Category Archives: technology

Google: Blurry targeting

Posted on by
Reply

Screenshot anime GJ-bu

“The evidence will be stored in my digital camera forever.” If this is how you imagine Google, you may not have looked very closely.

For years now, Google has offered a wide range of services to the Internet users for free. They have been able to afford this because advertisers are willing to pay for small, unobtrusive ads associated with many Google services. These advertisements are supposed to be “targeted” so that the people who see them are the people more likely to respond to them.

This works well enough in the case of simple search. If you search for “credit cards”, there is a good chance that the major financing companies and you may have a common interest in the matter, for the time being. Of course, your interest in the matter could be entirely theoretical, but on a larger scale it makes sense to match up search results and advertisements like this.

If Google knows a little bit more about you, they can be even more useful. For instance if you search for “flowers”, your friendly neighborhood florist may want to provide their services, but this would require some knowledge of where you are. If Google is allowed to keep track of where you are – not necessarily to the square foot, but the square mile at least – they could let your local florist advertise rather than one in a different city.

Gmail, another free service from Google, is also financed this way. By showing ads related to the text in your mail, they get money from advertisers and you get a chance to buy something relevant, or at least become aware that it exists. This worries some people, who don’t like that robots are reading their mail. But there is no actual reading involved: The system simply responds mechanically to words in the mail. For instance, when I discussed the author Orson Scott Card with a friend, Gmail started showing ads for credit cards. Card=card!

For the most part, however, I find that the ads are utterly random. For instance, 99.9% of my mail is in English, but almost all the ads are in Norwegian. They seem to be based on the location of my Internet Service Provider and nothing more. I could of course be an exception; perhaps someone at Google has set some kind of flag at my account. But the opposite seems more likely: People see an ad that interests them and thinks it is tailor-made for them, but it is actually just made for ordinary people and they are ordinary people. This is known as the “Forer effect” or “subjective validation”, if you want to read up on it.

There is a certain sense of paranoia, or at least of reason for paranoia, when people speculate that Google will show ads for condoms on their mobile phone when they are on their way to a date. There is no reason to think we are getting anywhere close to that. I have been feeding Google all the information I reasonably could since I discovered them, surely enough to write a biography in several tomes (and a few novels perhaps) but there is no sign that they are using any of that. The location of my Internet Service Provider, my gender (possibly, although I think they default to male if you log on anonymously) and the occasional keyword in the text, but usually just the ISP, which they can extract automatically from my IP address.

Not to make light of the IP address. If they were to target their random customer in Norway with ads for things that can only be bought in America, or in China or India for that matter (far more populous nations than the USA), the ads would be wasted or have entertainment value at best. When showing ads for Norwegian companies, there is at least some theoretical chance that the ad may click. Although this has never happened in all these years. I have only responded positively to two ads, none of which were Norwegian, and only one led to a sale. For the most part the ads either pass by or evoke a mild response of disgust. But then I am not exactly normal. More about that all the time, I guess.

The conclusion so far is that the “targeted advertisements” from Google have a long, long way to go. You may have heard about the retail chain that started sending a young woman ads for baby stuff before she had told her parents that she was pregnant. The fact that I have only ever heard of this one story makes me wonder whether there is even a causal connection at all, or just incidental.

For instance: After buying wedding presents to two of my friends on Amazon, some months passed and I started getting hints about baby stuff from them. Which normally would have been a great idea, I suppose, if I intended to continue giving them gifts, and if they were normal. But even my friends tend to not be entirely normal, and so here too. The point is, if I were a woman and pregnant when the baby recommendations came in, I might have freaked out as well, even though the causal link was actually Not Like That.

As it is, Google at least is far, far, far away from the stalker fantasies of some of its detractors. It is so far away from stalking that it is just barely useful.

Help! I’m being monetized!

Posted on by
Reply

Screenshot anime Yuyushiki - touch screen!

Just a hunch, but I think a certain older software company has a hard time adjusting to a new generation of customers. Just saying.

