Alan Turing

2012 is Alan Turing Year, and yesterday, 23 June 2012, his 100th anniversary was celebrated. A fantastic 100th Anniversary Conference is being held in Manchester in these days, with keynotes from Roger Penrose, Vint Cerf and other luminaries. Andrew Hodges, author of Alan Turing, the Enigma has a comprehensive Website on Turing, and David Leavitt, writer and English Professor, wrote yesterday on The Washington Post, inAlan Turing, the father of the computer, is finally getting his due“:

 

Turing’s remarkable career was marked by happenstance. In 1936, when he was a student at Cambridge, he attended a lecture in which M.H.A. “Max” Newman characterized an old and thorny logic problem as a matter of finding a “mechanical process” for testing the validity of a mathematical assertion. Turing took the phrase “mechanical process” at face value and wrote a paper in which he laid out the architecture of a hypothetical machine to do the testing — what became known as the “Turing machine.” The paper, intended for specialists, amounted to a blueprint for the modern computer, a “universal machine” that could do the work of an infinity of single-use machines.

Alan Turing is known for many extraordinary feats. He was the one who cracked the German Enigma code, by developing a machine (a quasi-computer) who could defeat the corresponding German machine (the Enigma) which encoded top-secret messages from Berlin headquarters to U-Boots around the world. As Leavitt says, he was the only who thought a machine could ever defeat another machine. This result, which eluded British, US and Polish mathematicians, could well have changed the course of the war.

Not only. He was the one with the vision of an Artificial Intelligence. With his seminal paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence (Mind, 59, 1950) he opened the field of AI from scratch and provided an intelligence test instrument (the Turing Test) which, if somehow naive –after all, he thought of it well in advance of computers being built and used– has never been won by a machine, yet.

But he is most important because he defined –again, without the computer– the computer itself and the whole of computer science, providing a simple, elegant and mathematically sound model of a computer, the so-called Turing Machine. A Machine, universal in scope, which can “compute” whatever is “computable”: a Machine which, in a few words, can compute what a supercomputer of today can compute. This result is extraordinary, for Turing showed that no matter the power and the technology, his abstract Machine could compute all and the same things that whatever other machine could, no matter how powerful.

At the same time, Turing also worked out the inverse proposition: There are intrinsic limitations on what can be computed, which cannot be eluded. His Halting Problem is a masterpiece of elegance and beauty and shows how little-powered is human thought. Suppose in fact that you got a nice program for a computer, Turing said. It could be a ten-line program or a ten-million-line one (for instance, Microsoft Word). It would be great if one, by inspection and analysis, were able to see if that program eventually stopped. Because a non-stopping program is unsafe and unusable (except those which are made that way ad hoc, like Operating Systems). Certainly Bill Gates would pay me handsomely if I came out with one. Well, Turing showed that this is not the case. We cannot build a machine which can inspect a program and tell us if it will eventually stop or not. It is called an undecidability problem. Its beauty lies in the fact that it is fully independent of technology: neither can we overcome this limitation with the best and fastest supercomputers or grids or whatever; and neither can hypothetical Andromedans with a technology a billion-year more advanced than ours.

So be it. Unfortunately, Turing lived a miserable life which eventually would lead him to suicide –with a poisoned apple, like Snow White:

In 1952, he was convicted of “gross indecency” – in effect, tried for being gay. His sentence – and he was faced with the miserable choice of this or prison – was chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones. He took his own life just two years later.

Only recently has Britain’s Gordon Brown issued a statement of official excuse: Gordon Brown: I’m proud to say sorry to a real war hero. His are the words above.

Alan Turing is at last getting the recognition he deserves, as a genius who changed the world forever –without the world taking care to note–. The memory of what was done to him must remain strong, though, for such monstrosities are inflicted upon human beings out of ignorance and prejudice.

Here is a WikiMindMap of Alan Turing from Wikipedia.

WikiMindMap for Alan Turing

David Leavitt wrote a nice biography: The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer, available on Amazon.

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Banks and numerical literacy?

Should a bank know about digits, dollars and cents? Yes it should. Yet in this case we find that, at least those who design and proof a deposit slip, don’t really know. We may say it doesn’t really matter, but it is bothersome. It’s like one who keeps saying “massage” instead of “message”. Everybody will understand him (remember Peter Sellers?) but, with some laughs.

