B. Karloff and chemical apparatus

Boris Karloff and some mysterious bench apparatus.

Before PBS

"Predictions for Educational TV in the 1930s"

May 29th, 2012

Smithsonian

Today most universities offer online courses that allow students to study and take tests without physically being on campus, but in the 1930s the distance learning technology of the future was television.

Both radio and television were initially envisioned as methods for point-to-point communication, but once radio broadcasting became mainstream in the 1920s universities saw the potential of the medium to reach a broad audience with educational programming. This was especially true in rural farming communities where long distance commuting to a university was out of the question.

Universities in the U.S. may have been at the forefront of experimenting with radio broadcasting, but frankly, they weren’t great at attracting sizable audiences. As Douglas B. Craig explains in his book Fireside Politics, “many university stations [of the 1920s] began operations with high hopes of bringing education to the masses, but soon faltered as broadcasting costs increased, audiences diminished, and professors demonstrated that lecture-hall brilliance did not always translate into good radio technique. These problems were quickly reflected in an unfavorable allocation of frequency or broadcast times, sending many of these stations into a downward spiral to oblivion.”

The handful of universities that were successful at attracting large audiences did so by introducing an almost confrontational approach to their presentation. University of Chicago Round Table, which began as a local Chicagoland broadcast in 1931 but ran nationally on NBC radio from 1933 until 1955, adopted a talk radio format that would be quite familiar to today’s audiences. Rather than a single professor lecturing on a given topic, University of Chicago Round Table had three professors or scientists sitting around a triangular table while facing each other. These people would then debate scientific subjects like whether there was life on other planets and whether light is a wave or a particle. As Marcel C. Lafollette notes in “A Survey of Science Content in U.S. Radio Broadcasting, 1920s through 1940s, the goal of University of Chicago Round Table was to “keep it moving and keep it conversational” — a rule of broadcasting that holds true today.

Experiments in television brought universities that had failed at radio a fresh start, but it was still unclear as to whether these technologies should be used for narrowly targeted or broadcast purposes. In 1933, the University of Iowa became the first American university to broadcast TV. The first public demonstration of television in the state had occurred just two years earlier at the 1931 Iowa State Fair, and there was tremendous excitement by scientists at the University of Iowa to see what it could accomplish. Unreliable and unclear at the time, the rudimentary television technology of the early 1930s meant that the few experimenters who owned a TV (most likely constructed by themselves, rather than purchased in a store) had to turn on their radio in order to hear the broadcast, as the audio and visual couldn’t be broadcast together. As noted in the March 16, 1933 Monticello Express (Monticello, IA):

    University of Iowa’s radio and television stations WSUI and W9XK are now ready to present the first scheduled series of sight and sound educational programs ever given by an American university. This announcement was made by the department of electrical engineering last Friday. The first broadcasts will probably be made once a week between 7 and 7:30 p.m., exact evening to be determined upon later. Details of the broadcasts are now being arranged and it is expected that a regular schedule of illustrated lectures will commence next week. Illustrated lectures have been chosen for program material because they are adaptable to radio and television synchronization pictures being confined to small areas with details.

In 1935, New York University professor C. C. Clark conducted a class using a shortwave radio transceiver (a radio that can both send and receive messages) from his home. Because the radio went both ways, Prof. Clark was able to take questions from the class. The April 1935 issue of Short Wave Craft magazine reported on Clark’s experiment as a harbinger of the bold new way that classes may one day be conducted by television.

The article in Short Wave Craft included the drawing below, which proclaimed that it would be a scene “commonplace for tomorrow.” Interestingly, the article also makes mention of the need for advertising to sustain such ventures — a controversial prospect at the dawn of television broadcasting.

The article claims that practical television broadcasting is just a year or two away, but doesn’t mention the experiments at the University of Iowa. The magazine goes on excitedly about the commercial opportunities of television even though the FCC wouldn’t yet allow stations to sell advertising in 1935.

It would be another four years before television’s coming out party at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, and even then, the television receiver wouldn’t become a staple of American homes until well after World War II. In 1952, the FCC set aside 242 noncommercial channels to encourage educational programming. One year later, it became apparent that the funding required to produce such shows was sorely lacking. Still, Life magazine tried to keep the faith: “The hunger of our citizenry for culture and self-improvement has always been grossly underestimated; the number of Americans who would rather learn a little something than receive a sample tube of shaving cream is absolutely colossal.”