Microsoft is running a smear campaign against Google, accusing them of providing free services just to earn money from spying on you, basically. Which is not too far off, but they go too far when they imply that you pay for this. In one sequence, they use the verb “monetize” correctly, but illustrate it with money flying out of your pocket. This is a way of thinking that should have died during the Bronze Age. I will show you why. Follow me to ancient Mesopotamia, where humankind discovered Trade.

Local barter with people you knew has existed since before the dawn of history. Young Neanderthal males brought with them extra stone axes when they left home looking for a wife. But almost 6000 years ago, someone discovered that you could smelt copper and tin together and get bronze, which was much easier to make into weapons and tools than stone, hard enough to do the same work, and could be recycled over and over. There was just one problem: Tin and copper were only rarely found together. Usually there was stormy seas, high mountains or dreadful deserts between them. What to do?

Someone came up with a genius plan: They brought copper with them from a place where it was plentiful and therefore cheap, and bartered it against tin in a place where tin was common but copper was rare. This way they left every time with more than they started with, and this practice caused them to get rich without actually digging in the mines. I am sure there were envious people at the time reacting much like Microsoft does today: These guys get rich from other people’s work! It just ain’t fair! But the practice continued, because people on both ends of the trade caravan ended up with more bronze than they could have had alone. Everyone was better off.

The caravans did not come and steal your stone axes. If you wanted to make stone axes like your ancestors had done for a hundred thousand years, you were welcome to it. And in the same way today, if you want non-targeted advertising, you are welcome to it. But I would like to point out that since non-targeted advertising is more expensive (you have to reach several times as many people to make the same sales) the extra cost is added to the product. So if Microsoft succeeds in smearing Google out of existence (good luck with that), you will help pay for it. Money will float out of your pockets, so to speak.

Going ass first into the future has always come at a cost. But at least this time nobody will hit you on the head with a bronze ax. So we live in good times. And Google is making them even better, by monetizing us all.

(Another matter is whether their targeting actually works, but that is a story for another day.)

 

Neverwinter MMORPG

Posted on by
Reply

Screenshot Neverwinter MMORPG - Protectors Enclave

I think this is the prettiest part of the game I have seen so far. Not much to write home about, but reasonably well rendered … just kind of gritty.

The new massive multiplayer online role playing game Neverwinter will be available to the “freeloaders” (free to download, free to play) on April 30, but I am already in. The reason is that I bought a second-tier “founder’s pack”.

In a perfect world, games would be free, and this is as close as you are likely to get. What I mean by that cryptic statement is that you can play the whole game, including endgame content, without paying a dime (if you have a computer and internet access, at least). But obviously someone is paying. In this case, I am one of them. Paying customers get some goodies in the game which makes it a little easier and more colorful. And some of us paid in advance, helping to foot the bill of getting the game to the market. As a thank-you, we got in on the game a little earlier.

Neverwinter is a medieval-style sword and sorcery game, unlike the two other games I have played from Cryptic Studios, the superhero games Champions Online and my favorite MMO ever, City of Heroes. Like other medieval games, Neverwinter tends to have the players all look pretty much alike at the start, except for variations from race, sex and class. I haven’t seen the high-level areas, but so far it looks like people continue to look pretty much the same, the weapons and armor found by questing aren’t all that different looking. The style is on the gritty side, and people are not particularly good-looking. The women all have well developed breasts though, although the armor can reduce the visual impact in some cases, thankfully. I suppose prioritizing breasts over beauty is a hint as to who they expect to be their typical customers.

Despite this initial impression, I have to say the game is surprisingly good. The game mechanics and lore are based on the original Dungeons & Dragons role-playing system, the first in the world of its kind, and a mainstay of paper, pencil and dice role playing for many years. I actually had some source books and stuff for this myself, many years ago, shortly before the Internet came to Norway. It is still viable.

The saving throw, to keep to the terminology, is the wide range of lore accumulated over the pen and paper years. There are innumerable books set in the same game world and at time in the same city, and the copyright holders are actively consulted in making the game. This makes for an immersive, integrated world where all the threads come together. And then there is my excuse for supporting the game in the first place: The Foundry.

