So here's another: Karen Wilcox and Mike Wilson met in homeroom in the 7th grade at South East Junior High in Iowa City, IA. And fell in love. Then her family moved away and she broke it off rather than have a long distance relationship. They would both go on to be married twice, and divorced twice. Forty-eight years later, they would rekindle their relationship. On August 9th, just before noon, they got married. The ceremony was held in the very classroom they shared as home room**.

^{*Cockles are not listed on any anatomical drawings of the human heart I've ever seen. I learned the phrase from a nice church going lady who lives up near Carolton. Near as I can tell, a Cockle is a type of bottom dwelling bivalve that can be found in the coolest, bottom most regions of brackish coastal waters. So I mean, if something warms the cockles of your heart, (a) it must be warm, and (b) you need to see a cardiologist about getting those cockles removed.}

^{** The exact date and time was 8/9/10 11:12 am.}

You see, the hottest thing out there in embedded computing is the Android operating system from Google. Essentially, it's a scaled down linux running a just-in-time java execution environment. It's open source, scalable and extensible. All these geeky words simply say this: an Android based smart phone is every bit as good, if not better, than a iPhone. And to prove it, I canceled my AT&T contract and purchased the all new HTC Droid Incredible. And the phone is... incredible. It has an 8 megapixel camera - more than my trusted sony Cybershot's 3.2mp - that takes video or stills. It has a 1GHz snapdragon processor with 512mb of RAM. Now keep in mind - that is a top of the line desktop workstation's specs from 2005... but is now in the palm of my hand. The 2GB flash card it came with was swapped out for an 8 GB flash card from Amazon so I could store my music and video. The sound playback, but they way, is very good. Also, it has a true GPS receiver; most cell phones interpret your GPS coordinates by triangulating to cell phone towers. My phone actually triangulates to satellites in geosynchronous orbit. Take a minute to absorb that.

In all honesty, the only thing the iPhone 4 has to compare with all this is that it has a new high resolution display. Big whoop. I'll see iPhone's high resolution display and raise it the Verizon network, which provides higher quality and broader coverage. On my iPhone, 1 bar meant I couldn't even make a phone call. On my Droid, 1 bar means I can make a call with crystal clear voice clarity, and I can download at 3G speeds.

So, I would like to thank AT&T and Steve Jobs for choosing not to support loyal customers. And if the rumors are true that you are bringing the iPhone 4 to Verizon in Q42011... I'm afraid I've found the droids I'm looking for.

For instance, why is there more matter than anti-matter in the universe? Or why is it that the universe seems to be expanding at an increasing rate? Scientists have tried a number of fixes, including Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) and the much talked about "Dark matter" solution. Out of Taiwan (or as the Chinese like to call it, "Capitalis Pig Occupied Tai-Pei") comes a theory which says no to the big bang, and actually provides convincing support for an alternate theory called "Quasi-Steady State Theory" (QSS). The latter theory holds that the universe doesn't have a beginning or end, but rather goes through alternating periods of expansion and contraction. The problem with QSS has been that it required the creation of new matter, something which violates a fundamental law of thermodynamics. The new theory, however, makes QSS plausible by proposing that space and time are interchangeable the same way mass and energy are interchangeable, and the four are linked. As the universe expands mass is converted to time and volume is converted to space. This tidily explains the red-shift seen in Type IA supernovas. However, QSS isn't perfect. Big Bang was able to explain the Cosmic Background Radiation - a ubiquitous field of microwave radiation which exists more or less all over the sky. Under QSS, this field ought to have dissipated over time.

Big Bang Theory, which is so accepted as to be referred to as the Standard Cosmological Model, may have to defend itself for the first time since the 1930's. Ironically, it would need defending against a theory it replaced.

That was then. This is now. The latest thing in the world of mobile phones is smart phones based on the open source Android operating system. Applications that run on Android (and indeed Android itself) are based on - you guessed it - Java. So if you want to write apps on Android, you want to know Java.

The next logical question is, why would anyone want to write apps for Android? Well the most obvious idea is to get rich. Individuals have become millionaires virtually overnight by writing apps for the iPod. Android aims to be bigger because it will be on nearly every smart phone, not just iPhones and iPods. But Android isn't just about phones - Android can run on a wide variety of devices, including a new generation of tablet pc's.