MOOCs...the form of future education?

MOOCs=massive open online courses.

"What is the Future of College Education?" 

August 27th, 2012

Smithsonian

It was a just about a year ago that a handful of Stanford professors began hatching a revolution in college education.

Sebastian Thrun, more widely known as the head of the team behind Google’s driverless car, decided that he and colleague Peter Norvig would start making their popular course in artificial intelligence available online. Free of charge. To anyone in the world. About 160,000 people signed up.

A few weeks later, another Google researcher/Stanford computer scientist, Andrew Ng, followed suit, offering his equally popular course, “Machine Learning” for free. More than 100,000 people watched his lectures online. As Ng pointed out, it would have taken him 250 years to reach that many students in a conventional Stanford classroom.

The problem, of course, is that Stanford charges students in those conventional classrooms about $40,000 a year. Freebies were not a good business strategy.

By January, Thrun had lined up venture capital money and left Stanford to start Udacity, an independent, online-only education service focusing on science and technology courses. Within a few months, Ng and another Stanford computer scientist, Daphne Koller, had rounded up their own boatload of VC money–a reported $16 million to start with-and went on leave from Stanford to start their own online college operation called Coursera.

Less talk, more questions

But Ng and Koller actually have ratcheted things up another notch. Instead of just distributing its own online courses, Coursera has formed partnerships with some of America’s top universities to help them convert courses for free Internet access. Last month, the startup announced that in addition to its four original partners,–Stanford, Princeton, Penn and Michigan–it has added 12 more, ranging from Duke and Johns Hopkins to the University of Toronto and the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

So what does that mean? For starters, Coursera is spreading what’s becoming the new model for online teaching. No more videos of professors talking non-stop for an hour. Instead, lectures are chopped into much smaller chunks, say 10 minutes long, with students asked a quiz question every few minutes. They need to answer correctly before they can move on with the video.

And having tens of thousands of people taking the course at the same time makes it much easier than you would expect for students working on their own to find and study with like-minded classmates. Ng says that, on average, it takes only 22 minutes for someone to get a question answered in Coursera’s online forums.

The huge size of Internet classes–they’re now known as massive open online courses or MOOCs–also allows for much more comprehensive analysis of how subjects are taught and whether they’re understood. Since the online behavior of students is tracked–where they rewind videos, how they respond to quiz questions, etc.–professors can see where a large number of students may have struggled or given the same wrong answer and then make adjustments. Course material now not only has to be interactive, but also more dynamic. Immutable lectures, delivered as if chiseled on stone tablets, are going the way of chalkboards and elbow patches.

Professors also will be teaching classes far more culturally diverse than any they’ve previously experienced. When Coursera announced a few week ago that its enrollment had topped one million in just four months, it also noted that the students who’ve signed up for courses live in 196 different countries. Six out of 10 are outside the U.S.

Can this make money?

Is this really where college is headed? It says something that last spring Harvard and MIT launched their own their MOOC partnership called edX, and that over the summer, the University of California at Berkeley joined it. Even if top-line universities aren’t sure what they’ll gain by offering free courses to the world, they don’t want to risk being left behind if this is a template of the future.

Clearly, there remain some very large unanswered questions, starting with how do any of these partnerships make money. One notion is to charge a relatively small fee, say $50, for a student to receive a certified copy of a letter saying he or she has completed a course. In other words, it wouldn’t cost anything to take a class, but you’d have to pay for proof that you finished it.

Another idea Sebastian Thrun has floated is to have MOOCs serve as a new kind of placement service, using what they glean about students to help companies find employees with very specific skills. But, as recruiters from Intel and Dell told Bloomberg Business Week recently, a certificate for an online course may help someone land a job, but only if they already have a conventional, sit-in-a-classroom four-year degree. Only a very few colleges, including the University of Washington and the University of Helsinki, have agreed to give credit to students who complete MOOC courses.

What about cheating?

