I just finished watching the TED Talk by David McCandless called “The Beauty of Data Visualization” and it is stunningly awesome! In the talk, he discusses the importance of understanding the relativeness of data when it is reported in the news. ”Visualizing information is a form of knowledge compression” where we squeeze enormous amount of information and understanding into a small space. McCandless was not trained in graphic design, but “”being exposed to all this media over the years had instilled a kind of dormant design literacy in me.” He says he is something of a “data detective” (see his graph “Mountains out of Molehills” in the talk for an example).
Edward Tufte also discusses the importance of data visualization, but he is something of a technology Luddite. David’s interactive digital data visualization “Snake Oil” is simply awesome and demonstrates a path that “information supergraphics” could take if Tufte were to embrace technology instead of just bashing it (I went to one of Tufte’s workshops last year and I can tell you that the only “good technology” was his iPhone).
If there was ever a video to show a math or statistics class at the beginning of the semester, this might be it. Of course, then you’ll actually have to DO some data visualization during the semester, but hey – it will keep you honest!
The problem is that the very short talk does not present a “formula” for changing education, just Benjamin’s idea that the pinnacle at the top of the math pyramid should be statistics instead of calculus. There is nothing in the the short talk that suggests any kind of coherent plan for how it could be done, or even a suggestion that he has a plan. That’s what I would want to know about. Of course, it’s only a 3-minute talk and it’s certainly possible that he had nothing to do with the name of the talk.
I did agree with these two statements, but want to add my own two cents:
1. “very few people actually use calculus in a conscious meaningful way in their day to day lives” … but I’m not sure we teach people how to use calculus in a “conscious meaningful way” nor are many of us required to use calculus for the simple reason that our superiors don’t understand it at all. Calculus could be used in a “conscious meaningful way” but our society chooses not to engage. As a matter of fact, very few people actually use statistics in a conscious meaningful way in their day to day lives. Enough said.
2. “it’s time for our mathematics to change from analog to digital” … here I agree, kind of. It’s time for our mathematics to include both analog and digital, and it’s definitely time for our mathematics teaching to change from analog to digital. What happens in most math classrooms is based on a factory-model of education that developed before computers even existed. Even though the world has changed, the instruction (for the most part) has not.
I found it more interesting to read through the comments that followed the short TED talk. There is an interesting conversation taking place there. One wise commenter pointed out that it’s possible that there should not be just one pinnacle on the math pyramid. Both Calculus and Statistics could be considered penultimate goals of a mathematics education. I think that’s dead-on.
If there’s anything I’ve learned during the process of writing my dissertation, it’s that the system of collegiate mathematics education is extremely complex. There will be no “easy” fix to the system, even if someone is able to convince a majority of the stakeholders that their change is the correct one.
Margaret Wertheim speaks at TED about the beautiful mathematics of coral reefs, hyperbolic geometry, and more. In particular, I liked her bit (around the 8-minute mark) where she says that if zero and one are already possible answers, then mathematicians would become immediately suspicious that infinity might be one too (think, how many ways can two lines intersect). She also discusses the inability to see a principle when it is right in front of your face (like the hyperbolic geometry in leafy lettuce).
Just watched an amazing 7-minute TED talk on The Mathematics of War where an interdisciplinary team of researchers (physics, mathematics, economist, intelligence, computers) figured out how to mine data from public streams of information to collect and analyze modern warfare.
It turns out that when they began plotting the number killed in an attack with the frequency of those attacks, they found the data was linear. Not only was this relationship linear, but the same linear relationship then appeared in every modern war they looked at (with slopes that varied slightly).
So, next they modeled the probability of an event where x people are killed.
Finally, they went back to each conflict to try to understand the meaning the slope of the line. It turns out that the alpha value (which hovers around 2.5) has to do with the organizational structure of the resistance. If the resistance becomes more fragmented, it is pushed closer to 3. If the resistance becomes more organized, it is pushed closer to 2.
Anyways, it’s only seven minutes. You should definitely watch it!
I’ve been working on this Wii Smartboard hack project for about two weeks and today I’m pleased to report that I finally have liftoff !
What is it? Johnny Lee (who presented at TED 2007) has been doing some fascinating work with simple Wii remotes. One of his projects, shown below, has been to make a “hack” version of a SmartBoard using a wii remote, an infrared light, and a bluetooth capable computer.
It’s been blogged about all over the Internet, and several of you have urged me to write about it, but I wanted to try it myself before passing it along. So … here are the gory details (more lucid details, without all the embellishment, can be found on Johnny Lee’s website. It is the project called Low-Cost Multi-point Interactive Whiteboards Using the Wiimote.
