On AP Exams and College Credit

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I strongly disagree with Michael Mendillo’s argument of not letting high school courses count for college credit. He argues:

Advanced Placement courses are taken by students 15 to 18 years old. At those stages in their education, students focus on remembering facts and, under the best possible situations, learning the methods of assembling and evaluating those facts. For high-school students who do well in, say, AP physics, that would be a terrific start to being a physics major. They could enroll in the highest introductory-level freshman physics course offered. The original goal of the AP concept would have worked.

For students not majoring in science, however, that same success has quite a different consequence. Lost to these nonscience students is an exposure to cutting-edge science and the methods of science taught by professors active on a daily basis in their exploration of nature. In how many AP classes in high school does the physics instructor say, “At the last American Physical Society meeting, one of my students presented a paper on this very topic”? Or, in an astronomy class, “My upcoming observations using the Hubble Space Telescope will address this dark-energy issue”? Identical scenarios exist, of course, for science and engineering students who miss out on university-level introductions to the humanities and social sciences taught by active scholars in those areas.

The end result is that in many introductory college courses, the top students are simply not in the classrooms. For them, faculty-student interactions are not possible and the overall value of a university education is diminished. All of these aspects of educational disservice are due to the existence of the AP system.

I took ten AP courses in my high school. The remarkable difference between the AP courses and the regular (“gifted”) courses I took was that the AP courses were significantly more difficult, thorough, and taught students invaluable comprehension skills (rather than rote memorization). I believe that AP courses are actually superior to many freshman college courses. In an AP course, you are instructed five days a week for a semester (and two semesters for subjects like biology and chemistry). You can’t compare that to college courses taught three times a week and condensed into one semester.

The AP exam is a three hour duel; it is more comprehensive than the typical college final. If you received a 5 on AP Biology or AP Calculus, I have no doubt in my mind that you know your stuff and should rightly get the chance to skip these introductory courses in college. I did and I never regretted my decision. In fact, because I exempted out of so many introductory college courses, I was able to take fewer courses every semester, which allowed me to devote more attention to each of my classes than I otherwise could have done with a denser schedule. As a result, I asked more inquisitive questions, had a chance to work on extracurricular problems, and learned the material more deeply than if I never got my AP credits.

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What do you think? If you’ve taken AP courses and did well on them, how did you feel about exempting those courses in college?

Brooklyn’s Rube Goldberg Master

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Joseph Herscher builds Rube Goldberg machines for fun (though not for a living). The New York Times profiles the artist, who explains that his goal is to try “to make it as absurd and useless as possible” to do very simple tasks via his amazing contraptions.

The project is also an attempt to inject larger meaning into a form he already loves. Four years ago, with no particular training in sculpture or mechanical engineering, Mr. Herscher built his first Rube Goldberg machine in the living room of the large house in Auckland, New Zealand, where he lived. Like his current projects, it was constructed mainly out of recycled materials and dollar-store finds, like Solo cups and paper-towel tubes. The result was a massively complex installation with an elementary school mad-genius aesthetic: balls rolled through tubes, bounced and dropped from one platform to another. A teakettle filled a plastic cup with water until it tripped a lever. Whirling sledgehammers slapped the balls forward until a final hammer swung down and smashed a Cadbury Creme Egg into a satisfying splat of chocolate ooze.

This is the Creme Egg in action (Joseph spent seven months on this project!):

Click over to the NYT article to see a video of his new contraption, the “Page Turner” in action. Pretty cool stuff. I wonder how many broken vases he went through before he got it right.

Meaningless Expressions, Abstractionitis, and More

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Dan Pallotta has a fun rant about jargon titled “I Don’t Understand What Anyone Is Saying Anymore.” He explains how business conversations use such buzzwords as “paradigm shift” and “synergy” without true substance. He mentions five “strains of this epidemic” such as:

Abstractionitis
We have forgotten how to use the real names of real things. Like doorknobs. Instead, people talk about the idea of doorknobs, without actually using the word “doorknob.” So a new idea for a doorknob becomes “an innovation in residential access.” Expose yourself repeatedly to the extrapolation of this practice to things more complicated than a doorknob and you really just need to carry Excedrin around with you all day.

Acronymitis
This is a disease of epic proportions in the world of charity. I was at a meeting just two days ago at which several well-meaning staff members of a charity were presenting to their board, and the meat of their discussion revolved around the acronyms SCEA and some other one that began with “R” that I can’t recall. In the span of three minutes these acronyms must have been used eight times each. They were central to any understanding of the topic at hand, but they were never defined. So I had not the vaguest idea what the presenters were talking about. None. Could have been talking about how to make a beurre-blanc sauce for all I know.