The Foundry is a set of developer tools given to users to make their own quests. These quests are then made available in much the same way as the quests created by the developers themselves. Users vote for the quests, and can also flag them for inspection if they contain illegal or indecent content. A similar system existed in City of Heroes, but it is actually even better integrated in this game. You can play only Foundry missions for as long as you like, and get the same kind of half-randomized encounters and loot that you will get in the native quests. In theory you should be able to play all the way to level 60 this way, and some people will probably do.

Unfortunately for their hope of trapping me in their game, the interface is very mouse-heavy. The two main attacks for every class are bound to the left and right mouse button, and you also use to mouse to choose the direction you look and move. As a result, I can only play a fairly short time before my right arm starts hurting again. It has never completely recovered from the repetitive stress injury some years ago, and probably never will, barring divine intervention or nanotechnology.

But on the other hand, as it were, there is crafting and leadership. These skills can be performed through a web interface, including on my smartphone. You can also use the web portal to check your inventory or access the auction house, and guild members can also use it for guild activities, whatever those may bet. This can be done in a rather low-stress manner, including tapping on my smartphone screen, which avoids the cramping from constantly having to hold on to the mouse.

The leadership skill is lumped together with crafting. You assemble a virtual team of mercenaries which you assign to various tasks, like guarding a caravan or exploring the terrain. Each task has a set duration and gives a certain outcome: Leadership XP, pretty much always. Sometimes also character XP, and/or coins, astral diamonds, maps or chests of random goodies. The goodie chests, coins and diamonds go into your inventory. You can actually level up by using XP from your little mercenary team, but if you have the opportunity, you can level up much faster by praying as well.

Oh yes. There are various small gods in the game, and Invocation (available at level 11) let you get various goodies from them once an hour. There is no set praying hour, the 1 hour limit is just a minimum. You need to find an altar or campfire, but these are pretty common (and there are portable altars to be found as well). Sometimes you get just a combat buff (which expires after you’ve been online a certain amount of time), other times special coins, astral diamonds (used for various special shopping) and even a decent amount of XP. So in theory again, you could level up and become rich simply by praying. I am sure some Americans find this appealing. I find it amusing.

So basically there are numerous ways to level up your character and get stuff without playing through the main quests at all. You can pray, you can craft or send your imaginary mercenaries around, or if you deign to fight, you can do so using player-made content only (including your own).

On the off chance that you go fighting, you will have a pet to assist you from the start if you are a Founder like me. Otherwise you gain a companion at level 16, which can be of any class of your choosing. Again, you may have your companion do most of the fighting, but in that case they will level up and you not so much. (You still get the XP for finishing the quest, at least.)

I could see myself spending months trying these fringe activities, just because I can. But preferably those that don’t require frantic mousing. No matter how powerful I become in a 2-dimensional world, it is not worth destroying my body in the 3-dimensional world. And my soul probably won’t thrive on enormous amounts of this, either. It’s not really something I think I will miss having dedicated my life to, when that life is over. Your life may vary.

But a quite well-crafted game it is, so if you’re planning to play a lot of MMORPG, this is well worth a try for free.

Unlimited Internet and me

Posted on by
Reply

Screenshot anime Nyarko.W

“Books, games, bras and missiles! All at your fingertips, ready to be downloaded!” Honestly, I have not downloaded any bras and missiles yet.

I am consolidating and expanding my Internet access. I had four different mobile broadbands from two different suppliers. The plan is to go to one mobile broadband from each plus one DSL landline broadband. It’s a low-capacity broadband, at 5 MB it is barely worthy to be called broadband by modern standards, but that’s fine with me. The main point is that there is no upper limit of n GB use per month, as there is on mobile broadband.

In my previous rented home, I had fiberoptic broadband, which was a huge overkill. But because I had rented the place for 5 years, it was actually quite affordable – it required a large initial cost to get the fiber to the small house by the riverside, but it was cheap from then on. Of course, the house was sold from out under me after a year and a half, so I decided to rely on wireless broadband for a while. This DSL broadband is a bit of a compromise. It cost nothing extra to start using, and I should be able to take it with me if I move to any house that has had copper-cable telephone at some time in the past. This was common until 20 years ago or less, so most homes fall in this category.

The DSL needs a special broadband modem. It comes with a wireless router built-in, so that’s nice since the phone contact is not in my home office. The modem is sent by mail, but the post office opens after I have gone to work and closes before I go home, except on Saturdays. Not a big deal, the line will for some obscure reason not be enabled until the 23d this month. I am pretty sure they just need to flip a switch, but perhaps this makes them feel important or something. I’ve made do with mobile broadband for more than a year and a half, so I can live with that for a couple more weeks.

Only after I ordered the DSL did I find out that one of my wireless broadbands actually has unlimited 3G, there is no n GB per month upper limit. (I have another with 8 and one with 5, I think – it varies.) Of course this was the one I used the least. I have now set it up as the default Internet connection for my home PC. So, it turns out I did not really need to buy anything new to have unlimited Internet… but at least I will now have 3 different sources of broadband, so I’m unlikely to get another 2-week vacation from the Net like I did back when I had only DSL back in the original (and best) Chaos Node, when Telenor threw the wrong switch and their helpdesk couldn’t find out what was wrong.

Anyway, I am celebrating my unlimited Internet by downloading and uploading more freely than usual. I’ve downloaded the new Neverwinter MMORPG (massive multiplayer online role-playing game). It is distributed via BitTorrent, a file sharing technology more famous for illegal copying, but which also is used for legitimate purposes like this (it is free to download and free to play, they get their income from selling various in-game perks and decorations.) So I’ve uploaded a few gigabytes of that.

But really, the Internet is too big for me to have it all running through my home, much less my mind.

 

Self-spaced repetition software

Posted on by
3

Screenshot Sims 3

Games are usually the enemy of studying, but some elements of games can be used to improve learning.

Spaced repetition is an amazing technique for learning without understanding. Understanding is certainly superior and in a league of its own, but it is hard to command or even predict; and sometimes you need to memorize for a while before you can understand. One may compare this to gathering ingredients before you can cook. Before you can read sentences, you must know the words, and so on.

Spaced repetition takes advantage of a particular memory effect: The best time to repeat something is just before you forget it. Repeating many times in a row adds little after the first couple repetitions. Repeating at fixed intervals helps, but the best effect comes with increased intervals. You may for instance double the intervals, which is more effective than fixed intervals. But the best effect is when one actively recalls a fact just as it is about to be forgotten: It should take a little effort to remember it, but one should be able to do it.

Since our brain is not under constant surveillance, the only person who can know this time is ourselves. Conventional Spaced Repetition Software (SRS) starts with a standard model of human memory, then adjusts intervals down if people keep forgetting, or up if they remember everything. Good SRS lets the user mark the difficulty with which they remember. But there is an even better solution, at least in some ways, and the Duolingo online language site has found it.

When you start a study unit in Duolingo, the “learning meter” is empty. As you learn, it fills up until it is full. But as time passes afterwards, the learning meter begins to slide down toward empty again. You can see this for each topic, and for each “workbook” in a topic. (This is a session that typically takes 10-15 minutes to go through.) You can then go back and test yourself.

If you go back and run the test while you remember everything, you will certainly get the learning meter back to full again, but the experience will be rather boring. Duolingo is a very game-like learning system, where you have to translate back and forth, listen to sentences in the target language, describe pictures or pick from multiple choices. You never know what the next question will be. But if you know everything by heart, it is not very exciting. It is like winning chess against a small child.

On the other hand, if you wait too long and have forgotten the words or phrases, you will be thrown out after three mistakes and have to start that workbook over until you get it right. That is not too much fun either, even though it only costs you a few minutes.

The result is that the users themselves find out how long to wait to get the most rewarding “game” experience. If it was too easy, you learn to wait longer. If it was too hard, you make sure to return earlier next time. There is no need for the software to know whether you learn fast or slowly. All it needs to do is reward you when you get the balance right, and it does so with an exciting learning experience and a feeling of winning against a worthy opponent: Your own forgetfulness. You pick your battles, so with a little experience you pick the best time yourself.

