Skip to main content

Home/ Math-a-manics/ Group items tagged languages

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Peter Kronfeld

Languages Grew From a Seed in Africa, a Study Says - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...15language.html

math languages

shared by Peter Kronfeld on 15 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • .  Dr. Atkinson
  • Dr. Atkinson, an expert at applying mathematical methods to linguistics, has found a simple but striking pattern in some 500 languages spoken throughout the world: A language area uses fewer phonemes the farther that early humans had to travel from Africa to reach it.
  • Dr. Atkinson is one of several biologists who have started applying to historical linguistics the sophisticated statistical methods developed for constructing genetic trees based on DNA sequences.
  • Peter Kronfeld on 15 Apr 11
     
    Math used to trace possible origins of language back to southern Africa.
Peter Kronfeld

Go Ahead, Mess With Texas Instruments - Phil Nichols - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...278899

education edtech learning programming

shared by Peter Kronfeld on 02 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • If you had asked them, most of my high school teachers would have called me an unmotivated student or said that I lacked discipline and didn't take learning seriously. And yet, that abandoned storage bin told another story: with the aid of my calculator, I'd crafted narratives, drawn storyboards, visualized foreign and familiar environments and coded them into existence. I'd learned two programming languages and developed an online network of support from experienced programmers. I'd honed heuristics for research and discovered workarounds when I ran into obstacles. I'd found outlets to share my creations and used feedback from others to revise and refine my work. The TI-83 Plus had helped me cultivate many of the overt and discrete habits of mind necessary for autonomous, self-directed learning. And even more, it did this without resorting to grades, rewards, or other extrinsic motivators that schools often use to coerce student engagement.
  • I've now begun to see Texas Instruments graphing calculators as unique among educational technologies in that they enable learning that is couched in discovery more than formal teaching.
  • take the notion of "correctness." School typically assumes that answers fall neatly into categories of "right" and "wrong." As a conventional tool for computing "right" answers, calculators often legitimize this idea; the calculator solves problems, gives answers. But once an endorsed, conventional calculator becomes a subversive, programmable computer it destabilizes this polarity. Programming undermines the distinction between "right" and "wrong" by emphasizing the fluidity between the two. In programming, there is no "right" answer. Sure, a program might not compile or run, but making it offers multiple pathways to success, many of which are only discovered through a series of generative failures. Programming does not reify "rightness;" instead, it orients the programmer toward intentional reading, debugging, and refining of language to ensure clarity. This is a form of learning that privileges the process of discovery over the interventions of formal teaching. It can fuel an intrinsic desire to pursue similar learning experiences, but even more, it gradually transforms the outlook of the student
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Subversion encourages students to take an imaginative stance toward learning, to embrace failure as an integral part of success, to see the world for what it is and consider what it might look like under a different set of conditions.
  • The iPad is among the recent panaceas being peddled to schools, but like those that came before, its ostensibly subversive shell houses a fairly conventional approach to learning. Where Texas Instruments graphing calculators include a programming framework accessible even to amateurs, writing code for an iPad is restricted to those who purchase an Apple developer account, create programs that align with Apple standards, and submit their finished products for Apple's approval prior to distribution. As such, for the average student, imaginative activities on an iPad are always mediated by pre-existing apps and therefore, are limited to virtual worlds created by others, not by students themselves. Pair this with the fact that most teachers and administrators only allow classroom use of a few endorsed apps and it becomes clear that these devices are doing more to centralize the school's authority over the learning process than to encourage self-directed creative activity.
  • learning to program taught habits of mind that persist to this day in small yet vital ways. In my work as a teacher, I often hear colleagues lamenting the widespread use of calculator games among students. They consider such forms of "play" an abuse of educational technology and a threat to student learning. But this assumption ignores the tacit learning that arises from repurposing conventional learning apparatuses. My TI-83 Plus awoke a curiosity that exerted a subtle but powerful push toward autonomy and self-direction.
  • Peter Kronfeld on 02 Sep 13
     
    Learning to program a graphing calculator gave the author a deeper education. Results: intrinsic motivation and an ability to "embrace failure as an integral part of success", as well as developing creativity, problem-solving skills, and persistence. Interesting critique of the iPad as a more conventional tool of learning vs. subversive.
Peter Kronfeld

Big Data's Impact in the World - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...datas-impact-in-the-world.html

math statistics data

shared by Peter Kronfeld on 13 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • The impact of data abundance extends well beyond business. Justin Grimmer, for example, is one of the new breed of political scientists. A 28-year-old assistant professor at Stanford, he combined math with political science in his undergraduate and graduate studies, seeing “an opportunity because the discipline is becoming increasingly data-intensive.” His research involves the computer-automated analysis of blog postings, Congressional speeches and press releases, and news articles, looking for insights into how political ideas spread.
  • But the computer tools for gleaning knowledge and insights from the Internet era’s vast trove of unstructured data are fast gaining ground. At the forefront are the rapidly advancing techniques of artificial intelligence like natural-language processing, pattern recognition and machine learning.
Peter Kronfeld

Sizing Up Consciousness by Its Bits - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...21consciousness.html

consciousness informationtheory mathematics

shared by Peter Kronfeld on 21 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • Dr. Tononi’s theory is, potentially, very different. He and his colleagues are translating the poetry of our conscious experiences into the precise language of mathematics. To do so, they are adapting information theory, a branch of science originally applied to computers and telecommunications.
  • Dr. Tononi began to think of consciousness in a different way, as a particularly rich form of information. He took his inspiration from the American engineer Claude Shannon, who built a scientific theory of information in the mid-1900s. Mr. Shannon measured information in a signal by how much uncertainty it reduced.
  • Dr. Tononi and his colleagues have been expanding traditional information theory in order to analyze integrated information. It is possible, they have shown, to calculate how much integrated information there is in a network. Dr. Tononi has dubbed this quantity phi, and he has studied it in simple networks made up of just a few interconnected parts. How the parts of a network are wired together has a big effect on phi. If a network is made up of isolated parts, phi is low, because the parts cannot share information. But simply linking all the parts in every possible way does not raise phi much. “It’s either all on, or all off,” Dr. Tononi said. In effect, the network becomes one giant photodiode. Networks gain the highest phi possible if their parts are organized into separate clusters, which are then joined. “What you need are specialists who talk to each other, so they can behave as a whole,” Dr. Tononi said. He does not think it is a coincidence that the brain’s organization obeys this phi-raising principle.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • It is impossible, for example, to calculate phi for the human brain because its billions of neurons and trillions of connections can be arranged in so many ways. Dr. Koch and Dr. Tononi recently started a collaboration to determine phi for a much more modest nervous system, that of a worm known as Caenorhabditis elegans. Despite the fact that it has only 302 neurons in its entire body, Dr. Koch and Dr. Tononi will be able make only a rough approximation of phi, rather than a precise calculation. “The lifetime of the universe isn’t long enough for that
  • Peter Kronfeld on 21 Sep 10
     
    Measuring consciousness with mathematical concept of information theory
1 - 4 of 4
Showing 20▼ items per page