Timothy King – Page 25 – Mechanical Sympathy

Think Different

A grade 8 career fair last week had my senior computer
engineering students giving hundreds of grade 8s their
first glimpse of virtual reality.

Being one of the first to set up virtual reality in our area, I’ve had the pleasure of putting hundreds of students in it for the first time.

When they first find themselves in Google’s Tiltbrush, students tend to either scribble in 3d, write in space or, on occasion, try and build something intentionally three dimensional because they’re realize where they’re working. With a steady stream of students trying it for the first time on Thursday, this kept happening until something different occurred.

When you get a student who knows how to draw they tend to sketch quite effectively in the virtual space, though it tends to be based on 2d thinking (like they’re drawing on paper). We had a girl who had never tried VR before but obviously knew how to sketch enter the HTC Vive virtual space, but rather than working in 2d she immediately began sculpting 3d shapes.

Grade 8 Tilt Brush No Watermark by gking53 on Sketchfab

This immediately caught the eye of the gifted grade 12 I had operating the system. He got our attention and we watched her build out complex, identifiable 3d shapes. What made it more amazing was that she was doing this without moving her head. She was drawing in 3d but from a 2d perspective without even seeing what she was doing. Everyone around the VR sets stopped what they were doing to watch something special.

Afterwards her teacher came up to me and said she was ASD and not very verbal. I imagine the school system sees her as an expensive non-standard student but what we saw was a kind of genius. Our gifted VR operator certainly thought she was exceptional, and not in a bad way. Perhaps it requires an exceptional intelligence to recognize another exceptional intelligence.

***

POND Family day. One of the largest sources of data
on neuro-atypical children in the world and based in
Ontario! Our family is part of the DNA research and
our son volunteered to get fMRI’d as well.

On Saturday my family attended the POND Network’s family day at UofT. Having kids can often act as a kind of mirror, showing you more about yourself. Having an autistic son has made me more aware of how neuro-atypical I am (I’ve learned coping mechanisms, but they aren’t my natural state).

Where other people seem to require social interaction in order to be happy, I am very much an introvert. There are few cases where I find people who engage rather than drain me. I tend to go to ground after a week of teaching because I’m all peopled out.

The research presented by the Ontario Brain Institute was very interesting, and frustrating. Google has been doing fantastic open source computing work doing the heavy lifting with sequencing genome data for neuro-atypical brains, but the process is still in its infancy. We need much more data from more people and faster computers to narrow down the genomic complexities of neurological issues like ASD. The current thinking is that ASD isn’t caused by one or even a few genes, but by complex interactions between hundreds of them. Understanding this process will require many people providing data to a massive computing effort.

A moment occurred in the presentations when a parent asked how close they are to being able to give a biological rather than psychological diagnosis for ASD. He asked because students with a physical disability will have the earth moved to be accommodated, but students with psychological disabilities are generally warehoused and ignored, especially if they aren’t problematic. The example he gave was in education, where a school will spend tens of thousands of dollars on ramps and elevators for a student in a wheelchair to be able to access the building and integrate with their peers, but won’t offer a fraction of that to a student with a neurological issue. This got a round of applause from the audience.

The speaker had an even better answer. She said this is awkward because she’s a psychiatrist and the issue isn’t whether or not this is a physical or mental diagnosis but instead an indictment of the government and society in general’s stigmatization of mental illness. It doesn’t end at mental illness though. If you aren’t neurotypical, you aren’t accorded the same rights and access to care. The goal should be to enable all people to reach their potential, the type of diagnosis is irrelevant. This got a big round of applause too.

It also raised some hard questions around how we treat difference of thought. My son has a great deal of trouble organizing and completing linear tasks, but he can make diabolically difficult lateral connections. Having a conversation with him will force you to think laterally in ways you never had before (unless you’re too stupid or lazy to make the effort, in which case he sounds nonsensical). I’m a pretty good lateral thinker, but the connections he makes are astonishing, yet he’s considered substandard because he’s not at the level of his peers in a loud, socially driven classroom. He almost failed French because he wouldn’t speak it in front of the class – the kid with social anxiety and ASD wouldn’t perform like the other kids would. He’s sat in a desk in a row in a crowded, loud classroom with neurotypicals who thrive in this environment, and then he’s told he doesn’t stack up to them. Their accommodation is to give him access to a support room twice a week.
I often think that if the school system doesn’t destroy him, my son is going to grow up to do something exceptional precisely because he doesn’t think like everyone else.

If you look at a movie from the ’80s you’ll find that we’ve come a long way in how we treat gender and sexuality differences. If you watch a film from the 1950s you’ll see that we’ve come a long way in how we treat racial differences, but differences in how we think are still a place of stubborn prejudice.

