What I Learned Today

It is time, at last, to look for a new car. For the first time in a decade, I started looking into what the current interesting automotive options are. I have many friends who own Priuses, and naturally an energy-efficient machine appeals to me. But I’ve discovered that in 2013 there is a much wider range of options beyond Toyota.

Electric cars! No longer a sci-fi fantasy or an option reserved for the super-rich, electric cars are out there on the roads today. A great starting point for learning more about the options, considerations, map of charging stations, etc., is pluginamerica.org. With that under my belt, I decided to go for some test drives.

My first stop was at the Nissan Dealership. The all-electric Leaf is comfortingly familiar (I already drive a Nissan) and really, I must say, quite charming. The visibility out the back feels a little more constrained than in my current Sentra, but this seems (puzzlingly) to be a common design feature of newer car models. Our test drive was in the top-trimline Leaf SL, featuring leather seats, with front AND rear seat heaters (!), a “Photovoltaic Solar-Panel Rear Spoiler” (a roof-mounted solar panel that provides power for your car accessories!), and the CARWINGS® phone app to let you remotely check the battery status, schedule charging, turn on the AC before you go out to the car, and other amazing stuff.

Driving the Leaf was a delight. Electric motors have more torque at lower speeds, and the vehicle’s acceleration from a stoplight was a real pleasure. (Of course, I am comparing it to my manual transmission ’99 Nissan Sentra experience.) I didn’t get to test highway-speed passing (which might not be as powerful since the electric motor has much less torque at high speeds) because the freeway was clogged with Los Angeles weekend traffic.

The dashboard interface was surprisingly simple. Left: engine temperature; right: charge and estimated range; top: are you regenerating power (braking) or consuming it (accelerating)?

The mini-dash at the top shows speed, time, and temperature, plus a cryptic icon meter on the left. This turns out to be your visual feedback about how “eco-friendly” your driving is. When you minimize braking and accelerating, a little “tree” progressively grows there, starting from a little bare trunk and then adding branches. If you finish growing one tree, it is saved on the lower right (1up!) and you start growing the next one. Apparently the number of trees you grow is stored for the lifetime of the vehicle. It is probably accessible with the CARWINGS app and coming to a social media site near you.

I was puzzled by the tree metaphor. When I asked about it, the salesperson said, “Each tree represents a tree that you saved by driving a Leaf.” I asked, “But wouldn’t it make more sense to use barrels of oil or something? Cars don’t run on trees.” Him: “No, it’s because of CO2 emissions, you know?” Because CO2 kills trees? What?

I really enjoyed the driving experience. The only thing I didn’t like was that I couldn’t seem to adjust the rear-view mirror. The salesperson advised me to adjust the height of my *seat* to make the rear-view mirror show the right field. Weird.

Here are the Leaf’s vital statistics:

Next I visited the Chevy dealership to try out a Volt. The Volt is not an electric car. It is a plug-in hybrid, meaning it has a small electric battery that it can run on for a while, plus a gas engine that kicks in when you run out of battery charge or you need extra acceleration or you get over 70 mph. As such, it seems to be a better practical solution than the Leaf: you get increased reliability, increased performance, increased range, but the car still burns (some) gas, and you’ll pay another $10k for it.

The Volt also felt very nice to drive, but I didn’t like it as much as the Leaf. Probably because they needed to fit a gas engine and a battery into a standard car package, they abandoned the center rear seat and instead use that space to store the battery under/in the car. That seemed fine to me. However the dashboard is a confusing barrage display with odd choices about how much real estate is given to different items.

In front of the steering wheel is something that looks like this:

Left is charge/range; middle is speed and a bunch of cluttery icons; right is the mysterious green sphere. This sphere is the equivalent of the Leaf’s growing trees, except you don’t accumulate anything. Instead you are instructed to use it as a feedback device. If the green sphere floats up, you are accelerating. If it goes down, you are braking. Your mission is to keep it in the middle, i.e., do nothing. Since I already know when I’m accelerating or braking, as I’m the one doing it, it was hard to see how this adds anything useful.

Some other green sphere that I never decoded is reproduced in the default view on the big navigation screen in the center console:

Here are the Volt’s vital statistics:

In summary, I liked the Leaf a lot more, but the Volt would be a more practical solution. A 75-mile range, after which you must spend 6-12 hours recharging your car (although apparently with the right charger you can get to 80% capacity in 30 minutes), would be very constraining as the only car in a household (great as a second car, though!). Nissan is offering some other nice incentives to woo the nervous customer, including free roadside assistance and several days of free (regular) car rentals for those times that the Leaf won’t suffice (roadtrips?). I also don’t know enough about how available the charging stations scattered around the city are. (On the up side, charging is free paid for by the government.)

