SimuPad-STEM Education Innovation

LeWeb 2011 Eric Schmidt & Loic Le Meur

2011-12-08T22:35:00.001-08:00

Demo of HoloKlip embeded

2011-12-02T18:09:00.001-08:00

A Box2D demo of a Pendulum Lab running on SimuPad

2011-10-11T20:26:00.001-07:00

This is a skeleton implementation of the PhET Sim for a Pendulum Lab. I am currently buried in work so I haven't finished it yet. Nevertheless it demonstrates the versatility of SimuPad. This lab uses the excellent Box2DFlash library. I manually converted the ActionScript to Javascript (not fun). There is a JS port but it is outdated.

Public Release of SimuPad

2011-03-16T12:58:00.000-07:00

ColaboPad is now SimuPad. It is a development environment for building interactive programs using Javascript/SVG/Html/CSS. Consider SimuPad an HTML5 replacement of flash, though not a complete replacement. Development on the SimuPad platform is browser and cloud based. Below are some examples of applets built on the platform:

Has Google been humbled?

2010-12-05T07:14:00.000-08:00

Oh how much difference a few short years make...I don't work for Google and don't know anyone who does, but I imagine there has to be some discontent within Google about the company's seeming inability to make successful products. It was less than 5yrs ago when Google could do no wrong, they were anointed the smartest guys in the tech game with super human intelligences and insight. There is only one problem with that pronouncement, it hasn't materialized. For a while Google's failures have been attributed to having too much of an engineering-focused culture, this explanation in retrospect appears to have been quite charitable. The simple fact that is becoming glaringly clear is that Google was never as brilliant as was suggested, and I think no company is. Anyone remembers the legendary Google job interview questions? Yeah.

As the late great Notorious B.I.G. so eloquently put it: "Never get high off your own supply". Google got drunk off its own Kool-aid and as anyone in the hood knows, it is never pretty when the crack-dealer becomes the crack-head, you go from being part of the most revered group in the hood to being part of the most maligned.

The fact that a number of Google's large acquisitions have been companies whose technical prowess is less than stellar (Double Click, Youtube, Interest in Groupon) perhaps proves the foolishness of Google's early focus on job candidates who knew the solution to the "four color theorem".

Google is clearly in no danger as far as its core search/advertising business goes but if they don't do some serious self-evaluation they are going to find themselves being increasingly irrelevant in the tech space and continually bidding truck-loads of money for no-name companies who have better ideas and execution. Soon someone would come out with a better Gmail and Google is going to find itself bidding billions of dollars for another small startup.

My advise to Google, put down the silly programming questions and start looking for workers who know that the ultimate value of technology is what you can do with it not what the technology can do. If there is no alignment between what a piece of technology does and what I would like to do, it has no value to me. In other words it is time to start getting some real humans on your payroll who understand the needs of other humans, so far the algorithm has failed you.

Who should pay for college?

2010-09-02T20:53:00.000-07:00

For some time now I have thought about the cost of higher education and who should be paying it. Obviously the answer to this question would be “whoever is the beneficiary should also pay the cost”, fair enough. But then the question becomes, who's the beneficiary of an educated population/workforce? A naive and short-sighted response would be to say the person acquiring the education, but is that really the case? Clearly society as a whole benefits from an educated population, it can be stated without much argument that societies with higher literacy and education levels fair much better than those without. My focus however is on the tangible benefits of education especially as it relates to the workforce. I would assert that the two biggest beneficiaries are cooperations/employers and the government who collects taxes from the labor of an educated workforce. To some this might seem like a radical notion, it is considered almost axiomatic to associate higher education with higher earning potential and as such directly equate the benefits of higher education with higher earnings. But this is a mis-characterization of the fact and I suspect a willful one. Take for instance the case of a construction worker or a plumber, while these professions might not require a four year degree (not too many jobs really do!), there is still a good deal of skill acquisition required in order to do these jobs. However here is an interesting observation, when a construction worker brings home his paycheck, no one looks at it and says that their paycheck is a reflection of the benefit of their education/skills! It is automatically acknowledged that the paycheck is a reflection of their labor, ie they are being paid for their work. Yet work that requires higher education is almost never given such acknowledgment, instead every piece of research you find out there would compare education with earnings, as if all one has to do is get a college degree and they can stay home and collect money indefinitely!

Going back to my point and earlier question of who should pay, if you accept the fact that as a college graduate I am being paid not for my education but rather for my work, then all of a sudden education seizes to be the perceptual benefit it is often presented as being. This issue becomes even more troublesome when you consider that a good deal of college graduates would spend 10-15 yrs paying for their education, well after they have left college. Put simply, this is a scam, as a society we are being taken for a ride both by our government and our employers. There is a reason why historically skill was acquired through apprenticeship. The employer took up the responsibility of training the worker because this is simply a cost of doing business. Not to dehumanize the worker, but a worker to an employer is a resource. Just as a machine needs to be prepped and maintained to produce so too must an employee be trained. Because employers aren't capable of providing the kind of education needed to perform many skilled work in today's environment, that responsibility has shifted to colleges and universities, the problem is that the cost of this service went from being a cost to the employer to becoming a cost incurred by the student.