I am not sure how easy this is to translate into other forms of learning, but I think it may be easy with anything that requires memorization of facts. Geography and history come to mind. Make small, focused units and a table where one can see which ones begin to slip. Adjust the speed at which they slide depending on past performance. It can probably be done better than it is in DuoLingo, but the principle works amazingly well. Humans are very good at learning things when having fun.

Back in the real world?

Posted on by
2

Screenshot anime Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai Next

“I’ll just escape to the 2D world and console my broken heart.” But the 2D world is not just for escaping anymore – it is invading the “real” world on a broad front, or at least mine.

The Sims 3: University Life is fun and all, but perhaps it did not really deserve four entries. Then again it seems harmless, and does not require lots of special training and strange thinking. The Sims games are a great way to connect to people.

Back in the real world, I will gladly admit that I have mixed feelings about my own scarcity of higher education. I only took two winters of tertiary education. It was a lot of fun, but I was broke and living on my own. My parents were also poor and could not really have helped out much. Student loans were available, but the truth is that I had (and have) no ambitions of career in this world. I enjoyed learning just to learn, but I had no interest in competing and using my elbows to get ahead in the world. As such, I would not fit in too well with the type of people who took higher education in Norway in the early 1980es. It was still some years before college became a natural part of young people’s lives.

If I were suddenly to become rich, I might enroll at a college or university just for the fun of it, but at my age it has no monetary value at all. I would not be finished with a Master of anything until I was 57 or 58, and with the lower bound on retirement age now at 62, no employer would even consider me. We lack qualified workers of many kinds, especially engineers, but the best one can hope for when over 50 is working for a temp agency. I have every intention to work until 75 (the current upper bound on the flexible retirement age) unless some dire illness strikes me down. Which is certainly possible, but what I mean is, I have no intention to ever retire. I intend to work until I die or become disabled, whichever comes first. Work is love. Work is service to God and country and humanity. It is what we were born to do. But learning, learning is fun.

Luckily, unlike my sims, I can study online, and even for free. I can learn math at the Khan Academy, languages at Duolingo and Livemocha, all for free. There are also several traditional universities that offer online lectures and courses, some of these for free as well. I haven’t looked into that yet.

(Livemocha, despite its random name, is a website that helps arrange community-based language learning online. You study some small piece of the language with their course, then practice it with real people who already speak it. Or that is what it looks like from the description. I hear good things about it – it has a lot more languages than Duolingo, for instance – but I would not impose on real people unless there was some dire need. And since I am trying to learn to read, not to speak Japanese, it is anyway not what I am looking for. But it sounds awesome for neurotypicals, who love to do all kinds of things together with real people.)

When not playing The Sims 3, I find myself “playing” with French on Duolingo. It is quite a bit of fun, actually. Between the two, I am even lagging behind on my favorite anime. There are several decent series this year, and I am a couple weeks behind on most of them. What is the world coming to, when learning a random language is more fun than watching anime?

And of course, by now we have to wonder what I meant by “real” world. I suppose studying is more real than watching my sims study, kind of, but I am still listening to a robot voice on the Internet. Between studying French on the Internet and Japanese on my smartphone, playing games and watching anime, there isn’t much that is “real” in the way my grandmother would have meant “real”. But at least i eat real food (noodles are real food, yes?) and sleep in a real bed! Long may that last.

Duolingo

Posted on by
1

Screenshot anime Osaka-okan

To someone from Osaka, there may not seem to be much difference between Jalapeno and Frappucino. Today’s topic: Learning languages for free on the Internet!

When I wrote about the Khan Academy, I mentioned that it was very good for math but you would have to go elsewhere for languages. Well, I’ve found one place you can go, but the range of languages is a bit limited yet. Still, the idea is very interesting. And, it is free!

One day, one of those university intellectuals was pondering the troubles of the world: Not only was learning a new language too expensive for most of the human population (typically costing $500 for a self-learning kit, and most of the world does not have hundreds of dollars lying around – let us not even talk about going to a school that teaches foreign languages). But in addition to this, most of the world did not have all the information of the English-speaking Internet in their own language, either. Spanish is a big language used in rather advanced nations, but the Spanish Wikipedia is only 1/5 of the English. Life is unfair, and then you die. Intellectuals know this.

