GMO Labeling - Even a Kid Can Understand Why.

Last July in Danger Lurking in the Plastic Packaging of our Food? I wandered away from that article's title topic and took a light poke at the government for not insisting that GMO ingredients in food should be labeled as such.

GMO ingredients still aren't labeled, and here's a TED talk from a 15 year old that makes clear why they ought to be. 15 year old explains why GMO's ought to be labeled, It's only a 13 minute talk. Made sense to me. Is your congress-person as smart as a 15-year old? Honest enough to do what's right?

Not sure who represents you in the federal House of Representatives and Senate? Well, if you know your zip code, visit Find Your Senators and Representatives to find out who represents you. Now that you're armed with that information, you can visit Contacting the congress to actually contact them and make your opinion known. Isn't even going to cost you a stamp as they tend to have web forms or e-mail to receive your communications.

My apologies to my non-U.S. readers, but please work out how to let your government know of the need for GMO labeling.

Blogs aren't meant to be read-only. Please take a moment to comment on this article and re-share it with your friends. Even if you just give me a comment lifted from the GEICO commercial: "Everybody knows that!", I'll still be glad to hear from you.

TED Talk for Mature Audiences - Dismal Science, Disappointing Careers

For many years now, Economics has been known as the "dismal science". So, who better than a (Canadian) economist to deliver a 15 minute TED talk on "Why You Will Fail to Have a Great Career". TED talks, in general, are upbeat talks and this one, despite it having a somewhat cynical tone to it, really does have an upbeat message in there. I do worry in pointing out the talk that it requires a certain amount of maturity to hear the real message. The message an immature audience just might receive from this talk could be extremely negative. You've been warned! So, if you think you have the maturity to find the constructive up-lifting message in his talk, give a listen to Larry Smith of U. of Waterloo on why you will fail to have a great career.

The talk mentions the 2005 Stanford Commencement Address by the late Steve Jobs. If you haven't given that one a listen, I urge you to spend the 22 minutes that it'll take to play that one for yourself too.

you don't have to agree with the speakers in these video talks. If you have an opinion on what you've heard here, you're invited to leave a comment down below. I'm looking forward to hearing from you. And, of course, if you know someone who might benefit from giving a listen to either or both of these videos, please pass along the link to this blog article.

Danger Lurking in the Plastic Packaging of our Food?

I stumbled across this article from a web site unfamiliar to me:

http://www.care2.com/causes/if-plastic-bags-are-causing-infertility-in-pigs-what-are-they-doing-to-us.html

Worrisome, but I didnt want to sound the alarm without checking into it further. So I did some Google searching looking for the same warning from some other source. Found it from National Geographic and that's good enough for me to consider the story to be confirmed.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/06/140605-pigs-plastic-sperm-endocrine-disruptor-infertility-science/

The troublesome chemical showed up in plastic bags imported from China, but not in bags of local (Spain) manufacture? I wish I had more confidence that the matter would be properly handled and fixed by China. But I've not seen any tendency toward openness in China.

In case you need more to worry about, here's a 17 minute TED talk on some common pesticides in our environment. You say you aren't worried about frogs? Well, you probably should be.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=X9NFPZGyDPg

What should you and I do about these problems? Alas, I haven't a clue about what to do. A sternly worded letter to your congress-person (who likely is heavily under the influence of some big agricultural chemical company) would be a beginning, but I've not got much more respect left for our government than I have for that of China.

Am I the only one who has noticed that the food labels track most bad things in milli-grams (mg) but trans-fats on the label are tracked in grams (g)? In case you don't remember, 1 g = 1000 mg. Anything under 500mg of trans-fat in a "serving" is loudly touted as zero grams of trans-fat per serving by the power of rounding down to the nearest whole number of grams. And there are some pretty funny notions of "servings" to be found on those labels. Muffins from my local super-market come in packs of 4 muffins, zero grams of transfat per serving, but a serving is 1/3 of a muffin. Makes me wonder if 1/2 a muffin has enough trans-fat in it that they'd have to round it up to 1g on the label.