An even more insidious aspect of the current situation is that parents have been pulled into this scam. Parents have gone from having to provide guardianship and affection to their children to now being expected to mortgage their retirements to pay for college. This predatory scheme is obviously based on every parent's sense of obligation to equip their children for the best opportunities possible.
Besides buying a million dollar house in the middle of the Arizona desert on a sub-prime mortgage it is hard to imagine a more lousy investment than paying for your kids college education. The exception is if you can clearly afford it, in which case it should be considered as merely an expensive gift otherwise it is a bad idea on so many levels that I am surprised it ever became such a common expectation of parental responsibility. When you mortgage your retirement to pay for Junior's college degree what do you expect to get out of it? Sure Junior would graduate with his political science degree but then he'll be living three thousand miles away too busy being an employee to even checkup on you to make sure you are safe at home and haven't triggered a "Silver Alert" on the New Jersey turnpike (in a less PC-world this would be called "Senile Alert", but I digress).

The cost to students goes beyond just tuition. If one considers the fact that by age 16 most people while not fully matured are still capable of being quite productive; additionally considering that the pursuit of a college education means most individuals would not enter the workforce until around age 22; then there is about 6yrs of lost earnings in addition to tuition cost and of course the interest paid on debt incurred. Bottom line is that the more one assesses this issue the more it stinks. Take for example the fact that a college degree has become a required piece of paper for so many jobs. Do you think if employers had to pay the cost for this education they would continue to demand it for every paper-pushing job out there? Basically employers have no skin in the game (so to speak), it doesn't hurt them to demand a four year degree for a job that clearly doesn't require one.

Now don't get me wrong, this is not a rant against the merit of a college education. My argument is that for most of us a college education is simply a longer and more rigorous version of an apprenticeship and we should not be made to shoulder the cost while our employers simply have to sit pretty and read our resumes. It is time for our employers to start paying for the skills they demand of their workers. To a certain extent society as whole including our government should bear this cost.

In any case I am not an economist so I can only make common sense arguments. I am disappointed and quite frankly surprised that this isn't much of an issue in our socio-political debates.

On early-stage hiring at tech startups

2010-08-29T11:35:00.000-07:00

Recently I was wondering about the disjoint between the high-minded message that hot startups engage in versus how they actually behave. Specifically regarding early stage hiring practices. We all know there is no better time to join a high flying tech startup than when it is pre-IPO. However when one examines how recent alumni (Google et al) of this group hire you see a really exclusive clique-based hiring approach that is quite contrary to their often parroted motto. Often they limit their hiring to include only graduates from elite academic institutions and other high-flying professionals. Of course the justification is that they need the very best at this early stage of development to maintain momentum. My question is: how much of the work that goes on in these companies really require everyone to have an MIT quality education? It would seem to me that besides the handful of people responsible for strategy and vision, everyone else merely needs to be competent at what they do. Am I to believe that the rest of the working population that didn't go to these top-notch schools cannot be relied upon to write working java/javascript code? or make nice looking marketing brochures? The effect of this practice is to essentially give more opportunity to people who've already had a good deal of it. There aren't too many poor rural/urban kids at places like Stanford/MIT/Harvard...etc. Most of the grads of these schools come from already privileged backgrounds and by just graduating from these institutions they are pretty much guaranteed a lifetime of excellent opportunities, so it is quite disappointing to see these tech startups just keep on piling on the goodies for them. Interesting thing is that post-IPO is often when they start parroting about diversity, when the best part of working at the company has been dished out and many earlier employees become over-night millionaires. I guess they figured at that point merely having "employees" is enough to keep the ship sailing. I am sure if you observe facebook you'll find a similar pattern, once they are 5yrs post-IPO then they'll start sending recruiters to HBCUs:)

On the joys of creativity as a software developer.

2009-12-16T16:23:00.000-08:00

First, it is important to separate the two types of software developers, those for whom writing code is merely a path to a paycheck (nothing wrong with that) and those of us who devote more time beyond 9-5 to personal projects. For the former the paycheck is enough, for the latter I find that generally there are four sources/levels of satisfaction that comes from creativity:

Realization of vision:
So you are sitting around day-dreaming and suddenly an idea pops into your head for some great (in your opinion of course) software product. Or it could simply be functionality you need but can't quite find in existing products. When you actually get over the inertia of shooting-up your IDE and doing all that grunt work that makes up most of the effort of creativity, and you see the result of what you had envisioned functioning exactly the way you had envisioned, you experience the first level of satisfaction.

Using your own creation:
I have written a lot of software and rarely do I create something that I personally find truly useful. But every so often I do create something that I actually find quite useful and use frequently, there is something magical about the self-sustainability of living off your own creation, in our modern world it is something most people will never experience.

With ColaboPad I experienced joy 2 in one of my MBA classes. I used it to draw the following graphical solution for linear programming:

Hopefully an 'A' is in the works:)

Seeing others use your creation:
This is satisfaction one gets from having your vision, thought and knowledge validated. It says your expertise is valuable and it isn't just your opinion.

My recent experience of this Joy: I am an audiophile and needed a tool that I could use as a web-based remote for my wireless music setup, the result is rythmote which I use regularly.

Making money from your creation:
Now you may not be in it for the money,again nothing wrong either way. However, there is something special about being able to get someone to part with their money in return for something you created!

This joy is what I am ultimately aiming for with ColaboPad, I think the software is solid enough to be able to get paid for it, I just need to work on my sales pitch:)

Official launch of Colabopad

2009-11-17T10:26:00.000-08:00

I will be using this blog to get questions and feedback from users..

****Questions or Comments?***: