Steve Jobs Muses on What’s Wrong with American Education, 1995

in Apple, Education | November 10th, 2011

In late Octo­ber, Com­put­er­world unearthed a lengthy inter­view with Steve Jobs orig­i­nal­ly record­ed back in 1995, when Jobs was at NeXT Com­put­er, and still two years away from his tri­umphant return to Apple. Filmed as part of an oral his­to­ry project, the wide-rang­ing inter­view begins with Jobs’ child­hood and his ear­ly school days, and it all sets the stage for Jobs to muse on the state of pub­lic edu­ca­tion in Amer­i­ca. He began:

I’d like the peo­ple teach­ing my kids to be good enough that they could get a job at the com­pa­ny I work for, mak­ing a hun­dred thou­sand dol­lars a year. Why should they work at a school for thir­ty-five to forty thou­sand dol­lars if they could get a job here at a hun­dred thou­sand dol­lars a year? Is that an intel­li­gence test? The prob­lem there of course is the unions. The unions are the worst thing that ever hap­pened to edu­ca­tion because it’s not a mer­i­toc­ra­cy. It turns into a bureau­cra­cy, which is exact­ly what has hap­pened. The teach­ers can’t teach and admin­is­tra­tors run the place and nobody can be fired. It’s ter­ri­ble.

Asked what changes he would make, Jobs con­tin­ued:

I’ve been a very strong believ­er in that what we need to do in edu­ca­tion is to go to the full vouch­er sys­tem. I know this isn’t what the inter­view was sup­posed to be about but it is what I care about a great deal.… The prob­lem that we have in this coun­try is that [par­ents] went away. [They] stopped pay­ing atten­tion to their schools, for the most part. What hap­pened was that moth­ers start­ed work­ing and they did­n’t have time to spend at PTA meet­ings and watch­ing their kids’ school. Schools became much more insti­tu­tion­al­ized and par­ents spent less and less and less time involved in their kids’ edu­ca­tion. What hap­pens when a cus­tomer goes away and a monop­oly gets con­trol … is that the ser­vice lev­el almost always goes down.

And so the answer. Vouch­ers, entre­pre­neur­ship and mar­ket com­pe­ti­tion:

I’ve sug­gest­ed as an exam­ple, if you go to Stan­ford Busi­ness School, they have a pub­lic pol­i­cy track; they could start a school admin­is­tra­tor track. You could get a bunch of peo­ple com­ing out of col­lege tying up with some­one out of the busi­ness school, they could be start­ing their own school. You could have twen­ty-five year old stu­dents out of col­lege, very ide­al­is­tic, full of ener­gy instead of start­ing a Sil­i­con Val­ley com­pa­ny, they’d start a school. I believe that they would do far bet­ter than any of our pub­lic schools would. The third thing you’d see is I believe, is the qual­i­ty of schools again, just in a com­pet­i­tive mar­ket­place, start to rise. Some of the schools would go broke. A lot of the pub­lic schools would go broke. There’s no ques­tion about it. It would be rather painful for the first sev­er­al years.… The biggest com­plaint of course is that schools would pick off all the good kids and all the bad kids would be left to wal­low togeth­er in either a pri­vate school or rem­nants of a pub­lic school sys­tem. To me that’s like say­ing “Well, all the car man­u­fac­tur­ers are going to make BMWs and Mer­cedes and nobody’s going to make a ten thou­sand dol­lar car.” I think the most hot­ly com­pet­i­tive mar­ket right now is the ten thou­sand dol­lar car area. You’ve got all the Japan­ese play­ing in it. You’ve got Gen­er­al Motors who spent five mil­lion dol­lars sub­si­diz­ing Sat­urn to com­pete in that mar­ket. You’ve got Ford which has just intro­duced two new cars in that mar­ket. You’ve got Chrysler with the Neon.…

