Proposal for a Technology Capacity in the Trinity Curriculum

This is a follow on to my previous blog post about the curricular proposal that recently came out at Trinity. On Friday 9-7-2012 there was a meeting of the faculty to discuss the proposal. It came out fairly quickly that the committee who designed the proposal acknowledged the not addressing technology was a hole in the current proposal and that it needed to be addressed. They also mentioned an addendum for a "Capacity" in technology that had been given to them shortly after the first time they had presented the proposal to another group of faculty (the University Curriculum Counsel), but they hadn't had sufficient time to integrate it, or even decide if they liked it. In this blog post I want to lay out my idea for how technology should be incorporated, which I believe mirrors the existing addendum closely. I will provide my reasoning, more details than are in that addendum, and also consider the feasibility based on faculty resources.

Why?
I want to start off with a quick recap of why I think that including proper technological proficiency in Trinity graduates is essential today and will grow in importance moving forward.

• The world is run by computers and technology. Digital processors running software control your financial transactions, your utilities, your car, and pretty much everything else you use on a daily basis.
• This is an area where primary and secondary schooling utterly fails. For example, students in Texas are required to take 4 years of English, Math, Science, and Social Studies. For foreign language it is a 2-year requirement and the higher level graduation plan needs three years. One can debate how effective their efforts are, but there is some foundation in all of these areas. On the other hand, Texas students are required to take NOTHING related to understanding and utilizing technology. (In fact, the way it is included in the curriculum discourages the types of students who would attend Trinity from taking it.) In a way, this makes technology education at the college level something of a remedial subject. However, it is clearly important to the future world and we have to make sure our students aren't completely ignorant at graduation.
• Computers are tools that can solve certain problems that humans are very poor at. This isn't really about technology. This is about problem solving, and having enough knowledge to be able to identify, and hopefully use, the proper tool for solving various problems. With the growth in data sets, especially publicly available data sets, finding correct answer to more and more problems is becoming something that computers are really good at it and humans aren't.

What?
So what should our technology requirement be asking student to do? You can probably tell from what I wrote above that my real goal is to get students to the level of proficiency that they can use a computer to solve problems in fields that are relevant to them which are not easily solved by humans by hand. Most of these problems involve either numerics or data processing of a scale that simply puts them outside the reach of unaided humans, but they are things that a computer can finish almost instantaneously if given the right instructions.

I think that by aiming for this objective, these courses will implicitly give students another thing that I feel is absolutely essential, a sufficient comfort level in working with technology. Comfort in working with technology is essential for so many aspects of modern life, and as computing power becomes more ubiquitous, that is only going to grow. However, I don't think this is what courses should focus on. This should instead be something that falls out of the mix when we force students to use technology to solve other problems.

For me, the ideal way to do this involves programming. It doesn't have to be serious programming, but it needs to involve putting together logic using the basic logic structures that have been part of the programmers toolkit for decades. I would argue that learning how to program changes the way a person views every problem they encounter in a way that is far more fundamental than learning a foreign language. When you program, you have to really break a problem down and figure out how to express that problem in terms that a computer can understand. So programming is, in many ways, a translation problem. You translate from normal human terms to the more formal terms and syntax of a programming language.

While I think that the programming part is critical, the way in which it is done is far less important to me and should be selected to agree with the problem area. At the faculty meeting to discuss this, someone made a negative comment about courses teaching Excel. If all a course taught was basic Excel, I would agree. However, there is a lot to Excel that goes beyond the basics. Since the goal is to focus on using technology to solve problems, and the problems should be of sufficient complexity that basic Excel won't do it, I would be perfectly happy with a course that uses Excel and has students write VB Script to implement more complex logic. Indeed, if the data sets that are associated with that course/topic tend to be tables of data, they probably come in either Excel or CSV format anyway, and then Excel isn't just a suitable choice, it probably becomes the ideal choice. (Other spreadsheets would work too. For example, the spreadsheet in Google Docs also has a scripting environment.)