What got me into this isn't money - well actually it is, but only in reverse. My son, who might weigh 80 lbs by now, will go to school and carry nearly 30% of his body weight in books. Those books will cost more than $220 and will already be out of date by the time he gets them (even if they're new for this year). Also, they will sometimes contain inaccuracies that go unnoticed except by teachers and the occasional bright pupil.

Now consider this: a tablet PC can cost as little as $100. It weighs less than 3 lbs. It can contain more books than the library of congress. A student can download news articles, reference material, and classic books that have entered the public domain from authors like Shakespeare, Mark Twain or Emily Bronte. They can also download a new breed of peer-reviewed, open source modular text-books which cost $0.00.  What is needed is a decent reader for Android - something like Stanza, only with the ability to highlight text and add notes.

That's my project - an eReader that eliminates the high cost of textbooks and alleviates back strain. It really goes beyond that - I foresee a future in which classrooms use augmented media environments to support collaborative learning. Kids raised in a world of multi-tasking and digital on-demand content are much more apt to learn more and faster in the 21st century, and teachers need the tools to keep up and even stay ahead.

For now, I'm starting over. The Java language hasn't changed much in the basic form, but it's grown exponentially since I last compiled a class module. Also, I need to get used to the Eclipse development environment, ADK emulator and learn patience - since Java is still painfully slow.

1. One of Gate's biggest monetary ventures was an attempt to reduce the overall size of high schools on the theory that smaller populations would be more conducive to learning. There is some merit to this: a concept exists in psychology known as Dunbar's number. Based on studies of primates, with smaller studies of humans, it was determined (by a guy named Dunbar, no less) that there is a cognitive limit to the number of distinct individuals a person can recognize as individuals to whom they can relate to. The number is commonly held to be at about 150. If someone exists outside of that group - say they're number 151 - then they're not a person. They're a thing, specifically a thing that performs a function. The garbage man, for instance, isn't Frank-with-two-kids-in-college. He's "the thing that comes and takes the trash away." Strong evidence suggests that Dunbar's number varies based on neuro-anatomic development. For instance, chimpanzees - who have decidedly smaller brains than we do - recognize about 35 other chimps as chimps. Accordingly, you typically find chimpanzees living in troops (yes, they're called troups) of between 30 and 50. The point of Dunbar's number is that it can be difficult to have a cohesive population that is easily directe

   One modification to Dunbar's number is that you have two degrees of separation that are tolerable. If you're outside of one individuals 150 count group, but you have a friend who is inside, then you have a sort of temporary honorary membership. This allows humans to exist in large societies, though other phenomena come into play.

   How does Dunbar's number come into play with school or class size? Social pressures diminish with group size and the need to conform to a standard put forward by an authority decreases as well. This is why high schools are dominated by cliques, many of which are anti-establishmentarian. As Gates found out, the size of the school itself had no statistically significant impact on learning. And if you think about that - a high school of 1,500 students might as well be a high school of 15,000 students. The number of interactions an individual taking six classes might have is close enough to their Dunbar number. For instance, a student in six classes who might have 30 classmates in each class would have 180 fellow students and six instructors for a total of 186 interactions. Fold in the two degrees of freedom in for your social networks, and a school with 22,506 students will have much the same level of social interaction as a school with 180. What is most relevant is not school size, but individual class sizes. Reduce the number of student in each class, and you increase the authority and influence a single instructor has. (This is the part of my writing where most educators go "no duh".)

2. Another place where Gate's fails is in structuring incentives. Though most school reform initiatives center around giving monetary rewards to teachers for meeting standards, these turn out to not be the most effective incentives. While most teachers won't turn down an extra bit in their paycheck, there is a surprising amount of embarrassment in making more money than someone you regard as a colleague. Gates casually dismisses this communal attitude that some teachers have. The truth is that one key to success in team-driven environments involves not singling out team members for recognition, but in rewarding the team. Incentives for direct competition runs counter to encouraging the kind of sharing in best practices that will lead to good teachers becoming great teachers.

