Tuesday, March 19, 2013

The Kind of School I Would Like to See

A big problem with schools is that the free market gets flipped on its head. Students rarely get to choose their teachers. When they do, the choice is made primarily on the easiness of getting an A. Even if a student does choose a teacher for being good at teaching, the teacher is not rewarded. Ultimately, there is little competition among teachers whose salaries are based primarily upon seniority.

In a system that does not reward good teaching, there won't be many good teachers. I would like to see a school where each teacher chooses the price for their course and is paid for each student that elects to take it. They pay the school a fee for the use of its resources, but keep the rest as profit. 

One problem with this system is that students will still choose their classes based on easiness. The only way to give students the right incentive is to eliminate the GPA and "degree." Instead, each course should be treated separately. Each teacher chooses their own grading method: percent, letter grade, pass fail, position in class, or even no grade at all. There are no mandatory courses. Maybe, a standardized test is given by each department as a requirement for graduation, but nothing else. 

A problem is then: what do the graduates show potential employers? That is the hard part. In the current system, there is a nice, simple number that they can show off. In my imaginary school, the employers will have to look at a complicated list of courses with a variety of different grading methods. Maybe, resources will develop that help potential employers to assess graduates. Maybe, not. I don't know the answer.

In the end, what I want is not really a school, but a market of learning. I want to to transform the school into a grocery store where the staff members are employees, the teachers are food brands, the courses are food items, and the students are hungry customers.

A flea market is a good analogy too.

Right now, its more like a factory where the teachers are minimum wage employees and the students are well packaged, identical products.

And what is with those graduation hats?! Not the ones in this picture, which are weird too.
Just, graduation hats in general are very strange. And the gowns?...

Counting to 1023 With Your Fingers

Everyone is taught from an early age to count with their fingers. The trouble is that it only works for numbers of 10 or less. Or, does it!...

In fact, anyone with ten fingers can easily use them to count to 1023 ($2^{10} - 1$).

Make two fists. That is zero. Lift only your right thumb: 1 ($2^0$), only right index: 2 ($2^1$), right thumb and right index: 3 ($2^0 + 2^1$), only right middle: 4 ($2^2$), and so on.

This way, any whole number less than 1023 can be represented. Suppose you wanted 783. That would look like:

What? I'm an engineer, not an artist.
 ($783 = 512 + 256 + 8 + 4 + 2 + 1 = 2^9 + 2^8 + 2^3 + 2^2 + 2^1 + 2^0$)

This is probably not the most intuitive way for most people, but that might just be a result of their upbringing. If this was the way you learned to count, I bet it would seem perfectly natural. Either way, it is certainly more useful.

Saturday, March 16, 2013

Giant Roller-Coasters: The Future of Transportation

I was recently on a flight to Colorado for a skiing trip. And although I am always impressed by the defiance of gravity that is human flight, on this occasion I was imagining the possibilities presented by skiing, namely the harnessing of gravity.

The big problem with planes is that they are too slow, inefficient, and unpredictable. The culprit is of course friction. However, there is a way to do with out it. The idea of a vactrain has been around since 1910. Essentially, it is a train that levitates on magnets and runs in a vacuum tube. There would theoretically be no friction and the train could go at extremely high speeds with incredible energy efficiency.

Nice looking train. Too bad shape is completely irrelevant
when there isn't any air resistance...

The question is: how should the train be accelerated and decelerated? If the magnets are used to decelerate the trains, which could be done, a large percentage of the energy would be lost, even with attempts to re-store it. There is a better way to do it though: gravity.

Why not start and end the train high up? Then it will accelerate down one hill to reach a high speed and decelerate up another to stop. That way no energy is ever lost. Basically, I believe that giant roller-coasters are the future of transportation!

(Amazingly, I am not the first to think of this. Who would have thought that using giant roller-coasters in vacuum tubes as a transportation system would be an unoriginal idea? Still, I couldn't resist talking about it a little. Unfortunately though, roller-coasters actually can't go that fast. Even with a drop in altitude of a mile, the train would only reach a speed of about 500 mph. Maybe, a little energy loss isn't that bad after all.)