Book Review: Quantum Philosophy and the End of Education
March 11, 2019 § 1 Comment
Quantum Philosophy and the End of Education, by Roo Pavan (self-published)
April 1st, 2019
This self-published book by a retired physicist turned tech millionaire has taken the education establishment by storm — and not in a good way. Few people had even heard of this book or its author, Roo Pavan, until President Trump mentioned it approvingly in a tweet. It is doubtful whether our Esteemed Leader actually read the book, but that didn’t stop him from claiming he would use it as the blueprint for education policy in his second term. Like most of the book’s critics, he probably only read the sensationalist claims in the final chapter rather than the surprisingly thoughtful analysis that preceded it.
Which is a shame, because that would have been a conversation worth having. The author’s main thesis is contrarian but hardly new: that Western philosophy in general — and higher education in particular — are more about perpetuating a cultural elite than actually pursuing truth and serving society, though he concedes that those have often been a useful byproduct.
Solutions to Three of the World’s Hardest Problems
December 17, 2018 § Leave a comment
The Problems
(Drawn from the list identified by Social Capital on December 15, 2018)
- Disrupting Programming
- Can we enable people who don’t know programming to build applications?
- Is there a way to structure, pipe, and manage data better?
- Disrupting Education
- Can we educate humans in interesting ways so that they learn to think in multi-disciplinary ways?
- Can we educate people in small, continuous ways so they keep learning throughout their lives?
- Disrupting Urban Transport
- Can we build new transportation methods that enable us to take someone form point A->B faster?
- Is there a way to build better, cleaner cities?
The Solutions
Three Steps to Startup Success (in 15 syllables)
August 17, 2018 § Leave a comment
How to Print Mac Scientific Posters onto Multiple Sheets of Paper
August 7, 2018 § Leave a comment
There are many ways to create scientific or other large-format posters on the Mac, but printing them out on similar-sized paper at FedEx can cost $100. If you’re not going for tenure or selling expensive jewelry, here is a low-cost alternative using an ordinary home printer, a few dollars of posterboard. and the $5 Mindcad Tiler from the Mac App Store.
Sunday School 2.0: Shark Tank for Spiritual Growth
July 29, 2018 § Leave a comment
The purpose of Sunday School 2.0 is to create an adaptive architecture of participation where everyone can experience what it feels like to be children of God, including:
Best Practices for Design in Agile
August 7, 2015 § 1 Comment
A Bibliography, mostly discussing UX Design but a little on the related issue of Architectural Design.
- A List Apart: Getting Real about Agile Design
- The uneasy relationships between design and agile
- SPARC: What an Agile Design Process looks like
- Thought Works: Just Enough Design
- Martin Fowler: Is Design Dead?
- Design Spikes
- Enough Design Up Front
- Overcoming Why Designers Resist Agile
- Agile Web Design Manifesto
- Agile Modeling: Agile Design Practices (architecture-focused)
- How does Design get done on an Agile Project?
- The Last Responsible Moment for Design
- Stack Exchange: How is architectural design done in an agile environment?
- Full Day Training: Lean UX and Agile
- 12 emerging best practices for adding UX work to Agile development
- Atlasssian: Collaborative design in agile teams (video)
SIDA: Moving Object-Oriented Design beyond Model-View-Controller
September 16, 2011 § 2 Comments
[Update: this post has been obsoleted by RIBS: Marrying the REST and MVC Design Patterns « iHack, therefore iBlog]
SIDA stands for “State • Interface • Data • Algorithm“, and is a refinement of my earlier “DIDA” model (where the “D” stood for Design). DIDA in turn was an expansion of the well-known Model–View–Controller design pattern based on insights from the Data-Context-Interactions architecture.
The key premise of SIDA is that there are four primary artifacts that need to be designed, from the most important on down:
- Concrete States
- Clear Interfaces
- Consistent Data
- Concise Algorithms
- Presentation of Views
- Controlling of Actions
- Binding of Roles
as shown in the accompanying diagram.
In a simple system, the state is implicit and the relations are absorbed into one of the artifacts, reducing SIDA to the traditional View, Model, and Controller, respectively. For more complex systems, however, it may make sense to design explicit objects for each relation, e.g., traits for roles, presenters for views, and strategies for actions.
In addition, SIDA is intended as a general architecture, describing the internal structure of everything from databases to web services to GUI applications. An interface as defined from inside the system may appear as data or an algorithm from outside the system.
The most interesting (and perhaps unusual) aspect of this diagram is how it makes state a central features, something developers never use. If state really is so central to the design process, perhaps it deserves explicit language support, as provided by UnrealScript or typestates (as in Rust).
This is all still merely a hypothesis on my part, as I haven’t actually put any of this into practice yet. Anyone with more experience care to comment?
DIDA: Reinterpreting MVC object modelling in light of DCI
September 15, 2011 § 2 Comments
[UPDATE: This post has been obsoleted by SIDA: Moving Object-Oriented Design beyond Model-View-Controller]
I recently read about The DCI Architecture: A New Vision of Object-Oriented Programming, a successor/complement to the original Model–View–Controller design pattern, by one of the original authors. The DCI stand for:
- Data
- Context
- Interaction
To help me sort it all out in my head, I developed a comprehensive picture I call DIDA, which attempts to incorporate both MVC and DCI in a single unified design pattern. DIDA stands for:- Design
- Interface
- Data
- Algorithms