Last year at a Head’s meeting I suggested that neuro-atypical people should be in teaching. They will cause it to change by offering different approaches that might improve the system as a whole. Our head of guidance thought this was ridiculous. Outliers shouldn’t be teaching or even in education. Education should be about moulding students to society’s expectations. I’ve never felt more disenfranchised by the education system than I did at that moment, and I’ve frequently felt disenfranchised by it both as a student and a teacher. I guess people will always find a systemic reason to identify and diminish another group of people for their own benefit.

When my son was first diagnosed with ASD I was hoping for a cure, now I believe that he isn’t thinking incorrectly, just not the same as most people, and that can offer us all a social advantage. It would be very shortsighted of us to try and stamp out that difference. His ability to make lateral connections of thought might one day allow him to solve a problem in a way that no one else could even conceive. This is assuming the education system doesn’t beat it out of him. Instead of exploring his differences of thought he’s repeatedly forced to perform neurotypical tasks in a substandard way and then rebuked for it. There is no point in his day where he’s allowed to explore his intelligence in the way that a gifted student is because his mode of thought is deemed foreign.

A good place to start would be to take away the distinction between physical and psychological diagnosis and treat all students to the same support. That might mean breaking down the systemic, grade based process of education by introducing purely individually driven learning goals and achievements. My son may not graduate on time because the system he is in seems designed specifically to not work with how he thinks, but he’ll get there eventually, and it would be nice if he wasn’t constantly being told he was a failure when he does. The chances of him going on to develop his unique talents in spite rather than because of his education would be much greater if he doesn’t feel like the rest of society thinks him a loss.

Education, like socio-economic status, is an invented sense of superiority. If you do well at something designed specifically for you, have you really done anything of value? If you struggle to do well in a system specifically designed to work against you, are you a failure? Neurotypicals might not be able to use their customized education to grant themselves social advantage any more, but can you imagine an education system in which every student was able to minimize their weaknesses while maximizing their strengths without some shortsighted idiot judging them? The human race would flourish in the diversity of ideas that would bloom from those graduates. We only have to get past our prejudices to get there.

***
Austim & History – where would we be without these people?
8 Inspiring People with ASD

Putting Students into VR for the first time shows many ommonalities, and exceptionalities…

Educational Maelstroms

Nice to see you’ll support pension cuts,
shame that was never on the table

I find myself in a bit of an educational maelstrom at the moment. Government twitter trolls who like to tell me I must be enjoying my summer off instead get sharp replies about my sitting in a computer lab in Milton taking my 3rd AQ in 7 years of teaching. When I’m done here I’ll have 4 teachables (English, history, visual arts and computer engineering).

I’ve also taught summer school four times. Since I started teaching in 2004, my summers have been busy, and expensive. I know there are teachers who don’t do additional training. I also know that whenever I did training when I worked in the private sector, they paid for it. Getting lumped in with a brand of teacher who expects more for less makes me angry, I’m not that guy.

I also attend Edcamps, self directed professional development. I can’t recall ever seeing my private sector colleagues driving an hour out of their way on a Saturday morning to spend the day learning how to do their jobs better. Then there are the conferences (that take a lot more of my time than just the day or two of school I miss) where I spend a lot of my own time developing educational theory and training for (I hope) the benefit of teachers and students.

I’m immensely proud of Ontario’s education system, and don’t see it as a political pawn to be used in a game that has more to do with financial shell games than anything real. I’m a liberal who can’t vote liberal any more. Worse, I’m a voter who doesn’t know what the point is any more, because political parties in Ontario only stand for re-election, they don’t actually stand for anything else.

I haven’t mentioned the department headship I took on with minimal notice and then was attacked for taking on in a full time capacity; working with teachers can be very tiring. I haven’t mentioned the sixty or so hours I spend each year coaching soccer. I can’t understand why my own government is intent on generating public hatred at my expense for their own ends.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/story/2012/04/30/bank-bailout-ccpa.html

I’m not sure what I did wrong. Looking at any metric you care to apply, we do more at less cost than just about any education system in the first world. Our cost to performance ratio is excellent.

Instead we get strung up, vilified and turned on by the very government that won office by scare mongering the electorate away from the blue myopia.

Ontario will bail out poorly run businesses because they live in the ‘real world’ and are meaningful, tough, manly ways to make a living? They drive the economy? If that were the case, we’d still be in a destitute market that eats itself to pay 1% of the population. If you think private business will do anything other than the least it has to while feeding itself, you’re naive, and dangerous. The economy is like a cockroach, let it pick up the scraps, you don’t feed it steak.

Thank goodness we have higher standards in education, health care, and other services. If we ran the province like GM, or American banks, or Blackberry, we’d be in real trouble (though we would have a small group of hospital administrators and school superintendents who were immensely wealthy).

