The Unreasonable Man

Astronomers detect '10th planet'

Astronomers in the United States have announced the discovery of the 10th planet to orbit our Sun.

The largest object found in our Solar System since Neptune was discovered in 1846, it was first seen in 2003 but has only now been confirmed as a planet.

Designated 2003 UB313, it is about 3,000km across, a world of rock and ice and somewhat larger than Pluto. Scientists say it is three times as far away as Pluto, in an orbit at an angle to the orbits of the other planets. Astronomers think that at some point in its history, Neptune likely flung it into its highly-inclined 44-degree orbit.

It is currently 97 Earth-Sun distances away - more than twice Pluto's average distance from the Sun.

Its discoverers are Michael Brown of Caltech, Chad Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii, and David Rabinowitz of Yale University.

David Rabinowitz told the BBC News website: "It has been a remarkable day and a remarkable year. 2003 UB313 is probably larger than Pluto. It is fainter than Pluto, but three times farther away. Brought to the same distance from the Sun as Pluto, it would be brighter. So today, the world knows that Pluto is not unique. There are other Plutos, just farther out in the Solar System where they are a little harder to find."

Link: BBC Science.

Mind the Gap?

Mike Baker from the BBC assesses a policy speech Ruth Kelly (the UK's youthful Secretary of State for Education) gave to the Institute for Public Policy Research

This event asked whether the government should worry about socially mobility in the UK. Although headway has been made on tackling unemployment, child and pensioner poverty, there is concern that social mobility in the early 21st century has fallen back to the levels of the 1960s.

There has been a raft of measures designed specifically to raise standards in the most deprived schools and neighbourhoods, from Education Action Zones to city academies.

It has not been cheap. Yet according to Ruth Kelly, while it has raised absolute standards, it has not closed the [education] gap. In primary schools, pupils from poorer homes are not improving as quickly as those from wealthier families.

The government tried to seek some consolation in figures which suggested that the gap was being closed at school level, with primary schools in more deprived areas improving slightly faster than others. Yet this was the least convincing evidence in the government's report.

The statistics did suggest that the more deprived schools were improving faster in terms of getting more children to Level 4 in the English tests at age 11. Yet at Level 5 that picture was reversed.

A more accurate picture is gained from children's average point scores. Again, though, the evidence is not as conclusive as Ruth Kelly suggested. In fact, it amounts to the less affluent schools improving their pupils' performance by the equivalent of about one-tenth of one term's worth of educational progress.

In other words, they have caught up by about five days' worth of teaching. So much for the marked improvement of schools serving deprived populations.

[...]

Ruth Kelly's problem is different: it is how to raise the early educational disadvantages of those born into poverty.

Grammar schools at age 11 would not help most of them because, as the government's figures show, the absolute gap between poor children and the rest is already large by the end of primary schools.

[...]

Ruth Kelly has already indicated that she intends to focus on giving the poorest children more help early in their life. Starting with the youngest children is surely the right strategy. Her background in the Treasury with Gordon Brown suggests tackling poverty is a key aim. Her repositioning of policy direction may also prefigure a Brown premiership from, say, 2007.

[...]

But to achieve her own target, Ruth Kelly will have to put even more disproportionate resources into disadvantaged areas, target more and better teaching at pupils from poorer homes, and skew the choice of the best schools in favour of families who are least able to gain that competitive edge for themselves.

The middle classes may not like it if they think their own children are being disadvantaged.

Link: BBC Education

Link: pdf file - Ruth Kelly's speech from the IPPR

How our human interface may evolve...

Eyetap: The EyeTap Personal Imaging Lab (ePI Lab) is a computer vision and intelligent image processing research lab focused on the area of personal imaging, mediated reality and wearable computers. Originally founded in 1998, it was formerly known as the Humanistic Intelligence Laboratory (HI Lab) at the University of Toronto by Professor Steve Mann. Its mandate from the beginning has been to research wearable computing and cybernetic concepts and to channel developments into practical, market-driven products and processes.

Steve Mann has also written Cyborg: Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Computer

Many of these ideas tie in with the MyLifeBits Project - Microsoft BARC Media Presence Group which is a lifetime store of everything. It is the fulfillment of Vannevar Bush's 1945 Memex vision including full-text search, text & audio annotations, and hyperlinks. There are two parts to MyLifeBits: an experiment in lifetime storage, and a software research effort.

The experiment: Gordon Bell has captured a lifetime's worth of articles, books, cards, CDs, letters, memos, papers, photos, pictures, presentations, home movies, videotaped lectures, and voice recordings and stored them digitally. He is now paperless, and is beginning to capture phone calls, IM transcripts, television, and radio.

The software research: Jim Gemmell and Roger Lueder have developed the MyLifeBits software, which leverages SQL server to support: hyperlinks, annotations, reports, saved queries, pivoting, clustering, and fast search. MyLifeBits is designed to make annotation easy, including  gang annotation on right click, voice annotation, and web browser integration. It includes tools to record web pages, IM transcripts, radio and television. The MyLifeBits screensaver supports annotation and rating. We are beginning to explore features such as document similarity ranking and faceted classification. We have collaborated with the WWMX team to get a mapped UI, and with the SenseCam team to digest and display SenseCam output.

Hackers & Painters

Hackers and Painters: Essays on the Art of Programming
Paul Graham

One of the most thought provoking books I've read in a long time.To quote from the jacket: "Examines the world of hackers and the motivations of the people who occupy it."

Malice vs Stupidity

I found this on Status-Q way back from November 26th, 2001

Hanlon’s Razor:

Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity.

Japanese develop 'female' android

Japanese scientists have unveiled the most human-looking robot yet devised - a "female" android called Repliee Q1.