The reality is that tools, whether they be Excel or something else, change over time. That is part of the nature of technology. That is also why courses should not focus just on tools. If a student takes a course in his/her first year and that course focuses only on tool usage, it is possible that tool won't even be available or supported by graduation. However, whatever other tools will inevitably be used to solve those problems will inevitably use the basic knowledge of programming/scripting. So this skill/knowledge translates well across pretty much all tools because the nature of programming has shared elements across all languages. In a sense, there are certain constructs that are used to describe algorithms, just as things like past and present tense exist across all natural languages. By focusing on problem solving and forcing students into more challenging problems that require going beyond basic tool usage, we get to the logic elements that persist across time even as tools and technology change under them.

How?
So how do we make this happen in the curriculum? For me, the main point is that the majority of students do this in a course in a department other than Computer Science. The key is that the computation should have purpose and context. There should be problems associated with a particular subject or line of study. When students take a course in CSCI at Trinity, we can throw some problems at then and give it some context, but everyone in the room has different interests and in the Computer Science department, we are often interested in the nature of computation itself more than the problems it can be used to solve. (This is much like the difference between pure and applied mathematics. Almost no one outside of mathematics cares about pure math until some application is found for it to help them solve a problem.)

So these would be courses taught in other departments and to get approval for satisfying this capacity, they would have to demonstrate how solving problems through technology fits into the syllabus. Some of these certainly exist. Certainly CSCI courses would qualify, but I think there are probably quite a few others around campus in departments like Communications and Urban Studies as well as some upper level STEM which also do this without modification. More will be needed though. I think many of these courses could be easily created from existing courses that have been enhanced with assignments/projects that wouldn't have been possible without the technology addition. For existing courses that already use technology for problem solving, they could work with their current hour allotments. For courses that need this added on, I would not want to see the computing elements cut into their normal content. Instead, I would rather see an extra hour added for that purpose. That extra hour would include the time where students learn how to use the technology for problem solving as well as where they will find whatever information (such as data sets) to use in the process. So a lot of the courses that satisfy this would go up to being 4-hour courses under the current system. It might also be possible to have the technology be an add-on lab that only some students would take. That might not work well in many cases, but allowing it as an option would be very helpful for those situations where it does work.

The situation where additional problems are added to a class that involves using technology to solve them is where resources really come into play with this proposal. If Trinity can't actually enact and sustain a proposal, then it doesn't matter whether or not it is any good. Clearly, the courses that already satisfy the requirement require no new resources. However, that will likely be a small fraction of the total. Most of the seats for this requirement would need to come from courses that are augmented with computation and the faculty teaching those might well need some assistance to do that.

How many seats are needed? I personally think that students would benefit most from having to take 2-3 courses that fulfill this requirement. The hope is that students would see slightly different approaches. That helps them to abstract the ideas and see how to apply them more broadly. For every course that is required, we need ~650 seats/year. Courses are typically 20-30 students so it is reasonable to say that we need about 30 sections of these courses each year for every course that is required. That means anywhere from 15-45 courses/semester to have 1-3 of these in the graduation requirements.

Is this doable? I think so and I will go into detail below. First though, I can already see some people objecting that there is no reason there should be 3 computing/technology courses required. However, I would remind anyone making that objection that these aren't computing/technology courses. These are courses in subjects from around the campus which include a significant assignment or project which highlights using technology to solve a problem in that field. There are over 20 departments on campus so even requiring three of these courses for graduation only implies that each department offer ~2 such courses per semester.

(If my department chair sees this blog he should probably stop reading at this point.)

Where things get harder when it comes to resources is the fact that not all faculty will feel comfortable putting this type of content into their class. Even faculty who might be able to find great data sets online, and who want to have their students process/mine those data sets for interesting information might not feel comfortable with the responsibility of giving the students the capability to do that type of technology based problem solving. I don't think they should have to do it alone. I can't volunteer CLT to help with this because they have other tasks. However, the CS department and the instructors housed in it who currently teach IT skills could likely provide some support for this.