Dietary guidelines for trans-fat is to keep the amount that you eat each day as low as possible. Heck, even the guidelines for sodium allow 1500 mg/day of sodium as a recommended daily allowance and 300mg/day of cholesterol. (Speaking of which, have you looked at the nutrition facts for a McDonalds egg and sausage biscuit? 1170 mg of sodium in one. 250 mg of cholesterol in one. But if you are hungry, one of those isn't much of a breakfast. Advice: don't make a habit of McDonald's for breakfast.

http://www.cdc.gov/nutrition/everyone/basics/fat/transfat.html

Now if our government really had our best interest in mind, wouldn't it push the food company's to report tran-fats in mg (like they do for cholesterol and sodium)? But does that happen? No. Obviously way too controversial a matter? Right up there with identifying which products contain GMO corn.

Sigh.

Bill Gates TED Talks - Ideas Worth Sharing

Bill Gates is the well known founder of Microsoft. I'm not a fan of Bill nor of Microsoft. I am an advocate for "open source" software, and I think Microsoft has brought much harm to the computer industry. But that isn't what this brief article is about.

Bill Gates' modest house
 
 

Bill has given a couple of really good TED talks, short ones, about 10 minutes each. I pointed out this first one before. It advocates more technology in the classroom, specifically video recorders so teachers can assess their teaching sessions.

Teachers Need Real Feedback

A balanced assessment of the idea would have to take George Orwell's concerns from "1984" into account, but as presented, I think the video idea has merit.

A second Bill Gates TED talk, looking at the education problem from an entirely different perspective, is this one:

How State Budgets are Breaking US Schools

Alas, he does better at explaining the problem than he does at suggesting solutions.

What do you think of his suggestions? Is he merely advocating that a larger slice of the education budget should go into technology because that is in his self-interest, or is he showing real forward thinking?

Control Engineering?

My Master's degree

My MSE is from U. of Michigan, Ann Arbor. As I previously explained in a STEM post, I was there in a program sponsored by Bell Labs called "One Year On Campus". Within a maximum of 12 months, it was a requirement for my continued employment to complete a Master's of Science, Engineering degree. The Labs imposed a few additional requirements on the courses I was to take. I was to take an information theory and communications course (modulation techniques, etc., etc.), a digital logic course, and I'm not sure what all else. My main interest was in studying computer science, but the University had a requirement that X% of your courses had to be from within the department of your major. For broad studies of computing, that was a problem as the computing courses were spread throughout the University. The digital logic, machine architecture and assembly language courses were over in the Electrical Engineering department. The computer graphics courses were in the Industrial Engineering department. Operating systems, higher level languages and compilers were in the Computer Science department. Database courses were way over in the business school. So, the Engineering school created the "CICE - Computer, Information and Control Engineering" department to cross list all of the above courses. By majoring in CICE, I was able to take a broad variety of computing courses and still meet that X% within my major department requirement.

So much to do and only a year to do it. So, I admit that the edge of the CICE curriculum where I did not fit in many courses was control engineering. I had some exposure to it, but just enough to hum along if someone decided to sing about the subject. I couldn't even confidently promise to you a competent explanation of the topic if you asked me about it.

TED talk/demo of control engineering

So, I was excited today to find a most excellent TED talk demonstrating control engineering with a set of "Quad copters". The talk has some very impressive demonstrations of software control of the copters. I could wish for a more technical explanation then they offered. I'm not at all sure how many processors of what kind they used to track and control the copters. I'm pretty sure there's more real-time computation going on there then would comfortably fit into one processor, but that's just my gut feeling and not based on any real experience.

And so, for your entertainment and to convey to you what the heck "control engineering" is about, I share with you Raffaello D'Andrea: The astounding athletic power of quadcopters from June 2013. Run time of the video is about 16 minutes.

Want to know more?

I did some mild Google searching to try to find the source code for the control programs, which I assume are likely to be "open source". I didn't find exactly what I was looking for. But I did find some useful info. There's a Wikipedia article about Quadcopters and from there, there are plenty of links to additional information. I found this article about the lab where they test their stuff to be interesting. I was heartened to learn that they do have a safety net to catch the falling copters when the software is still under development. The article does give me the distinct impression that they've developed custom hardware to do the control algorithms fast enough. That is a potential major obstacle for a casual hobbyist who wants to play. If the Wikipedia article doesn't give you enough leads to follow there's an existing Pearltree specifically about quadcopters. I did find some open source (Arduino controller) quadcopter projects. e.g. this one and another one.