But this particular fertile egghead came up with an idea: How about we teach people a second language for free, and in the process make them translate the Internet? And so, Duolingo was conceived. Some months later, as is good and proper, it was born. It’s been going through some childhood diseases, or at least warts, but it is thriving now.

The website presents you with a range of exercises, starting at the most basic with words like “the” and “woman”. As you begin to get an idea of the language, you get to translate expressions and short sentences between your starting language and the target language. You translate both ways as part of the basic training. Several possible translations are often possible. You get used to all that. As you gain confidence, you learn to translate longer sentences.

At some point in your linguistic ascent, some of the translations you are given are actually from the Internet, not from your teachers. The website then uses “crowdsourcing”, in this case a kind of election system, to determine what translation is best. If enough people try to do the right thing, the right thing will likely emerge, if it is within their skill level.

(We are not talking about religious truth here, where it is an axiom that the majority is always wrong…)

The learning process is “gamified”, much like at the Khan Academy, with skill points and small data sets which you complete to “level up” to more advanced sets. At the beginner level, you typically go through around ten words at a time. Or at least that is the case for French, my test language.  (English is already my third language, so I am doing this just for the test. The only other language I want to learn right now is Japanese, since it is the only language I don’t understand but still hear pretty much every week, besides being almost impossible to translate by machine.)

The available languages at the moment are Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and German. Or English for those who speak those other languages. Thus the “duo” – it works both ways. This will come in handy when we translate the Internet, since it is always easier to translate into a good-sounding form in your native language. (For instance, I doubt a native English-speaker would say “good-sounding form”! ^_^;)

The languages just happen to be those used by the imperialist powers of the 19th-20th centuries. This may sound like a bad idea, but it has some benefits. Remember, the problem was that the developing world could not afford expensive language training? Much of the developing world is former colonies, where one of these languages is used either as the national language or as a second language. (Actually, I am not sure any of the former German colonies speak German anymore, and if any speak Italian, it is probably just one or two countries. But still, they are among the more popular second languages.)

One benefit of having only European languages is that they are very similar. They may not look that way to you, gentle reader, but if you have ever tried to learn more than a dozen words of Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Korean, Hebrew or even Finnish, you will realize that all of the big European languages are siblings of English on one side or another. English is originally a Germanic language (actually more related to the Scandinavian languages than to High German) but with a large vocabulary from the Latin-derived (or Romance) languages, most of which are quite similar to each other. Again, they may seem alien to you if this is your first time learning a new language, but they present minimal challenge compared to learning a language with completely different cultural concepts, like personal pronouns that depend on who you speak to as much as who is speaking.

Basically, you cannot translate a simple sentence into Japanese without knowing the relationship between the people involved. If there are no people in the sentence, then at least the relationship between the speaker of the sentence and the listener. (What other language programs usually do is default to formal or polite speech, which is great for business but quite different from what you’ll hear in a movie or on the street or in a family.) I am sure other non-European languages have other hurdles that I cannot even imagine. I know Chinese have tones that “sing” the same syllable differently, although they sound much the same to us. Hebrew and Arabic have sounds that seem more like a symptom of strep throat than a part of western speech. Some languages don’t have past and future tenses, and so on.

But for now, you can learn a related language with Duolingo. That seems like a good start. The sooner you get going, the more time you have to open your mind and realize that words and reality don’t map exactly one on one. If you live in America and only speak English, you should have at least learn Spanish before your first Spanish-speaking President. I am sure you have time if you start now. And it’s fun!

http://duolingo.com/

Khaaan!

Posted on by
5

Salman Amin Khan - Wikipedia Commons

Another real-life superhero (picture from Wikimedia Commons). Yes, he is good, smart, and handsome too, but keep your eyes to yourself girls, he’s married.

If one looks at the daily news, the future may look bleak. But then you come across projects like the Khan Academy, a global non-profit school on the Internet, and suddenly the future looks so bright you may want to put on shades. Chances are your local news channel is not likely to feature news like this on a regular basis, so today I will pick up the slack and tell you why this is amazing and awesome.

