Cell Phones in the Classroom

I spent a little time yesterday reading about using cell phones in the classroom. I'll do a more thorough write-up of this later, but I think one of the most interesting potential applications is using cell phones as an iClicker replacement. Sure there is an extra layer of complexity there in getting SMS responses in quickly especially if you're in the basement of a building with low signal strength and the question of how to deal with the less than 1% of students who don't have cell phones, but at the same time, you have a pervasive technology that students already use on a daily basis.

To loosen it up from the more formal polling of just certain questions, what about live tweeting in a classroom? You can use twitter from your cell phone or from a laptop. There are many conferences that provide a hash tag for that conference so everyone can follow what everyone else at the conference is tweeting about. So how about the professor set up a hash tag for their class and run a live feed either just to their monitor to see what students are or aren't understanding, or if they're feeling really adventurous, run the feed to the projector so the whole class can see. You could minimize purposefully distracting tweets by having students register their twitter account beforehand, so if someone puts something dumb up on the screen, you'd know who it was.

Of course, the type of professor who would kick someone out of class for participating in a discussion would retire before allowing something like this in their classroom, but they're not really the market for something like this anyway. It needs to be professors who actually want feedback from their students.

Internet Explorer has stopped working

Yes, thank you, Windows Vista, for that great error message. I think I already know what made it stop working, though. It probably has something to do with the fact that I clicked the red X thingy in the corner to close it.

Food Revolution

Awhile back, I mentioned a McDonald's commercial where a team loses the soccer championship, and we find out it's because they eat Happy Meals after their games. Here's the video that hadn't been posted at the time:



With the Olympics going on currently, we're inundated with more McDonald's commercials telling us how much the athletes eat it all the time. I suppose it is possible that it's not all a big lie and that these commercials are not outright fraud. Yes, these athletes work hard to fine tune their bodies to do amazing things, and it seems that fast food wouldn't fit in there. However, it is plausible that McDonald's is an integral part of these athletes' diets. Considering that Michael Phelps eats 12,000 calories a day to keep up with his training demands, it is possible he loads up on a few Mighty Kids Meals at 800 calories and 1400 mg of sodium per meal as an efficient way of piling on the raw energy his body needs. That doesn't mean it's good for the rest of us. Exercise like Phelps and you can eat whatever you want.

So do we add a sin tax to bad food or threaten kids with cancer or diabetes to fix the problem?

Jamie Oliver may have it right with his goal to educate people about food so they have the tools to make good choices for themselves. He says:

I wish for everyone to help create a strong, sustainable movement to educate every child about food, inspire families to cook again and empower people everywhere to fight obesity.

Hopefully his Food Revolution works. Is there anything else that can?

One Way Street

I'm often impressed by some of the things Seth Godin has to say, and I've linked to a few of his blog posts here in the past. One of the things I'm less than impressed with is the fact that there's not a way to post comments on his blog.

I've had both Scott Adams and Mark Cuban respond to things I've written in the comments on their blogs. If that doesn't show off the power of the Internet, I don't know what does. The great equalizer of the Internet puts us all on the same level.

It doesn't work that way for Seth, though. He recently posted about an app he'd like to have. He called for someone to develop a non-linear presentation application that would run on the iPad, although it would work as well on any PC.

The funny thing is, what he's looking for pretty much exists already in Prezi. Now, Prezi doesn't exactly match what he describes, as he's still thinking in terms of slides and Prezi has gone to a slideless presentation design. Well, they claim it's slideless, although, you could possibly call it a one huge slide with everything on it presentation design, but it's nonlinear, nonetheless.

Maybe Seth has seen Prezi. Maybe he hasn't. With any other person that throws out an idea like this, I'd just make a comment on the blog post and point them to this existing product that closely matches what is being called for. Seth could then comment back that he's seen it, but it doesn't work for him. Or he might exclaim that he's going to go buy a bunch of stock in Prezi. Instead, he locks himself off from feedback, in spite of his persistent call to listen to one's customers.

To take it a step further, in his call to develop this killer app that he wants to buy, he set up a wiki for people to go collaborate and work out the design for the app. That's cool, until you see that he set up the wiki, and right at the top explains that he just set it up for everyone else to use to collaborate on, but he's not going to come back and check on the process or participate at all. He just wants to buy it when it hits the iTunes store.

Welcome to 1995, Seth.

Wireless Electricity

How soon will this be available for my Wii remotes?

Big Issues

After last year's successful legislative session, Utah lawmakers are ready to debate another set of very important issues. Bills to watch include:

banning endangered wolves from entering the state
getting rid of 12th grade

I'm all for tossing around interesting ideas, but these ideas should have been presented in some unknown committee or sitting around the dinner table at home and then never made public to anyone, let alone actually debating them on the hill while the per diem clock is ticking.

The budget is always a big deal. Hopefully they keep the reduced tax on groceries steady and make cuts elsewhere. I bought some ice cream last week for $2.06. Imagine the mobs who would form to protest if that same ice cream suddenly cost $2.13. Sure it was full of both fudge ribbons and E.L. Fudge cookies, but come on, we're talking over 3% here.

english bad

How did the arguably greatest country in the world end up with one of the arguably worst languages in the world? And how did that terrible language end up as the de facto language of international business?

Why does English have so many silent letters? Why are there so many ways to pronounce every letter? The rules in Spanish are more complicated than some languages, but definitely more intelligible than English. You can always tell how to say a word based on how it is spelled. The imperfection with Spanish comes into play where there are multiple ways of spelling a word based on how it is pronounced.

Even if we could get pronunciation down, English is still missing more advanced features of other languages. What happened to the second person (as if that were advanced)? Why are we stuck with forming new words like y'all to reduce the confusion of having no difference between singular and plural you (as if that were advanced)?

If you really want advanced, take a look at Guaraní, the native language of Paraguay, which enjoys co-official language status along with Spanish. It is enjoying a resurgence and is actually taught in schools again after the efforts of some to hide their native tongue. Even this little-known language has something most languages don't: clusivity. A language like Guaraní with clusivity gives the speaker an 'inclusive we' and an 'exclusive we' so the listener knows whether or not he or she is included.

Jim: We're going to the store.
Tom: Great, I'll get my coat.
Jim: No, I mean Amber and I are going to the store. You're not invited, Tom.

Awkward, I know. Not in Guaraní. If Jim had said ñandé instead of we, Tom would know he was invited to go with Jim and Amber. In the above case, however, Jim would have used oré to signal to Tom up front that 'Amber and I' are going to the store.

Perhaps the language reform question will become moot as texting and Twitter have their way with us, but in the mean time, there ought to be something we can do to fix our language. I'm not suggesting we go as far as the nooalf guy, but the first reform I have adopted has to do with quotation marks. If a sentence ends with a word or words in quotation marks, I put the final punctuation outside the quotation marks. I just like it better that way, even though it's "wrong". It's at least a place for ñandé to start.

Be Weird

HP's recent problem with facial recognition software failing to recognize the face of a black man underscores the importance of good quality assurance (QA) testing. Regardless of whether it was just an issue of too much backlight or something else with the algorithm, there is a problem here that should have been caught.

Recognition of different races is something that should have been pretty obvious to test. Recognition in poor lighting situations is another obvious one. HP likely did test both of these items.

It is just as important for QA teams to test things that aren't quite so obvious, such as the combination of race and poor lighting. What if you throw glasses, a hat, and headphones into the mix? What about glittery makeup? Facial hair? Vibration from using a laptop with the camera while riding as a passenger in a car or bus?

How far do you take it? Where are the reasonable limits?

For a good QA team, that's a trick question. There are no limits.

I remember finding some pretty obscure stuff when I did QA testing on videoconferencing units for Sorenson Technologies. The main product I worked on was sold as the D-Link i2eye. We stuck them in the refrigerator and under hot pads to test extreme temperatures. We'd leave a call going for 48 hours straight. We affectionately referred to one bug I found as the Kevin Bacon bug, referring to his movie Hollow Man, wherein his character turned invisible. I figured out how to send video from a third party unit to a unit that was in a call with someone else. The unit received video from both sources and mixed them together, so you'd get something that looked kind of like a semi-transparent shape moving around on the background of the other video.

What did they do about the bug I found? Nothing. They determined it was not likely enough to actually happen to warrant setting up the unit to filter where it received video from. It didn't matter to me. My job wasn't to determine what the programmers were to work on. It was to do weird stuff and report the results. Now that I manage programmers and QA testers, it is my job to prioritize what gets worked on and to remind the QA testers to stay weird.

Tax Deductible

As much as I like Seth Godin, he's recently given people some bad tax advice or at least inferred it. He's offering 3,000 free review copies of his upcoming book Linchpin to people who donate at least $30 to Acumen, an organization dedicated to eliminating poverty.

They're well on their way to meeting their goal of raising $100,000, which is great.

The problem is his unclear statement that you get a tax deduction for the donation. Tax laws state that if you make a donation in exchange for a gift, the portion of that gift that coincides with the value of the gift is not deductible. If the gift is a surprise to the donor, the full amount is deductible. In this case, the donations are specifically being made in order to obtain a copy of the book. That means you're buying the book.

I suppose a portion of the $30 would likely be deductible but not all of it. The book is currently listed on Amazon for $17, so you would probably get a tax deduction of $13. At the same time, the $30 minimum must be met in order to qualify for the 'free' book, which may in fact mean the entire thing is not deductible even though it's more than the value of the book. But don't take my word for it. Or Seth's. Talk to your accountant. Pony up for charity and get yourself a copy of the book either way, but be careful about actually claiming it on your taxes.

Match

Seth Godin recently talked about people who begrudgingly agree to work together or perform a business transaction, spending an inordinate amount of time explaining how it's a special case that isn't going to happen again.

I have to agree with his point that it makes no sense to go half in.

Just recently I had my racquet restrung, since I've been playing quite a bit in the mornings before work. I went to a local retailer, who is often more expensive than chains, but whom I generally trust. I had been looking at their website and found some string for a good price. When I got to the store, they did not have the same string as what was listed on their website. The string in the store was all $20, whereas the online string was $7. I asked if they had the less expensive string I'd seen on their website. The guy helping me said they didn't, but that they price match anyone, as long as it is the same item.

I paid $20 for the string and left my racquet to be restrung. After I got home, I got to thinking about the price match policy I had been told about. I looked online and quickly found the same string I had just purchased for $4, plus $5 shipping. I called the store, confirmed they would match the $9 price, drove back to the store, and waited while everyone in the store complained about how the price was too good, how it was probably below their cost, and tried to figure out a way to not give me half my money back. They relented and gave me $11 in store credit, which I told them I'd use to buy a racquetball glove another day, since the store was just about to close.

After several days of calling to see if it was ready, I talked to someone who said they didn't want to string it for me. I would have been fine if they had told me up front the price match didn't apply, since the in-store purchase included the stringing service. In effect, it's really not the same product, which is why I specifically asked about that issue on the phone before I drove back in. Since they did initially agree to string it without charging any extra when I talked to them the first night, I finally convinced them to actually string my racquet.

My issue now is that I don't want to go back there again. I'll go use my store credit, which at their prices won't buy me much. I was planning on buying $100-150 worth of bike parts from them to fix up my bike or perhaps even buy a new bike. Now because of the big deal they made out of $11, I'll probably go somewhere else. They've made me feel guilty like I was trying to get away with something, and I feel like every cashier knows who I am and talks about me as soon as I leave.