The full tran­script appears here. Or, if you want to watch the inter­view on video, you can jump to Com­put­er­world, where, rather lame­ly, you will need to reg­is­ter before watch­ing the actu­al talk. Bad job by Com­put­er­world.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load Free Copy of Steve Jobs Biog­ra­phy; Plus Inter­view with Author

Steve Jobs Demos the First Mac­in­tosh in 1984

Steve Jobs Nar­rates the First “Think Dif­fer­ent” Ad (Nev­er Aired)

David Crosby & Graham Nash at Occupy Wall Street; Echoes of Woodstock

in Current Affairs, Music | November 9th, 2011

First came Willie Nel­son, Pete Seeger, and Arlo Guthrie, and now Cros­by & Nash (sans Stills). Play­ing yes­ter­day at Occu­py Wall Street, their short set includ­ed Mil­i­tary Mad­ness, What Are Their Names, They Want It All, Teach Your Chil­dren (above), and Long Time Gone, which they sang dur­ing their hey­day at Wood­stock more than 40 years ago. A long time gone, indeed.

All of this pro­vides a good excuse to post anoth­er favorite video of ours — CSN’s one-time band­mate Neil Young play­ing Ohio, a now canon­i­cal song from the protest move­ment song­book. The haunt­ing clip was record­ed live at Massey Hall in 1971, and appears on one of the fin­er acoustic gui­tar LPs.

More Occu­py Videos:

Noam Chom­sky at Occu­py Boston

Slavoj Zizek Takes the Stage at Occu­py Wall Street

Joseph Stiglitz and Lawrence Lessig at Occu­py Wall Street

Visualizing Bach: Alexander Chen’s Impossible Harp

in Animation, Math, Music | November 8th, 2011

“Music,” Got­tfried Leib­niz famous­ly said, “is the plea­sure the human mind expe­ri­ences from count­ing with­out being aware that it is count­ing.” Com­put­er artist Alexan­der Chen makes this plea­sure vis­i­ble with Baroque.Me, his geo­met­ric com­put­er ani­ma­tion of the Pre­lude to Johann Sebas­t­ian Bach’s Cel­lo Suite No. 1 in G major.

Chen visu­al­ized the piece by imag­in­ing a harp with strings that would auto­mat­i­cal­ly morph into dif­fer­ent lengths accord­ing to the prin­ci­ples of Pythagore­an tun­ing. “It’s math based on the frac­tion 2/3,” writes Chen on his blog. “I start­ed with the longest string, set­ting it to a sym­bol­ic length of pix­els. When cut to 2/3 length, it goes up a fifth. Cut its length by 1/2 and it goes up an octave. 3/4 length, one fourth. From these sim­ple num­bers I cal­cu­lat­ed the rel­a­tive string lengths of all the notes in the piece.” He used eight strings because the Pre­lude’s phras­ing is in groups of eight notes. The strings are “plucked” by two sym­met­ri­cal pairs of nodes that revolve at a uni­form rate, rather like a dig­i­tal music box.

Chen, 30, lives in Brook­lyn, NY, and works in the Google Cre­ative Lab. One of his most pop­u­lar pieces for Google was the Les Paul Doo­dle, which allows users to dig­i­tal­ly strum the gui­tar strings. Chen grew up learn­ing music and com­put­er pro­gram­ming in par­al­lel. He plays the clas­si­cal vio­la, but with the Bach ani­ma­tion he want­ed to remove the per­former’s inter­pre­tive ele­ment from the music. “It’s a piece that I’ve heard a lot since I was a kid,” Chen told the BBC recent­ly. (See the “Math­e­mat­i­cal Music” pod­cast, Nov. 3.) “Peo­ple always bring dif­fer­ent lev­els of expres­sion to it. Peo­ple play to dif­fer­ent tem­pos and they add a lot of dynam­ics, or less dynam­ics. But what I want­ed to let the com­put­er do was just kind of to play in a real­ly neu­tral way, because what I real­ly want­ed to express was how much emo­tion and inten­si­ty is just in the data of the notes them­selves. I think that’s real­ly where the beau­ty of the piece at its core is.”