The Khan Academy starts with first-grade math of the 2+2=? Type, and continues all the way into the depths of calculus. It also features physics, chemistry, history and various others, but seems to avoid languages so far. New courses are added constantly, though, so perhaps one day even that will be covered. For the time being, it requires you to be fluent in English though.

To sum up the principle of the Khan Academy in a couple words, it is self-paced mastery. The student works at his or her own pace, but is expected to demonstrate mastery in more basic skills before continuing to the more advanced. The problem with ordinary school teaching is that you have to follow a set pace. If you are running ahead, you will get bored and distracted, and you certainly won’t get any help from the teacher. If you are lagging behind, you will hopefully get help, but it may not be enough, because now the class must move on and sorry if you only understood half of it but the time is out! At the Khan Academy you can watch YouTube videos explaining and demonstrating concepts, as often as you want. You can then do exercises to make the knowledge into skill. Only when you have reached mastery of the skill, will the software on the website direct you to the next step.

It is true that intelligence has a generic component, but there is some randomness in this world also. Someone may have a hard time “getting” a particular topic, but have an easier time with the next… but if they fall off the wagon at the first difficulty, they may be running after and never get the chance to excel. When you can work at your own pace, you can overcome any difficulty by spending more time on the basics. Of course, this requires you to actually want to learn. Luckily children and young people tend to be naturally curious. But just in case, the site hands out badges and maintains counters, making learning into a bit of an online game.

In addition to the instructional videos, you can ask your fellow students if you are in doubt. Experienced students are encouraged to tutor those who come after them, because this is another way to cement your skills into long-term memory. In fact, teaching is one of the best ways to learn anything, especially when the knowledge is still fresh. It helps you to see the knowledge from different angles and adds a personal, even emotional component in relating to a human rather than just a book. (In Norway we have a saying: “One learns as long as one has pupils.” This is a local pun on another saying: “One learns as long as one lives”, but I’d say teaching is more effective than just living. Your teacher may vary. ^_^)

Let me remind you once again that this is a free, non-profit service available over the Internet. By using YouTube for its many instructional videos, it lets Google take much of the heavy bandwidth load, but the videos are embedded seamlessly in the learning interface. Even in the middle of solving an equation, you may call up a related video that explains the principle, and then continue where you left off without ever leaving the browser window.

The site started with math (Mr. Khan made the first videos for his relatives) and this is where the site shines most brightly. Even if you fell off the math bandwagon the day you should learn two-digit addition, you can catch up here and continue all the way to calculus on your spare time. I don’t personally believe that all humans need to be skilled in calculus, but the point is, if you dropped out at school in first grade and you feel the urge to learn calculus, time is the only thing you need. You don’t need to be intelligent; if you learned the numbers and can read, you can simply keep repeating the exercises until you master them. And if calculus is not your thing, at some point you may want to scoot over to a neighboring domain such as statistics, economics or physics. Once you have the necessary math automated in your head and your fingertips, these fields become wide open to you. Just listen to the explanations and do the exercises until you master each little step along the way.

Do you now see why this makes me optimistic about the future? Not so much my future. I have reached an age where I am happy to still be breathing when a new morning dawns. But with literally a billion people having the opportunity to learn an ever growing range of topics to the point of mastery, for free, in their homes (or the library) … well, as I said, children are naturally curious. Right now most of them don’t even know that this opportunity exists. But the rumor is going to spread. I am spreading it now, and I ask you to do the same. Bookmark http://www.khanacademy.org/ or just type “Khan academy” in your favorite search engine, and a life of fun, easy learning is waiting for you and/or your kids.

The Khan Academy is founded by Mr Salman Amin Khan. He quit his job as a hedge fund analyst to “empower an unlimited amount of people for all time.” That’s a goal I can respect!

Quora, Quora everywhere

Posted on by
Reply

Screenshot Sims 3

Now with mobile app!

It seems like Quora has been releasing at least one new patch to their Android app each day lately. That is probably an exaggeration, but they have come pretty fast. I have to say, their app is really good now. I find it better than the web site in some ways, but mostly the same. I am quite impressed. I wonder how long they can keep it up: There is no advertising, and they would be hard pressed to sell the answers, even those by renowned experts in their fields, since there is nothing to stop the same people from giving the same answers somewhere else for free.

