Learning

A report shows responders didn't adequately train for the situation.

Book signing has begun at @SDASM!

In Slate today, I have a piece about Yitang Zhang’s amazing proof of the bounded gaps conjecture.  Actually, very little of the article is about Zhang himself or his proof; I wanted instead to explain why mathematicians believed that bounded gaps (or twin primes) was true in the first place, via Cramér’s heuristic that primes behave like random numbers. And a lot of twin primes is exactly what number theorists expect to find no matter how big the numbers get—not because we think there’s a deep, miraculous structure hidden in the primes, but precisely because we don’t think so. We expect the primes to be tossed around at random like dirt. If the twin primes conjecture were false, that would be a miracle, requiring that some hitherto unknown force be pushing the primes apart.

Blog: Technology and LearningThe stats of Microsoft's next gaming platform, the Xbox One, are truly impressive. According to Wired, in comparison to today's Xbox the Xbox One will have: 8 times the graphics performance. 5 billion transistors, a ten-fold increase. 8 GB of memory, up from 512 MB. A custom built Blue Ray drive. A 500GB hard drive. Bigger, better, faster. Wow. So why is it that my reaction is mostly meh? Perhaps my lack of enthusiasm for the Xbox One is routed in the fact that sitting in one place for hours and interacting with a gaming device is something that I will never ever do. Even a gaming device that I can talk to and gesture at, and that can control every electronic device in my house, is still a piece of technology that fails to match my life. When I play games it will be when I have a few minutes to spare. It will probably not be at home. It will be when I'm traveling, or in-between places, or have a few minutes to kill. The games I buy will be one's that I will only play a few times, so they better be cheap. To the extent that I play games (and I'll admit that I am not a hardcore, or even a softcore, gamer), I will play on my mobile device. Microsoft may invent the world's greatest device to hook up to a TV and play the world's most realistic games. But unless I ever sit in front of my TV (which I don't), this technology will go un-purchased. Which brings us to higher ed. We are probably a good deal like Microsoft. We've been successful. We are big. We know how to continuously improve what we do. We can improve our courses, upgrade our campuses, re-design our classrooms. Whatever the equivalent is in higher ed to adding more transistors and memory and processors, we can do that. It's worth asking, however, if continuous improvement is really what we need in higher ed? Will continuous improvement address the fundamental issues we face around costs, access, and quality variation? Is higher education following the same path as gaming? Are students moving to ahead of us to new platforms for learning and accreditation? Platforms that are more flexible, lower in cost, and designed around their needs rather than ours? Are we busily building the higher ed equivalent of the Xbox One, where instead we should be fundamentally re-thinking postsecondary? Show on Jobs site:

My co-writer legendary space journalist Leonard David interviewing me at @SDASM before my book signing for …

If you are tied to your cell phone to monitor weather, calendar events and stocks, the Alert Tube could be the next gadget you need. Michael Watson built is around a Raspberry Pi, it monitors the net for events that you choose and alerts you by light patterns, text to speech or sounds. You can see the entire project build details here. “The Alert Tube is an open source information appliance that connects wirelessly to the Internet of Things in the cloud. The user interface is dead simple, it communicates data via customized colored light sequences, sounds and text to speech. The idea for the Alert Tube came from something simple, a clock. You don’t have to turn it on, or boot it up and request information, it simply tells you the time, all the time, without you having to ask. That’s the idea behind the Alert Tube. You tell it what you want and then it continuously displays and/or emits audible information, without you having to ask. Simply walk by and take a glance at it or listen for any important alerts. Set it and forget it!”

A fourth-grade field trip to a Mississippi River park popular with fossil hunters turned deadly Wednesday when gravel saturated by persistent rain gave way, killing one child and injuring two others.

Physicist Marc Millis discusses how close humanity really is to a faster-than-light drive like warp speed on "Star Trek."

A 37-year-old man arrested Wednesday has pleaded not guilty to mailing a threatening communication, after a pair of letters containing the deadly poison ricin were discovered in Washington state last week.

Jurors in the Jodi Arias murder trial said Wednesday they were unable to reach a unanimous verdict on whether she should be sentenced to life in prison or death.