Len's News, Notes, and Stuff

Bill Gates says the American Education System is Screwed Up

Check out this speech that Bill Gates made at the TED conference in 2009.  Check it out from the 9:00 minute mark to the end. It’s only 10 minutes of your time, but it’s quite eye-opening.

• Over 30% of kids never finish highschool; over 50% for minority kids.
• Less than 25% of kids from low income will finish a postsecondary degree.
• Teacher quality is the most critical factor, and there’s a huge variation between top-quartile & bottom-quartile teachers.
• Some people are just good at teaching, but the system does not encourage them to stay and does not encourage others to learn and benefit from the good teachers.

Gates talks about what some successful schools are doing differently.  They aren’t the ones that are screwed up.  They’re taking data and using it to improve teaching.  They’re working with teachers to make teaching better.

Want to learn more?  Listen to Gates.  He’s passionate about this, he really is!

Shoot the Frickin’ Mosquitoes with Frickin’ Laser Beams

This is an invention that would make Dr. Evil proud.  I’m pretty damn happy about it, too!  Are you tired of mosquitoes in the summer?  Well, if you were in a subtropical or tropical area where mosquitoes carry deadly diseases, you’d be more than just annoyed by the little buggers.  You’d want them to burn, burn, BURN!

Well, thanks to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, some very smart people have created a system that detects mosquitoes based on the frequency of their wingbeats, and then zaps them out of the sky with lasers.

I’ve always thought of taking a shotgun to shoot flying bugs out of the sky.  Of course, I’ve also thought about taking a shotgun to creepy crawlies, too.

This is a much better solution.  Far less mess, and best of all, they can use it to set up a literal protective wall around an abode.  No mosquitoes getting in.  It’s Star Wars / SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative) technology applied to something cooler than shooting down Soviet warheads!

Enjoy this footage shot at something like 6000 frames per second.

Be sure to check out Intellectual Venture’s other anti-malarial solutions.  The lasers are cool, but there’s more to it than that.  However, the minute Home Depot or Canadian Tire stocks mosquito zapping lasers for use here in Canada, I’m getting some.

Using SMS in an Emergency is No Guarantee of Establishing Successful Communication

Some agencies are advising the public to use text messaging (SMS) in a large-scale emergency. The rationale is that the voice lines will be overloaded, but the little data packets for text messaging will get through. Conceptually this sounds nice. In fact, I used to advise this in the past, too. But based on my understanding of mobile standards and the results of some unplanned tests, I’m not so sure it’s good advice anymore.

You’re likely using CDMA or GSM mobile networks wherever you are in North America. CDMA theoretically has no capacity limits. However, in practice, capacity per cell is limited by the computer power present at each base station. GSM has an upper capacity limit based on the channels available and the time slots available per channel. In other words, whichever network you’re on, there is a real and finite capacity cap.

From what I know, there is no dedicated data channel or dedicated data capacity on either GSM or CDMA. Text message data packets compete with voice calls to get through. True, it’s easier to tap Send to try sending your SMS through than to redial and Send a voice call, but your chances of making a successful connection remains the same each time.

Following a major emergency, everyone who has a cell phone jumps on the network and tries to call family or other loved ones. The network is jammed. Most people are unable to connect their calls. If, at this point, you try to send text messages through, you are still competing with all the other callers out there – and text messagers.

Now, if everyone sent text messages rather than calling, everyone would probably get through. One SMS message imposes a negligble load on the system. Unfortunately, voice is a much richer, faster way to communicate and you can’t blame people for trying to make voice calls after an emergency. So the reality is that the cell networks will be jammed for voice and for data.

I’ve had two unplanned test experiences with this. The first was during the initial hours of the 2003 Blackout in NE North America. The second was in the first few minutes after midnight New Year’s.

Right after the 2003 Blackout hit, the cell networks were, predictably, flooded and overloaded. I worked for a cell carrier at the time, so everyone had a Blackberry already. Some of us had the older Berries running on the Mobitex network, and some of us had the newer Berries that ran on the GSM network. Mobitex was RIM’s proprietary network for Berry data. Guess what happened? Nobody could make any voice calls successfully without trying at least a dozen or more times. Those of us on Mobitex Berries could PIN-to-PIN message one another freely, but those of us on GSM Berries were out of luck.

There is no dedicated data network like Mobitex anymore. All Blackberry data is now carried by the GSM & CDMA networks, and data packets are treated no differently than voice packets.

Right after New Year’s, everyone wants to wish their friends and family a Happy New Year. My friend and I, independently, figured we’d send text message greetings out and outsmart all the people trying to make voice calls out. Unfortunately, we both found our phones saying the same thing: they were unable to send the messages.

When the cell networks are jammed, it doesn’t matter whether you’re trying to connect by voice or data. Capacity is shared, and capacity is limited. You simply cannot rely on text messaging to enable timely, efficient mobile communication following a major emergency. The agencies who advise you to do so either do not know any better, or figure giving you one extra option – no matter how flawed it may be – is better than nothing.

If you find yourself in a pickle after a major emergency and can’t get a cellular voice call through, by all means try text messaging. You do have a higher chance of getting that one message through in a given timeframe and that is simply because you can retry an SMS faster than you can retry making a voice connection – but know that you are not guaranteed to be able to get through just because you’re trying to send data.