Dan concludes:

You will gain tremendous credibility, become much more productive, make those around you much more productive, and experience a great deal more joy in your working life if you look someone in the eye after hearing one of these verbal brain jammers and tell the person, “I don’t have any idea what you just said to me.”

Sounds like a good resolution to take up this year. Click over to the article to read it in entirety. And don’t forget to vote for your least favorite buzzword/expression (as of this writing, “thinking outside the box” leads as the least liked expression with about 18% of the vote).

Why Do Humans Have Chins?

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According to this piece in the Smithsonian, the human chin is unique to homo sapiens and isn’t found in other hominid species (I didn’t know this). So what’s the purpose of the chin in humans?

Perhaps the most common explanation is that our chin helps buttress the jaw against certain mechanical stresses. Ionut Ichim, a Ph.D. student at the University of Otago in New Zealand, and colleagues suggested in the journal Medical Hypotheses in 2007 that the chin evolved in response to our unique form of speech, perhaps protecting the jaw against stresses produced by the contraction of certain tongue muscles. Others think the chin evolved to safeguard the jaw against forces generated by chewing food. Last year, Flora Gröning, a biological anthropologist at the University of York in England, and colleagues tested the idea by modeling how modern human and Neanderthal jaws withstand structural loads. Their results, which they reported in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, indicated the chin does help support the jaw during chewing. They suggested the chin may have evolved to maintain the jaw’s resistance to loads as our ancestors’ teeth, jaws and chewing muscles got smaller early on in our species’ history.

A completely different line of reasoning points to sexual selection as the driver of the evolution of the chin. Under sexual selection, certain traits evolve because they are attractive to the opposite sex. Psychological research suggests chin shape may be a physical signal of the quality of a mate. For example, women may prefer men with broad chins because it’s sign that a man has good genes; likewise, a woman’s narrow chin may correlate with high levels of estrogen…

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(hat tip: Tyler Cowen)

The Dangers of Yoga

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In the latest issue of New York Times Magazine, we learn about the dangers of yoga:

…A number of factors have converged to heighten the risk of practicing yoga. The biggest is the demographic shift in those who study it. Indian practitioners of yoga typically squatted and sat cross-legged in daily life, and yoga poses, or asanas, were an outgrowth of these postures. Now urbanites who sit in chairs all day walk into a studio a couple of times a week and strain to twist themselves into ever-more-difficult postures despite their lack of flexibility and other physical problems. Many come to yoga as a gentle alternative to vigorous sports or for rehabilitation for injuries. But yoga’s exploding popularity — the number of Americans doing yoga has risen from about 4 million in 2001 to what some estimate to be as many as 20 million in 2011 — means that there is now an abundance of studios where many teachers lack the deeper training necessary to recognize when students are headed toward injury. “Today many schools of yoga are just about pushing people,” Black said. “You can’t believe what’s going on — teachers jumping on people, pushing and pulling and saying, ‘You should be able to do this by now.’ It has to do with their egos.”

Seems like The Times is starting off the year with some controversial health articles. I highlighted “The Fat Trap” previously.

Solving the Sudoku Minimum Number of Clues Problem

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Three mathematicians — Gary McGuire, Bastian Tugemann, and Gilles Civario — spent a year working on a sudoku puzzle. Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that. The essential question they sought to answer: what is the minimum number of clues one must be provided to solve a sudoku puzzle? Turns out that one must see 17 clues (out of a total of 81 squares on a sudoku board) to solve the puzzle uniquely. From their paper, here is the abstract:

We apply our new hitting set enumeration algorithm to solve the sudoku minimum number of clues problem, which is the following question: What is the smallest number of clues (givens) that a sudoku puzzle may have? It was conjectured that the answer is 17. We have performed an exhaustive search for a 16-clue sudoku puzzle, and we did not find one, thereby proving that the answer is indeed 17. This article describes our method and the actual search

If you aren’t familiar with sudoku…the puzzle solver is presented with a 9×9 grid, some of whose cells already contain a digit between 1 and 9. The puzzle solver must complete the grid by filling in the remaining cells such that each row, each column, and each 3×3 box contains all digits between 1 and 9 exactly once. It is always understood that any proper (valid) sudoku puzzle must have only one completion. In other words, there is only one solution, only one correct answer.

And hence the interest in the minimum number of clues problem: What is the smallest number of clues that can possibly be given such that a sudoku puzzle still has only one solution?

