these png images will have to do for now.

The Gimp: Photoshop’s Free Cousin

Observing moss.

For those of us too cheap to buy Photoshop, or who want to support the open-source movement, the Gimp is a great little image manipulation program. I use the “Oilify” option a lot to obscure students’ faces. Gimp’s not as sophisticated as Photoshop, but if you’re not heavily into graphic design, and are not too picky, it does a good job.

Jumping the creek. Be careful with the flaming sword; someone might get hurt. (Image created by Piper Ziebarth; photographer Lensyl Urbano).

As a Photoshop clone, Gimp shares many of its basic principles. It also comes from the ImageMagick command line tools, which I’ve used to automate image processing in the past.

Gimp itself is, however, pretty easy to learn. I’ve shown one student how to use it, and we’ll see if and how the knowledge propagates through the class.

Triplets? Clones? Or maybe robots?

And Women Inherit the Internet

Women are the routers and amplifiers of the social web. And they are the rocket fuel of ecommerce.

–Aileen Lee (2011): Why Women Rule The Internet on TechCrunch.com.

Last month I observed that the girls in my class were blogging a lot more than the boys. It’s still true, and now there’s an informative, if somewhat hyperbolic, article by Aileen Lee that asserts that the blooming of social media websites is driven, primarily, by women.

I’m always a bit leery about articles like this one. There are lots of statistics, a few anecdotes, and a brief reference back to some scientific research (Dunbar numbers), but the overly excited language coming from a venture capitalist is enough to remind me of the irrational exuberance of the dot-com bubble.

The writing is so over-the-top, that I’m truly surprised that there isn’t a single exclamation point in the entire article! Although, based on Ms. Lee’s first words in the comments section, this might be due to the herculean efforts of a good editor.

My antipathy might also be due to my irrational, visceral distaste of the language of business and commerce, which is so geared toward breaking people into faceless demographic groups to be marketed to that it verges on being dehumanizing. I suspect my feelings are truly irrational because I’ve seen scientists do similar parsing of demographic statistics and have had no trouble; although, perhaps, I may have been a little more empathic because the scientists were looking at issues of vulnerability to disease, infant mortality, and the like.

However, since the article’s anecdotes correlate with my own anecdotes, I find it hard to disagree with the underlying premise: women are more inclined than men to make and nurture social connections so they are a key demographic in understanding the future of the internet.

It’s also a reminder that the social atomization typified by the dominance of the nuclear family at the expense of extended family, is now being ameliorated by social networking, which suggests some interesting social and cultural changes in a, possibly, more matrifocal future.

(hat tip The Daily Dish).