No question that plenty of skeptics are dubious about the depth and quality of an online education, who feel the sheer size of the classes precludes any level of one-on-one learning and also invites cheating.

So far only about 25 percent of the people who have enrolled in Coursera courses have actually completed them. And earlier this month The Chronicle of Higher Education reported “dozens” of complaints about plagiarism in essays written for some of the humanities courses Coursera is now offering. (Almost all of the free online courses to date have been in science or technology.)

The accusations actually came from other students, who, in the Coursera system, grade and comment on each other’s essays. In response to the complaints, Coursera reminded students of the honor code they signed when they enrolled. It also is considering using software that can detect plagiarism.

Some professors in the program have suggested that cultural differences could, at least in part, explain why someone would lift whole sections of text from Wikipedia for a course for which they’re not receiving any credit. Eric Rabkin, a University of Michigan English professor who teaches a Coursera class, told the Chronicle that one student who admitted plagiarizing content said he didn’t realize copying and pasting text from another site was inappropriate.

Coursera’s Daphne Koller would point out that this comes with making top college courses available in places where a year ago it would have been inconceivable. She put it this way recently: “This could enable a wave of innovation because amazing talents can be found anywhere. Maybe the next Albert Einstein, or the next Steve Jobs, is living in a remote village in Africa.”

Class acts

Here are a few other ways technology is changing education:

    Pack light: Another well-financed online initiative called The Minerva Project will be added to the mix by 2014. Its goal is to be the first elite global university. From sophomore year on, students will be encouraged to live in a new country, or at least a new city, every semester.
    That algorithm just doesn’t understand me: Winners of a competition sponsored by the Hewlett Foundation have devised algorithms that can grade essays.
    Today’s assignment is from “Mythbusters:” Big media companies, such as Discovery Communications and the News Corporation, are moving into the digital textbooks business in a big way. They see it as a boom market that could become a new source of revenue.
    You tie shoes?: According to an infographic from LearnStuff.com, 1.5 million iPads will be used in classrooms this year. Also, while 70 percent of American children between ages two and five can use a computer mouse, only 11 percent can ties their own shoes.

"Criteria of Science, Cosmology, and Lessons of History"...an interesting paper by Helge Kragh

Abstract...

Perhaps more than any other science, cosmology exemplifies the inevitable contact between science and philosophy, including the problem of the demarcation criteria that distinguish science from non-science. Although modern physical cosmology is undoubtedly scientific, it is not obvious why it has this status, and nor is it obvious that all branches of theoretical cosmology satisfy ordinarily assumed criteria for science. While testability is generally admitted as an indispensable criterion for a theory being scientific, there is no agreement among cosmologists what testability means, more precisely. For example, should testability be taken to imply falsifiability in the sense of Popper? I discuss this and related questions by referring to two episodes of controversy in the history of modern cosmology, the debate over the steady state theory in the 1950s and the recent debate concerned with the anthropic multiverse. In addition, I draw attention to the use of historical analogies in cosmological and other scientific arguments, suggesting that such use is often misuse or otherwise based on distortions of the history of science. 

  "Criteria of Science, Cosmology, and Lessons of History" by Helge Kragh

The ole lab coat

 Not Edison's

"Thomas Edison's lab coat, other artifacts in disrepair"

$20,000 in funds allotted for fixes at West Orange laboratory and Glenmont home

by

Jeremy Hsu

August 28th, 2012

NBC NEWS

 When Thomas Edison finally hung up his lab coat, it still had acid burns from chemistry experiments carried out at the U.S. inventor's West Orange laboratory in New Jersey. Repairs helped erased the burn marks, but added wear and tear from decades of display on a wire hanger has compelled the U.S. National Park Service to launch a new conservation project.

The worn lab coat is just one of three artifacts in need of repair at the Thomas Edison National Historical Park. A second object, a faded American flag, represented a 1920 gift commemorating the 43rd anniversary of the "Ediphone" dictating machine. The third artifact hangs behind Edison's desk in his laboratory library — a projection screen that is likely the world's oldest movie screen by being dated to at least 1893.

"Probably most significant of the three is Edison's laboratory coat," said Joan Harris-Rico, collections manager at the Thomas Edison National Historical Park. "It's made of cotton in the duster style, and has hung in the chemistry lab for decades."