If you try your own Google searches, be careful about people in other fields of research with names similar to Raffaello D'Andrea. e.g. I found a biology PhD candidate at U. of Michigan named Rafael D'Andrea - Not the same guy. Oh, and I did find some Cornell U. work in the field of quadcopters too: Autonomous Quadcopter Docking System. Oh my, on page 11 of that report, the guy strapped his Android Smartphone to the quadcopter to add a camera to the configuration. That must have taken guts! (I wonder if he has the "Send me to Heaven" game on his Android phone? Not me!)

If you want to get into the math of control of a quadcopter, this looks like a reasonable place to start reading: Estimation and Control for an Open-Source Quadcopter. Or just sit back and enjoy the demo video that I pointed to in the previous section. Not everyone has to be a DIY engineer with amazing toys.

MOOC's: Be careful what you wish for.

There's an old warning that you should be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it. Here's an article from the Slate "web magazine" cautioning that MOOC's are going to doom us all:

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/07/moocs_could_be_disastrous_for_students_and_professors.html

Countering that point of view, the article does manage to provide a link to a TED talk by coursera founder Daphne Koller, speaking at Edinburgh in June 2012:

http://www.ted.com/talks/daphne_koller_what_we_re_learning_from_online_education.html (21 minutes)

Now my own experience is limited. I took Udacity's CS101 course last year. It has no fixed schedule and I worked on the course when time was available and did eventually complete it with 100% on the final exam. I've signed up for another couple of Udacity courses, but haven't managed to get around to finishing either. Home Internet outages and a few weeks hospitalized distracted me from sticking to it. Of course, with no fixed schedule, I can always return to those courses and get down to work on them.

Koller and coursera seem to put much more emphasis on a fixed schedule than does Udacity. For example, I've been taking coursera's Systematic Program Design Course and have to concede that I have not kept up with it's mandatory schedule of weekly homeworks and quizzes. Realistically, I have to concede I'll not be completing that course this summer and will have to try it again the next time it is scheduled. Not a bad course, but it does get tedious in its attention to microscopic details. I also got distracted with learning a new programming language (Racket) along the way. Too bad as the course was to have 2 peer reviewed assignments and they were to be my first experience with peer reviewed work.

I think the gloom and doom suggestions of the Slate article are a bit too Luddite a point-of-view for my taste. I think MOOC's will lead to a lot of change in education courses in the future. The MOOC courses will establish baselines which future improvements will have to beat. Koller emphasizes that the MOOC offerings collect a lot of data which provide the prospect of guiding future improvements. The one thing that I can see screwing up a bright future of continuous course improvement is if copyrights are used to restrict building a better course based on an existing course. U.S. copyright law has seemed to get repeatedly stretched with additional years to make sure Mickey Mouse, et al, never pass into the public domain. I can only hope that the MOOC courses stick to the tradition of Creative Commons licensing so that it is possible to found an improved course on an existing good course.

On a related topic, although Bill Gates is not a person that I often have praise for, in this 10-minute TED talk by Bill, he does a nice job of arguing that teachers need more feedback. A modest bit of technology, such as a video camera on a tripod, can give teachers a basis for self-assessment and the possibility for peer reviews.

http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_teachers_need_real_feedback.html

Ken Robinson on how to effectively run an education system - Command and Control isn't the right choice.

Ken Robinson surely must earn a lot of air miles giving talks at TED conferences. Here's another one, from fairly recently. May 2013 is when it was published to Youtube.

Ken Robinson: How to escape education's death valley

I did laugh out loud, so he still manages to give an entertaining talk, but he compares the scale and challenges of Finland's education system to that of a US state. I can accept that for at least some states the scale is comparable. Texas, New York, and California and perhaps Illinois are likely outliers in the size distribution, but that can presumably be solved by carving things into administrative regions. Except on matters of revenue collection, upstate NY surely doesn't want to be lumped in with New York City anyhow. But I do think there are vast differences in the educational challenges faced by the US vs. those faced by Finland. Wikipedia tells me that 91% of the people in Finland speak Finnish and 41% of the population can speak Swedish. There are various other languages spoken by a fraction of the population, but the totals are in the thousand's of people. Compare that to the languages of New York where the total of non-English speakers runs into the millions, thanks to NYC's long term position as a port of entry into the "melting pot" of US culture. I believe there is also more cultural diversity in the US than in Finland and that this makes it easier to run a successful high school in Finland than in Brooklyn.

So, I don't think that Robinson has been entirely convincing in his talk. Nonetheless, he makes lots of valid points about how and how not to effectively run an education system. The prevailing testing culture imposed on US schools seems well captured in this "What real-world skills do you have?" cartoon.

