Day: October 21, 2000

Don Larson linked to a CNN article about computers in education. The article basically opposes some exposing young children to computers in the school environment. Since I’m going to buy daughter a computer for her fourth birthday, I disagree strongly with the “keep small kids away from computers” line, but on the other hand I’m not very impressed by schools’ use of computers.

To put it bluntly, the problem from my experience isn’t the computers, it’s the schools. The biggest problem is that public schools tend to take the approaches to teaching other subjects that don’t work for those subjects and that really don’t work for computers.

One school district in Michigan, for example, developed an elaborate plan for making children computer literate that started in the earliest grades and went through high school. The problem? The entire curriculum basically involved extensive long-term training in two software packages that are available only on a single platform. I can’t think of a worse way to teach kids about computers.

The big problem is that most computer instruction treats computers as a tool to complete specific tasks rather than a general purpose tool like the encyclopedia or dictionary that kids should have a broad understanding of how to use. A lot of computer instruction that I’ve seen the next door neighbors bring home, for example, goes down to the level of telling kids exactly which menu selection to pick in IE4 or something along those lines.

On the other hand, it is foolish to go to the other extreme and not give young kids access to computers. We’ve got four functioning computers in my home (and several nonfunctioning ones in the basement) and our 3-year-old is intensely curious about them. She regularly asks me to see the pictures of her that are on her web site, and recently became fascinated with watching her mom play The Sims (now she asks mom to show her the “little people” who live inside the computer and “helps” Lisa play the game).

Slashdot linked to this Financial Times story that claims a Scotland-based company has created a complete map of the web. The only problem is that the claims the company makes can’t possibly be true.

The main objections are large technical. A complete page-level map of the web, which they claim to have, would require a huge database — it would certainly be among the largest private databases in the world and it is extremely doubtful they could construct and implement such a database a) on their rather low investment funding and b) without anyone noticing before now.

That this is basically marketing hype becomes apparent when the article gets around to describing a form of encryption (well not quite encryption but close),

Finally, Whitelaw demonstrates steganography – the art of concealing text within more text. “Steganography is considered the third biggest threat to US security after biological and chemical attack,” he says.

If I encode a love letter to my wife in a JPEG of my daughter, I’m the third biggest threat to US security? In fact most of the steganography schemes I’ve run across aren’t really sophisticated enough to hide the hidden message. Especially when you’re talking about concealing a plaintext message within another plaintext message — it’s usually pretty easy to distinguish between such messages given the artificial constraints they have to operate under (this is also why watermarking with audio files to prevent piracy has been such a bust — it is not trivial to hide one message into another, different message).

This looks like a company hoping to make a killing by selling to gullible police forces (which is a redundancy) and corporations.

I had a not so good night last night (bad dreams), but all that changed thanks to Seth Dillingham who had me howling in laughter with news that Ice-T has joined the cast of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit as a cop.

Unlike Seth I think Ice-T can pull off the cop routine (remember “New Jack Hustler”?), but definitely not in a Law & Order style show. Anyone remember the “Players” show that lasted 20 minutes where he played one of three ex-cons who got special assignments working with police? That’s the kind cop you want Ice-T playing.

Quick sidebar: I once got insulted by Ice-T at a concert, though somewhat indirectly. I used to do entertainment reporting for the local newspaper and since I was always an Ice-T fan I wrangled my way to reviewing a concert that turned out to be a real dud — this was right after the Body Count album was out but before “Cop Killer” became a huge national controversy.

Anyway, Ice-T comes out and before kicking off the concert announces that he just talked to a reporter from the paper I worked for who was reviewing the concert who asked him all of these ridiculous questions. Then Ice-T let off a few profanities at the unnamed individual.

Of course the alleged interview never took place and this was just sort of preemptive strike he did in every town. David Lee Roth actually pioneered this technique after Van Halen hit it big and some in the media were criticizing their lifestyle. So Roth would just get on stage and rip into the local press regardless of whether or not he’d actually talked to them.

I guess the idea was that the press was probably going to rip them anyway after the show, so what did they have to lose? Actually I gave Ice-T a good review which didn’t go over well with my boss who wanted to make the story about Ice-T’s bizarre tirade rather than whether or not the concert was any good.