But that’s not all! There’s more research to be done. I still want to try out the Prius as well as the new plug-in Prius, and may also sample the Honda Fit EV, the Ford Focus EV, and the Honda Civic hybrid.

I read Douglas Rushkoff’s book, Program or Be Programmed with a mixture of fascination and criticism. I didn’t agree with every argument (e.g., that computer networks have no notion of time; many internet protocols use timestamps to ensure reliable communication), but each chapter gave me something to wrestle with mentally, and the book as a whole made me see various aspects of my life (interacting with technology) in a new light. Rushkoff’s thesis takes a historical view of how new technology penetrates society gradually, and those who develop the ability to manipulate and create, rather than just to use and consume, are the ones in control. Arguing from examples based on the development of writing, print, and electronic media, he notes that for us today, it’s the ability to program that gives us control over the new technological world, and that (somewhat chillingly) willful or accidental ignorance about the motives of Those Who Program may cause you to execute their Program without even knowing it.

This great, short video lets Rushkoff summarize his points in two minutes flat:

I am already a “programmer,” in that I have programming skills, but even so I consume most of what’s on the net as a user, rather than getting out there and being actively involved myself. Programming is what I do at work. On the other hand, I’ll never forget the thrill I experienced when I first contributed to an Open Source project. My art, my creation, uploaded into the ether after building on, complementing, and extending the work of complete strangers! And who knew where others might take it! It was like Free Love, but in C.

But after reading his book, I couldn’t help but think a while about what built-in biases about how various technologies work are shaping my own thoughts, habits, and ability to create.

This point, however, is the tenth of his 10 commandments. The earlier ones have value too; it never hurts to get another reminder of the value of not always being “on”/”connected,” and of being present in the here and the now.

I’ve been experimenting with some of the new massively multiplayer online course offerings from Coursera. In the spring, I took Cryptography, and I am now taking Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World. These courses are offered for free, for anyone who wants to take them. I’ve been curious about the (eventual) business model, since there will have to be some way to recoup the investment in web site architecture and content. The lectures do seem to be “record once, replay forever”, but it’s still a big effort to do up front.

One way they’ve kept the ongoing costs reasonable, though, is by offloading one of the biggest time consumers in traditional education: grading. The Cryptography course was conducted in an entirely auto-grading mode. The homeworks each week were a series of multiple-choice or fill-in-the-blank questions. The feedback was actually quite good from these exercises — if you got something wrong, there might be a clue as to where to look, and if you got it right, there was usually an explanation, which you could learn from if you’d just gotten lucky with your choice. Further, you could attempt each homework 4 times, a process designed to encourage “mastery” (progressive learning). I know what you’re thinking. Four tries on a multiple-choice test should basically ensure you get 100%, since you could explore all possible options. Not so! They’ve made the process more sophisticated, producing a new mixture of answers for each question each time you attempt it. You really do have to think through the problems each time. I approve.

The F&SF class is different. Our assignments consist of 300-word essays, which can’t be auto-graded (with any real reliability). First I must note that I found WRITING a 300-word essay to be particularly challenging. How can you say anything of substance in 300 words? How can you call out something of interest in a 400-page book using only 300 words? But, as in haiku, the limitations of the medium are themselves a spur to inspiration. So then, how to grade them? Coursera has adopted a peer grading strategy, in which you are assigned to grade a random set of your classmates’ essays, and your essay correspondingly is sent to a random set of peers to be graded. In this class, we’re required to grade four peers, but allowed to grade more. The grading itself is very coarse: you assign one score for Form (grammar, organization, etc.) and one for Content. Each can be given a score of 1 (poor), 2 (average), or 3 (exceptional). You are also required to provide some text feedback.

So far, I found the grades I received from my peers to be fair, but I don’t think I’ve learned much from them. Most of the feedback was compliments, with a few rather surface-level critiques, rather than the kind of feedback you’d get from a professor or TA. But one reason for this is the bizarre organization of this particular class. You are required to do the reading, write an essay blind (on no suggested topic, simply something that “will enrich the reading of an intelligent, attentive fellow student”), and only THEN are you permitted to view the professor’s videos with his analysis of the readings. Perhaps this is intended to reduce “bias” from the instructor, but ultimately all it does is set you up to be evaluated tabula rasa (with respect to the course content), so I don’t see how the assessment has anything to do with what you have learned. These should be pre-tests rather than the sum of the grade. With the current scheme, the lectures themselves unfortunately become less of a priority, because by the time they’re available, you should already be moving on to read and plan an essay on the next reading. That’s a shame, because Dr. Rabkin is clearly a thoughtful and knowledgeable source. I’ve found most of his lectures to be interesting and thought-provoking (even though I disagree violently with some of his analysis of Grimm’s Fairy Tales! Ugh!). So, two weeks in, I’m not very enamored of this kind of peer grading. I hope Coursera continues to experiment with new strategies.