If you didn't see Robinson's previous TED talks on education, see the links from my January, 2013 Blog article "TED Talks on Education". They were enjoyable and informative talks too.

Education's Future: "Go Do Something Interesting".

Another interesting TED talk on the future of education. The speaker is Seth Godin. The question is "What is school for?".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXpbONjV1Jc (17 minutes)

As usual, it is easy to see how that could work out for a self-motivated student, but what about the unmotivated students? Will they just waste time until school is over? Spending hour after hour playing World of Warcraft doesn't sound like a well rounded education to me.

Life could be awfully complex for a teacher in the future if all the students are going off in their own directions and each student is looking to the teacher during the day to answer questions they have from the diverse lectures they listened to last night. I suppose there can be various specialists on staff, and depending on the questions, the teacher could redirect the student to the appropriate specialist. Except for the lower grade levels, that isn't all that much different from the staff of schools today, except for the change from having assigned time slots to sit with each specialist on your schedule.

Unclear to me is how the school will insist on a "well rounded" education. I suppose this comes down to some assumptions on what school is for. I believe that one of the things school is for is to educate the students to the point where they are prepared to learn new things in the future. That calls for some fundamental reading and writing skills, some basic math skills and some elementary knowledge of history and literature. This may not fit the student's opinion of what is "something interesting", but if the school hands out diplomas to students who aren't prepared even to be knowledgeable voters, then the diploma doesn't mean much. This is where the cynic would point out how little a high school diploma means today.

On the one hand, I can see a case for loosening up a school's schedule, spending less time in required classes, but on the other hand, I can see an awful lot of students frittering away the time released for them to go do something interesting. Do you see a way to structure things such that no one gets left behind and folks who are motivated can go as far as they want to go?

Danny Hillis: The Internet Could Crash - We Need a Plan B.

Here's another interesting TED talk. The speaker is Danny Hillis, the designer of the now defunct "Connection Machine", a very parallel computer with a lot of lights on the front panels. One of those machines managed to show up as a backdrop in one of the Jurassic Park movies. When I was managing a computer center at Bell Labs, we did consider purchase of a "Connection Machine", but it seemed that my users weren't really ready for something way different from the Sun servers and DEC-VAX machines that were the heart of our operation at that time. A "Connection Machine" seemed too risky in any case since the price tag was large and the company attempting to sell us the system was not well established and therefore could (and indeed did)go out of business in the blink of an eye.

Danny Hillis: The Internet Could Crash - We Need a Plan B

The TED talk was given in February 2013.

Reminds me of the proposal I made to split up the computer center in Murray Hill Building 5. The assumption had been that in the event of a disaster that took out our computer center there, that we'd fall back onto the facilities of the "Murray Hill Computer Center" in Building 2. That might have been a feasible plan when our Building 5 operation was small relative to the size of the Building 2 computer center, but technology and user demand in Building 5 led to enormous growth in storage and compute capacity. It was clear to me that Building 2's computer center didn't have the oomph we'd need if something happened to Building 5. I found a small raised floor area in Building 4 that was slated to be decommissioned and proposed that we move some of our "eggs" out of the Building 5 basket. I wasn't promising that we'd be able to transparently absorb the loss of Building 5, just that it would assure that our users wouldn't be entirely out of business if something happened to one of the buildings.

I was especially nervous about Building 5 because it has a wood-truss roof protected by a water-sprinkler fire protection system. One time, when a pipe in the ceiling burst, Rick, our lead computer operator, described it as "Rick's VAX Wash" as torrents of water poured down on one of our VAX 11/780's. Much to my disappointment, I couldn't stir up any interest in our users who fund our budget in splitting the computer center partially out of Building 5. Ultimately I left that organization for a less political and more technical position elsewhere with Bell Labs, Murray Hill.

But God saw to "meting out justice". That winter heavy snows covered the roof of Building 5, and then rain saturated the accumulated snow, but temps dropped and turned the whole pile on the roof to heavy ice that refused to slide off the arched roof, a significant static load. The load was too much for the wood trusses and one of them snapped during the night, shifting the load to its neighbors, which in turn similarly snapped. In the morning, the only visible symptoms were that the suspended ceiling tiles inside the building were strangely out of place. This led to the building people figuring out what was wrong and evacuating the building. Desks were set up in the main lobby of Building 6 so people could continue to have a place to work. The computer operators were issued hard hats and Building 5 was closed to all but "essential personal". Rick called it "closed to all but dispensable personnel" until the trusses could be repaired several months later.