I guess that’s where we headed, because if we’re gonna stink, we might as well all stink equally.

Into The Heart of Darkness

I’ve spent a lot of time on back roads and regional highways but have seldom ventured onto major freeways. I’m not a fan of driving in cities, I find people to be quite idiotic and when you put a lot of them together it reaches a critical mass. Put those same distracted idiots in giant metal boxes while you’re out in the wind and the maths just don’t work out, so I don’t do it if I can help it.

Rather than cater to this avoidance I went right into the heart of darkness yesterday: downtown Toronto. A Grand Lodge meeting at the Royal York had me making the 240km round trip predominantly on major freeways.

First day of HOV with one person per box, and you wonder why Toronto has traffic problems. The HOV lanes for the Pan Am Games disappear when the games go, so Torontonians can go back to their selfish, unecological ways .

Why take the bike? Well, the Pan Am Games are on so they’ve finally gotten some sense and instituted HOV lanes (it took the Pan Am Games to make Toronto accessible to the rest of the province – go figure). Fortunately for the selfish, environmentally oblivious Toronto commuters, the HOV lanes go away again when the games are over and Toronto is once again an hour further away for the rest of us.

Motorcycles are always high occupancy. They are a highly efficient way of moving people compared to cars which is why they are so popular in places with less money than sense. When things started to inevitably slow down (at eleven o’clock in the morning), the HOV lanes never did. I’ve never gotten into Toronto so easily. In under 90 minutes I was parked on Front Street.

Why else take the bike? Parking a car in Toronto will punch you in the nose and take your lunch money. Around the Royal York it’s particularly expensive, often about $40-50 for a day, unless you’re on a bike! About 500 feet down the road from the Royal York there is free (!) parking for motorcycles.

Free parking for two wheelers right on Front Street – you can see the Royal York off to the left. I purchased a $23 club sandwich (!) with the money I saved not having to pay for parking.

What was the ride down like? Well, the country bit was lovely. It was about 20°C, sunny and not at all humid, a perfect day for a ride. The 401 through Milton is alright, but when you get to Mississauga it starts to get silly and then goes bonkers around the airport. In training they give you helpful advice like always ride on the inside or outside lane so you can take a blocking position, but that quickly becomes academic on the 401.

With lanes constantly appearing and disappearing and suddenly expanding out to 12 lanes you’re playing a fool’s game looking for a specific lane. Spending your attention on what lane to ride in probably means you’re not paying as much attention as much as you should to the vehicles whipping around you at 120+km/hr. You can’t keep a space bubble because the traffic is too thick and follows too closely, and you can’t lane split in Ontario to get out of tight spots. If you ride defensively (and you shouldn’t if you don’t), you’ll find your ability to manage threats stressed on the four hundred series highways leading into Toronto.

The only incident was a guy in a Mazda who decided to lane change (no indicator, you see them less than 50% of the time) into me. He had been twitch lane changing repeatedly so he was marked as a jackass on my radar. When he turned into me I was easily able to avoid him, and then give him some stink eye and a head shake. He hadn’t seen me (he hadn’t shoulder checked or indicated either, and he had his phone on his lap). You always get a sheepish response from people when they make a mistake that might have cost you your life.

That much traffic is a real test of your rider-radar. It’s a constantly evolving, high speed situation, so you’re always fluidly responding to variations, trying to make space, identifying idiots and giving yourself every chance of getting where you’re going. If you’re prone to tunnel vision or lazy traffic responses when you ride, don’t ride past the airport in Toronto.

The Concours hanging out with two cute Italians on Front Street

From up in the saddle you have an clear view of occupants in cars. I’d say about one in five has a smartphone on their laps and half of them are dividing at least some of their attention with it. Ontario’s distracted driving laws have driven phone use in cars underground. There should be more OPP officers on bikes out on the highway, they’d make a mint, as well as raising the awareness of motorcycles in the minds of drivers. Why are there no undercover police bikes?

Bike parking on Front, right there!

The ride in and out was pretty much flawless thanks to the government prioritizing access to Toronto for the Games. I guess the rest of Ontario’s citizens don’t rate better access to our capital. Once the games are over and things go back to the usual I’ll be avoiding Toronto once again.

Permanent HOV lanes, the ability to safely filter in traffic and any other law that emphasizes the efficiency and agility of the motorcycle would make the Greater Toronto Area much more palatable to riders, but as it stands the mentality of Toronto commuters and the laws the government creates to support them make it a no-fly zone for me.

The Concours flirting with some Vespas. Parking for free in Toronto? Priceless!

Union Station in Toronto decked out for the Pan Am Games.

The Royal York – the grand dame of Toronto hotels, very nice indeed.