She has flexible silicone for skin rather than hard plastic, and a number of sensors and motors to allow her to turn and react in a human-like manner. She can flutter her eyelids and move her hands like a human. She even appears to breathe.

Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro of Osaka University says one day robots could fool us into believing they are human.

Repliee Q1 is not like any robot you will have seen before, at least outside of science-fiction movies.

She is designed to look human and although she can only sit at present, she has 31 actuators in her upper body, powered by a nearby air compressor, programmed to allow her to move like a human.

Link: BBC Technology.

Teens OnLine Presence

American teenagers are embracing the internet, with 21 million now using the web on a regular basis. Half of these say they go online every day, according to the Pew study.

What Teens do OnLine:

• Send or read e-mail: 89%
  
• Visit websites about TV, music or sport stars: 84%
  
• Play online games: 81%
  
• Online news: 76%
  
• Send or receive instant messages: 75%

The amount of time American teenagers are spending online and the range of things they are doing have both increased. Just over 50% of those online use a broadband connection, 81% play games online, 76% get news online and 43% make purchases.

"Increasing numbers of teenagers live in a world of nearly ubiquitous computing and communication technologies that they can access at will," said report co-author Amanda Lenhart. Their fondness with being online even extends to when they are physically away from the computer.

"Instant Messaging 'away' messages, in effect, maintain a presence in this virtual IM space," said co-author Mary Madden.

Link: BBC Technology.

A moment of quiet reflection?

Segregation of Faiths seems to be a BAD idea, so we need to think about the underlying truths of this story.

Pupils at faith schools are about one year ahead of those at general state schools, a study suggests.

Analysis of national tests scores of pupils in one London borough back up the findings of other recent studies. Academics from the London-based National Institute of Economic and Social Research studied results for 11-year-olds in Barking and Dagenham.

They said possible reasons for the differences included pupils' family backgrounds and smaller year groups. Pupils who were of the lowest ability gained the greatest relative advantage, they said.

[...]

Researchers concluded that children in religious schools were about one year ahead of those in general schools, on average.

The advantage was greater for children in the lowest-performing band, they said. The bottom 25% of pupils at church schools were about a year and a half ahead of those in bottom 25% of the general schools.

Study author Professor Sig Prais wrote: "It could be that the home backgrounds are more educationally and emotionally supportive - for example, having a greater general concern with the ideals of education."

He also suggested there could be a cumulative "infectious" effect from "a few disturbed or disturbing children", and said the generally smaller yearly intakes of church schools might foster a calmer atmosphere.

Other possible causes of the difference could include church schools being more academically selective, for example by suggesting to parents of children showing signs of disability that their child might be better catered for by a bigger local authority school.

----

For the study, researchers looked at the maths national test results of 11-year-olds in Barking and Dagenham for 2003.

Link: BBC Education.

Supernova '05: Find, Use, Share, Expand

Tom Coates (of Plasticbag.org fame) reports on the talk Jeff Weiner (Yahoo!) gave at Supernova '05.

There is something specially gratifying about being presented with a talk that you didn't expect and which actually makes you think in different directions. For me, the first talk that really did that at Supernova was by Jeff Weiner from Yahoo!

He presented an exercise in sizing the amount of knowledge in the world. He didn't take it too seriously - it was just an attempt to articulate some scale. But it goes a bit like this. If you imagine a typical person and all the things they know about, they probably know a little something about an enormous range of things. There's a lot of information stuck in their heads, one way or another, whether that be about the best places to eat or the best ways to clean a sink or the best bands of the 1990s or particle physics. If you include all the stuff they know about their family and their neighbourhood and their job then you could probably get someone to write a few sides of A4 paper about a few thousand topics. He postulated maybe 10 pages per subject on average with about 5000 subjects per person.

Now, ignoring overlap for the sake of convenience (and probably because we don't really seem to generally worry about duplication online anyway), if you multiplied those 50,000 pages by the seven billion people in the world, you'd end up with hundreds of trillians of potential documents full of information. And how many do current search engines think are on the internet? Only eight billion. As a proportion of the total knowledge that we might be able to capture out of people's heads, that's a trivial number. Significantly less than one percent. This, says Jeff, is no larger than a rounding error...

This is where it got interesting for me - if there's all that information in the world, then it's the responsibility of an organisation like Yahoo! to get that information to the people who might want or need it. And to do that, they need to get people to actively participate. And here's where he puts up the 'vision statement' and it's even nicer than Google's. It goes like this:

Enable people to find, use, share and expand all human knowledge

That emphasis on the creative aspect of knowledge - the fact that people make it and that an organisation could be there to help them and to make it easier for them to share it and even to employ it - really appealed to me. The only thing that subsequently spoiled it was when he revealed that you could make the acronym F.U.S.E. out of all the core parts of the enterprise. That was a lurch too far for me...

Link: plasticbag.org

Break the mould, then reset it

The independent sector needs resources and passion to expand, argues Alistair Cooke in the Daily Telegraph.

Commenting recently on the latest count of pupils at independent schools, Jonathan Shephard, my successor as general secretary of the Independent Schools Council (ISC), declared proudly: "We have maintained our market share".

Actually, total numbers have gone down for the first time since the economic recession of the early 1990s, but so too has the school population as a whole. This means that seven per cent of children are in independent schools, a proportion that has remained unchanged for about as long as anyone can remember.

But people are crying out for more places. Opinion polls consistently show that around half of all parents would take them up if they existed and were affordable. The ISC should be working for expansion, not priding itself on standing still. Over 80 per cent of its member schools are charities with long experience of using the favourable financial arrangements available to them. They need to be infused with a reinvigorated sense of charitable purpose which would make them want to extend the benefits of an independent education to as many children as possible.

Read on here: Telegraph Education