There are exactly 6,670,903,752,021,072,936,960 possible solutions to Sudoku (about 6.7 * 10^21) . That’s far more than can be checked in a reasonable period of time. But due to various symmetry arguments (also known as equivalency transformations), many grids are identical, which reduces the numbers of grids to be checked to 5,472,730,538.

I am always on the lookout of mathematicians doing fun things, so if I find any papers on solving other types of games or puzzles, I will post the results here.

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(via Technology Review)

My Favorite Photo of 2011

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I spent some time this weekend looking over the photos I captured in 2011. While I didn’t travel as much as I have in previous years, one experience stood out: witnessing a space shuttle launch for the first time in my life. I saw the last launch of Space Shuttle Endeavour, mission STS-134. I actually ended up going to Florida on two separate occasions, as the first scheduled launch of Space Shuttle Endeavour was scrubbed.

But on the morning of May 16, 2011 everything was going according to plan. I woke up early, set up my tripod to get a coveted viewing spot, and waited. You can read my lengthy post of how the day unfolded on my photoblog, but the incredible moment we were all waiting for occurred shortly before 9AM that morning. And so, I captured this glorious scene as Endeavour lifted off:

Space Shuttle Endeavour Lifting off from Kennedy Space Center

Here is what I wrote about the experience the day of launch:

People were cheering so loudly. Now, for the first few seconds of lift-off, we relied on our visual senses to stimulate us: sound had not yet arrived. We were located three miles away from the launch site, and the first boom of the engines and the solid rocket boosters cracked about five seconds into the launch sequence. And what a phenomenal sound it was! There were these crackles, going off and on, like fireworks were exploding about five feet away from you. The sound literally made the hair on your arm and legs stand up. It was absolutely incredible!

Truly, a day I’ll never forget.

Here is my entire NASA-themed gallery for those of you curious to see what other photos I captured while at Kennedy Space Center. What’s your favorite photo memory from 2011?

Is Internet Access a Basic Human Right?

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Vinton Cerf, a fellow at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and vice president and chief Internet evangelist for Google, begins this op-ed by expounding on the importance of the Internet, but concludes that Internet access is not a human right:

It is no surprise, then, that the protests have raised questions about whether Internet access is or should be a civil or human right. The issue is particularly acute in countries whose governments clamped down on Internet access in an attempt to quell the protesters. In June, citing the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, a report by the United Nations’ special rapporteur went so far as to declare that the Internet had “become an indispensable tool for realizing a range of human rights.” Over the past few years, courts and parliaments in countries like France and Estonia have pronounced Internet access a human right.

But that argument, however well meaning, misses a larger point: technology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself. There is a high bar for something to be considered a human right. Loosely put, it must be among the things we as humans need in order to lead healthy, meaningful lives, like freedom from torture or freedom of conscience. It is a mistake to place any particular technology in this exalted category, since over time we will end up valuing the wrong things. For example, at one time if you didn’t have a horse it was hard to make a living. But the important right in that case was the right to make a living, not the right to a horse. Today, if I were granted a right to have a horse, I’m not sure where I would put it.

The best way to characterize human rights is to identify the outcomes that we are trying to ensure. These include critical freedoms like freedom of speech and freedom of access to information — and those are not necessarily bound to any particular technology at any particular time. Indeed, even the United Nations report, which was widely hailed as declaring Internet access a human right, acknowledged that the Internet was valuable as a means to an end, not as an end in itself.

By similar logic, Cerf explains that Internet access is just a tool for obtaining something else more important, and shouldn’t be considered a civil right either (though the case for Internet as a civil right is stronger than that of a human right, he concedes).

Cerf’s argument is in opposition to United Nations, which released a report in June of 2011, citing Internet as a basic human right.

Christopher Hitchens on Charles Dickens

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Published today is Christopher Hitchens’s last piece for Vanity Fair, in which he writes about Charles Dickens (whose 200th would-be birthday will be on February 7, 2012) and the celebration of childhood.

I was surprised to learn from this piece that perhaps Fyodor Dostoyevsky met Charles Dickens:

And then, in late 2002, The Dickensiancarried a little bombshell of a tale: it seemed that in 1862, during Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s visit to London, he had met Dickens. And not only met him but elicited from him the exact admission that we would all have wanted the great man to make. Here is how it goes in En­glish, as summarized by Dostoyevsky in an 1878 letter to a certain Stepan Dimitriyevich Yanovsky. According to this, the two men met at the offices of Dickens’s own personal magazine, All the Year Round.