$23 club sandwich, it was good, but twenty three bucks!

Rockstars of the Digital Classroom!

Another one of those things that would have been unimaginable only a decade ago – an international micro-conference! Wendy Gorton of Wikispaces fame collected together teachers using digital tools in the classroom and created a virtual meeting place where they could all share their processes and practices.

Garth Holman is a teacher deep into how #edtech pushes pedagogy in Ohio. Jessica Sullivan is living in eternal summer in Caracas, Venezuela where she is leveraging social media and digital tools to produce students who are actually digitally fluent! Our kids should be so lucky.

That it is possible to put something together like this with little more than an internet connection and a few laptops is astonishing. Wikis themselves are a web-specific evolution in information sharing, a crowd sourced medium for self publication. The social power of wikis are still reverberating around the world. Garth talked about how his students create learning content and then set it free online, my own students do something similar using wikis. As a way of creating shared notes and interconnecting information, wikis leverage digital learning spaces in a way that many other digital tools that act like paper analogues do not. If you’re using Google-docs to replace handouts you’re not getting what the new medium is capable of. Many teachers use digital tools as a replacement for paper, but that doesn’t use the fluidity of digital information to best effect.

Besides exploring the limits of digital information sharing and delivery you’ve also got to consider the best digital tool for the job. If you’re only using a single digital tool you’re probably finding it difficult. When trying to use Google-docs to create shared notes you’ve probably run into the chaos that ensues. Wikispaces lets you create working groups and lock out areas of a wiki so only the production team in that subject can edit. As each student builds their own interlinked page in the wikispace, they are able to produce collaborative, supported material without stepping on each other. Diversifying your digital learning toolbox is vital. If you’re not picking the best tool for the job you’re going to run into organizational problems.

I’m doing a presentation at the upcoming elearning Ontario symposium on creating a sufficiently complex digital learning ecosystem. The idea that a single system (D2L) or a single platform (GAFE) can give you a sufficiently diverse digital learning environment isn’t just simplistic, it’s also a bit monopolistic. As a digitally fluent teacher you should be able to reach out online and find the digital tools that suit your learner’s needs best.

In addition to regularly using Wikispaces, I’m also a big fan of Prezi and blogging (platform irrelevant). If you’re looking to leverage digital tools in learning, offering a broad ecosystem of digital tools is the first step towards a student centred, diversified learning environment. All of the teachers above talk about how they are using Twitter in addition to a variety of other digital tools to make that happen.

Won’t you make my black Ninja blue?

Project: restore the original blue paint job of a 2007 Kawasaki Ninja 650r.

Plan: remove the flat black-out paint job and restore the original metallic blue

Backstory:

This ’07 650r Ninja is my first bike, I got it a couple of months ago. I was considering buying a new bike, but wanted something I could get mechanically familiar with. I got this Ninja with low miles (still only 8k on the clock when I got it). There was evidence it had been dropped, but the bike was in excellent mechanical condition and with the low mileage, it seemed like a good candidate for a restoration that would let me familiarize myself with motorcycle maintenance (I’ve owned many interesting cars, so I know my way around an engine bay).

Making a black Ninja blue again

So far so good, the bike is letting me figure out the mechanics and maintenance, and works flawlessly otherwise. The biggest effort has been trying to figure out how to strip the blacked out paint job and restore the body to the stock colour. Here is the process to date:

How to Strip Paint Off a Motorcycle:

My first attempt was heavy handed,
but lessons learned on the front
fender paid off elsewhere

Stone chips were showing the blue paint underneath around the front fender, headlight and leading edges of the fairings. With it looking so shabby anyway (it’s not like it’s a nice black paint job), I began with the front fender, trying to find ways to remove the black.

I tried wet sanding the black but this didn’t prove very effective. The compound curves on the body work (’07 Ninjas are very sinuous) make sanding smoothly difficult. The sanding block would either burn through into the

Goof Off Graffiti remover got
the worst of the black off,
then a wipe with a soft, lint
free painters cloth with some
thinner took away the haze

blue below or damage the clear coat; it was too blunt an instrument. I eventually tried some graffiti remover and it did the job while preserving the factory paint.

Once I got the technique down, the
black came off leaving the blue in
good shape underneath

I initially tried wiping off the sprayed on remover with painter’s rags, but they are too smooth to work well with paint this thick. I eventually tried tea towels with a rougher texture and they worked well with the Goof Off.

Eventually I found that spraying a thick coat of remover on a spot on the tea towel and then wiping in small circles would remove the black paint leaving the blue underneath untouched. This is best shown around the seat at the back of the bike. Even the clearcoat was left intact by working in small circles, removing the black paint in small areas at a time. The paint there is not even waxed and looks great, this part of the bike was quickly restored with no damage to the underlying paint.