Bill Gates may be the founder of Microsoft, but he's not the only senior executive in Redmond that has an opinion on education. The founder of Microsoft's International Division, Scott Oki, founded the Oki Foundation in 1987. In 1992, he retired from Microsoft (fabulously wealthy, I might add) to pursue a mission of helping children. One result of his passion is a book called Outrageous Learning.

I was handed a copy of Outrageous Learning pro bono last week, and I promised the giver that I would have it finished by the weekend. It took me five hours. The book centers around a vision of education reform that casts aside a system that has changed little since the turn of the last century and replaces it with a system centered around eleven principles or "planks":

1. Local Leadership;
2. Promoting best-in-class teachers;
3. School Choice ;
4. More time dedicated to learning;
5. Rigorous elementary education, optional secondary education;
6. Leveraging volunteerism;
7. Customized curriculum;
8. Early intervention and needs-based instruction;
9. Thrift in education spending;
10. Character development;
11. Achievement-based cultures.

Having read this book cover to cover, I've found very little to disagree with. I think Oki makes the mistake of assuming that teachers should be held solely accountable for and held liable for student achievement. That is a fine point that does not undermine the rest of his platform. The book is $10 at Amazon. You can also read some excerpts at the Outrageous Learning website.

We're counting down now to the start of school. Brannon will be in the 3rd grade this year, which means he'll learn his multiplication tables. Actually, he learned multiplication and division last year, a concept I demonstrated geometrically with blocks. This summer I gave him a dose of algebra, teaching him variables and order of operations. My goal is to be able to teach him differential calculus by the time he's in 7th grade. But according to Dr Arthur Benjamin of Harvey Mudd College, I should probably teach him to gamble.

"There are three kinds of lies. There are lies, damned lies and then there are statistics."

You probably think that that quote comes from Mark Twain. Twain himself would tell you that it comes from the 19th Century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. The strongest evidence is that it originated with parliamentarian Charles Wentworth Dike. Who said it is not as important as what is being said: that statistics, despite being comprised of nothing more than simple arithmetic, is quite possibly the most powerful and powerfully baffling segment of mathematics. If you think calculus is hard, it's only because you've never tried to calculate the probability of an event occurring in a normally distributed data set along a 95% confidence interval. Yet, statistics are used every day by politicians, doctors, economists, analysts and scientists. Yet, so few people outside of technical fields can truly understand the application of statistics. In this TED Talk, Harvey explains why he thinks that teaching kids statistics would have a much more profound impact on our scientific and technical literacy than calculus.

Here's an interesting fact: while calculus can describe the orbit of an electronic around the nucleus of atom, it takes statistics to tell you where you'll probably find it at a certain point.

Switch first to electromagnetics: 178 years ago the poor son of a blacksmith and church minister found that if he wrapped a coil of copper wire at either end of a loop of ferrous metal and induced an electrical current to flow through one loop, an electrical current similarly flowed through the other. The man's name was Michael Faraday, and he had just discovered electrical induction. Today, you can't open your eyes without seeing a device which relies on induction. Induction is used to "step down' 120 volt household current to the 5 volt current we need to charge our cell phones and iPods. Induction drives electric motors which compress gasses that heat and cool our homes. Induction allows loudspeakers to reproduce Mozart (or Black Eyed Peas, if that's your thing).

So if it's possible with the electromagnetic force, could it also be possible with the gravitational force? John Swain of Boston's Northeastern University thinks so, and he's published a paper with analogue formulas to describe gravitational induction. Since a number of gravitational phenomena closely follow electromagnetic phenomena, it makes sense to expect induction to be a property of gravity as well. With this new effect in the arsenal, scientists studying electrogravitics and magnetogravitics can now make more accurate models of gravitational phenomena such as why some objects appear to have a non-linear gravitational attraction. For instance, while we expect Pioneer 10 to slow down, it is slowing down faster than our current understanding says it should.

Features and Benefits

Primarily, Roku is marketed as a way to see your Netflix instant queue videos on your TV set. This alone makes the Roku worth the $79.99 price; you can stream high quality DVD content at will over the internet. You won't get access to much recent content, but there's still plenty of good stuff out there.