And here is Hitchens’ take on the supposed encounter:

So it was sweet while it lasted, the rumor of a meeting between two great literary titans: an encounter that one of them didn’t even find interesting enough to put in a letter. It could have happened, but I doubt it. That’s the wonderful thing about the celebration of Charles Dickens: he truly is ranked among our immortals, and it truly doesn’t matter if the legend should sprout and then drop a Dostoyevsky or two.

Hitchens wished to empart one of Dickens’ core beliefs:

It is all there to emphasize the one central and polar and critical point that Dickens wishes to enjoin on us all: whatever you do—hang on to your childhood! He was true to this in his fashion, both in ways that delight me and in ways that do not. He loved the idea of a birthday celebration, being lavish about it, reminding people that they were once unborn and are now launched. This is bighearted, and we might all do a bit more of it. It would help me to forgive, perhaps just a little, the man who helped generate the Hallmark birthday industry and who, with some of his less imposing and more moistly sentimental prose scenes inA Christmas Carol, took the Greatest Birthday Ever Told and helped make it into the near Ramadan of protracted obligatory celebration now darkening our Decembers.

There is also another lesson that we can learn from Dickens, writes Hitchens: atoning for ones mistakes. But you’ll have to read the piece to find out what he says about that.

The Many Faces of Stephen Colbert

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If you’re a fan of Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report and its mastermind host, Stephen Colbert, you have to read this Charles McGrath piece in The New York Times. Over the six years of the show’s existence, Stephen’s popularity has exploded:

There is a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream flavor named after Colbert (Colbert’s Americone Dream) and a NASA exercise device (the Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Elliptical Trainer, or Colbert) and a minor-league hockey team mascot (Steagle Colbeagle the Eagle) in Saginaw, Michigan…

In the piece, we learn about the creation of the “new Colbert” and Stephen’s efforts to create a super-PAC:

The new Colbert has crossed the line that separates a TV stunt from reality and a parody from what is being parodied. In June, after petitioning the Federal Election Commission, he started his own super PAC — a real one, with real money. He has run TV ads, endorsed (sort of) the presidential candidacy of Buddy Roemer, the former governor of Louisiana, and almost succeeded in hijacking and renaming the Republican primary in South Carolina. “Basically, the F.E.C. gave me the license to create a killer robot,” Colbert said to me in October, and there are times now when the robot seems to be running the television show instead of the other way around.

On Colbert’s most awkward (but perhaps also his most defining) moment:

…Was his appearance at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2006. Mark Smith, an A.P. reporter who, as head of the correspondents’ association, was responsible for booking the talent, admitted later that he wasn’t all that familiar with the show, which was only three months old when he approached Colbert. Neither, to judge from video of the event, were many in the audience. Colbert got up and addressed the president, saying: “I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things. He stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a powerful message: that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound — with the most powerfully staged photo-ops in the world.”

Stephen Colbert’s father died when Stephen was 10, and he muses on his experience growing up. Turns out, Colbert began pronouncing his name as “coal-Bare” when he was in high school:

By high school he had become dreamy and nerdy, spending all his time reading science fiction and playing Dungeons and Dragons, and his friends were all the same way. “Socially, we were out in the hinterlands,” he said. “Living in the social mud huts.” But during junior year he happened to say something that made people laugh, and pretty soon he had become the school wit. It was around that time that he started Frenchifying his name. “I was probably still Colbert to a lot of people,” he said, pronouncing the T, the way the rest of his family did. “But in my mind I was coal-BARE.”

On the popularity of the show:

Colbert likes to say that the whole show is a “scene,” a term that in improv-speak means not just a unit of dramatic time but a transaction in which one character wants something from another. The other character in this instance is us, the audience, and what Colbert wants from us is love. The one moment on “The Colbert Report” that is not fake is when he sits at his desk and basks while the audience chants, “Ste-phen, Ste-phen, Ste-phen!” He can’t get enough.

I like the author’s comparison to James Thurber’s famous short story, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” (a must-read, if you’ve never read it):

The show also enables a Walter Mitty side of Colbert, which is why he says he will never get tired of it. “As executive producer of this show, I get to ask my character to do whatever I want,” he said. Among other things, the character has so far visited troops in Baghdad; bottled and branded his own sperm; dueled light sabers with George Lucas; sung with Barry Manilow; sung as a trio with Willie Nelson and Richard Holbrooke; appeared on the Jimmy Fallon show, along with Taylor Hicks and the Abominable Snowman, in a big production of the hit song “Friday”; harmonized on the national anthem with Toby Keith; and danced a passage from “The Nutcracker,” in suit jacket, tights and codpiece, with David Hallberg.

There are so many money quotes in the piece that you just have to read the whole thing.