The departure of Larry Robertson from the race for the District 1 seat on the Coweta County school board is unfortunate. Robertson is an active contributor to the community, and his candidacy represented an opportunity for district 1 to have a broader choice of representation this fall.

Robertson’s departure also underscores the difficulty faced by many parents in knowing which school district they’re in. As a resident of district 1 for both tax purposes and for voting in County Commission races, it ought to have been reasonable to believe that his school district was also district 1 for school board.

The realignment of districts has caused confusion for some parents, but also consternation for others. Working families should not have to drive several miles to one school when another suitable school is located near their home. Parents should have a greater say in where their child goes to school.

We would like to thank Mr Robertson for stepping up to the plate for Coweta County Voters, and wish him well.

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.}

So you can imagine that my sympathies go out to students and teachers of the 9th grade at East Coweta High School...

If you pick up a copy of today's Times-Herald, you'll find a story below the fold about the broken air conditioning at East Coweta High School. The official weather report for Sharpsburg yesterday (Friday the 13th) was a high of 97° with humidity of 94%. Not only are those conditions not conducive to learning, but they're not safe. Dean Jackson, the PR guy for the Schools, says that classroom temperatures stayed "around 76°", but parents tell a different story. Kristy Ivey, whose daughter is in the 9th grade at East Coweta, tells the Time-Herald that her daughter got sick and nearly passed out.That doesn't sound like 76° to me, it sounds like 96°.

The problem, according to Jackson, is that one of the cooling towers keeps tripping and has to be manually reset. No... no it doesn't. If a breaker is tripping, you don't continue to reset it. You swap out the breaker with a new one, and if that trips you troubleshoot the electrical components down-line of the breaker that are causing it to trip. Jackson also says that maintenance personnel have been working on the problem. For a week? If your maintenance people can't resolve a problem like this after the first day, then you need to call an HVAC specialist. We have $14,000,000 budgeted for maintaining schools this year; I'm sure that will cover the cost of a repairman.

It's understandable that equipment failures occur from time-to-time. Our response to those failures should focus first on maintaining the learning environment for the student. These students can be moved to the lunchroom or the library until the AC is repaired. We should also ask ourselves if our facilities are in need of renovation and overhaul. I have been told about ongoing problems at a number of District 1 schools, particularly Eastside Elementary and East Coweta Middle. These issues need to be addressed and resolved. When students are in class, the only thing that should be causing them to sweat is a pop quiz.

Here's some more hot air for you: I have my first speaking engagement as a candidate; I'll be speaking at the Coweta Tea Party Meeting on September 21st, 2010. The time is 7:00 pm, and the venue is tentatively set at McGuire's in Senoia. The location is subject to change as McGuire's is more interested in the Beer Party. I can respect that; tea is an afternoon drink anyway.

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.

By the time I was 8, I had collected all sorts of junk from the neighborhood trash piles. I had gone dumpster diving behind old office buildings and brought home IBM Selectric typewriters which once had cost thousands, but now were just door-stops. (Actually, not true. Every last one of them ran fine, and I kept one to type with.) A family friend, who was a CB enthusiast, noticed my predilection for tinkering with electronics and gave me the Radio Shack 301 Electronic Projects kit. This was  simple pine-wood box, inside of which was a cardboard panel. On this panel were attached various electronic components which were wired to springs. By pressing the springs aside and inserting jumper wires, you could connect the various components into simple circuits. (In fact, there were three IC's on the 301 kit, so you could actually build simple computers.)

I quickly exhausted all 301 projects and moved on to bigger and better electronic projects. By the time I was in high school, I could repair just about anything, even if the problem wasn't related to a failed component or mis-wired circuit. Being able to tinker that way, to try and sometimes even fail, gave me the courage, experience and grounding to tackle any project, idea or problem.

Over the weekend, I had a proud father moment; my son told my wife, who then told me, that he'd like to learn about technology. At 8, he's already shown an aptitude for operating electronic devices. I've refurbished an old PC with an educational software package called Edubuntu for him to get experience with using computers (and also to help him learn things like typing, multiplication, etc). But what I hadn't expected is that all the times he watched me replace outlets and install dimmers during my everlasting-home-improvement project, he was taking mental notes. There was sorcery involved when dad got his tools out and either fixed something or made something better. And he wanted to be my apprentice, my paduan learner.

A trip to the minute clinic to get my pesky sinus infection dealt with gave me the chance to swing into the Radio Shack in Peachtree City. I expected I'd have to buy about $50 worth of electronic components, a breadboard and jumpers. Radio Shack had long ago retired the 301 electronics project kit, and though they did have the BasicStamp PIC microcontroller kits, they were overpriced and too advanced for an 8 year old. But then I spied the Elenco 101 Snap-Kit. This is similar to those old project kits, but instead of inserting wires into springs, you snapped together components like snapping the buttons on a jacket. A kid can relate to that! Also the more complex parts of the more advanced projects are modularized. Each component is labeled to include the symbol for the component, its polarity and is color coded. The projects clearly explain how the circuit works as well as each components function.

My son took to it like a duck to water. He hungrily built the first six projects. He listened to me explain about voltage, current, resistance and polarity. We discussed ohms law.  There are 95 more projects in the booklet, but I'm ready to give this kit an A+ for inspiring kids to understand technology at a fundamental level. And the price - $40 - can't be beat. Also, there are smaller kits available from Elenco which are compatible with this kidt, meaning you can mix and match. The smaller kits are as cheap as $15. If you want to teach your kids about electronics, this is a great product to start with.