Graffiti remover (I can’t speak for all of them but if they are all formulated similarly then you should get similar results) does a fine job of stripping a bad paint job off bike body work. Work in small areas, spraying on to the rag and then applying to the paint. The top layer of the black comes off on the first application, the blue shows through after the second.

Hidden bruises

This closeup shows just how
the black is coming off to
reveal the Ninja blue below

Of course, when someone blacks out a bike they might be doing it for aesthetic reasons, but I don’t think I’ll be assuming that any more. It turns out the bike had been dropped pretty hard on its left side. As I was removing the flat black it looked like I could see her hidden bruises for the first time. The scuffs had all been sanded smooth for the black paint job, but as the extent of the injuries become clear I’ll have a better idea of what happened. It looks like the bike went down and slid without hitting anything. It still has its original front end and various switch gear, so this was an asphalt slide that damaged the body work.

Looking at the bottom of the main fairing, I found that one side appears to be unpainted other than the flat black while the other is blue, so this is probably a replacement fairing.

The fairing on the right
has no blue under the black

I’m about half way through stripping the black off. I’m to the big front fairings now, and they have a lot of real estate on them. Working in small circles, this is going to take a while.

Once I’ve got it stripped down, I’ll remove the panels, repaint them metallic blue and then paint the frame (burnt orange) while I’m in there. The end result should be a colourful Ninja that proudly wears its stock metallic blue paint, albeit with some touch ups that make the bike even more visually interesting.

Notes:

I picked up the Goof Off at Canadian Tire. They had other brands there, I haven’t tried them, but if I do I’ll follow up with comments.

The factory paint job on an ’07 Kawasaki Ninja 650r:

Autumn Colours

Thanksgiving Monday was warm, sunny and a perfect Fall ride. I tried to connect two previous rides, but failed because it was a holiday weekend and the city had leaked out all over my quiet, country roads.

Just after lunch I headed north east to Horning’s Mills and River Road, a favourite of mine. The roads were clear and I had an enjoyable time getting off the middle of the tire, something I don’t get to do as much as I’d like in southern Ontario.

Coming halfway back down River Road, I turned south to the top of Highway 10 and worked my way south in traffic to Mono Cliffs, where I road through the ridiculously crowded Mono Centre (lots of GTA cars trying to park at the park entrance) before cutting south on Airport Road and enjoying a clear run up Hockley Valley Road.

Things started to go really sideways in Orangeville. I should have taken the hint and just headed home. South on 10 turned into a parking lot at the lights on the highway, so I turned around and worked my way through town and down past Alton before heading south on Mississauga Road to Belfountain, where I hoped to grab a coffee and bike-watch.

It wasn’t to be. Traffic was backed up all the way in to Belfountain, and then it started to back up heading onto the Forks of the Credit as a clan of about thirty Indians (of the eastern variety) started to walk in a large clump down the middle of the road, enjoying the fall colours in equally colourful saris.

At this point I u-turned, abandoned any ideas about trying to access the Forks or Belfountain and headed home, tragically, without coffee.

It was a beautiful ride and reminded me of one very important fact: whatever you do, do not go any where near Caledon when Fall colours are on display!

River Road and then a diagonal cut up to Noisy River would have landed me in Creemore (safely out of reach of most day trippers from the GTA) for a nice coffee before the ride home. Now I know.

Here are the colours!

I’m all about the bike, but if you’re going to take a car, a freakin’ 427 Cobra would be the one!

The ride through Horning’s Mills & River Road

The mile eater! I sometimes forget I’m on a Concours and find myself dropping a knee
!

We’re Not Ready For This: A.I.

I saw this the other day:

He goes over deep learning, self-directed computer intelligence for the first fifteen minutes or so and summarizes at about 17:00 minutes. The social implications of deep machine learning are quite profound.

Here are some other artificial intelligence related media that you might want to peruse:

Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near (a long and tedious mathematical read with some wonderful implications mixed in.)

Her, Spike Jonze’ deep ode to A.I.:

A lot of Hollywood A.I. talk falls short into HAL type horror, but this one doesn’t, it goes all the way. By the end you’ll be questioning our short comings rather than fearing what a superior intelligence might do. I wonder what Kurzweil thought of the A.I. in this film and what it ends up doing.

Better education doesn’t help? Work is irrelevant? What do we do
in a world of human pets that serve no real function in terms of survival?
This could be an age of unprecedented creativity, or the beginning of the end.

The TED talk has an interesting moment in those final two minutes where Howard is talking about the social implications of an imminent (the next five years!) machine intelligence revolution. He talks about computers taking over jobs that we consider to be human-only and doing them better than people ever could. This isn’t about coding a better piece of software, it’s about computers coding themselves in a never ending cycle of improvement. It’s also about people no longer having to be responsible for their own survival decisions.