Currently the CS department teaches ~3 sections of CSCI 1311 each semester and the IT Skills instructors in the department teach ~7 sections of 1300. That is 30 contact hours per semester currently devoted to the CC. Some of those sections would probably be kept untouched, but in a very real sense that is enough human time to assist with one hour of credit for up to 30 courses each semester. In addition, early efforts to do things like prepare video lectures that cover this material could make it possible to get students up to speed with the skills that they need to solve the problems in question with less direct involvement from faculty in that aspect of the course.

In summary, the reality of the modern world is that computers run everything and students need to have some knowledge about how the software that runs those computers works. They also need to know how to make the computers solve problems for them in situations where the computer can do it better than a human. This should be done in the context of topics the students are studying for other reasons, not just because we are twisting their arms to code. We have the resources to make this happen. It just takes a little will in the part of the faculty. The result will be much stronger students who are more ready to enter the world of 2022.

A Curriculum for 1992

(Update: The faculty met to discuss this on Friday afternoon, 9/7, and the committee said that they did feel this was a hole in the curriculum and they needed more time with the proposal to fix it. I will keep my fingers crossed. My next post will basically elaborate on my proposal and the staffing requirements for it.)

Trinity has been working on revising the curriculum for nearly a year now, and today a formal draft of that curriculum was sent out to the faculty. As you can tell from the subject of this post, I am not impressed. I'm writing this post not only to express my ideas, and inevitably some frustration, but hopefully to motivate alumni to take a little action in regards to this. Keep reading for details.

Computers Are Just a Fad
At least that is the impression I get from the curriculum document. The charge for the revisions was to create a curriculum for the 21st century. However, the only mention of technology in the entire document comes in the FAQ at the end. Here is what they say:

2. If we are trying to educate students for the 21st century, why isn’t technological and information literacy part of the capacities?

Answer for technological literacy: 

Our committee agrees that the ability to use, understand, and criticize technology is of tremendous importance. Technological advances flow into the classroom as they become relevant to educational content and delivery, and we are confident that Trinity faculty bring these technologies (as well as a thoughtful discussion about their strengths and limitations) into their courses.

Answer for information literacy:

Information literacy is a hallmark of a Trinity education through the university’s commitment to the QEP. It was felt that most, if not all, of our classes support and reinforce information literacy.

At least they see this as a weakness of their proposal, and they acknowledge the importance of technology. However, they seem to think that faculty will somehow magically start incorporating this into the classroom and that students are certain to take courses that use the needed technology. The reality is that college faculty, to a large extent, as some of the least technologically savvy people on the planet. What is more, I frequently see students who work to avoid technology in the same way that they avoid math and science. This is a bad decision on their part, and most will realize it later in life. Part of why students pay to go to college is so that other people can give them direction and help them avoid making those bad decisions. In my opinion, as this curriculum currently stands, it fails miserably in this area.

Globalization: The Game Changer of the Last Several Decades
So what does this curriculum do instead? There are changes in it. One of the big ones is a push to address globalization. This includes a "capacity" with courses on "Global Awareness", "Understanding Diversity", and "Foreign Language". This is on top of the standard elements where you have to be able to read, write, and speak as well as a smattering of courses from humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and math. The new part is dealing with being an "engaged citizen", which seems to be largely motivated by a desire to have Trinity students prepared for globalization.

In my opinion, globalization is yesterday's news. I made the subject of this refer to 1992 because honestly, a really forward looking curriculum would have included globalization back then. Now this is just a knee-jerk reaction to a boat that was missed two decades ago. Globalization was perhaps the biggest influence on our economy and the general evolution of the world over the few decades up to 2010. However, it isn't what is going to shape the future. Yes, global exchange of information is going to continue to be important, but production of goods is on the verge of heading back the other way. New approaches to digital manufacturing, including 3-D printing and increase automation, are making it possible to put the production of goods back close to the point of consumption. After all, why should we ship materials to China, have them assembled there, and ship them back if they can be assembled here? For the past few decades the answer was that assembling them here cost too much. However, today even Chinese companies like Foxconn are planning to replace their human workers with robots. Those robots aren't any cheaper to run in China than they are here. However, energy costs for transportation are only going up. So at a certain point (which I expect is <10 years from now) you cross a point where you want to put the robots close to the end consumer and make things as close as possible to where they will go in the end.