To hear the Pre­lude with the inter­pre­tive ele­ment back in, you can watch this video of Pablo Casals per­form­ing it in 1954:

Social Media in the Age of Enlightenment and Revolution

in History, Stanford, Technology | November 8th, 2011

As the French like to say, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Before there was Twit­ter, Face­book and Google+ (click to fol­low us), Euro­peans liv­ing in the sev­en­teenth and eigh­teenth cen­turies had to deal with their own ver­sion of infor­ma­tion over­load. Emerg­ing postal sys­tems, the pro­lif­er­a­tion of short let­ters called bil­lets, and the birth of news­pa­pers and pam­phlets all pumped unprece­dent­ed amounts of infor­ma­tion — valu­able infor­ma­tion, gos­sip, chat­ter and the rest — through new­ly-emerg­ing social net­works, which even­tu­al­ly played a crit­i­cal role in the French Rev­o­lu­tion, much like Twit­ter and Face­book proved instru­men­tal in orga­niz­ing the Arab Spring.

These his­tor­i­cal social net­works are being care­ful­ly mapped out by schol­ars at Stan­ford. Above, we have Anaïs Saint-Jude paint­ing the his­tor­i­cal pic­ture for us. Below Dan Edel­stein gives you a clos­er look at Stan­ford’s Map­ping the Repub­lic of Let­ters project.

via Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty News

Alfred Hitchcock Reveals The Secret Sauce for Creating Suspense

in Film | November 8th, 2011

Speak­ing at an AFI Sem­i­nar in 1970, Alfred Hitch­cock revealed the essen­tial ingre­di­ents that went into mak­ing his films. When he stripped every­thing away, what Hitch­cock real­ly cared about was cre­at­ing sus­pense films (not mys­tery films) and get­ting the sus­pense ele­ment right. In the famous clip above, the direc­tor explains why sus­pense­ful scenes have to sim­mer for a time and then cool down prop­er­ly. Things can’t be brought to a rapid boil and then be quick­ly tak­en off the stove. Hitch­cock once made that mis­take in his 1936 film, Sab­o­tage. (Watch the offend­ing scene right below or find the full film here.)

Of course, Hitch­cock learned from his mis­take, and there­after shot count­less scenes where the sus­pense builds in the right way. But we par­tic­u­lar­ly want­ed to find one scene that pulls off the bomb sce­nario, and so here it goes. From 1957 to 1959, Hitch­cock pro­duced Sus­pi­cion, a tele­vi­sion series for NBC, and he per­son­al­ly direct­ed one episode called “Four O’Clock”. It fea­tures a watch­mak­er who sus­pects his wife of hav­ing an affair, and so, filled with jeal­ousy, he decides to mur­der her with a bomb made by his own hands. Things take an unex­pect­ed turn, how­ev­er, when two bur­glars tie him up in the base­ment with the tick­ing bomb. We leave you with the final, cli­mac­tic scene.

You can watch the full episode here. Enjoy.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

16 Free Hitch­cock Movies Online

Alfred Hitch­cock Explains the Plot Device He Called the ‘MacGuf­fin’

The Eyes of Hitch­cock: A Mes­mer­iz­ing Video Essay on the Expres­sive Pow­er of Eyes in Hitchcock’s Films

Alfred Hitchcock’s 7‑Minute Mas­ter Class on Film Edit­ing

Open Culture Now on Google +

in Google | November 7th, 2011

Just a very quick fyi: Today, we launched an offi­cial Google+ page for Open Cul­ture. It’s anoth­er way to get intel­li­gent media deliv­ered to your dig­i­tal doorstep each day, and to share it with friends. If you don’t have a Google+ account, you can cre­ate one here, and Wired has a nice lit­tle primer on using the ser­vice here.