What happens to insurance companies when automotive accidents are a thing of the past? Accidents don’t happen when the A.I. managing it can not only control the car in question, but also move the entire traffic jam up ten feet to avoid accidents. This is often misunderstood as people say that A.I. driven vehicles could have bad code that causes a massive pile up. These aren’t machines running code, these are machines that create code as they need it, kind of like people do, but much faster, and with absolute precision. And however well they do it now, they’ll do it better tomorrow.

What happens to human beings when they are no longer
responsible for their own survival?

The busy truck driver still needs to sleep, what replaces him won’t. It’ll never drive tired or hungry or angry or distracted either. It’ll only ever use the least amount of gas to get where it’s going. One of the tricky things about trying to grasp human superior A.I. is in trying to envisage all the ways that it would be superior. That superior A.I. would never stop improving, it would take over any concept of efficiency in business.

As Howard says, machines that are able to build machines in a continuously improving manner are going to make the social change caused by the industrial revolution look like a blip on the radar.

Perhaps the hardest implication of a machine intelligence revolution is the idea that your income is tied to your usefulness. Our entire society is predicated on the idea that your income somehow reflects your usefulness. If human usefulness is no longer tied to social status, what would society look like?

During the big market bailouts in 2008 someone online described business as the cockroaches that feed off the work of human society. He suggested that you don’t feed them steak, you just let them thrive on the waste. The implication was that capitalism is a necessary evil that serves human beings, not the other way around as it’s often stated (people are a necessary evil in capitalism).

The idea that people could be free to pursue their own excellence in the future without having to work for the cockroaches is quite thrilling, though it would require a huge jump in social maturity for human beings. We’d have to begin identifying our own self worth through our own actions rather than our education and employment. I suspect most people aren’t close to that. We’d also have to recognize that everyone has a unique and valuable place in society, which sounds like socialism!

Education is as guilty as any social construction in aiming children towards the idea of success being employability and income. We stream students according to their intellectual capital and then tell them to work hard in order to achieve financial success in the future. The very idea of effort is tied to financial success – something we’d have to change in a machine intelligent future. Can humans value themselves and seek excellence without the yoke of survival hung around their necks?

Universal income is an idea being floated in Switzerland and elsewhere. If the future is one where people are no longer integral to their own survival, we better find something other than a survival instinct to base our self value on, or we’re going to quickly run out of reasons for being.

The IT idiot

I’m currently reading the very meaty and painfully direct “Shop Class as Soulcraft” by Matt Crawford. In the book he laments idiocy in professionals and (at another point) the vagaries of management language in modern business where there is no objective means of determining an employee’s competency. Both of these arguments come together beautifully in the relatively recent field of information technology.

I’ve been working in IT, both in the private and public sectors, for going on fifteen years now. I’ve worked in small offices, and on massive installs, in engineering shops, manufacturing concerns, universities, schools, and in offices. With a certain breadth of experience comes a pretty good bullshit detector. Crawford’s ideas around professional idiocy and manager-speak appear to have, unfortunately, come together in a perfect storm of hidden incompetence in information technology.

THE IDIOT

Crawford talks about Robert Persig (the author of Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance – another great read)’s idiot mechanic, who is more intent on appearances and action than submitting himself to the truths the bike is trying to tell him, and what that means to his public role as a professional mechanic. The kid ends up butchering Persig’s bike while taking no time to actually try and diagnose what the problem is; he’s all hands and no brain. Crawford describes the idiot:

“Persig’s mechanic is, in the original sense of the word, an idiot. Indeed, he exemplifies the truth about idiocy, which is that it is at once an ethical and a cognitive failure. The Greek idios means “private,” and an idiotes means a private person, as opposed to a person in their public role – for example, that of motorcycle mechanic. Persig’s mechanic is idiotic because he fails to grasp his public role, which entails, or should, a relation of active concern to others, and to the machine. He is not involved. It is not his problem. Because he is an idiot… At bottom, the idiot is a solipsist.” (p98)

That lack of involvement should spark a memory with any teacher reading this. The student who refuses, at all costs, regardless of the differentiation you throw at it, to do anything whatsoever, is an idiot in the technical sense of the word.

From the IT angle, I see people like Persig’s idiot mechanic every day. You know the type, they know just enough to be dangerous (and have tools on hand). They tend to make grand assumptions, usually based on a non-existent knowledge base, and then act on them to make the situation worse. They talk loudly, and use a lot of word whispers (“you know?”, “right?”, “know what I mean?”, etc) to make sure you agree with them (it’s a handy way to externally monitor what’s going on when you have no idea yourself, and dovetails nicely with the idea of management speak presented later).