The site seems to become steadily more popular. This means more stupidity, but the system still works well in keeping the quality stuff at the top. There seems to be quite a bit of trolling in the religion-related subforums, but that is to be expected. Science-related questions still get great answers. Since a question can appear in several forums (have several topic tags) simultaneously, I keep discovering new topics that I want to follow.

As a result, Quora is eating into my book-reading time. This bothers me, but then my book time was pretty thin already. It also eats into my Twitter time and Google+ time, which bothers me less. Hopefully nobody on Google+ notices that I only read the people I know best, and only a few times a day at most.

Long-time readers of the Chaos Node will know that I have a tendency to have “fads”, usually of 2-3 weeks duration, when I spend particularly much time on a particular activity. Then it fades for a while until the next time. I would guess this is one of those fads, but I won’t know for sure until it has faded. In the meantime, I enjoy learning new things, seeing human minds working, and even answering a few questions myself.

The future of LED lighting?

Posted on by
Reply

Two circular LED lights with 19 diodes each

This is not how you normally see the new LED lights. They are used for indirect lighting, usually mounted under or over shelves. It is not recommended to look straight at them, I doubt it is dangerous but it certainly is uncomfortable.

Electricity has been quite well understood for more than a century, and I remember LED – light emitting diodes – used as on/off indicators on radios etc in my youth, more than 30 years ago. Not much later did I buy a nightlight using the same technology. It was faint, but used almost no power. It was the only light source that converted electricity to light so efficiently, losing almost nothing as heat in the process.

It was only the last decade or less that I started to get LED-based torchlights and head-mounted lights. By now the high-energy blue LEDs had been invented. While these had more energy loss in the conversion, they were still more efficient than the competition. Coating high-energy LEDs with a phosphorescent material allowed white light instead of blue, but some energy was lost in the process.

Only the last couple years have LED-based light bulbs been affordable and widely available enough that I could replace the incandescent bulbs in my apartment with white LED bulbs. These fit in the same sockets, but have a converter in their base which also draws power and produces a fair amount of heat. Depending on the type and brightness, LED bulbs use from 20% down toward 10% of the electricity used by a corresponding old-fashioned incandescent bulb. They also are expected to last 15-30 years, so it should be a good investment even at today’s prices. On the other hand, prices are still sliding, so it will likely become even cheaper in the future.

The practice of retrofitting, simply replacing incandescent bulbs with LED, is not optimal. To get that much brightness in the shape and size of the old bulb, you have to pack the LEDs densely together and close to the heat-producing converter. Since we mostly are lazy and hate change, this cannot be avoided, and there will probably be further progress in this area. But it is already possible to get more light (and less heat) out of the same electricity, simply by changing the size and shape of the light source.

The usually circular plates with many small diodes are sold for uplight and downlight, to be mounted under or on top of shelves, cupboards etc so as to cast their light up toward the ceiling or down toward the floor, providing indirect lighting to nearby parts of the room. Because they don’t need to be packed tightly, they don’t have a heating problem and are more effective and less likely to fade or break over time. They add very little heat and use little electricity.

I recently bought a pack with three such light circles, although it can be expanded to five. I am impressed with how much light they give, and they stay cool. I hope eventually, when the incandescent bulb is a thing of the past, flat-panel LED lighting will become the standard.

One can imagine bars or rectangles with rows of diodes, covered with a semi-opaque cover that diffuses the light enough to hide the individual diodes and not make the lamp painful to look at. These could be mounted in full view and provide a stylish illumination in new or renovated homes, either fixed to wall or ceiling, or vertically as movable lamps, perhaps shaped like a “staff”, with the power transformer in the dark lower part and a brightly shining upper section to illuminate the surrounding room. Or if that is too bright, another possible form is a “platter” pointing up toward the ceiling, causing a bright spot there to make the room bright. I have not seen these shapes yet, but I would not be surprised if they are already out there. The shape of the bulb has survived so far, but I don’t expect it to last forever.