In addition, technology is significantly minimizing the need to actually speak a foreign language to have a dialog with someone who doesn't speak your language. Today Google Translate can allow me to have a reasonably fluid conversation with someone who speaks a different language, and the quality of translation and speech understanding is improving by leaps and bounds. If you have seen comparisons between Google Now! and Siri, you can see what one extra year of development means in this space. I fully expect that by 2022 I will be able to speak to someone in almost any language in a manner that is very close to natural without knowing that language. This isn't to say that there aren't cognitive benefits to learning a foreign, natural language. It is just to say that interpersonal communication is going to cease to be one of those benefits.

If Not Globalization, Then What?
So what do I think is the game changer of the coming decades? What should our new curriculum aim for? The paragraphs above should make this fairly clear. Globalization is going to take a back seat to the oncoming surge of digital technologies that will be enabled by machine learning based AIs and automation. It is impossible to predict exactly what will be relevant, but based on what is already out there you can feel pretty confident that in 2022 most students will have cars that drive themselves and many of them will have robots at home that cook and clean. (Sound Sci-Fi? Then you need to follow me on Google+ or at least go search for videos of those things on YouTube because they are feasible today and will be cheap enough to be wide spread in a decade.)

There are other things that are becoming increasingly significant as well. The buzzword of "big data" is everywhere for a reason. In addition, the rollout of IPv6 wasn't much hyped, but there are rumblings of the beginning of the internet of things if you look in the right places to hear them. When your shirt has an IP address and is constantly sending information about your temperature and heart rate into the cloud for analysis, then you will begin to understand what these things are. They are primed to change the way we live in dramatic ways.

What does this mean for the curriculum? My take is that if a graduate of 2022 looks at a computer and seeing a magic black box with pretty pictures on it, that graduate has already lost at life. They are a powerless consumer with no ability to produce in the markets that will define their time. If we let them become that, we have failed the trust that they put in us when they enroll in our school.

My Proposal
So what do we do about this? What do I think the curriculum document should have included? First, let me tell you what it should not have included. It should not require that every student take a CS course specifically aimed at teaching students to program. That would be a nightmare for me on many different levels. In addition, it wouldn't really benefit the students. Some students need to know how to really code. Those students can learn about programming language fundamentals without associated context. For the vast majority of students though, they need to learn how to use computers to solve problems with at least slightly more competence than just using pre-written software.

Increasingly, data is what drives the world. Humans are horrible at manipulating even reasonable amounts of data. Computers are great at it. The graduate of 2022 should have seen the data associated with courses in a number of different departments and they should have had to do something beyond just plugging it into existing software to dig for meaning or answer questions based on that data. They need to have some experience using a computer and associated technologies to solve problems. That is what really matters. They need the skills to turn the computer into a tool that they can use to solve problems that are beyond what they can do alone.

I believe the best way to do this is to require that students take a few courses that require them to do computer based problem solving. The ideal situation would be that courses that normally count for 3 hours in departments all across the University add an extra hour of credit and a computational problem solving component. For example, a course in Political Science could ask students to analyze census data or data from the last presidential election. Have the students answer questions that aren't simple queries in Excel. That way they might learn how to write VB Script and do a little logic to solve the problems. Or maybe the questions you want to answer are well suited to some reasonable SQL queries. Sometimes the right approach might be writing scripts in Python, Perl, and Scala. The details don't matter to me. The details should be chosen to fit the data set and the questions being asked about it. What matters is that students learn how to make technology do what they want it to instead of acting as passive consumers of software that someone else has written.

I've always liked the expression that if your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. All too often, I see people do things the hard way because they don't know there is an easy way. Even worse, I see people who can't even conceive of certain questions because the tools they know don't allow them to answer those questions. If our graduates fall into either of those categories, we have failed them. I don't want to see that happen. A major curricular review is the time to make sure we do things right. Unfortunately, I don't think the current proposal is doing that.