So here is the little gem. This is the deposit slip of a major bank. An important bank which carefully prepares its deposit slip. You would think the slips are all right.

And yet, observe.

bank deposit slip

Got it?

Count the digits of the five deposit fields: they are all five digits each (plus 2 digits for cents). This means that each can hold a number between zero and $99,999.99, which is exactly one cent less than $100,000. Now, five times $100,000 (minus 5 cents) makes 5 cents short of $500,000, which is a 6-digit number. Then, how come the TOTAL field contains 7 digits for the dollar amount (plus 2 for the cents)? No way 5 deposits of max $99,999.99 each can total up to $1,000,000.00 which is the minimum amount of dollars with 7 digits.

Should the bank know better? Sure, but who cares, we are not the 1%.

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Zen of Teaching / The Workshop

On Tuesday, June 12th I had the pleasure to lead a workshop on my project “Zen of Teaching: Myths of Teaching, Learning & Technology” within the NMC 2012 Summer Conference at MIT. What a tremendous, awesome experience!! I had a group of twelve plus a sweet couple of the competent NMC staff, including the awesome Samantha Adams and Victoria Estrada, who took notes of everything, tweeted and later published it. The group was really fabulous, lots of questions and discussions over the three hours of the workshop. It did help me focus on my research and provided valuable feedback which I’ll incorporate into the website/book zenofteaching.us.

Here is (not the latest version of) the presentation: http://slidesha.re/zenofteachingus.

Here is a workshop summary done by NMC’s Victoria Estrada.

[NOTE added 1 Feb 2018: The one above is one dead link caused by the NMC’s demise, late 2017. Luckily, the Internet Archive has one copy (https://web.archive.org/web/20120627063707/https://www.nmc.org/news/summer-conference-recap-zen-teaching), or else I would doubt the existence of said summary.]

Here is a brief video in which I reflect on the most important thing of the workshop, by Samantha Adams:

 

Last, here you can check a daily digest of all days of the conference. [NOTE 2018: This link is also dead, see above NOTE. The Internet Archive does have a copy–herebut unfortunately the pages listed of daily summaries are broken links without a saved copy 🙁]

Finally, here you can find the Storify summary of my workshop. Enjoy and participate!!

http://storify.com/avunque/zen-of-teaching-the-workshop

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Zen of Teaching Interview with Mike Wesch and Gardner Campbell

The following is a summarized article based on an interview of Michael Wesch and Gardner Campbell. As with some past interviews, a student assistant, Gabriela Rivera, has carefully reviewed my notes, written a transcript, and later produced the following abridged version. I had the great pleasure of meeting with Dr. Wesch and Dr. Campbell during the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) conference in Austin, Texas held between the 13th and 15th of February, 2012, and this is a short summary of the interesting things which were said during that conversation. I can’t really say how much I am grateful to both Mike and Gardner for their time and disposition. I had a great time, and hope they both -as well as you readers and watchers- have it also.

The interview began with some observation (from Chris Dede) that it is so important and difficult at times, to unlearn the stuff we have built up with time… In the end, the idea of exploring the myths of teaching and learning is just this: to expose the things that we must unlearn if we want to unleash the real teacher in all if us.

When it comes to education and the use of technology and media we must unlearn many unconscious assumptions about learning and teaching that have been created in the past. Gardner Campbell says that a teacher’s job is not to be a proctor. Take blogs, for example. Many teaching professionals get anxious about the idea of having to read every blog post and every comment posted by students. According to Gardner, the job of the educator is going to be richer and not as easy to manage as just monitoring every aspect of the students communication. The students must be encouraged to discuss things amongst each other, and it is important not to intervene as an educator. Spontaneous learning can break out in this type of open, communicative environment.

There are certain aspects that keep faculty from changing the way that they teach. In Michael Wesch’s experience this may include lack of funds or professional development support, but he believes the majority feel that fear prevents them from changing. Many educators feel that they must model a style of teaching in which they are in control. As educators, we need to model innovative risk taking behavior, and break the cycle of stagnation. The traditional point of view of rigorous thinking incites us to analyze and criticize in an adversarial or cynical way. It is important to promote other types of criticism. Wesch believes empathetic and connective thinking is important because it allows us to put ourselves in the position of others. It can open our minds to other opinions and ways of thinking that may benefit us. It takes true courage and strength as an educator to risk one’s own ego and appearances in favor of promoting wonder and curiosity in the students.