The disengaged idiot fits especially well with information technology because it’s a dark art to the vast majority of people. You can talk out of your ass to 95% of the population and they have no idea what you’re saying, freeing you to say pretty much anything you want. The bigger the words the better. And because most people are users, they’re more than happy to sit in on the tech talk, and participate at the same level as the disengaged idiot.

Many moons ago, right out of high school, I found myself working in a Canadian Tire shop. One day one of the mechanics burned himself on Fuego. He proceeded to flip out and run up a bill of unneeded repairs to the order of a thousand dollars; a good example of the moral failure of the idiot, and one I see all the time in IT, especially when dealing with older customers to whom the dark art seems positively Satanic.

MANAGEMENT SPEAK

Crawford also does a brilliant dissection of the ‘peculiarly chancy and fluid’ life of the corporate manager (substitute administrator or educational consultant for equal value here). In a world with no objective means of assessing competence, the manager lives in a purgatory of abstraction, using vague language “…staking out a position on all sides of a situation, so you always have plausible deniability of a failure.” Crawford goes to great lengths to point out that this isn’t done maliciously, but rather as a means of psychic protection for the people trapped in this morass. At any point an arbitrary decision can make you redundant (shown brilliantly in Up In The Air – many of the people in the interviews are real people who have actually been downsized), regardless of your own abilities or actions.

In a world of meaningless language, actual technical competency is devalued with every spoken word (a central theme in Crawford’s book). Objective competency is ignored in favor of MBA wording that allows the initiate of globalized business speak to survive regardless of what decisions they might have made. In fact, the very making of decisions is discouraged. In places where reality matters, your opinion is not as important as it has been socially projected to be. As Crawford so cuttingly notes: “This stance toward ‘established reality,’ which can only be described as psychedelic, is best not indulged around a table saw.”

One of the many reasons I’m looking forward to ‘teaching tech’ this fall; there is no doubt of the student’s focus, ability and honesty of effort when reality is judging them. If you made it, ignored lessons, examples and process, and it didn’t work, no amount of ‘but you’re still fantastic’ student success talk will mitigate a failure staring everyone in the face. The fantasy of ‘everyone’s a hidden genius’ so popular in education today is best not indulged when reality (and the objective assessment implied in it) are judging the results. Do or do not, there is no good try in tech… and that’s not a bad thing, unless you’re trying to peddle a new ed-theory on zero failure.

Management speak, based on the the surreal, ‘psychedelic’, entirely provisional world of business became popular along with globalization (itself founded on many hidden assumptions). Grown out of the initial industrially driven abstractions of Taylorism in the early 20th Century, modern business is so far from the witness of truth (like the stock market it has spawned) that it has more in common with Alice in Wonderland than it does with a shop manual; the best you can hope for are some vague metaphors to describe it.

The IT Idiot Management Babbling: Making An Objective Technical Skill Abstract

Information technology is a new technical field. It began and grew in a well established, Taylorist, globalized, MBA driven, entirely fictional world. The language around IT maintenance is often clouded in mysticism, grown from the same vague, plausibly deniable language of modern business and finance. We feed that fire with talk of digital natives, people who magically have technical skills because of their birth date. In education, we ignore this new, vital fluency in favor of magical realism; our adherence to business speak serves our students poorly.

I’m not saying every student needs to be a qualified information technology technician, but it is safe to say that every student graduating at the moment should be familiar enough with digital technology that they don’t get white washed by an idiot’s babbling, or convinced by the parochial and intentionally misleading language surrounding information technology. Auto shop is often taught this way – as a means of delivering a basic familiarity to students so they aren’t bamboozled by an idiot. IT should adopt the same position as this older, wiser tech.

IT is a measurable skill. I take great pleasure in offering up the A+ certification practice test to the resident experts in senior computer engineering. When the best of them barely get half right, and realize that they are 30% away from a pass, it sets the stage for a systemic, meaningful learning of a technical skill they’ve always been told they magically gained by being born in the nineties.

I wonder if people born in the 1900s were magically imbued with the ability to fix the new automobiles just coming out. What we do is absurd, and it feeds misinformation and empowers the idiot. It’s bad enough when we purposefully remove objective standards from academic classes (and I’m not talking about standardized tests – they are about as far from objective standards as you can get, just another fiction), but to actively discourage objective standards in a technical field? That gets downright dangerous, and expensive!

You’re Supposed To Tell Me The Answer

“You’re supposed to tell me the answer, you’re the teacher, it’s your job!”

Isn’t that a sad expectation from a senior high school student? After twelve years in education this is what they think the process is about. I wonder how many teachers it took to embed this thinking in these students.

