I just finished reading Eminent Dogs, Dangerous Men, the story of a Virginia writer and shepherd who explores Scotland in search of adopting a border collie suitable for helping him work his sheep farm back home.

One of the things that impressed me the most in reading this book was the vivid description of life as a shepherd. I had never imagined shepherding as being a very mentally demanding occupation, but here we learn of a shepherd who by the age of twelve could recognize each of the family farm’s one thousand sheep individually, and recall their attributes such as medical history and grazing preferences.

While the accounts of shepherds was fascinating, this is mainly a book about border collies, and their stories are at least as fascinating: a border collie who successfully rounded up a flock of frightened sheep in the darkness of night; a border collie who could gracefully drive sheep down from precarious mountain peaks; a border collie so determined to obey his master’s commands that after being told to “stay”, to the horror of his master who neglected to signal otherwise, he stayed put without taking a step while being trampled to death by a herd of cattle.

We also gain insight into the close relationship that can develop between shepherds and their border collies: an expert sheep dog who, after being sold to another shepherd after several years with his first, refused to herd sheep in any sensible way for his new master; the shepherd’s complete inability to tend to the sheep without his dog; a shepherd who, upon learning that his beloved border collie is about to pass on, spends the night with it, outside, in the snow, wrapping the dog in his own coat until morning.

This book paints border collies as absolutely magnificent creatures; if not the most beautiful, then surely the most faithful of all dogs. But the book concludes with a warning that border collies can be difficult to deal with as pets. If you already have a border collie, reading this book will give you a greater appreciation for your companion; if not, it would be inadvisable to run out and adopt a border collie just because of the stories in the book, as taking care of a border collie can be more intense than many other breeds of dog.

(Thankfully, I had already adopted a border collie before reading the book!)

There are a few photographs, but the book is mostly straight text, and would be perfectly readable on a Kindle or an iPad, if the publisher sold an electronic edition, which they don’t. You can buy a printed copy at Amazon.

The MIT Media Lab course on Learning Creative Learning for Spring 2013 has come to an end. While the course boasted twenty or so in-person students who received academic credit, I was one of over 10,000 online students who signed up just for fun. Statistics show that less than 10% of students registered in such online classes actually participate meaningfully, with recent anecdotes suggesting that the number may be closer to 4%. I would estimate that around 150 people (1-2%) appeared to be engaged with Learning Creative Learning.

I’ve written elsewhere about some specific things that we explored in this course, but the major takeaway for me was simply reinforcement of the value of creative learning: don’t just read a book or listen to a lecture, but do something with what you are learning. Reading the popular news over the past couple of years, a lot of people seem thrilled with the free online classes offered by such great institutions as Harvard or Stanford. Big name lectures broadcast on the web is indeed interesting, but if we think we are amazing students just because we listen to amazing lectures, we are fooling ourselves. Write about what you are studying. Build something with the knowledge you’ve gained. Contribute. Create.

The final LCL session was an opportunity for students to offer ideas to the teaching staff on ways to improve the course. The biggest problem cited over and over was that, while there was plenty of interaction amongst the class participants overall, dividing the class into small groups for deeper discussion really didn’t work. If you have a small group of ten people, and only 10% of them participate in the discussion, then you don’t get a very lively discussion!

Despite such shortcomings, many aspects of the course were great. Interesting lectures and guest speakers, plenty (but not too much) good reading, and much emphasis on doing something rather than just consuming facts. I look forward to seeing how this course and related efforts develop in the future.

I just finished reading Seymour Papert’s Mindstorms, the first couple of chapters of which were assigned readings for the MIT Media Lab course on creative learning, but I found so enjoyable that I kept going.

The central topic of the book is about the Papert’s LOGO/Turtle programming environment, which I had used myself in elementary school. I saw Turtle programming then as an introduction to computer programming in general: writing scripts to make the “turtle” on the screen move around and draw pictures. Papert’s intentions were in fact much deeper than that; he developed the Turtle programming environment for the purpose of creating situations in which children could learn about basic concepts of Newtonian physics (how objects move) and differential geometry (how shapes can be constructed).

While much of the book uses the Turtle programming environment as an example, the main thesis of the book is that people learn best when they are engrossed in an environment in which to make use of what they are learning, rather than learning abstractly, disconnected from application of the ideas. Papert brings up the challenge of learning a foreign language: would you learn French better by sitting in a classroom memorizing books, or by living in France for a month, communicating with native speakers? The goal of the Turtle system, then, was to provide an artificial place for children to go to engage in ideas of physics and geometry, where those were not just abstract concepts but things to play with and to create with.

But Papert’s grand vision was not to create Turtle and be done with it. He hoped that it would serve as an example for others, to continue to use computers to create environments in which people could engage with ideas for better learning of any imaginable subject. Years after writing the book, he mused that, unfortunately, what most readers got out of the book was a study of the Turtle system itself, rather than the ideas behind it.

A very good read for those interested in education, and the intersection of education with technology. Oddly enough, the book does not appear to be available in digital format yet, but you can buy a printed copy at Amazon.

These are some notes I took following a conversation with the staff at a local dog training organization:

• If your dog is anxious or agitated around strangers, you need to slowly acclimate her to being around other people.
• Do not reenforce fearful behavior. If she jumps up on you or cowers around you, she is seeking confidence and reassurance from you. It’s best to ignore her in these situations, or instruct her to do something else that she has learned to do on command. It’s only okay for her to jump up on you if you say it’s okay, not just any time she wants.
• Around strangers, if she becomes agitated, keep her on a short leash: an inch or so of slack is enough for her to learn that she should prefer staying right next to you instead of running away from or toward the other people.
• Have your house guests throw her treats from a distance, so she learns to associate visitors with treats. Preferably use high quality, high value treats that she especially enjoys (but rarely gets).
• Do not exhibit fear or anxiety yourself; she will pick up on that, and she needs you to be a strong leader.
• If she gets out of control around other people walking on the sidewalk, try to practice that on purpose rather than avoid it. Preferably get her around people on the sidewalk who are walking away from her, rather than toward her. They will still be in the vicinity, but less threatening.
• Some of her behavior may be related to natural herding instinct. Unless you plan to put her into service as a sheepdog, it’s best to train that out of her, as much as possible.
• One benefit of her herding instinct is that she protects the herd. Once she accepts someone into her herd, they become someone she protects, not someone she fears.

In one of those rare instances when my schedule and that of the local chapter of the IEEE aligned, tonight I enjoyed listening to a talk by Chris Wyman on the topic of real-time 3D graphics rendering. This blog post is just meant to capture some of the notes I made during the talk:

• There are two kinds of wrong answers in computing: an answer can be so inaccurate that it is useless, or an answer can be so late as to be useless. Inaccurate answers might be timely, and late answers might be accurate, but in neither case is the answer helpful.
• Some optimization techniques that made sense decades ago, such as caching trigonometric values in memory rather than recomputing them, no longer make sense, as computing has become faster than memory access.
• There are two general approaches to improve real-time interactive graphics rendering: you start with fast but poor quality graphics and improve the quality, or you can start with slow but high quality graphics and improve the rendering time. Relatively simple adjustments can make a big difference, coming from either direction.

Graphics rendering is about as far away from what I do as you can get and still be within the field of computer science, but it was interesting to get some insight into this line of work.