Many educators feel imprisoned by the limits of teaching focused on content. It is evident that nowadays, with the volume of information available, it is impossible to teach students everything there is to know about a certain subject. Educators are limited by a certain amount of hours available in a course where they have to fit a variety of material. That being said, the role of the educator is no longer simply to impart knowledge, but to inspire a certain way of thinking.

I observe that education today needs to focus also on issues that are political in nature. One of the biggest political issues pertaining to education is funding. We need to reform the way in which money is handled when it comes to education, and in Campbell’s opinion, one of the things we can do to begin this process is to follow the money. We need to find a way to address the problem of the political corruption within the education system, and most of this comes down to money handling issues. In many cases these discussions are censored by the institutions themselves. Corruption needs to be called out when it is observed in a clear manner. It is very important to maintain an open debate, in this way, dialogue remains open and new solutions can be forged.

I find it quite disturbing to note that in some ways the Internet may be taking a turn and is now closing in on itself. Campbell replies that the Internet represents something truly rare in human experience: It was designed by very thoughtful people, most of them in an academic context. On the other hand, Wesch points out that the most important aspect of a crisis that we must recognize, is that there are solutions. Today we have the tools with which to resolve this crisis. There are a variety of free, online tools, and the only way to protect them is to get people excited about them.

Another issue presented to Mike and Gardner was the question of the value of College. Due to this global crisis, there are a number of students who question the value and the need for college. The cost of college is exorbitantly high and many students are beginning to doubt whether it is really worth it. Wesch feels that we need to validate the students’ concerns while at the same time encouraging a sense of community within the universities.

Campbell shares with us that the first four years of higher education are an interesting moment in the lives of most students. For the traditionally aged student (about 18 years old) this comes at a particularly interesting moment in their cognitive, social and physical development. At this time, the student should not be expected to gain any degree of mastery in a particular subject, even though they may get fairly masterful in writing and a few other things and certainly a degree of depth in a particular subject. According to Campbell, the most important thing that happens in those four years is that the student is introduced to civilization from the point of view of a co-creator of culture. Through the modeling of professors and the enthusiastic energy of other students, pupils are able to see that the world is much larger and much more susceptible to their own creation. According to Wesch, in order to do this they need courage, a sense of empowerment, a sense of connection and meaning, all of which can be found in a physical, face to face community. Unfortunately, we often see that institutions separate this drive towards co-creation from academic duties. In a sense, educators often stifle a student’s enthusiasm by creating the idea that we must separate these individual or auto-dictated interests from their academic applications.

Within the academic community exists the concept of “transfer” which refers to the ability to take the skills learned in the classroom and apply them to their daily lives or other things within school. We often find that students have trouble applying this concept. This may be due to the problem of compartmentalization. The students master a type of “fake transfer”, just like they would learn any other procedure, often giving what Campbell defines as an “awful simulation of integrative thinking”, because the educators have already ruled out any type of integrative thinking due to fear that it would undermine their established dogmas about genuine integrative thinking (out of fear that it would ruin their disciplines). We must recognize that this transfer cannot be forced.

The activity of meaning-making happens within the mind of the student and it is important, in the words of Campbell, “to model the ability to be surprised, to model the ability to be dizzy with the possibility of a new idea” because it demonstrates that the process of integrative thinking and transfer is occurring within the mind of the educator. The subjects or concepts transferred are irrelevant, it is enough to focus on reason, analytic ability and creative, deep thinking.

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What’s Up (4 Non Blondes and two distant versions)

Yesterday night, while eating dinner, I caught my daughter Flavia while humming an obviously known tune. So, I quickly youtubed it, and found the song I so much loved in 1992: What’s Up, by 4 Non Blondes. I really loved that song, and I heard it over and over for a long time. Of course, there was no YouTube in 1992, and then I simply forgot about it. So, yesterday was an epiphany: the very first time I watched a video of the band, in synch with my daughter who was humming the song.

But the fact is that she was humming a different version of it, a much newer, processed version, which comes together with a video. In fact, she didn’t believe it was the same song at all! Here it is.

Watch the new version and enjoy the comics, the surreality and irony of it. Ah, it is a triumph of pop culture! Also, the music processing and arrangement is genius. It is a preview of what our youngsters are looking at.

And it was a moment of sharing with my daughter. Long live rock’n’roll!!

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