Clockwork Bedlam

Steven Pinker on the 'Ghost in the Machine', Soul, Free Will

2009-01-06T23:11:00.001-08:00

Authors@Google: Steven Pinker

2009-01-06T23:08:00.000-08:00

Steven Pinker: A brief history of violence

2009-01-06T23:05:00.000-08:00

Steven Pinker: The stuff of thought

2009-01-06T22:44:00.001-08:00

Tony Robbins: Why we do what we do, and how we can do it better

2009-01-06T22:31:00.000-08:00

Mena Trott: How blogging changed my life

2008-12-05T17:21:00.001-08:00

The Ten Thousand Hour Rule

2008-11-20T19:19:00.000-08:00

Malcolm Gladwell in his new book, Outliers: The Story Of Success, published this month by Allen Lane of London, discusses what cognitive psychologists call the 10,000 hour rule for the development of true expertise. This is a relatively amazing piece of research which has something important to say to us about succeeding at our goals and perhaps at life. Here is Gladwell writing about one of his success stories, Bill Joy.

The University of Michigan opened its new computer centre in 1971, in a low-slung building on Beal Avenue in Ann Arbor. The university's enormous mainframe computers stood in the middle of a vast, white-tiled room, looking, as one faculty member remembers, "like one of the last scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey". Off to the side were dozens of key-punch machines - what passed in those days for computer terminals. Over the years, thousands of students would pass through that white-tiled room - the most famous of whom was a gawky teenager named Bill Joy.

Joy came to the University of Michigan the year the computer centre opened, at the age of 16. He had been voted "most studious student" by his graduating class at North Framingham high school, outside Detroit, which, as he puts it, meant he was a "no-date nerd". He had thought he might end up as a biologist or a mathematician, but late in his freshman year he stumbled across the computing centre - and he was hooked.

From then on, the computer centre was his life. He programmed whenever he could. He got a job with a computer science professor, so he could program over the summer. In 1975, Joy enrolled in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley. There, he buried himself even deeper in the world of computer software. During the oral exams for his PhD, he made up a particularly complicated algorithm on the fly that - as one of his many admirers has written - "so stunned his examiners [that] one of them later compared the experience to 'Jesus confounding his elders' ".

Working in collaboration with a small group of programmers, Joy took on the task of rewriting Unix, a software system developed by AT&T for mainframe computers. Joy's version was so good that it became - and remains - the operating system on which millions of computers around the world run. "If you put your Mac in that funny mode where you can see the code," Joy says, "I see things that I remember typing in 25 years ago." And when you go online, do you know who wrote the software that allows you to access the internet? Bill Joy.

After Berkeley, Joy co-founded the Silicon Valley firm Sun Microsystems. There, he rewrote another computer language, Java, and his legend grew still further. Among Silicon Valley insiders, Joy is spoken of with as much awe as Bill Gates. He is sometimes called the Edison of the internet.
The story of Joy's genius has been told many times, and the lesson is always the same. Here was a world that was the purest of meritocracies. Computer programming didn't operate as an old-boy network, where you got ahead because of money or connections. It was a wide-open field, in which all participants were judged solely by their talent and accomplishments. It was a world where the best men won, and Joy was clearly one of those best men.
His book is filled with such stories, as is an article recently published in the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/nov/15/malcolm-gladwell-outliers-extract.

I encourage you to read the article or buy the book or ask for it for Christmas. What it has to say to you about what it takes to achieve real success is key to your education, I suspect.

Gladwell explains:
Ten thousand hours is, of course, an enormous amount of time. It's all but impossible to reach that number, by the time you're a young adult, all by yourself. You have to have parents who are encouraging and supportive. You can't be poor, because if you have to hold down a part-time job on the side to help make ends meet, there won't be enough time left over in the day. In fact, most people can really only reach that number if they get into some kind of special programme - like a hockey all-star squad - or get some kind of extraordinary opportunity that gives them a chance to put in that kind of work.

So apparently it is not only 10,000 hours of hard work that are required but there are other things as well as Gladwell writes:

But there are very clearly patterns here, and what's striking is how little we seem to want to talk about them. We pretend that success is a matter of individual merit. That is not the whole story. These are stories about people who were given a special opportunity to work really hard and seized it, and who happened to come of age at a time when that extraordinary effort was rewarded by the rest of society. Their success was not of their own making. It was a product of the world in which they grew up. Their success, in other words, wasn't due to some mysterious process known only to themselves. It had a logic, and if we can understand that logic, think of all the tantalising possibilities that opens up.

Success it seems is a pretty demanding goddess. Who knew?

READ THIS BOOK!