Contrary to what some agencies are advising, do not count on being able to establish timely, effective communication using SMS.

Carmen is Don Jose’s #1, but only my #4

Bizet’s Carmen is one of the opera world’s most reknowned and most enjoyed pieces. It is full of familiar arias and melodies. It has love and passion, heartache and murder. It has high and rousing energy at times, and quiet emotional moments at others.

Yet, for all this, Carmen is at most #4 in my books.

The Canadian Opera Company’s production tonight was top notch. The sets, the costumes, the chorus, and the main performers were all very good. i particularly liked the performance the chorus gave, I loved the stage direction and thought the set design and lighting for Act 2 were perfect.

Unfortunately, neither the story nor the characters really hooked me. For all the emphasis that opera necessarily places on the score and the vocals, for all the importance placed on what the ears and eyes take in, if the heart is not moved, then the final effect is less than staggering.

My favorite opera experiences – thus far all with the COC – have been La Traviata, Rigoletto, and The Marriage of Figaro. Ones that I truly failed to appreciate were Die Walkure and Elektra. Carmen is somewhere in the muddled middle – not up where I love it, and not down where I clearly did not enjoy it.

If you know that you are a fan of Carmen, go see the COC’S production. It’s very well done.

If you haven’t seen opera before, you could do a lot worse than Carmen.

Unfortunately, keen though I was to see this classic, and as good as the score was, the story and characters were not enough for me. Carmen was Don Jose’s #1, and she ruined him. Carmen, however, is my #4 and led me to neither ruin nor revelation.

The Digital Civilization is Built on Sand – and It Won’t Take A Catastrophe to Realize That

We are building a digital civilization on sand.  In fact, we don’t need anything as drastic as a worldwide catastrophe to realize this.  On an individual level, simply consider the data you may have in old file formats.  On an organizational level, consider how you might restore data off your backup tapes when you need that data most.  On a societal level, consider how much data you could pull off the Internet without a solid telecom and electrical infrastructure.

Digital content is easily transported, free to replicate, and can be replayed back in a myriad of forms.  Unfortunately, both the media upon which the data is stored and the file formats used are short-lived beasts that will prove to be insanely difficult obstacles to surmount in the future.  “The future” doesn’t even have to be very far away.  5 years or 10 years down the road and you’ll have serious problems.

Anyone over the age of 20 likely remembers magnetic media in the form of floppy disks.  Maybe you remember the not-so-floppy 3.5″ floppies (remember those puppies?  1.44MB on a high-den, 720kb on a double-den).  Maybe you even remember the really-floppy 5.25″ disks (1.2MB on a high-den, 360kb on a double-den, if I remember correctly!).  If you have data stored on those things right now, how much of a hassle would it be to try to get that data out of there?  And how much luck would you have in opening an old Wordperfect document, Harvard Graphics presentation, Quattro Pro spreadsheet, or running some of those classic DOS programs that weren’t built for systems with more than 1024kb of RAM?

Even if you have data stored on media that you can still read, there’s the problem of actually accessing it.  When I was working for a different provincial ministry, I asked our key IT contact about the process involved with restoring critical information back to our file servers if they were ever damaged or lost.  He told me, no problems, we have the data on backup tapes, cycled at varied intervals, all protected off-site, in a vault, or wherever.  Unfortunately, in order to restore the image backups, you had to have a new server that was the exact same configuration as the one that you’ve lost.  That is the big challenge – how do you get the exact same server as the one you lost if the one you lost is 1, 2, or 3 years old?  Technology moves on.  Vendors generally don’t offer systems and configurations that they did 1, 2, or 3 years ago.

His answer was that unless we got the exact same configuration, we would not be able to restore data off our tapes.  Simple as that.  How long would that take?  Anyone’s guess.  If you had the system on-hand, it would take a few hours to restore the data.  But if you didn’t, it could take a week, two weeks, or even a month or more to get the right machine delivered.  That’s unacceptable for critical data that you must have on-hand for business continuity purposes.

How much worse would it be for an archivist or any sort of researcher trying to get the data off that tape 10, 15, 25, 50, or 100 years from now?   They probably would never be able to get the records and information off there.  It would, for all intents and purposes, be absolutely lost to us, even if the physical media itself survived.

The move from physical records to digital records is one of the big challenges and headaches that archivists around the world are wrestling with.  There’s no going back to a world that relies on paper and physical documentation.  But key, critical data and information needs to be stored and protected in physical form.  There simply is no choice in the matter.

There are business continuity reasons for this in the short-term.  There are historical archival reasons for this in the long-term.

Etchings on stone slabs will survive for thousands of years.  Printed material will survive for centuries.  Digital data may only survive for a handful of years.

If everything goes right, digital data is magnificent.  But things will go wrong, somewhere down the road.  You might need to access information stored in a digital file that you can’t open anymore.  Or maybe you don’t even have the hardware to read the media.  Or, perhaps someone millennia later is trying to learn about our age or about something that happens in our age.

The article that I linked to above talks about how our knowledge legacy will really only be what we have on printed media.  Digital content will all be lost in due time.  I agree with that view, and I just wanted to point out that there are also near-term, dollars-and-cents reasons for worrying about putting all your eggs in the digital basket.