Education Links

To see my list of education publications, companies, apps, games, etc., go to my website here: https://sites.google.com/site/themarrowoffrances/links/education

Contributions welcome!

5 Great Options for Edu-Tech Funding

"Education is a more than $1 trillion market where innovations can produce massive benefits to the world and also create huge change in the lives of individuals." 

                                 – Bo Fishback, VP of Entrepreneurship at the Kauffman Foundation

The growing ubiquity of internet access and the spread of tablets have greatly expanded the market for learning products, putting educational programs once again in the limelight. But education’s a tough field to break into, not just financially, but also for getting users and finding ways into notoriously bureaucratic school systems. Fortunately, the increased potential of technology-supported education has seeded numerous ventures focused on catalyzing educational start-ups. To help you get there, I’ve chosen 5 great options for edu-tech funding and support:

Links:

• Imagine k12
• Startl's Accelerator Program (in partnership with DreamIt Ventures)
• TechStars
• Kauffman Labs Educational Ventures
• Milken-Penn Business Plan Competition

HPR Info graphics

Here are three info graphics I made for the Harvard Political Review!

Hot or Not? Princeton mathematicians

Currently reading "A Beautiful Mind" by Sylvia Nasar, a biography on John Nash: mathematician, Nobel Prize winner for his pioneering work on game theory, and schizophrenic. 

I love biographies. They read like creative fiction, without the ensuing guilt trip of consuming too much frivolous fluff. Catering to our natural superficiality, biographical authors typically go all out in vivid, exaggerated descriptions of their real-life characters. Sylvia Nasar does not disappoint. If the world was as described as in "A Beautiful Mind", Princeton University's math department in the 1950's would have been a godly haven of brilliant Adonises, their stunning good looks matched only by their ridiculously high intellect. Should I devote my life to inventing a time machine or are Ms. Nasar's depictions overly embellished? Let's investigate!

1. John Forbes Nash, Jr. 

      "Six foot one, he weighed nearly 170 pounds. He had broad shoulders, a heavily muscled chest, and a tapered waist. He had the build, if not the bearing, of an athlete, "a very strong, very masculine body," one fellow graduate student recalled. He was, moreover, "handsome as a god," according to another student. His high forehead, somewhat protruding ears, distinctive nose, fleshy lips, and small chin gave him the look of an English aristocrat...He wore his fingernails very long, which drew attention to his rather limp and beautiful hands and long, delicate fingers...His speech had an Olympian and ornamental quality..." (pg. 62)

"Handsome as a god"? Yes, please. Let's see a picture:

Not exactly how I imagined gods to look like, but hey, I'm picky. Sylvia Nasar clearly needs a new editor: Nash's ears are not slightly protruding. They are protruding. Eh, I can't fault Nasar for the description much though: most of those overly flattering descriptions are from his own classmates. To each his own, I suppose!

In an effort to keep this post a tad (tad) bit intellectual, here are some interesting tidbits about Nash you might not have known:

• Nash never won the Putnam or made it to the top five. This would bother him for life: he believes this lack of recognition caused Harvard, his top choice for graduate school, to insufficiently value him, and to this day continues to identify mathematicians by the frequency of times they won the Putnam. 
• Princeton, where Nash ended up attending, became the prominent location for mathematics in the United States virtually overnight. Prior to the 1940's, mathematics and physics were overlooked in the U.S.: famous physicist Willard Gibbs was refused a salary for seven years by Yale on the grounds that his studies were "irrelevant" and American students had to go to Europe for any advanced mathematical schooling. The sponsorship by the Rockefeller Foundation and $25 million fortune from New Jersey department store owners created a fat balance, allowing Princeton to bring a slew of famous mathematicians, including Albert Einstein. 
• At Princeton, Nash and fellow graduate mathematicians received "a maximum of pressure but a wonderful minimum of bureaucracy." Grades were completely arbitrary, there were no course requirements, and classes could be skipped without punishment; however, if the faculty decided an individual couldn't make the cut, he could be quickly dropped from the school.
• "Nash appeared to be interested in almost everything mathematical...Yet he avoided attending classes. No one recalls sitting in a regular class with him...Nobody remembers seeing Nash with a book during his graduate career either...Nash's main mode of picking up information he deemed necessary consisted of quizzing various faculty members and fellow students." (pg. 68)
• Why didn't he like reading books, you might ask? He thought that learning too much secondhand would stifle creativity and originality; "He was obsessed with learning from scratch." 

Next, we have Emil Artin, Professor at Princeton and a critic of young Nash: he found Nash "irritatingly brash" and "shockingly ignorant". Artin was apparently one of the leading algebraists of the century. According to Ms. Nasar, he was also "slender, handsome, with ice-blue eyes and a spellbinding voice." Oh, and he looked "like a 1920s German matinee idol" with a "gaunt, elegant body." Hmm. Picture?

Ms. Nasar is proven wrong again: his eyes are not ice-blue, but in fact a sort of brownish gray, or, more accurately, a sort of grayish brown. Clearly, he is suffering acutely from some strange malady, as his skin, lips, and hair have also attained that curious color. 

We must proceed. Time machines take a lifetime to create, after all. We lastly have John Milnor, a dazzlingly brilliant young mathematician. Winner of the Putnam Prize three times, he was one of the select few that Nash viewed highly enough to engage in conversation with. Not only that, he was, in the words of Ms. Nasar, "tall, lithe, with a baby face and the body of a gymnast"; "the department's golden boy." (pg. 72)

Let's see how he fares!:

I really cannot, for the life of me, recall babies having so much facial hair. Admittedly, my memory is remarkably bad. As for Milnor: one eye seems to be looking at me, and the other past me, and the effect is quite unsettling. 

All in all, I have to say, after graduating with a slew of modern Harvard men, the old-fashioned Princeton ones are good eye candy. If not for their dreary pallor (gray was clearly "in"), I'd be raring to do some time travelling, asap!

Insipidity

Hello! I have been quite busy lately so I haven't had time to write another entry. Heh heh. Actually, that's only part of the truth. The other part of the truth is, there's only so much writing a girl (or boy) can take! Unless you're a writing fanatic, of course. Then, hats off to you! In my defense, I wrote a guest blog entry  on IT Valley on Microsoft's gaming division, and though it doesn't seem like it, that took a lot of time and a good amount of research. I may look like an uber gamer who speaks l33t language in my sleep**, but actually, I haven't played many games since I started college. I have also been writing a philosophy paper, which brings me such joy I can often hardly contain my tears. Seriously, if I didn't have a Lenovo, all of which are equipped with waterproof(!) keyboards, where else would I pour out my emotions? Though, I've gotta say, reading philosophy can drive me crazy sometimes, but some of the reading is awesome: "In guarding their fortune men are often closefisted, yet, when it comes to the matter of wasting time, in the case of the one thing in which it is right to be miserly, they show themselves most prodigal." *strokes (invisible) beard pensively* Very true, Seneca the Younger, very true. 

So! I have nothing to really show for myself, so I'll just post up part of a homework assignment I did recently for my Global Health and Nutrition class. It's a page on Iodine, which is really important for your body. Iodine deficiency is the most preventable cause for mental retardation, and has terrible side effects like cretinism and goiters. A lot of people are not getting enough iodine; this was partly salvaged in America due to the iodization of table salt, but it's becoming more of a problem because most salt is actually not iodized (~70%), even though people now depend on salt as their source of iodine. P.S. Did You Know? I have hyperthyroidism. It's not due to iodine deficiency (it's a genetic condition) and I don't have a goiter or mental incapacities (or do I?), but it does explain why I'm kind of weird and awkward sometimes =).

Getting back to my educational page: I wish I had room on my page for pictures of the diseases, it would have been more memorable. I also wish I had a classier way of designing and coloring things; the colors I choose and the ways I design things are so baby cute; I want to instead be lean, mean, and cool!

** just kidding. I look like a normal girl. NORMAL I TELL YOU

Awesome link: "Mad Libs" Style Form Increases Conversion 25-40%

This article shows how a good interface can really be effective:

Just look at that Sign up form! It's SO AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Whip out your I.D.s!: Informational Design, Instructional Design, and User Interface Design (pt.1)

Note: At first, this may seem a deviation from my focus on educational gaming but read on, dear friend, and enlightenment will come…

(Good karma, and tasty too. These tiny Buddha babies are pears grown within Buddha molds ==  #@$i12-ing awesome!) 

Circuitous Introduction

This semester, I’m taking a class on visualizing data, and it’s been ehh – pretty good. Lectures are overly simple and I have a hard time focusing on them (or going to them, heh heh), but the homework has been really useful: I’ve learned regular expressions, data-scraped a couple of websites, learned the fundamentals of Processing, a Java-based programming language for visual design, and thought of a really killer idea for my final project (Be prepared for May 2010, when my final project finishes development…it will blow your mind and change your dietary habits forever!...or so the current [really lame] marketing slogan goes).  In any case, last week we had to find, critique, and redesign some data visualizations.

As I've seen and learned, the overarching difficulty for a designer is balancing aesthetic consciousness with good design principles and proper expression of data. 

There was one visualization that particularly epitomized this problem. The designer in question? David McCandless, a self-described Information Designer with an interest in “how designed information can help us understand the world, cut through BS and reveal hidden connections, patterns and stories underneath.” Of his many notable accomplishments, McCandless has created a webpage, Information is Beautiful, won numerous awards, been featured all across the Internet, and published a book, The Visual Miscellaneum: A Colorful Guide to the World’s Most Consequential Trivia. Clearly, he’s somewhat of a hot shot. 

Designer focus: David McCandless (McCandles would have been so much cuter.)

There’s no doubt that the McCandless’ work is eye-catching and provocative: the data covers interesting topics (“Haiti Earthquake: Who’s given what?”, “What does China censor online?”, etc.), the colors used are vibrant and varied, and the shapes clean and vectorized. For the aesthetic enthusiast or information junkie, it’s a feast: delectable eye candy drizzled with stimulating brain candy. As a (brutally unscientific) measure of its visual impact, one common reason for purchase is its use as a coffee table decoration, presumably to instantly impress upon guests one’s unique intellectual bent. After all, how better to express your quirky love for knowledge than vibrant data on the time it takes different condiments to spoil? 

Worried about looking stupid in front of a potential love interest? Just put this book on your coffee table and she’ll realize your empty, awkward silences are actually moments of profound, unfathomable intellect.

So far, so good. It's clear that McCandless’ problem does not lie within his choice of content, and it certainly does not lie within his technical and artistic abilities (for they are substantial). What is the culprit then? None other than his fetish for transmogrifying the data so much that the fidelity of the data is destroyed. When the data – the base supporting the visualization’s very existence – is misconstrued, the visualization cannot be trusted and its value falls by a landslide. Quite astonishingly, McCandless is unapologetic for having deceptive visualizations. On the design I analyzed (“The Billion Dollar Gram”), he unabashedly states that there was “a little visual cheating to make everything fit.” Close inspection of the visualization shows obvious anomalies; for example, the area of Facebook’s $15 billion is larger than the area of Online Advertising’s $20 billion:

No no no, the LARGER rectangle represents the SMALLER amount. What are they teaching you in school these days??

No matter how high up the income ladder you may be, $5 billion is no chump change. This isn’t a data visualization – it’s one of those whacked up psychology tests where you’re seeing one thing and reading another!  

Y..no, Green, Bl-Red, Orange,.......
….I give up.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, there’s another serious problem: what are the numbers for “Facebook” and “Online Marketing” quantifying? Facebook’s net worth? Facebook’s profits? Online advertising’s revenue? The cost online advertising has inflicted on traditional print advertising? Revenue/profits/net worth/costs are HUGELY different. What is the point of looking at a visualization of data if 1) the visualization deceives and 2) the data is incomprehensible? I remind you that this work is from a highly acclaimed, published designer whose mission is to “cut through BS.” 

Maybe BS looks different when you have purple squares magically hovering before your eyes…

(McCandless’ profile pic)

Final thoughts on data visualizations and David McCandless (who hopefully never finds my blog. Or hopefully does. In which case my ego would become very, very large.)

I’m a bit unsure about my final thoughts on McCandless. On one hand, as I’ve stated, I’m really peeved about some of his designs and his disinterest in fixing some huge errors. If McCandless insists on bastardizing the data, then, well, he’s killing the main point of informational design: to inform efficiently and effectively.  It’s not just the deceitful data. McCandless has used design techniques that are clearly NOT optimal for presenting information. For example, the Billion Dollar Gram uses areas to represent amounts (the human mind is not good at measuring area – length is more comprehensible), as well as random colors that create false groupings. On the other hand, through his digital artwork, McCandless has made a lot of information more approachable to people. As someone who sees the potential in using technology to educate, I can’t help but be supportive of this kind of thing. Some of his designs are simply gorgeous, thought provoking, and at the very least, spur some great intellectual discussion online (for an example of one that I liked, see When Sea Levels Attack!).

So, what do you think?
        Do you support McCandless for making information more approachable?
        Or do you think he’s fundamentally wrong for bastardizing the data?


Next time: Front-end vs. Back-end in User Interface Design
Being able to present information clearly and pleasingly while maintaining the fidelity of the data is difficult. It requires an excellent designer who values the data and the user, a designer who doesn’t exploit graphics to enthrall and detract from the lack of usable, factually correct data. That is not to say good graphics are not important; a boring, visually ugly design will garner no interest and will be just as (or even more) useless.

The problem between balancing the front-end (look and feel) versus the back-end (code and data) similarly arises in user interface design, also called interaction design. The value of good user interface design is becoming an increasingly recognized, due in large part to the successes of companies employing user-friendly interfaces (iPod and Google search, to name a few of the most popular). This is a good segway to part 2, in which I will examine the user interface design of applications and programs (including, yes! - educational games). Let’s end with a quote, which we expand on next time. It seems to have been inspired by a cadre of McCandless-like User Interface Designers. Hmm.:

“We often see products that look really good – whose aesthetics are superb – but whose functionality or whose interactivity isn’t adequate. That is not because the product wasn’t designed, but because it was designed by an aesthetic, visual designer rather than by an interaction designer with the tools to master cognitive friction" 

-Alan Cooper, The Inmates are Running the Asylum, pg. 212