“There are three things that we need to focus on as a growing organization: scalability, scalability, and scalability”. If you’re like me, you’ve heard that line at least once. The pace of modern social and technological change is staggering. Most of us struggle just to maintain balance and not be swept away by the tsunami. …
Author Archives: scidata
Foundations
Building a solid foundation in the early years of a child’s life will not only help him or her reach their full potential but will also result in better societies as a whole.– Novak Djokovic I’m not a starry-eyed Isaac Asimov fan-boy. He had his warts. But his life mattered in the big scheme …
Adam Smith Loves Gridcoin
I’m a fan of Paul Krugman. This is not due to his economic or political views (although I always enjoyed it whenever he and George Will would square off on Sunday morning TV), or even to his 2008 Nobel Prize in economics. Rather, it is because Krugman owes, like I do, much of his life …
The picoXpert Story
picoXpert was one of the first (if not THE first) handheld artificial intelligence (AI) tools ever. It provided for the capture of human expert knowledge and later access to that knowledge by general users. It was a simplistic, yet portable implementation of an Expert System Shell. Here is the brief story of how it came …
Microsoft, Minecraft, and AI: Project Malmo
In a previous post, I complimented Microsoft on their purchase of Minecraft. I ruminated on the potential for STEM and experiential learning it opens up, particularly with the addition of HoloLens and augmented reality. Recently, Microsoft announced the public availability of their Project Malmo platform that uses Minecraft to provide an interactive environment for development …
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Learning does not mirror Teaching
An implicit assumption in most educational infrastructure is that teaching and learning are closely similar processes, perhaps even mirror images of each other. In the abstract at least, there is a transfer of knowledge from teacher to learner. It’s even possible that once a learner has assimilated enough taught knowledge, they could ‘switch polarity’ and …
Institutional Citizen Science
Personnel motivation and esprit de corps have always been important in any organization. Citizenship and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) have sometimes become as important to the brand as the trade name or logo. For many reasons, it is wise to consider institutional citizen science. Traditionally, participation in citizen science projects has been done at the …
Forth: A Syntonic Language
Educators sometimes hold up an ideal of knowledge as having the kind of coherence defined by formal logic. But these ideals bear little resemblance to the way in which most people experience themselves. The subjective experience of knowledge is more similar to the chaos and controversy of competing agents than to the certitude and orderliness …
The Asimovian Epoch
Centuries past are like the long night, a mysterious dream world. The modern, networked Earth is like daybreak, a world-wide awakening. The fifty years 1945-1995 could be considered as a sort of ‘twilight zone’ between the two. The bulk of thinking and research done during this period is too new to be of any great …
Microsoft, Minecraft, and STEM
Microsoft recently bought Mojang AB, the Swedish company that makes Minecraft, for a reported $2.5 billion. It was not Microsoft’s first attempt to woo Mojang, and many thought they would never be able to close the deal. In 2009, Markus Persson (‘Notch’), an unknown independent Swedish game developer, released the first version of his creation, …