For the more recent stuff, go to Amazon. You can buy season passes to popular TV episodes and new releases. My wife and I recently became fans (obsessed) with the Tudors. Seasons 1 and 2 were available on Netflix. Season 3 cost $22 on Amazon. Also, even though I can get House over-the-air on the local Fox channel, it's much better to view it at my convenience off Amazon On-Demand.

One of the benefits of the Roku player is that it conforms to our viewing habits. In all, there are very few shows that we derive real pleasure from. We've never seen the benefit of shelling out money for HBO, Showtime, Cinemax or Starz. Across the rest of cable, there are really only two shows worth watching: Mad Men and Caprica. Again: available via Amazon or Netflix.

Control Issues

It's important that I discuss the Roku's remote control. It's elegant - only 9 buttons, all neatly laid out. It's also somewhat exclusive. Newer smart-remotes such as the Harmony 510 (and higher) can operate most features, but the 'Home' button is apparently a Roku remote exclusive. So, the moral of the story is... don't lose that remote.

The slope of my roof is 45 degrees, which is actually pretty steep. My roof is as old as the house and will probably need replacing six or seven years; the grit is already coming off the shingle and washing down my gutters. At 45 degrees, I cannot get a grip on the roof, so climbing up to mount my antenna proved potentially hazardous to my health. I would not be proving any point about the cost of cable if I slid off my roof and face planted in the flower bed.

Just as I was making plans to rent a 40-foot ladder, my wife pointed out that I could mount the antenna in the attic. She's right of course - radio signals easily penetrate the roof and walls of your house. As long as you don't have a metal roof, you'll only lose about 3db of signal - the same amount of loss as a splitter. While it's a shame that no one will see my really cool high gain UHF antenna, that's not really not the point of it. About that 3db of signal loss - if you count that with the 3db from the splitter we invariably run into when have more than one TV in the house - then it's a wise investment to buy a $15 signal amplifier.Remember, +/- 3dB is either a doubling or halving of your signal strength; 6dB of signal loss is about 25% of the original signal. A good 10db amplifier is equal to a 10-times increase in signal, which will more than make up for mounting your antenna in the attic then splitting the signal up to three ways. (If the math doesn't add up to you, then google "logarithmic scale".)

With the antenna mounted, the signal amplifier in line and the digital TV converter set up, I get 22 channels. There's the local ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox affiliates. We also enjoy two public tv stations: Georgia Public Television and Public Television of Atlanta. There's also the CW and a local movie broadcast station called Peachtree TV. Then there's the religious and Spanish stations, which add five. Now if you're any good at math, you've only counted 13 so far. Where are the other 9? That's the beauty of HD programming - each channel has up to three sub-channels. For instance, WJSB the local Georgia Public Broadcasting affiliate has their normal broadcast on channel 17-1. On channel 17-2, they have PBS kids all the time. On 17-3, they're broadcasting documentaries. These are all being broadcast in HD, though the source might only be standard definitions (SD). However, because it's all digital, even the SD broadcasts look great. And the price is an agreeable $0.

Equipment

• Antennas Direct Mo 43XG, NewEgg: $78.99 - $20.82 (savings) + Free Shipping
  Easy to build, but the instructions are misleading on the box. Use the sheet on the inside. Overall very high quality construction. Compact design allows it to be mounted in the attic and out of the way. Very directional - only use all of your stations are within about 15 degrees of each other. Not a problem if you're in the suburbs. If not, you'll need a multi-element antenna array. You'll have less gain, but you won't need it.
• Apex DT150 Digital Converter Box, WalMart: $44.88
  Good overall performance. Guide is difficult to read on a 19" tube television. Remote feels flimsy. The power LED goes red when the unit is off, and is obnoxiously bright. Black electrical tape quickly fixed that problem. This is not necessary if you a TV with a built in ATSC tuner.
• RCA 10dB Video Signal Amplifier, WalMart: $16.74
  If you're running the wire directly to your TV and not splitting it in any way, this won't be necessary. Otherwise, it's a good investment. And by the way - a signal amplifier won't make up for a poorly designed antenna. If you're not getting  signal, then there's nothing to amplify. Also, if you're only running one TV off of a high gain antenna, you might overdrive the input on your TV/converter box, giving the same result as not enough signal.

In our next episode, I'll talk about the joy of my Roku player.