I admit to some small pleasure in quietly thinking, see, I told you we needed a Plan B. Alas, I suspect that Hillis's clarion call for a Plan B Internet is going to get as little support as my call for a Plan B for the Building 5 computer center. If it happens at all, maybe the Plan B Internet will be a side-effect of the transition to IPv6?? But if the IPv6 Internet is as vulnerable to attack as today's IPv4 Internet, that isn't much of a plan B as it merely requires a second attack to take down the 2nd Internet. Should Plan B look way different from the traditional international Internet and just focus on smaller communities (per country or per state, with paranoid gateways to get from region to region)? I don't see how to do it "safely" without having stronger "central control" than the Internet model has today. Big Government central control (ala the "Great Firewall of China") makes me plenty nervous, so I hope the network gurus of the world have some better ideas.

Please add your comments to this blog if you have suggestions on how to get a Plan B in place. What would it's scope be? What would it look like? How would you test it?

Spoken Word Poetry and fun with data

And now for something completely different.... Or is it? It's another TED talk by a teacher, but the topic is not STEM, not software, not design - It's poetry. 18 and a 1/2 minutes that reminded me how few English teachers I have had who were really memorable. But memory is slippery stuff.

I have a clear memory of the time Mrs. McCutcheon had us bring in a poem to read aloud to the class. I have no idea what poem I brought in and read, but remember clearly that Mark R. brought in the lyrics to "Get a Job" and with a straight face, read aloud every syllable of the song. I thought it was marvelous subversion of the assignment, and was surprised, years later, when I ran into Mark at a class reunion that he had no memory of the occasion. To her credit, Mrs. McCutcheon didn't object to Mark having chosen a "poem" that was a bit outside of the expected.

Anyhow, from way outside of my comfort zone, here's Sarah Kay in March 2011 on spoken word poetry.

If I should have a daughter...

Lest I lose my credibility as an engineer, I also offer here the 500th TED talk: Hans Rosling speaking to the state department in June 2009 (22.5 minutes, long as TED talks go).

Let My Dataset Change Your Mind

where he shows that things change with the passage of time and your mindset might not match the dataset. An impressive demonstration of data visualization.

If you're still unconvinced about the value of hard data, here is a brief, light musical interlude that came to my mind while I was watching this next video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05av9iJvgiQ.

and finally, here's another data-centric talk (15 and 1/2 minutes) looking at what we know about the AIDS epidemic in Africa.

Emily Oster Flips Our Thinking About The AIDS Epidemic in Africa

That talk was in March, 2007, and I confess to more than a little discomfort that in the years since, I haven't seen any signs of people changing their thinking on this topic. Esquire magazine hardly ever has occasion to talk about economists, even attractive female economists, but the TED biography for Emily Otter quotes from Esquire: "At just 26, economist Emily Oster may have the highest controversies-generated-to-years-in-academia ratio of anyone in her field.". Now there's a score that I can envy!

STEM Education Ideas

Frank Noschese is a high school teacher of Physics and Chemistry. This April, 2012 TEDx talk (about 15 minutes):

What's the difference between a scientist and a student?

advocates "Modeling" as the basis for STEM instruction.

I think my favorite part was his demo of the use for science text books in the classroom. I also liked the per-group presentations of results. I'm sure that provokes some great discussions among the groups.

Another Designer with Education Ideas

I have little notion of what distinguishes a TED conference from a TEDx conference, but today's find is a video from a TEDx conference. Lest there be any confusion, please note that I'm Drew Davis and one of the speakers in the video is Drew Davies. He is not me.

The Future Will Not be Multiple Choice. Run time is just under 13 minutes from May, 2012.

Give Miss Frizzle her cue and let's get messy....

If you didn't see it already, I suggest that you also see the talk about Design and Education in Bertie County, North Carolina.

Not everything is covered in nifty videos. You might find some interesting reading material by trying a Google search for:

demise of shop class

Among other interesting things that Google search led me to this 2006 article Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford. That article has since been expanded into a 2009 book by that same author. I confess that I haven't read that book.

As always, I welcome comments from you on my blog. It's your chance to influence where future articles are likely to wander. Thank-you for your time and thoughts. I'm happy to share this modest forum with you, but if, for whatever reason, you want to keep a lower profile than is implied by posting on a public blog, I invite you to e-mail to me, r.drew.davis at gmail nospam com. I trust you can decode that into a conventional email address.