Learning 2.0

2008-11-18T18:42:00.000-08:00

Traffic Travis SEO Tool, Wordle, Keyword Research, Archaeologist for Digg, SimpleSpark Web 2.0 Logos in 333 Seconds

2008-11-18T18:26:00.000-08:00

C-SPAN Goes Web 2.0, MySpace vs Facebook, Iterasi Bookmarking, Online Web Check, Corporate Narratives

2008-11-18T18:22:00.000-08:00

WEB 2.0 RESOURCES FOR RESEARCH AND TEACHING

2008-11-18T18:12:00.000-08:00

My Gads in plain english

2008-11-18T18:00:00.001-08:00

Pod Casting in Plain English

2008-11-18T17:56:00.000-08:00

Web Search Strategies in Plain English

2008-11-18T17:32:00.000-08:00

PR Web in Plain English

2008-11-18T17:30:00.001-08:00

Twitter in plain english

2008-11-18T17:22:00.000-08:00

WHAT IS Web 2.0?

2008-11-07T08:48:00.001-08:00

Shift Happens

2008-10-29T09:03:00.000-07:00

Ok are you ready? Pay attention! Shift happens.

and even more shifting happens.

Professor Wesch is at it again. Here's his discussion of Twitter and the World Simulation.

Monty Python skit on Literary language

2008-09-26T21:00:00.000-07:00

Here is a great sketch on the misuse of language.

A lesson here somewhere for writers, probably.

Here's a great skit by Monty Python on vocabulary

2008-09-26T20:20:00.001-07:00

The Medusa Story and Reflection as a Problem Solving Strategy

2008-09-16T16:01:00.000-07:00

Let's review this idea of the Medusa Story and its importance for writers. As you know the story goes that Medusa was a Gorgon whose very look was said to turn men into stone. The young hero Perseus defeated her by polishing the interior of his shield turning it into a mirror. As the Medusa approached within swords length Perseus watched her in the reflection of his mirror/shield and beheaded her. Perseus thereafter used the potent head to as a weapon against his enemies.

Now as I said, when we confront these stories we have to understand that we are dealing with a culture that did not have books, let alone paper or writing for that matter. What they had was gifted men who were trained in the arts of memory and could remember many stories which were told in poetry around the communal fires to entertain the King and his family/friends.

So they embedded life lessons of importance in vivid stories that could be remembered and told and retold across the generations. Now what is the life lesson here?

In my reading, the life lesson lodged in the encounter between Perseus and the Medeusa has to do how we deal with paralysis which arises as the result of confronting a problem. Do we act? How do we act? If we do act, what are the consequences of our actions?

Reflection is the answer according to this story. The young man refuses to be paralysed by the monstrous problem confronting him, he studies the monster, comes up with the strategy to polish the inner surfaces of his shield, positions himself so that the Medusa has to come to him, and when she does he considers the reflection and acts.

Reflection is the secret of progress. It is how our culture has confronted its problems, solved them and moved on. Reflection a process of thinking and the beginning of critical thinking.

Here are the outlines of Critical Thinking.

First: Critical thinking is a set of dispositions, that is to say a habit of mind.

The first disposition is the desire to name the problem and develop the proper technical vocabulary required to understand the problem. This includes coming up with appropriate metaphorical language to frame the problem through analogies.

This may include finding parallel stories in other stories drawn from relevant cultural documents: fairy tales, the Bible, myths, other literature, movies, popular songs.

Second is the disposition to make distinctions between parts of the problem, separating its pieces and parts into useful elements and sequences.

Third is the disposition to be well informed about the problem, to tap into as much information as possible to bring the problem under control.

Fourth is the willingness to seek out experts who are experienced in dealing with such problems and who have the life experience necessary to anticipate the consequences of the actions selected to resolve the problem.

The opposite of critical thinking is magical thinking, the dependence on divine intervention to deliver us from the problem.

There is a really insightful video about why we should study critical thinking by George Carlin. Now remember George Carlin was a social commentator who liked to use profanity in his peformances. Because of this I did not think I could embed it here in a classroom blog. So I have placed it instead in my personal blog: http://bedlamremembered.blogspot.com. If you want to see the Carlin and don't mind the profanity go listen to it.

Here is a wild video which contrasts critical thinking and indoctrination.

Here is a series of university lectures on socratic thinking and critical thinking.

Part 2

Part 3

Let there be books

2008-09-14T18:35:00.000-07:00

It is refreshing to know that in a time of efforts to replace books with everything electronic, that there is a place dedicated to books, more books, and yet more books.

So what is the moral of this story. That there is something profoundly precious about books not readily described by present contexts.