Call to Action
So I want to close with a little call to action for any Trinity alumni out there who are reading this. If having the ability to control technology and make it do what you want to solve problems has benefited you in life, let your old faculty know. Take a minute to tell them how skills like programming have benefited you in your life and what things you wouldn't be able to do without those skills. You might even just pass on a link to this if you don't want to write much yourself. In addition, forward this to other alumni so that they too might help the faculty at Trinity to see that computers are not a fad that is going away and that being able to bend and manipulate technology to your benefit to solve problems really is a valuable skill that everyone needs to have.

Color of clothing to wear during the summer

This post is a bit out of the norm for my blog, but a while back io9 posted and article on why you should wear black during the summer to keep cool. They linked to another article from The Straight Dope. These have been bugging me for a while. You can go out and do the experiment yourself and see if you feel hotter in white or black under the summer sun. I strongly expect the white will win. So why is the "physics" explanation saying otherwise?  My take is that it is because the physics they present has been oversimplified to the point of being wrong. They also look at a scientific study that has no bearing on clothing, unless you happen to wear clothing made of bird feathers.

Their argument misses one extremely critical point, your body does not emit thermal radiation in the same part of the spectrum as the Sun's primary energy emission or the color you see in (and yes, black-body radiation is a perfectly valid term for this despite what The Straight Dope says) . When you describe a shirt as white or black, you are talking about the reflectivity in the visible part of the spectrum. That is only a narrow part of the spectrum, but it happens to be where peak emission is for our Sun. For that reason, the color matters critically when it comes to how much solar energy is deposited in your clothing. A black shirt will absorb a lot more sunlight than a white one. That absorbed sunlight will be thermalized, increasing the temperature of the shirt.

Where their argument goes astray is when they start talking about the radiation from your body that tries to cool it. All object radiate energy away based upon their temperature. The term black-body radiation is often used because if you had a perfectly black object, which absorbed all incoming light, reflecting nothing, this is what you would see. It just happens that stars are pretty darn good black-bodies and their spectra fits the expected shape perfectly except where elements high in their atmosphere have absorption bands.

You, as a human, have a temperature much lower than a star. This means that you radiate a lot less energy and that it is at much longer wavelengths. The peak wavelength for your emission is roughly 10^-5 m. For the Sun it is closer to 5*10^-7 m. You are seeing your shirt and calling it white or black based on the way it interacts with light in that shorter wavelength. However, when it comes to cooling, the radiative component depends on the longer wavelength. To really know what that means, you need to have a far IR spectrometer and look at the absorption spectra of your shirt using that. I haven't actually done this, and if anyone has, please comment and correct me if I make a mistake here, but I have a feeling that light t-shirts are going to be mostly transparent and even if they aren't, their "color" in the far IR will have virtually no correlation to their color in the visible. The end result is that I expect the thermal radiation cooling your body doesn't depend at all upon the color you see your shirt to be. It depends a lot more on thickness, materials, and style of fabric.

As the article says, if there is any wind, then the dominant heat transfer mechanism will be the air moving heat away. That process too is independent of color. Perhaps the wind will take more heat from a black shirt, but only because the black shirt was hotter to start with so it had more thermal energy to give up. The white will still be cooler in the end.

My conclusion, wear white during the summer, and if you really are worried about whether your shirts are making you too hot, send them to a lab for some far IR spectroscopy to see which materials really let your body heat back out.

Certifying Knowledge: A Business Idea

I have written previously about things that I feel need to happen in education reform and how there could be a dramatic change in higher education that some refer to as the "education bubble". There is one big thing that I see being needed to really trigger that disruption. It is something that is clearly doable with current technology, but it hasn't been put into place yet. I feel like someone who wrote this and put it up quickly could make a lot of money. The piece that is missing is certification of knowledge with validation of the person who has the knowledge.

There are lots of sites out there now which measure various capabilities/skills. TopCoder is one of the first that jumps to my mind. They have a number of different competition based metrics to indicate how fluent a programmer is at different tasks. With all the MOOCs that are coming on line and their automatic evaluation, the ranks of these are growing quickly. However, one thing to note about the biggest MOOCs, like Cousera, is that they have a somewhat limited form of recognition of completion. Some of this is because the schools posting courses there need to still have a business model. Probably more of it though is because certifying a person would require that you really know who they are.

Universities go through a fair bit of work to verify a person's identity. At small schools that is implicit in the overhead of having small classrooms. I know all my students by name on sight. If someone else were to show up on a test day I would know something was wrong. Larger schools have other mechanisms to make certain that the person demonstrating knowledge is the same person who is getting the grade and the credit. This doesn't happen online yet, but it can, it needs to, and inevitably it will. It is just a matter of who will build the system. The rest of this blog outlines my idea for how this would be built and how it could go into a useful product.

Monitoring the Tester
The key, in my opinion, is the ubiquitous spread of webcams. Having things like biometric sensors can identify that the person is present, but a webcam and microphone makes it possible to further show that person is the one doing the work which is being evaluated. The webcam can do the same type of job as other biometrics to make certain that the person you want is the one at the computer. Facial recognition, voice recognition, potentially even information on the person's iris if they get close enough or the cam has enough resolution. In fact, the more forms of identity you have, the better it is. The site should mark each test/result with which verification techniques were used.

After the initial verification, the webcam and microphone can be used to monitor the person taking the test. Eye tracking can see where he/she is looking on the screen. Smaller body movements can show that the person seen in the image is actually the one clicking on certain answers at certain times or doing the typing. The microphone can monitor what is being said in the room to make certain that the person is not being told the answers by someone else in the room. One might even consider having 360 degree webcams to monitor the whole room.

The goal here is to have a system that can be run on a large fraction of the devices someone might want to use to do work that demonstrates their knowledge of a topic, and for that system to be roughly as accurate at preventing outside assistance as a human would be. Of course, it needs to be automated so that it can scale well. You can't be paying hundreds of people to watch other people taking their tests through a webcam. That loses the efficiency.

Certification Clearing House
To make this more valuable, you have to put it together with many forms of verification of knowledge. Many things will be done with fairly simple tests, but the ideal would be that you could have a site that not only does the verification, but which can tie in with other sites so that you might be able to do something like verify the identity of a programmer competing for TopCoder without having to rewrite TopCoder.

It would also be nice if employers could submit their own types of tests. So this could go beyond basic academic areas. The goal would be to have a significant database of areas of competency/mastery and the ability to link up employers and potential employees. In an ideal world, you would eventually use the type of oral exam method I described earlier that would use a Watson style area expert to run the tests. In addition, it could be tied in with educations tools to help teachers/learning coaches to see where people are having problems to get them over things. This type of system could literally be used for demonstrating the capabilities of people going from low grade levels up through graduate level study.

Business Model and Added Benefits
If you were to create a company on this model, it might be possible to collect money from both sides. There is clear value to individuals to have a certification of what they know and what level of mastery they have demonstrated in that knowledge. In addition, there is benefit to entities that want to verify that someone knows something.

One of the interesting perks that I see in this type of approach is that employers could actually build a description of skills for various positions. Some could be hard limits. Some might be desired attributes. Still others might be things where you need to have demonstrated a combined ability in several areas with the exact distribution being fairly insignificant. HR in this world gets a lot easier on the hiring end, and probably gets downsized a bit because there isn't nearly as much use for resumes.

In addition, if you want a job, you should be able to see the metrics in some form to see whether you qualify. I see this as a great motivator for kids in school. They could actually see what types of skills are valued for specific types and levels of jobs. They could see where there are going to be ceilings that come into play because they lack depth of a certain type of knowledge.

This goes back the other way too. Employers can do an analysis of real performance of employees to their measured skill sets and refine what types of skills really lead to better performance in a particular job. As long as enough of the information is open, this winds up being a generative system. People will find all types of new uses for the data and new meaning that can be pulled out of it.

Sociology/Psychology of the Superstar Effect

The following thought hit me on the way in to work. What are the full sociological and psychological implications of having a superstar effect across many industries? This is right in line with the full theme of technological unemployment. You get technology enabling a few people to serve the needs of vast segments of the population. The result is that you can have an entire market completely saturated by a few individuals and that doesn't lead to all that many jobs being created. The most visible example of this today is Amazon servicing a huge fraction of the purchases that happen in the US and with the possibility of extending it.

