TED

According to Nathan Myhrvold, steaming vegetables is actually worse than boiling, largely because boiling reaches the right temperature more quickly than steaming. This is the kind of wonderful information that TED provides through many different sessions and over four days. So, Joseph Crump told us about Brazilian favellas where women are leading a revolution in the use of digital tools and that the general rate of growth of internet based tools and technologies is far outpacing Western assumptions about the digital divide. The Web has become the major point of inflection with respect to learning and commerce.

We learned about how a 34 story windmill is built and mobile banking is enabling villagers in Africa to take control of their money and health concerns.

David Brooks (of the New York Times) gave a superb presentation on the need to enrich the policy space we share and talked about the role of the unconscious in the political world. Eric Whitacre created a virtual choir on YouTube that was amazing not only because thousands of people participated, but also because they found common ground in a virtual space. Most amazing of all was The Handspring Puppet company from South Africa which brought a life-size horse onto stage.

More to come in my next post.

TED Day One

University Rankings

Malcolm Gladwell has a terrific article in the most recent New Yorker on college ratings in the United States. Gladwell shows quite conclusively that the ratings are largely determined by the individuals and companies that produce them. The categories used turn out to be far more subjective and therefore subject to the whims and prejudices of the rankers than previously thought. Ratings in general have been a destructive means of differentiation between different universities and colleges in Canada. The Maclean’s (one of Canada’s few national magazines) survey which is roughly equivalent to the US News and World Report survey uses categories from the experiences of campus life to quality of teaching that cannot and should not be summarized in a simple question and answer format. Even though both magazines claim that they do a great deal of research, have you ever seen questions and categories that relate more directly to curricula within the humanities? How about a question about whether students have the chance to spend some time being creative outside of the context of demands largely defined by the credit system? The various categories used for the surveys could be described as ‘soft.’ How much money comes in for research? (This will inevitably favor the large universities and always does.) Here is a quote that describes one of the categories:

STUDENTS & CLASSES (20 per cent of final score) Maclean’s collects data on the success of the student body at winning national academic awards (weighted 10 per cent) over the previous five years. The list covers 40 fellowship and prize programs, encompassing more than 18,000 individual awards from 2005 through 2009. The count includes such prestigious awards as the Rhodes scholarships and the Fulbright awards, as well as scholarships from professional associations and the three federal granting agencies. Each university’s total of student awards is divided by its number of full-time students, yielding a count of awards relative to each institution’s size.

When you go through the award winners the large universities always garner the most not only because of their student numbers, but also because they have an infrastructure to support and seek out awards. This would not necessarily be a bad thing were it not for the fact that the “student” category is so important to the overall placing of the school. Or take another category entitled, faculty. Awards and research monies are tallied and even though these are adjusted to FTE (full time students) size, inevitably large universities gather in the most money. The problem as Gladwell so carefully explains, is that comparisons between large and small schools are fraught with problems not the least of which is that it is difficult to measure the impact of an institution on its faculty, students and community without in-depth research in each community. “The first difficulty with rankings is that it can be surprisingly hard to measure the variable you want to rank— even in cases where that variable seems perfectly objective.” (New Yorker of Feb 14 and 21, 2011 p. 70) Without going into too much more detail, weighting of different categories is ultimately a subjective choice.

Ironically, the large institutions all follow and devote themselves to rankings which have become the holy grail upon which an institution’s status stands or falls. This has also led governments and policymakers into centralizing the majority of their funding with institutions that are “the best.” I will let Gladwell have the last word:

There is no right answer to how much weight a ranking system should give to these two competing values (efficacy and selectivity). “It’s a matter of which educational model you value more.” (p. 74)

Hans Rosling: Asia's rise -- how and when

Vilayanur Ramachandran on Mirror Neurons

TED Talk on Learning in India

Never before seen footage of an Amazonian Tribe

TRIUMF (The Art and Science of Particle Physics)

I visited the TRIUMF lab at the University of British Columbia this week. This is one of three labs in the world that has the capacity to move the material world around at high speed to study the characteristics of sub-atomic matter. The other two are in Chicago (FermiLab) and Switzerland (CERN).

TRIUMF outlined three goals in its 2008 Mission Statement:

• Make discoveries that address the most compelling questions in particle physics, nuclear physics, nuclear medicine, and materials science
• Act as Canada's steward for the advancement of particle accelerators and detection technologies
• Transfer knowledge, train highly skilled personnel, and commercialize research for the economic, social, environmental, and health benefit of all Canadians 

So, what was a humanities/art/design person like myself doing at Triumf? Well, Emily Carr has a collaboration with the lab that links science and art in a really interesting and productive way. Students from Emily Carr are working on visualizations of what Triumf does, which is gaze into those parts of the material world that the naked eye will never be able to see. Of course, the debate between the sciences and the arts has been going on for a long time. Suffice to say, that the differences are there, but the similarities, that is the desire to engage in creative thinking and output are shared.

It was artists and scientists working in close proximity who developed a deeper understanding of perspective which led among other things to a fundamental shift in painting but also to a profound change in a variety of technologies. 

Artists and scientists have always been early adopters and developers of new technologies. The interactions are too numerous to mention. This quote summarizes the potential and the beauty of art and science meeting on a common ground.

"The materials in art pieces are universal. The sinuous molecules that bind pigments in oil paint are like those that beaded up in Earth’s primeval oceans to form the first cell. Glass is a translucent form of sand and is representative of the mineral content of the Earth’s mantle and Earth-like planets elsewhere. Metal is a relic of supernovae, the fiery stellar cataclysms that also enable biology by forging and ejecting life’s elements. Wood panels and paper are among the means by which formerly living things are brought into our service, making art an indirect homage to carbon and biology." The Living Cosmos: A Fabric That Binds Art and Science by Chris Impey and Heather Green (Leonardo, Volume 43, Number 5, October 2010, pp. 435-441)