Edison remains celebrated for having helped pioneer practical light bulbs, the sound recording industry and for helping commercialize movies. But his artifacts also bear silent testimony to the legacy of laying down the blueprint for modern innovation — bringing together a diverse group of Ph.D. chemists, machinists and inventors to all work under the same roof.

The lab coat carried a particularly poignant note for visitors as a personal reminder of Edison's work. But the national park staff has removed the coat from public display until it can be repaired.

"It not only has high historical value, but is also a favorite object of returning visitors," Harris-Rico told InnovationNewsDaily. "People will often ask, 'Where is the lab coat?'"

The U.S. flag remains on display in a wood and glass wall-mounted case, but its fabric colors have faded from 90 years of exposure to ultraviolet light. The fabric has "puckered" due to gravity's inexorable pull, and it also shows signs of both insect activity and water damage.

Harris-Rico and her colleagues hope to return the repaired flag to a new display case that has UV-filtered Plexiglas protection and without the acidic cardboard backing in the existing case.

Conservators could remove both the lab coat and flag to do their preservation work, but they probably won't enjoy the same luxury with Edison's ancient projection screen. The huge canvas, stretching 18 feet by 18 feet, hangs from a wood roller attached to the underside of the library's second floor balcony.

The screen's blemishes include at least one tear and brittleness near its stained bottom edge. But the full extent of the damage remains unknown until the screen gets unrolled — a process still done manually by a large wooden handle almost 120 years later.

Curiosity's snap of Mount Sharp

spaceREF...

The telephoto images beamed back to Earth show a scene of eroded knobs and gulches on a mountainside, with geological layering clearly exposed. The new views were taken by the 100-millimeter telephoto lens and the 34-milllimeter wide angle lens of the Mast Camera (Mastcam) instrument. Mastcam has photographed the lower slope of the nearby mountain called Mount Sharp.

"This is an area on Mount Sharp where Curiosity will go," said Mastcam principal investigator Michael Malin, of Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego. "Those layers are our ultimate objective. The dark dune field is between us and those layers. In front of the dark sand you see redder sand, with a different composition suggested by its different color. The rocks in the foreground show diversity -- some rounded, some angular, with different histories. This is a very rich geological site to look at and eventually to drive through."

Deceased--Jan Sawka

Jan Sawka
December 10th, 1946 to August 23rd, 2012

"PASSINGS: Jan Sawka"

Jan Sawka, Polish-born poster artist and architect, dies at 65

August 12th, 2012

Los Angeles Times

Jan Sawka, 65, a noted Polish American artist and architect whose designs included posters for theatrical productions and touring sets for the Grateful Dead, died Thursday after suffering a heart attack at his studio and home in High Falls, N.Y., his family said in a statement.

Sawka (pronounced SAFF-ka) had 70 solo shows at international museums and galleries, and his paintings, posters and prints hang in more than 60 museums around the world. He had just completed a multimedia piece titled "The Voyage" set to tour next year with former Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart.

In 2010, Sawka's work was featured as part of Westways magazine's cover art program on display at the Pasadena Museum of California Art. The artist painted his first impressions of Los Angeles after a day on the Sunset Strip in 1978.

"I took a notebook and markers and walked down Sunset Boulevard," Sawka told The Times. "It was awful and strangely beautiful how billboards dominated human life."

Sawka was born Dec. 10, 1946, in Zabrze, Poland, to a linguist mother and an architect father, who was imprisoned during the Stalin era.

Sawka completed two master's degrees — in painting and printmaking and in architectural engineering — and in his 20s became a star of the Polish poster school. Sawka was exiled from Poland in 1976 for his involvement in the Polish and American counterculture movements.

A year later, he moved to New York, where he produced editorial commentary drawings for the New York Times and designed theaters including the Harold Clurman, Jean Cocteau Repertory and Samuel Beckett.

Sawka was also known for his genre-bridging collaborations, including a 10-story set for the Grateful Dead's 25th anniversary tour and interactive sculptures inspired by Japanese technology studios. 

Jan Sawka [Wikipedia]

Jan Sawka's website