STEP 1: Build an infrared light pen and borrow someone’s wii remote. I did purchase the parts from Radio Shack for under $10: an infrared light, a switch, some wire, and a AA battery. For the pen construction (which was going to possibly require some sautering), I enlisted the Industrial Technology Wing of our campus for some help. One of their students did a fabulous job disassembling a standard whiteboard marker to create our working infrared pen. When you press and hold the switch, the infrared light is on. In our model, the battery is housed in the tail end, which makes it relatively simple to replace (by removing the duct tape). The infrared light is glued into the tip to hold it steady.
STEP 2: Find a computer that has bluetooth that can be hooked up to a projector of some sort. This actually turned out to be one stumbling block. It turns out that not a single classroom computer on our campus is bluetooth enabled. This left us scrounging for laptops (or my tablet PC), which kind of defeats the purpose of installing the system in a classroom, but for the purposes of trying the technology, it was fine.
STEP 3: Get the computer to detect the Wii Remote. This was the hardest step. I spent hours trying to get my tablet to pair with the Wii Remote. I still have not gotten my tablet to “synch” with the remote. It would detect the existence of the Wii Remote, but it would not pair. I suspect it has something to do with the fact that I am running Windows XP Tablet, and not a standard version of Windows XP or Vista. The tablet keeps insisting that I give a code for the Wii Remote before it will pair. This evening, my assistant Jill volunteered her laptop for the experiment and we used her Bluetooth (for the first time ever) to successfully perform the synch. So that’s one good thing I can say about Windows Vista. Where I spent hours not getting XP to synch properly, Vista managed it in under a minute.
STEP 4: Download Johnny Lee’s Wiimote Whiteboard software (found on his website). You can’t even run the software until you get the Wii synched, so don’t bother trying.
STEP 5: With the computer projecting, and the camera part of the wii pointing at the projected space (mirroring the computer screen), run the Wiimote Whiteboard software and calibrate the pen to the space. If the pen does not seem to be seen, you will have to keep adjusting the wii camera and starting from scratch until all four calibration points are easily seen by the wii remote.
This is Jill demonstrating our successful launch of the Wii Smartboard Hack.
Now, you’re going to ask, how does it work? Well, we still don’t have it set up properly. We need to play with the angle of the Wii remote camera, but Jill’s laptop ran out of power before we got a chance. You can see that the writing we’ve got on the board in this calibration is somewhat “blocky” but it was smoother in a previous (not pictured) calibration.
I guess all I can say, at this point, is that I can verify the technology works. So we have, at least, accomplished that much. Ideally, I would affix the wii remote semi-permanently to the ceiling projector apparatus so that it couldn’t be bumped during use, but I promised to return the wii remote (unharmed) to the owner.
So, we’ll update you again when we have power for Jill’s laptop and some time to work on our calibration issue. In the meantime, start thinking about what we might be able to do with a “smart” table with four seats and four infrared pens!
In Academe, we tend to think of scholarly journal publications as “the gold standard.” I’m here to argue that in the Digital Age, there is a new gold standard for disseminating findings, and it is way more than publishing in a joural and then reading your paper at a conference.
Easy-to-understand video explaining your scholarly work for a more general audience is the new standard, and TED (Technology, Education, and Design) is the gold standard of that work. If you haven’t ever seen TED Talks, you need to go out and do a little sampling.
TED is an absolutely stunning conference which puts the word “interdisciplinary” as we know it in Academe, to shame. Here is a small collection of some of my favorites in the STEM fields. My advice? Give up television for a few weeks and explore the TED collection instead. You will gain a radical new understanding of the world of technology that we (academics and the rest of the population) are about to enter.
Some of the really stunning visuals that Neil Turok used in his TED Prize talk were graphics from the website Worldmapper. The idea is that you start with a standard area map of the world, and then create cartograms (or density-equalizing maps) – resizing each territory to relate it with the variable being mapped.
John Pritchard, from the Geography Department at the University of Sheffield, was kind enough to give an overview of the process involved in the creation of these maps for this blog post:
A cartogram can be thought of as part map, part pie-chart. It attempts to keep areas (such as countries) in roughly the same place, whilst changing their size to reflect the value of a variable, for example, population. A world cartogram of population would show, for example, China and India as larger than their land area size, and Australia as smaller.
An algorithm that creates a cartogram from a map, preserving recognisable shapes whilst resizing countries, has been something of a‘holy grail’ of the cartogram world. The solution we use forWorldmapper, from Mark Newman and Michael Gastner at the University ofMichigan, is inspired by the diffusion of gas molecules. If you imagine the example of human population, the algorithm would have the effect of allowing the population of a densely populated country to ‘diffuse’, pushing back the boundaries of neighbouring, less densely-populated countries, until population density was evenly spread.