None of that is new thinking. It is stuff I have written about earlier, and which I post about a lot on Google+. The new thought was something that hit me as I was driving past the local high school. How does all of this potentially impact the thinking of youth and from there spread out into society? Perhaps right now the answer is that it doesn't. After all, kids are all often blissfully unaware due to their youth. However, I don't fully believe that, and even more, I really don't expect that to be true in a few years. Teenagers don't see social change, they are social change. They don't realize that ideas they are internalizing might be things that were revolutionary to those before them. They just believe them because they are logical at the time in which their view of the world is being largely formed.

So what psychological impact does it have if you internalize the idea that whatever you decide to do with your life, there will wind up being a few superstars and everyone else is pretty much doomed to failure? Here I mean failure in the sense that you probably can't make much of a living off of it. I know that thought does not sit well with me. I know well enough that while I am good at some things, even great perhaps, I am not world-class. Of course, I am well removed from my teenage years. Anyone who knew me then knows I had a pretty high opinion of my self, and I truly expected to be world-class in some things, like math and physics.

There is also another area where the superstar effect has been in place for decades, yet it doesn't seem to phase too many kids. That is the field of sports. High dollar professional athletes make a lot of money. However, as an example, the NBA only has 360 active players at one time. That's all the big money. D-league players can make a living, but even then we are talking about ~1000 people pulled from around the world with an emphasis on the US. What fraction of kids who play High School sports will go pro? I don't know the exact figure, but needless to say, it is very small. This doesn't prevent kids from playing sports. However, I have a feeling that most are playing for the fun of it, not because they honestly expect that they will become professional athletes. Only the top 1-2 players in a school can convince themselves they will be pros. Who knows, maybe the possibility of being a superstar pushes others to keep working harder.

That's fine for sports, which kids normally do for fun. What about in everything else though? How will a kid approach a math class if he/she feels the odds of "making it" in math were the same as making a professional sports team? You can ask the same question for science or English. Does having that thought in your head drive you to work harder to make sure you are the superstar, or does it eventually defeat you when you realize it simply isn't going to happen?

I am afraid the answer is the latter option. I am also afraid that this idea will eventually sink into the heads of young people as automation of both routine, and not so routine tasks increases. If our social structure is the same then as it is today, I think that will be a significant problem. As soon as they realize that they aren't going to be superstars, they give up because only the superstars survive and everyone else gets stomped down.

Klout and Occupation

Basics of Klout
I've been meaning to write a post on Klout for a while. Jon Perry wrote a very nice blog post at The Decline of Scarcity on the topic after Wired wrote an article about Klout. The basic idea of Klout is that the provide a metric for ones influence in social media. Some people love the idea while others hate it. The Wired article shows that however you might feel about it, some places are definitely starting to use it. I also feel that Jon Perry did a great job of describing why Klout, or something like it, could very well become a significant metric in the future. In a world where material goods are abundant, the attention of people will be one of the few scarce resources. That scarcity will give it value. If an individual can command a fair bit of attention from others, that implicitly will give him/her a certain value.

Of course, we don't live in a world yet where physical goods are abundant. That doesn't mean that commanding attention on social media is without value. Indeed, if you put yourself in the shoes of a marketer, there is tremendous value in knowing who different people listen to on different topics. Instead of pitching to everyone, you can focus on the people who can complete the pitch for you and get others to listen. The companies that are giving Klout perks today are the ones who realize this and who want to see what value they can extract from it.

Your Job Today and your Klout
An idea that I haven't seen discussed in other locations, but which weighs heavily on my mind is how occupation impacts Klout. This idea hit me because of a comment I saw on an earlier discussion of Klout. The commentor said that he was too busy doing things to spend the time posting on social networks that might gain him Klout. This strikes me as a very valid comment. There are certain jobs which will not lend themselves to a high Klout. Indeed, that is probably true for most jobs. People in those jobs can still achieve a high Klout, but they must do it on their own time.