You can check out Coursera’s statement of pedagogy in which they explain their design choices and include references to some external work on their efficacy. It’s mostly reasonable arguments. I’m on board with the mastery learning comment, for example. However, I found the argument for peer grading to be weaker. The main motivation (never articulated) has got to be the challenge of providing feedback for thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of students, which is a scaling issue. Instead they cite research on the benefits of peer review, which are valid, but I think never intended to be the SOLE source of feedback for students, and the strengths of crowd-sourcing, which depends on large numbers for reliability, which four random grades from others in the class don’t provide. I’m not asserting that this is an invalid method of instruction, but I’m not convinced by the evidence they’ve offered.

In working through these courses, I’ve already gotten ideas for how I would experiment creatively with this new teaching medium. Watching slides is boring. Watching a talking head is boring. I love, however, the occasional pauses that require you to answer a question (pop quiz!) to proceed. It’s great for capturing attention that may have been wandering. The Cryptography class made good use of these. The F&SF class doesn’t use them at all. If I were teaching, I’d also bring in props or direct students to relevant websites or otherwise increase the level of activity and interactivity as much as possible. Right now, the only interaction in the F&SF course is through the essays (anonymized) and the discussion forums (which no one can keep up with). I’d like to foster more interaction with the professor, without inundating that person. I think well crafted video lectures can improve on this front.

It never occurred to me to wonder where Motorola got its name. Recently, I heard this fascinating tidbit and followed up — it appears to be true!

From Motorola’s own timeline:

In 1930 Galvin Manufacturing Corporation introduced the Motorola radio, one of the first commercially successful car radios. Company founder Paul V. Galvin created the brand name Motorola for the car radio — linking “motor” (for motorcar) with “ola” (which implied sound). Thus the Motorola brand meant sound in motion.

Today, Motorola’s cell (mobile) phones give a whole new meaning to “sound in motion.”

There was a time before the Internet—and it wasn’t that long ago. Consider excerpts of this 1984 article from the Whole Earth Catalog, titled “Telecommunicating”:

Someday everybody will communicate by computer, according to an emerging army of dreamers.
[…]
Less expensive than national networks are local bulletin boards […] To give an example of the bulletin boards’ power; David Hughes of Colorado Springs entered onto his computer bulletin board the text of a pernicious city council bill outlawing professional work at home. Instead of tracking the bill down at City Hall, residents could dial in at their convenience and read the bill at home. Within a week, Hughes had gathered enough angry readers to storm the next city council meeting and influence council members to defeat the measure.
[…]
Programs are finally emerging that treat telecommunicating as a human activity instead of a technical obstacle course.

So much so that we don’t even use the term “telecommunicating” at all. We’re just communicating.

NPR’s Science Friday broadcast an episode in 1993 called “The Future of the Internet” that is well worth the listen. The episode itself made history by being broadcast on the Internet, instead of just by radio. Today, the topics and the way they are covered sound so… quaint. Compuserve! WAIS?

The opinions being expressed are enthusiastic, sometimes prescient, and other times (from today’s perspective) naive. “I found a complete archive of jokes on the Internet in under an hour!” “The magic number is 64,000 bits per second.”

Ira: “Let’s make it clear to everyone listening that you’re not on a telephone, are you?”
Caller Tom: “No, I’m sitting in front of a workstation, with a microphone…”

I did like the discussion of “information anxiety” (they had that back then too? ;) ) over the “glut” of information available (from the 420 different databases WAIS was indexing. Oh, my word.).

“One of the things we’re doing is learning how to ignore information, and that’s one of the most important things the Internet will let you do. […] You want your machine to be working for you … finding the right stuff. There’s just way too much out there already. So going and filtering through, searching, finding just the issues that you care about — your machine is starting to know a lot about you. It knows what you like, what you don’t like, what you’ve read, what you didn’t read.”

I wish we could say we’ve solved that problem now! Even with RSS feeds, collaborative filtering, and various learning systems, I still feel inundated by all there is to read, and without a good solution for sorting and prioritizing it. Email alone…!