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Send Your Clones to Conferences Far and Wide

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Clone troops B&W

During the weekend of June 21st, two conferences occurred - Blogging While Brown in Harlem, NY and Netroots Nation in San Jose, CA. These are both conferences that cover issues that I am interested in, and I wish I could clone myself and go to both!

 I selected Blogging While Brown, but unfortunately I had to cancel due to a business obligation.  So here I was - two conferences going on and I wasn't able to go to either.  I was pretty pissed. The only solution was to use Twitter to follow the conference and essentially clone myself so that I could be in three places at the same time.

Technology to the rescue!  I used Tweetdeck  to watch both hashtags from the conference (#BWBNYC and #NN13). I also made sure to set up a separate filter for each hashtag and the word "question". This enabled me to watch for questions that people asked (so I could ask follow up questions), as well as find when questions were being thrown out to Twitter community to answer.  

I was able to interact with conference attendees so often that some people actually thought I was at the conference! My little Shareef clones attended the conferences and people actually mistook them for me! Check out the following tweets.

Good luck with cloning yourself and attending conferences from afar!

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3D Printing: Making Prosthetics at Home

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3D printers from companies like Makerbot are helping to bring home the dream of printing our own 3D objects. They currently are out of range for most consumers at about $2000, but this price will come down in a matter of time.  Unfortunately, this amazing technology only makes the news when it is used negatively, like printing guns to make political points. 

NPR has a positive story about using 3D printing technology to help children born without hands.  The video below shows a cute example of the final result.

 

Richard Van As, a carpenter who mangled his hand in a work accident, and Ivan Owen, a creator of bendable puppet hands, put their minds together to create a crude version of a mechanical hand prosthetic. After that, the article states:

He emailed MakerBot, a firm that makes 3-D printing equipment, to see if the company would help out. It did, offering both Owen and Van As a free 3-D printer. "Then there was no stopping us," Van As says.
What had previously taken the pair a week's time or more — milling finger pieces, adjusting and tweaking parts — now took 20 minutes to redesign, print and test.

They posted the design and instructions for Robohand on Thingiverse, a website for sharing digital designs. Anyone can download the plans and — with a 3-D printer and about $150 in parts — make a hand.

Thingiverse is a great example of using a social networking site to spread innovative ideas across the world. Props to Makerbot for giving the duo a free $2000 printer to help realize the dream. Such positive uses of technology should be celebrated and given as much news as negative ones. Especially since we're going to all need 3D printers once light sabers become all the rage, as shown in the video below.

 

This post also appears on TWIB.

Digital Convenience vs. Physical Ownership

I've owned this since the 80s. Respect mine.

I've owned this since the 80s. Respect mine.

Most of my enjoyment as a kid came from tangible things - my cassette tapes,  my books, and my video games.  I could smash, lose, sell, trade, and do whatever I wanted with them - I owned them completely after purchase.  The big negative was that they took up a ton of space, and my small house combined with a mother who loved order meant that I couldn't get everything that I wanted. Also, we did not have infinite money. Or a ticket oak.

Nowadays, many of these tangible assets have been mostly replaced by digital.  The convenience of being able to own as much as you want without worry of physical space is balanced out by the loss of total ownership. You often own a license to access your content, which falls under strict rules behind how you can trade or sell your digital assets. Companies are still struggling to find the proper balance between convenience and ownership.

This issue is very hot in the video game space. Microsoft's Xbox One and Sony's PlayStation 4 are new systems coming out later this year that are slowly marching toward digital gaming. Microsoft recently announced a reversal of proposed policies to restrict how games are shared and traded.  Check out the discussion below between me, the ladies of Nerdgasm Noire, and a few other friends on Twitter.

 

Sally Ride Helped Me Space Out

It's been a great week for diversity in space - the 50 year anniversary of Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova becoming the first woman in space, the 30th anniversary of Sally Ride becoming the first American woman in space, and NASA naming a new class of astronauts that included as many women as men for the first time. This is progress!

In particular, Sally Ride holds a special place for me. She flew on the Challenger spacecraft in June 1983, only years before the Challenger incident. Challenger led to many schools and media (shout out to my 3-2-1- Contact magazine subscription) to focus heavily on NASA an the space industry, which served as one of my entry points into becoming a space geek. Ride passed away in July 2012, while I was one of my many NASA trips  that would't have been possible without the outreach of astronauts like her. 

More diverse space in sciences is a boon for everyone. Different experiences and outlooks are always an asset, whether it's in a corporate boardroom or being tethered of a space station. Little boys and girls from different backgrounds need to have heroes that represent the diverse suite of people that comprise the world.

Check out some great videos honoring her legacy below! 

 

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This post also appears on TWIB. 

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Make Smaller Groups? Make More Scientists

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Tutoring Services
I'm a strong proponent of science and math education, and one way that this can be further achieved is by tailoring classes to the needs of students by grouping students by how well they are doing with the material. This has to be balanced with teaching an entire class of students which can vary with abilities, but it can be done. I was happy to read a recent New York Times article by Vivian Yee detailing the history of grouping kids by ability within schools, how it fell out of favor in the 80s, and its current resurgence. Grouping by ability has its issues that have to be handled gracefully, but if we want more scientists, smaller groups are key.

I grew up in the "Gifted and Talented" program in my hometown of Paterson, NJ. Our teachers did the best job that they could in challenging us, but it was implemented poorly: a 35+ student class is likely to vary wildly in terms of ability. The best moments were breaking up into small groups of 4-5 students and working on sessions individually. This is something that I've carried into my larger tutoring sessions.

What happened to many of us in the Gifted and Talented traditional class structure? We got bored. We started to screw around. I saw plenty of good students completely fall off of the wagon. The curiosity and challenge that needs to be instilled in many of our future scientists was squashed when faced with an educational situation that doesn't challenge them. I was lucky enough to have a good support system at home to reinforce lessons, but not all kids do.

Smaller groups and increased focus will take additional resources. This level of effort will take money, time, supplies, training, and additional teachers. But you know what? We need to invest properly in our future, even if it means other things suffer. What other things? I don't know ... like a sports arena?  Check out the clip below from All In With Chris Hayes which discusses "how a city closing schools at least partly due to money is willing to invest $100 million in building a basketball arena for a private university."

Grouping is also something that needs to be done very carefully. Race and class need to be considered so that the groups are not entirely homogeneous. The groups should be very fluid, allowing kids to pass between in a structured manner.  The idea is not to completely separate students of differing ability from one another, but to augment the original lessons with deeper experiences for some groups and basic building for the others. The lesson planning should be structured so that the smaller groups should interact very frequently, since most of the basic content taught should be the same. The objective should always be to move students upward, not to lock them into these groups so that they can't advance no matter what they do (a failure of many of the Gifted and Talented, Honors, and even AP courses that I've seen).  

Is this impossible? Nope. Difficult? Definitely. And it's a long term process. But it's well worth the effort. 

For additional ideas about changing education for the better, check out Sam Seidel's book Hip Hop Genius: Remixing High School Education, along with the accompanying video below.

 

This article also appears at TWIB