Drew

Education and Technology

Today continues my coverage of "education" as a topic.

First, another TED talk: This one is by Salman Khan of Khan Academy, talking in March 2011 about the advantage of putting lessons into videos and how the material can be used to "flip the classroom". The talk is just over 20 minutes long.

Let's Use Video to Re-invent Education

The 2nd talk today is a non-TED lecture from one of Udacity's professors, Jörn Loviscach, talking at a May, 2012, conference in Switzerland about where he thinks education is being driven by the availability of MOOC's and video-on-demand lessons. The talk is about 40 minutes long, and is delivered in an accented English.

MOOC's and Other Faster Horses

I'm curious to see how "teaching until mastery" really works out with real students. It seems to imply a level of self-motivation that doesn't seem to be common-place. Perhaps the problem is that the self-motivation has been trained out of the children by the traditions of education where wrong answers are a bad outcome??

I also note that the dashboard Khan shows is far more slick than the guidance that the infrastructure of Udacity provides for tracking a class. Maybe Udacity needs more time and demand to come through with additional tools to support a role for a "local teacher" in the courses. The existing Udacity software doesn't really offer any overview of who is stuck and who is moving through the material with ease, not even identifying who isn't even putting in the time to try.

If you've had experience with MOOC's and/or "flipping the classroom", I'd sure like to hear about how that went for you. Please contribute some comments, even if you just contribute a link pointing to your own blog where you talk about this stuff.

Back in my time with a major industrial research and development organization, one of my frustrations was that so little attention was paid to failed projects. To this day, I strongly believe that there's lots to be learned by thinking through the reasons a project didn't succeed. Surely, if every project succeeds, that is evidence that you are setting the bar too low and need to try harder. So, failures are to be expected, but why did the project fail? Were the implementation requirements wildly mis-estimated? Was it a technical problem or was it a management problem? Surely there's value in figuring things out to maximize the chances of not repeating exactly the same mistake next time. But I was there long enough to see that rewards did not go to people who learned from mistakes. Pity.

And now with MOOC's there is a high enough drop-out rate that surely there is stuff to be learned from talking with the folks who didn't stick around long enough to cross the finish line, but I've seen little evidence that the MOOC organizations are making an effort to contact for "exit interviews" the folks crowding the exits. Seems downright unscientific.

Drew

A Designer's Perspective on Education

Here's another TED talk on Education (from July, 2010). What I like about it is it's a completely different point of view than I bring myself. The speaker is Emily Pilloton, a designer, who has gotten involved in reviving the education program in rural Bertie County, North Carolina. It reminded me of the relatively recent demise of "shop" courses, and manages to whip up a case for Design as a vehicle for motivating and providing education. It's a short talk (<17 minutes) with less comedy than the Robinson talks, but I found the talk to be quite energizing.

Teaching Design for Change

Reminded me of the old Teddy Roosevelt quote "Do what you can, with what you have, where you are".

I wish her the best of luck, and hope to hear some results in coming years. The program is quite new.

The elements in her plan:

1. Design for Education
2. Redesigning Education
3. Design as Education

I think it important to be reminded that not all elements of education need be verbally oriented though I'm a reading/writing sort of person. When I think "design" my reflex is to think about software design. Happily, not everyone in the world is just like me.

TED Talks on Education

TED Talks are short talks "Spreading ideas that matter". They cover a broad range of topics, but in general, they have excellent speakers who really have something to say. Along the lines of my new-found interest in Education, I offer up a couple of related TED talks that I recently stumbled into.

I suggest that you take 20 minutes to watch this TED talk by Brit Sir Ken Robinson: Do Schools Kill Creativity?. I liked it enough to add it to my Words of Wisdom Pearltree.

If you enjoy it too, there's a sequel from a few years later that is also worth viewing: Bring on the Learning Revolution!

At least one school teacher who I shared these videos with complained that the script leaned too much on humor and didn't have enough hard facts. He asked why any school teacher would be motivated to kill creativity in their students? Good question, but I'm quite sure I've encountered such in my own limited experience as a student. The video's speaker was convincing enough for me, but maybe that just shows my own biases.

Here's a short 3rd talk from the same speaker, but in a different, more visual format: Changing Education Paradigms.

Anyone got a convincing argument that it isn't so?