Beyond Google+, we also have an active pres­ence on Face­book and par­tic­u­lar­ly Twit­ter. So if you want a dou­ble dose of Open Cul­ture, you now know where to find it…

The Wonderful, Wooden Marble Adding Machine

in Math, Technology | November 4th, 2011

Cana­di­an soft­ware devel­op­er Matthias Wan­del enjoys spend­ing his spare time cre­at­ing wood­en con­trap­tions that com­bine a child­like sense of won­der with an engi­neer’s knowl­edge of mechan­ics. One of his most pop­u­lar cre­ations so far is this six-bit bina­ry adding machine, which has tal­lied near­ly one and a half mil­lion views on YouTube. As Rick Regan explains at Explor­ing Bina­ry, the machine func­tions like a low-tech inte­grat­ed cir­cuit. “It uses wood instead of sil­i­con, grav­i­ty instead of volt­age, and mar­bles instead of cur­rent,” he writes. “We don’t need no stinkin’ CMOS!”

The idea came to Wan­del after he noticed that one of his ear­li­er mar­ble machines incor­po­rat­ed log­ic-like ele­ments. “It had occurred to me,” he writes on his wood­work­ing site, “that per­haps with an insane amount of per­se­ver­ance, it might be pos­si­ble to build a whole com­put­er that runs on mar­bles.”  To illus­trate the point Wan­del built the adding machine, which stores the bina­ry states of six bits and can add num­bers from one to 63. The result may be more cool than prac­ti­cal, writes Regan, “but it cer­tain­ly is edu­ca­tion­al. It illus­trates basic prin­ci­ples of bina­ry num­bers, bina­ry arith­metic, and bina­ry log­ic.”

You can learn more about the machine on Wan­del’s Web page, and about the under­ly­ing log­ic and math­e­mat­ics at Explor­ing Bina­ry.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Calculus Lifesaver: A Free Online Course from Princeton

in Math | November 4th, 2011

It’s rare that we get to cov­er math here. So here it goes: Adri­an Ban­ner, a lec­tur­er at Prince­ton, has put togeth­er a lec­ture series (in video) that will help you mas­ter cal­cu­lus, a sub­ject that has tra­di­tion­al­ly frus­trat­ed many stu­dents. The 24 lec­tures (find them on Vimeo) were orig­i­nal­ly pre­sent­ed as review ses­sions for Prince­ton intro­duc­to­ry cal­cu­lus cours­es offered in 2006, and each ses­sion runs about two hours. It’s worth not­ing that Ban­ner has used the lec­tures to devel­op a handy book, The Cal­cu­lus Life­saver: All the Tools You Need to Excel at Cal­cu­lus. To find this course (and many oth­ers like it), look in the Math sec­tion of our col­lec­tion of 1500 Free Online Cours­es. Here you will also find Cal­cu­lus Revis­it­ed: Sin­gle Vari­able Cal­cu­lus, a vin­tage intro­duc­to­ry course filmed by MIT in 1970. Con­sid­er it a clas­sic…

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Math Mag­ic

Mul­ti­pli­ca­tion: The Vedic Way

Teach­ing Math with Doo­dling

Miss USA 2011: Should Schools Teach Evo­lu­tion? … or Math?

Hunter S. Thompson’s The Rum Diary: a ‘Warped Casablanca’

in Film, Literature | November 4th, 2011

In ear­ly 1960, Hunter S. Thomp­son was just 22 years old and his jour­nal­ism career was already on the skids. His last two jobs had end­ed bad­ly. At one place he was fired for insub­or­di­na­tion; at the oth­er, for smash­ing the office can­dy machine in a fit of rage after it swal­lowed his mon­ey. So he drift­ed down to San Juan, Puer­to Rico, and took a job at a news­pa­per called El Sporti­vo. His beat: bowl­ing.

The news­pa­per went out of busi­ness a few months lat­er, but Thomp­son trans­formed his expe­ri­ences into a nov­el, The Rum Diary. In the pro­logue he describes the atmos­phere of a San Juan news­room peo­pled with shift­less expa­tri­ates:

They ran the whole gamut from gen­uine tal­ents and hon­est men, to degen­er­ates and hope­less losers who could bare­ly write a post card–loons and fugi­tives and dan­ger­ous drunks, a shoplift­ing Cuban who car­ried a gun in his armpit, a half-wit Mex­i­can who molest­ed small chil­dren, pimps and ped­erasts and human chan­cres of every descrip­tion, most of them work­ing just long enough to make the price of a few drinks and a plane tick­et.

Thomp­son fin­ished the nov­el in 1961, but his career as a fic­tion writer was soon eclipsed by a grow­ing recog­ni­tion of his gift for nar­ra­tive jour­nal­ism, and The Rum Diary was­n’t pub­lished until 1998. As soon as it came out there was talk of a film adap­ta­tion. “Hunter’s dream,” said his­to­ri­an Dou­glas Brink­ley, “was to have The Rum Diary as a movie, because I think he always saw it as a kind of warped Casablan­ca.”

Thomp­son killed him­self before that dream ever came to fruition. After more than a decade of delays, a film ver­sion of The Rum Diary final­ly opened last week­end to mixed reviews and small audi­ences. John­ny Depp plays the alco­holic new­pa­per­man Paul Kemp as if he were a young Thomp­son: more laid back than the gonzo jour­nal­ist of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but with the same pecu­liar alien­ation and low, mut­ter­ing voice. Direc­tor Bruce Robin­son cre­ates the vivid atmos­phere of a Caribbean boom­town inhab­it­ed by shady busi­ness­men, clue­less tourists, drunk­en jour­nal­ists and resent­ful natives. But the sto­ry is like its pro­tag­o­nist: adrift, irres­olute.

To learn about Thomp­son’s ear­ly efforts to get the sto­ry made into a movie, you can watch The Rum Diary Back Sto­ry, filmed from 1998 through 2002 by Wayne Ewing. It doc­u­ments the author’s ini­tial pride at the long-over­due pub­li­ca­tion of the nov­el, fol­lowed by his grow­ing frus­tra­tion with the glacial progress in turn­ing it into a movie. Ewing filmed Thomp­son at his home in Col­orado and in a fire­side meet­ing at Dep­p’s home in Cal­i­for­nia. In one com­i­cal scene (episode eight) War­ren Zevon reads aloud an insult­ing let­ter Thomp­son had sent to a pro­duc­er.

Episode One is above, and the rest can be seen by fol­low­ing these links to Episode Two, Episode Three, Episode Four, Episode Five, Episode Six, Episode Sev­en, Episode Eight, Episode Nine and Episode Ten.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

John­ny Depp Reads Let­ters From Hunter S. Thomp­son

Hunter S. Thomp­son Gets Con­front­ed by the Hel­l’s Angels

Hunter S. Thomp­son Inter­views Kei­th Richards

Duelity: Creationist and Darwinist Origin Stories Animated

in Animation, Religion, Science | November 3rd, 2011

Pro­duced at the Van­cou­ver Film School, this split-screen ani­ma­tion tells the sto­ry of Earth’ s ori­gins from a cre­ation­ist and Darwinist/evolutionist point of view. To make things more inter­est­ing (spoil­er: stop read­ing now if you want to main­tain the ele­ment of sur­prise), the sci­en­tif­ic sto­ry is told using reli­gious lan­guage, where­as the Bib­li­cal ver­sion is told as if it were the sci­en­tif­ic one. The slight­ly con­fus­ing con­clu­sion (its’ a zinger) shows how the lan­guage we use to present ideas influ­ences their per­cep­tion. And the iron­ic use of info­graph­ics tops off this visu­al and lin­guis­tic exper­i­ment.

On the home­page of the project, you can watch the videos sep­a­rate­ly and down­load them. Also, the YouTube chan­nel of Van­cou­ver Film School is always worth a vis­it.

By pro­fes­sion, Matthias Rasch­er teach­es Eng­lish and His­to­ry at a High School in north­ern Bavaria, Ger­many. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twit­ter.