It’s 2012 and we have big things underway! Plans for the wave tank and the new data collection tools are taking shape.
In the broader world of education, MIT’s new online learning initiative, MITx, is set to launch this year. Here’s a post from Rhett Allain at Wired with his take on what MITx means for university classes. What do you think it means for free-choice learning?
Sid took some video of Ursula’s release last Friday. You can see it here. Thanks, Sid! You’ll notice that Jordan and Cory take care not to turn their backs to the ocean, but the ocean manages to dump a gallon or so of water on Jordan’s back anyway.
We release our octopuses from Yaquina Bay’s South Jetty, which is just down the road from HMSC. We try to release at high tide, when the octopus has more places to hide and a nice current if he or she wants to swim farther out to sea.
You can see our new external Octocam housing from the overhead “Outside Looking In” cam on the Octocam page. Look at the right side of the tank. The new camera is the small grey object sitting on the base of the tank. Tony built the housing to protect the camera from bumps and to block out the glare, but it also makes a nice aesthetic fit.
The new octopus—Case #11-42, nicknamed “Pearl” pending a formal name—can still be seen on the quarantine cam until she goes out front.
With the holiday season upon us, Santa Claus has been busy. He’s been working at the mall, smiling on billboards, clinging to windows and perching on treetops. With nostalgia in the air and family on our minds, my wife and I have also been busy sharing our childhood experiences of Christmas. The similarities and differences in our experiences of this holiday got me thinking.
I didn’t grow up believing in Santa Claus, at least in the literal sense. I was taught from an early age that Santa Claus was a symbol of everything we do and feel surrounding the holidays. To my parents, this was both a matter of honesty and an opportunity to discuss the importance of everything Santa embodied. Christmas was always a big deal for my family, and Santa was always present along with the Muppets Christmas album and our beloved plastic tree (evergreens are hard to find in Florida).
My wife grew up believing in Santa Claus, and she firmly believes her childhood Christmases were more meaningful as a result. She waited for reindeer, listened for Santa, and is grateful to have grown up believing that—at least once a year—magic could exist. Belief in Santa Claus was a way for her to experience a sense of wonder and possibility that can become difficult to sustain in adulthood.
Do these experiences represent distinct epistemologies passed onto us by our parents? Does Santa Claus tell us something about what kind of knowledge we value? Let us know what your family’s traditions—by no means restricted to the few I have mentioned—have taught you.
Enjoy your holidays, everybody.
I found this article by Paul Marks while browsing New Scientist a few days ago. IKEA is one of several store chains using the Indoor Positioning System (IPS) component of Google Maps to help their shoppers navigate. Marks also discusses some other IPS systems:
“Nokia’s version of IPS, not yet available to consumers, aims for even greater precision. The firm litters buildings of interest with Bluetooth-based radio beacons that switch phones running mapping apps based on GPS to using Bluetooth 4.0 signals once they walk indoors. Because the beacons are at fixed sites and have a short range, they can work out your position to within 30 centimetres – enough to “bookmark” a jacket in a shop window and browse back to it later.” [Link in original]
Will this change the way people relate to, and interact with, their surroundings more than GPS and existing applications such as foursquare already have? Tell us what you think.
Also, if you’re going to IKEA, could you pick up some meatballs for us? Thanks.
Mark and Katie identified a useful model for data collection using the face-recognition system. That model is Dungeons & Dragons. Visitors come with goals in mind, often in groups, and they take on a variety of roles within those groups. D&D and similar role-playing games provide a ready set of rules and procedures for modeling this kind of situation.
In practice, this means the Visitor Center exhibit space will be divided into a grid, with the system recording data based on proximity, direction and attributes of agents (visitors, volunteers and staff) and the grid squares themselves.
For example, the cabinet of whale sculptures inside the front door would occupy a row of “artifact” squares on the grid. Visitor interactions would be recorded accordingly. Interactions with the exhibit would update each visitor’s individual profile to reflect engagement and potential learning. To use only-slightly-more D&D terms, spending time at the whale exhibit would add modifiers to, say, the visitor’s “Biology” and “Ocean Literacy” attributes. The same goes for volunteers and staff members, taking into account their known familiarity with certain material.
Mark and Katie have drafted what is essentially a dungeon map of the VC, complete with actual D&D miniatures. Staff members will even have character sheets, of a sort, to represent their knowledge in specific areas—this being a factor in their interactions with visitors.
In a visitor group scenario Mark walked me through today, the part of the touch pool volunteer was played by what I believe was a cleric of some sort. Mark has happily taken to the role of Dungeon Master.
This all forms a basic framework, but the amount and specificity of data we can collect and analyze in this way is staggering. We can also refer back to the original video to check for specific social interactions and other factors the face-recognition software might have missed.
In other news, Ursula will be released Friday morning. Here’s the word from Jordan:
“Wednesday afternoon the HMSC Husbandry team decided that now is the best time to release Ursula back into the wild. Our octopus from British Columbia is as feisty as ever and we feel that she is in good health. Because of this, we will be preparing Ursula for her journey back to the ocean Friday, December 23, 2011. We invite you to attend starting at 8:30 a.m. in the Visitor Center. We will then proceed to release her off Yaquina’s South Jetty about 9 .a.m.”
Here’s a fascinating piece from Scientific American by Larry Greenemeier. It concerns data-mining software developed by Harvard University and the Broad Institute of M.I.T. and Harvard. The software in question is a component of the Maximal Information-based Nonparametric Exploration (MINE) program.
“The software teases out relationships among data points (potentially millions of them) and measures the strength of these connections. As the researchers report in a paper appearing in the December 16 issue of the journal Science, most data-mining tools used today can either find correlations between data or determine how solid those connections are—few can do both.” [Link in original]
Greenemeier summarizes the results of the program’s initial runs on World Health Organization and Major League Baseball data. Check it out.