I actually spend a fair bit of time on social media. I also spend a lot of time working to keep up on current technology. In my mind the two are both related to my job and to one another. That vast majority of people I interact with through social media are current or former students. As my job is to help prepare students to enter the world in ~4 years, I feel I need to have some idea of what is coming down the pipeline for that time. Much of my activity on the social media is in the form of sharing thoughts and interesting articles with those current and former students.

In other words, there are aspects of my job description which naturally lead to me having an increased Klout score. I can think of other occupations where that would be even more true. People in PR and marketing could virtually live in social media these days, experimenting with new approaches to reaching out to people. On the other hand, I can see most of my students going into jobs where they will have a low Klout score unless they go out of their way to boost it. Their jobs will focus on producing code, not distributing knowledge on how code is produced.

What do you think? Is this link between occupation and likely Klout score a fundamental problem with Klout or does it mean that Klout really does measure what it is supposed to?

Support the "Dr. Mark C. Lewis Closet of Tears"

First, some background. Trinity is building a new science facility. It is called the "Center for Science and Innovation", CSI. You can watch the construction online. This is a huge upgrade to the campus, and the new building will house Chemistry, Biology, Engineering, Psychology, Neuroscience, Entrepreneurship, and most importantly, Computer Science.

On Thursday, 5/3, I went to a meeting up in the President's office with a bunch of people who were much better dressed than I was. At this meeting faculty representatives from the different departments described how the new building is going to make a huge positive impact on how they work. The really well dressed people need that information so they can try to raise funds for the building.

From Computer Science, the biggest benefit of this move is just that we get pulled into the center of campus, and will be far more visible than in the past. We will also have beautiful rooms and student spaces. Every one of our classrooms has a wall that is either completely or nearly completely glass. One views the main walkway through the building and the other two have a perfect view out over the center of campus. (Note the big glass section at the far left in the figure above.) There are student areas right outside the row of faculty offices as well as further away for those who want to avoid the faculty. One of those overlooks a large studio area that will be primarily used as an Engineering design space, but which can also be cleared out for me to roller skate through or perhaps for other purposes.

After this meeting I had some final review sessions and I talked to students briefly about the meeting. I mentioned that three long-time faculty of the CS department are retiring this year and how it would be wonderful to have those classroom spaces dedicated to them. My wonderful students, being as caring and considerate as they are, had another suggestion. They said that in honor of my efforts over the brief 11 years I have been at Trinity, I should have a closet dedicated to me.

I was so flattered I had to run with the idea. My inspiration came from an anonymous student who wrote the following on a course evaluation last fall: "Oh dear god. Countless hours of my life spent curled up weeping on the floor ..." To honor this student and so many others like him/her, I felt it was only appropriate to write this blog post asking you to donate money to support the "Dr. Mark C. Lewis Closet of Tears". I would like to see this set aside as a private space where students can go when they have reached their wits end, and have given up all hope of stuffing more information into their brains. Or maybe for those student who are tired of banging their heads against walls searching for solutions to problems they think I picked just because they are unsolvable.

Your donation can not only support the construction of this valuable space. It can also help to pay for appropriate padded materials for the walls, floor, and ceiling. We want to make sure that future students can get out their frustrations and anxiety in a safe, supportive place.

So while you are writing out those big checks for the "Dr. Maurice Eggen Teaching Lab", the "Dr. Gerald Pitts Teaching Lab", or the "Dr. John Howland Teaching Lab" to honor their many decades of service to Trinity and their personal impact on your own education, send a note to Rick Roberts in development at rroberts@trinity.edu letting him know you want some fraction of that to go to the "Dr. Mark C. Lewis Closet of Tears". It is only appropriate that you should remember the children. Don't make them weep on the hard concrete hallways. Give them a safe place to bang their heads.

Disclaimer: I sincerely hope that anyone who read this far realized this is largely satirical and is actually a request to support the construction of CSI, and hopefully to acknowledge the contributions of Drs. Howland, Pitts, and Eggen. I honestly don't know how tour guides would explain a plaque that includes the text "Closet of Tears". You really should contact Rick Roberts or others in the Development office about plans that are in place and how you might support them.