My considered response to this was, “it’s not my job to give you the answer. If I give you an answer it isn’t yours. It’s my job to ask you the right questions and give you the tools you need to answer them yourself.” This isn’t a handing off of the responsibilities of teaching, and it isn’t easier than giving students answers by talking at them each period; this isn’t a case of a teacher becoming a facilitator.

Part of setting up the right question is carefully considering the student’s knowledge and where it can go next. The right question is a tricky proposition. Your classroom relationship with students has to contain a lot of two way communication and observation if you’re going to get a handle on where they are in their learning, you’re never doing that when you’re talking at students giving them all the answers. You can’t frame questions that are in a student’s zone of proximal development without a lot of feedback and observation. Teachers who talk at students and hand out answers and information like candy have little idea of where student understanding begins or ends.

The other side of this equation is providing tools for learning. This is a bit more complicated in an engineering class as I have to bring in a lot of equipment for student use. That equipment needs to be open and accessible so that students are the ones setting it up and making it functional. I was amazed this year when the vast majority of my senior computer engineering students had never partitioned a hard drive and installed an operating system. That kind of nuts and bolts work when building a functional learning environment is vital if students are going to begin to take responsibility for their learning.

Responsibility is at the bottom of this. Learning isn’t something that you do to someone, though many of our students believe this to be the case. Learning never happens unless the student doing the learning is active in the process, no one ever learned something from being told.

We’re back at it again tomorrow, and I’m still working to convince my senior engineers that they are the ones creating their learning, not me, I do a lot to curation though.

Demonizing Public Employment

An article by a conservative think tank, disseminated by a conservative media outlet:

http://m.torontosun.com/News/1304708716881

“Teachers have also seen very decent raises — 12.55% between 2008 and 2012 (10.4% for public elementary teachers) — while the rest of us have lost jobs or are just treading water.“

Facts by the government:

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/subjects-sujets/cpi-ipc/cpi-ipc-eng.htm

“The largest increase occurred in the transportation component, where prices rose 6.6% in the 12 months to March.”

Here’s where the opinion starts:

So, according to StatsCan, we are in an inflationary spiral (a boom/bust cycle predicted by Jeff Rubin in Why Your World is About to Get a lot Smaller caused by increasing limitations on oil production and economies designed to work on nothing else).

If we’re averaging 2-3+% inflation every year since 2008, that ENORMOUS 12.55% teacher salary increase actually looks more like (2008 2%, 2009 2%, 2010 3%, 2011 3% 2012 3% = 13%) a net loss in standard of living. But we shouldn’t even try to keep up with the standard of living, should we?

Why is the economy in such a mess? Because the free market has swallowed itself with its own greed. Public employees didn’t crash the economy, private business did.

I first heard this a couple of years ago in the middle of the financial melt down, when an investment banker had the nerve (after his industry made a mockery of capitalism) to suggest that the local waste removal workers should take pay cuts to help pay for something they had nothing to do with. The people who orchestrated this market collapse have somehow convinced the dull, cow-eyed public that they should enjoy a less restricted marketplace and continue to serve themselves bail outs with taxpayers’ money.

In an unrestricted marketplace, private employees lose their jobs, take pay cuts and can do nothing. With no oversight they are indentured servants to the wealthy. They are then incited to riot against the public sector employees who work for the social collective (government), performing duties vital to the public good. In the process, there is some kind of odd flip that happens where the private wage earners actually feel that what they do is more inherently valuable (putting money in rich people’s pockets), than what a public employee does (earning a living while serving the public good).

I’m choking on this nonsense. Evidently business and the economy are vital to us, but we shouldn’t oversee and ensure its smooth operation. We should eviscerate government services and oversight and put all that money back into the pockets of a self serving marketplace that would destroy itself for short term gain that benefits a tiny percentage of people. They then seem to Jedi mind trick a weak willed public that they employ as minimally as possible to accept the lie that private sector salaries are somehow more honestly earned than public sector ones.

Don’t pay taxes and slash government oversight now so you can pay enormous bailouts later. It’s not a great deal you idiots, and in the meantime you’re fired and hired for less over and over again. Left to its own devices, an unrestricted marketplace would place the lowest possible value on human work as it can. There are more and more people in the world, where do you think that puts your value as a worker?

Democracy isn’t going to work when special interest groups make claims regardless of the truth, and are allowed to manipulate media to indoctrinate a dim, accepting public.

Don’t feel bad about working for the public good, it’s one hell of a lot better than working as disposable labour to make the rich a bit richer.

And if you work for a private company? It’s not a bad thing unless you give them the reigns, they’ll sell you for a short term gain in a second (if it hasn’t happened already to you, it will). Only intelligent public oversight will ensure a reasonable, sustainable, fair private sector. Left to itself private business would cannibalize society for short term gain.