Interesting that this application to geography was inspired by chemistry!
Here are a few more maps that I found interesting. A map of War Deaths:
Finally, a great comparison of wealth in the years 1500 and 1990:
To learn more about how the maps were created, see the Worldmapper “About” page.
These maps would make a great exclamation point on a problem about percentages. For example, first you calculate the the percentage of deaths caused by war from several continents (North America, Africa, etc.). Then after the calculations, you can emphasize the findings with the appropriate map.
Most of the maps (at least, all the ones that I looked at) are accompanied with data or descriptive numerical information that you could easily build a word problem from.
His TED wish? To grow AIMS and promote the study of math and science in Africa.
This is a really inspiring TED talk … a little big about his theories of the universe and the big bang, and mostly about his motivation for founding AIMS, and its successes.
What’s the likelihood of stumbling across two kickin’ applications on astronomy in one day? Apparently, pretty good.
The first application I saw was released on TED Talks this week – a program called Worldwide Telescope – and an application by Microsoft (if you can believe that). The application must run on the same software platform as Photosynth (Seadragon). Worldwide Telescope will eventually be housed on the Internet at http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/ (not much there to see yet).
The second application is called Google Sky (launched today). This application has the advantage of being “live” right now. So you can go play immediately, zooming and panning through the sky in the same way you navitage in Google Maps.
If you haven’t seen Photosynth yet (previewed to a stunned audience last at TED last year), it’s an amazing application of trigonomety, the Internet, and computing power (view the TED Talk on Photosynth here and go to the Photosynth website here where you can try out a “preview” of Photosynth).
Apparently, I now have a feature series (like Technology Reviews) called “Today I want to be a …” (I figure four blog posts by the same title is a series). The previous posts in the series are:
I know that Pi-Day is tomorrow, and I should be excited to be celebrating a math holiday, but honestly I feel a little down. Where are the cool “explorer-style” applications for mathematics? Is the TI N-Spire supposed to do it for me when I’m comparing it to stuff like this? This is exactly the kind of feeling that led me to get three degrees as an undergraduate (math, chemistry, and biology … thanks for asking). Math, even with the cool applications that we have available to us today, is simply not as engaging at the lower levels as the sciences. I doubt very much that students go to Wolfram Demonstrations to “explore” concepts. Nobody logs in to MyMathLab, WebAssign or WebWorks just to “play” with the mathematics they are learning.
Maybe Wolfram can create an interactive galaxy of Wolfram Demonstrations (similar to Jonathan Harris’ Universe), where the “constellations” are mapped out through similar topics connecting the WDs or a TED-style interface for browsing? Only let’s just make all the demos “live” and not hidden behind a download and player.
Maybe Apple can make a touch screen calculator capable of graphing in COLOR with easy zoom and pan options at the touch of a finger and functionality for exploration where every option isn’t buried under a series of 5 menus (hey – if they can put EA’s game Spore on that phone, it’s certainly not out of reach).
Maybe the monotony of algebra and precalculus can be absorbed by an online virtual world where students learn through puzzles and concept-oriented games (sorry DimensionM – I’ve played you, and you’re just not ready for the College crowd – too much game, not enough content).
Maybe math teachers should act as roving content instructors – showing up at science, business, and computer classes to conduct “just in time” math teaching and working with other instructors to seamlessly integrate content into the rest of the curriculum.
I don’t know what the answer is, but I’m tired of longing for the great educational tools available in other fields. If we all push together, maybe by NEXT pi day, I’ll have something more exciting than pi to be excited about! All together now … let’s push our way into the 21st century with the power of Web 2.0.
The 2008 TED conference is going on in California right now, and so I find myself watching some old TED talks … wishing I were there and pining for the new talks that will begin appearing soon.
“It’s education that’s meant to take us into this future that we can’t grasp.”
“My contention is that creativity, now, is important in education as literacy.”
Paraphrasing: “If you were to view our education system from the point of view of an alien, you’d be forced to conclude that the purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce University professors. They’re the people who come out of the top.” Ouch!
Public education came into being (around the world) to meet the needs of industrialism.
Best quip (paraphrased) “University professors are just another form of life. There’s something curious about professors – not all of them – but typically, they live in their heads. They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads.” (Wow – what a great insight! This totally describes me!)
“The structure of education is shifting beneath our feet …”
John Pritchard, from the Geography Department at the University of Sheffield, was kind enough to give an overview of the process involved in the creation of these maps for this blog post:
