A few years ago, the government of Singapore summoned Mitch Resnick to help crack a problem. Although thousands of schoolchildren in that country were designing and building robots using the Lego Mindstorm kits Resnick helped invent, Singapore businesses complained that when these same students hit the workplace, they lacked creativity and initiative. Resnick discovered, in conversations with teachers, that robot building was an after-school activity, and classroom time was devoted to math and science drills.

This is Resnick’s issue in a nutshell, he explains. “The way technology is getting out there is limited.” If the “richest learning experience happens when people are actively designing, experimenting and exploring,” then why can’t we extend this approach into the school curriculum? Computers and technology should not be used merely to impart information, but to engage kids to design, create and invent – much as little kids do with blocks and paint in kindergarten.

Resnick demonstrates the creations of children who participated in special engineering and software designing courses. He had posed the challenge of inventing something that could be useful to them in everyday life. The results included such unique items as an odometer for roller blades, a diary security system, an automatic toilet paper dispenser and a mobile, wearable juke box. Resnick has launched Computer Clubhouses in locations around the world where kids often have no access to computers. He believes that “success for an individual or a country as a whole will depend on acting creatively.”

Sowing the Seeds for a More Creative Society

While MIT has an established record of excellence, warns Woodie Flowers in his address, it must “face the brutal facts.” The world has changed, and engineers can no longer follow the same path in education and training. He points to some recent studies that show MIT graduates don’t see much connection between their studies and the work they do in the world.

“Learning differential equations is training; learning to think using the insights from differential equations is education – they are profoundly different,” Flowers says. He recommends a new tack at MIT: a shift away from big classes where “we pretend students learn what we say,” to “active learning.” He suggests creating a Draper Labs of Learning. “Make choices—pick biology, electro-mechanical, energy, and get the best people on the planet involved,” Flowers continues. “Do world-class stuff to compete with movies.”

Establish more internships, and develop lifelong symbiotic connections with alumni. Enable students to “encounter structured ways to learn new things,” and give them opportunities to tackle big problems, especially in another part of the world. Focus on creativity and synthesis rather than analysis, says Flowers, and emphasize leadership and team participation. “We have an ethical obligation to focus on what we do with them to help them have a comparative advantage,” he concludes.

On a Liberal Education for the 21st Century

The Reagan and first Bush administrations believed that Hussein could be a strategic partner to the United States, a counterweight to Iran, a force for moderation in the region, and possibly help in the Arab-Israel peace process. That was, of course, an illusion. A ruthless dictator who launched an attack on his neighbor, Iran, who used chemical weapons, and who committed genocide against his own Kurds was never likely to be a reliable American ally. Hussein, having watched the United States gloss over his crimes in the Iran war and at home, concluded he could get away with invading Kuwait.

It was a costly error for him, for his country, and eventually for the United States, which now has the largest part of its military bogged down in the Iraqi quagmire. Meanwhile the architects of the earlier appeasement policy now maintain the illusion that they have a path to victory, if only their critics would shut up.

The true Iraq appeasers

This title will be released on October 19, 2006.

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. On August 28, 1854, working-class Londoner Sarah Lewis tossed a bucket of soiled water into the cesspool of her squalid apartment building and triggered the deadliest outbreak of cholera in the city's history. In this tightly written page-turner, Johnson (Everything Bad Is Good for You) uses his considerable skill to craft a story of suffering, perseverance and redemption that echoes to the present day. Describing a city and culture experiencing explosive growth, with its attendant promise and difficulty, Johnson builds the story around physician John Snow. In the face of a horrifying epidemic, Snow (pioneering developer of surgical anesthesia) posited the then radical theory that cholera was spread through contaminated water rather than through miasma, or smells in the air. Against considerable resistance from the medical and bureaucratic establishment, Snow persisted and, with hard work and groundbreaking research, helped to bring about a fundamental change in our understanding of disease and its spread. Johnson weaves in overlapping ideas about the growth of civilization, the organization of cities, and evolution to thrilling effect. From Snow's discovery of patient zero to Johnson's compelling argument for and celebration of cities, this makes for an illuminating and satisfying read.

The Ghost Map, by Steven Johnson

The District has just launched a host of aggressive anti-crime measures following a crime wave that left 14 people dead in the first 12 days of July. Police have been put on six-day workweeks , and detectives are being added to target violent offenders ; the city has installed the first of dozens of surveillance cameras in high-crime neighborhoods ; and it has modified the time of its youth curfew, now making it illegal for anyone younger than 17 to be out on the street after 10 p.m. But do such measures really work? Jack Levin, director of the Brudnick Center on Violence and Conflict at Northeastern University in Boston , weighs in on the key provisions of the District's emergency crime bill and some other crime - prevention techniques .

To Surveil or Not? That Is the Question

We collect FOUND stuff: love letters, birthday cards, kids' homework, to-do lists, ticket stubs, poetry on napkins, telephone bills, doodles - anything that gives a glimpse into someone
else's life. Anything goes...

Napkin notes were recently featured on PostSecret.

FOUND Magazine | Find of the Day

Stephen Colbert gets credit for influencing the language. A group called Global Language Monitor credits Colbert, who parodies a conservative TV host, with "truthiness." The word is defined as "truth unencumbered by the facts." He also used a word inspired by Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. "Wikiality" means "reality as determined by majority vote." The group now calls them the top-two TV buzzwords -- that is, reality as determined by what's said on television.

Colbert Leaves his Mark on the Language

A brief analysis of why MySpace is successful as a space for music

Why is MySpace popular

An interesting discussion surfaced over the past week among some bloggers, precipitated by comments from Esther Dyson in a debate with Vint Cerf in Wall Street Journal Online.

Paying Attention

Globalization is real, but its power to improve the lot of humankind has been madly oversold.

Return of the Tribes