The professor who tapped into a doomsday scenario to teach advanced space systems engineering
Paul Sandorff ’39 did not look like a harbinger of doom. A wiry Lockheed Martin employee with short-cropped hair and an affinity for meteoroids, he had been teaching at the Institute for nearly 15 years in February 1967, when he asked his students to prevent the world from being destroyed on June 14, 1968.
The noted inventor and futurist tells Singularity Hub that one of the challenges to language processing is teaching computers to process information in a hierarchical fashion, as mammals do. [Read more]
CNET News
The gTar, an electric guitar that makes it easy for anyone to play music with an embedded iPhone and LEDs, is now open for pre-orders. Incident, the company behind the gTar, has spent three years designing and prototyping the product. They launched on-stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York last year and had a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign that drew in more than 1,000 orders and $ 350,000. They released this video today, giving a behind-the-scenes look at the manufacturing process, which happens in Shenzhen, naturally. It’s a mini-documentary that shows the end-to-end process for making the gTar, which retails for $ 399. The gTar is a digital guitar that has interactive LEDs along the fretboard that can show you how to play songs. There’s a dock for an iPhone, where you can load in different songs or record your performances. The whole Kickstarter process was a real learning experience for the company. They had only anticipated about a few hundred orders or so. Instead they got demand for about five tons worth of product. It wasn’t difficult to scale up the manufacturing process, given the experience of the factories the company had partnered with. But managing expectations of backers has been a day-by-day learning process. “We got a lot of really, really mainstream backers, not early adopters. And the response they had was that they expected it to be commercial grade — something that you could put on the shelf and buy it ready-to-go,” said co-founder Idan Beck. “But the thing is that Kickstarter projects are still pre-production.” They had to refine the product in a couple of ways. They needed to make the strings more sensitive so that they could be used with standard guitar picks. They also had to make it easier to get firmware upgrades, with cartridges that you can pop in and out (so you don’t have to send the gTar back). They’ve also increased developer access so that more apps can be built specifically for the gTar. It’s still early though with only about a dozen developer packs registered. Incident is opening the online store today, and the company hopes to scale up in a sustainable way. “The key is to grow at a pace that you can control,” Beck said. Here’s the original video that shows how the gTar works:
TechCrunch
cylonlover writes “Maya Cakmak, a researcher from Georgia Tech, spent the summer at Willow Garage creating a user-friendly system that teaches the PR2 robot simple tasks. The kicker is that it doesn’t require any traditional programming skills whatsoever – it works by physically guiding the robot’s arms while giving it verbal commands. After inviting regular people to give it a try, she found that with few instructions they were able to teach the PR2 how to retrieve medicine from a cabinet and fold a t-shirt.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader writes “As a calculus professor for a small undergraduate institution, I normally lecture students who are majoring in the natural (or ‘hard’) sciences, such as mathematics, physics, and computer science. In fact, I have done so for almost thirteen years. However, for the first time this fall semester, we have a shortage of professors on our hands. As a result of this, I have been asked to teach a general education statistics class. Such classes are a major requirement for the large psychology student body we have here. I have never lectured social science students in any mathematics-related classes. My question to the Slashdot community is as follows: What are your experiences with teaching natural science classes to social science students? How is the experience the same or different in comparison to natural science students who may be more adept to the nuances of mathematics and other similar fields?”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
MrKevvy writes “The Tennessee ‘Teaching the Controversy’ bill was passed into law today. ‘A law to allow public school teachers to challenge the scientific consensus on issues like climate change and evolution will soon take effect in Tennessee. State governor Bill Haslam allowed the bill — passed by the state House and Senate — to become law without signing it, saying he did not believe the legislation “changes the scientific standards that are taught in our schools.”‘”
The governor adds: “However, I also don’t believe that it accomplishes anything that isn’t already acceptable in our schools.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
00_NOP writes “Everybody (or almost everybody) in England agrees that computing teaching to kids in high school is broken. In response the government promised a radical overhaul and a new curriculum. But then last week it was discovered the government had scrapped the bit of the education department that would develop any such curriculum. Not to be deterred, John Naughton, the Cambridge University academic who wrote the Short History of the Future, has now published his own ‘radical’ manifesto on how computing should be taught.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Once intended for a young cousin, Sal Khan’s online tutorials now attract millions of people, laying the groundwork for a new approach to education, “60 Minutes” reports.
[Read more]
CNET News
Let me tell you a funny story about technology in the classroom. I was teaching English at a charter school in Boston a few years ago, and my classes were working on “Macbeth.” I’m always looking for new angles of attack, especially with Shakespeare, so I decided to focus on different interpretations and stagings of [...]
SlashGear
An anonymous reader writes “The NY Times explores some of the best ways to teach kids and finds that some of the new tools are encouraging the kids share their work with each other. One teacher first tried to keep the kids quiet and staring at their own monitors but found it was better to let them copy each other. He calls MIT’s Scratch a ‘gateway’ tool. Then the article points out that programming Blender with Python is not as hard to pick up as your grandparent’s programming languages — and kids today are learning them in a few months.” The Wikipedia entry on Scratch is worth reading, too.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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