Serendipity35

    ”The Treachery of Images” by René Magritte says that "This is not a pipe." A strange loop.

I got a copy of Douglas Hofstadter's book, Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, when I started working at NJIT in 2000. It was my lunch reading. I read it in almost daily spurts. I often had to reread because it is not light reading.

It was published in 1979 and won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction. It is said to have inspired many a student to pursue computer science, though it's not really a CS book. It was further described on its cover as a "metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll." In the book itself, he says "I realized that to me, Godel and Escher and Bach were only shadows cast in different directions by some central solid essence. I tried to reconstruct the central object, and came up with this book."

I had not finished the book when I left NJIT and it went on a shelf at home. This summer I was trying to thin out my too-many books and I came upon it again with its bookmarker glowering at me from just past the halfway point in the pages. So, I went back to reading it. Still, tough going, though very interesting.

I remembered writing a post here about the book (it turned out to be from 2007) when I came upon a new book by Hofstadter titled I Am a Strange Loop. That "strange loop" was something he originally proposed in the 1979 book. This post is a rewrite and update on that older post.

The earlier book is a meditation on human thought and creativity. It mixes the music of Bach, the artwork of Escher, and the mathematics of Godel. In the late 1970s when he was writing interest in computers was high and artificial intelligence (AI) was still more of an idea than a reality. Reading Godel, Escher, Bach exposed me to some abstruse math (like undecidability, recursion, and those strange loops) but (here's where Lewis Carroll's "What the Tortoise Said to Achilles" gets referenced though some of you will say it's really a Socratic dialogue as in Xeno's fable, Achilles and the Tortoise) each chapter has a dialogue between the Tortoise and Achilles and other characters to dramatize concepts. Allusions to Bach's music and Escher's art (that loves paradox) also are used, as well as other mathematicians, artists, and thinkers. Godel's Incompleteness Theorem serves as his example of describing the unique properties of minds.

His new book back then was I Am a Strange Loop which focuses on the "strange loop" that he originally proposed in the 1979 book. I haven't read that book, but since I made it through the earlier volume (albeit in 18 years), I may give Strange Loop a try.

From what I read about the author, he was disappointed with how Godel, Escher, Bach (GEB) was received. It certainly got good reviews - and a Pulitzer Prize - but he felt that readers and reviewers missed what he saw as the central theme. I have an older edition but in a 20th-anniversary edition, he added that the theme was "a very personal attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter. What is a self, and how can a self come out of stuff that is as selfless as a stone or a puddle?"

I Am a Strange Loop focuses on that theme. In both books, he addresses "self-referential systems." (see link at bottom)

One thing that stuck with me from my first attempt at GEB is his using "meta" and defining it as meaning "about." Some people might say that it means "containing." Back on the early part of this century, I thought about that when I first began using Moodle as a learning management system. When you set up a new course in Moodle (and in other LMSs since then), it asks if this is a "metacourse." In Moodle, that means that it is a course that "automatically enrolls participants from other 'child' courses." Metacourses (AKA "master courses") feature all or part of the same content but customized to the enrollments of other sections. 

This was a feature used in big courses like English or Chemistry 101. In my courses, I thought more about having things like meta-discussions or discussions about discussions. My metacourse might be a course about the course. Quite self-referential.

I suppose it can get loopy when you start saying that if we have a course x, the metacourse X could be a course to talk about course x but would not include course x within itself. Though I suppose that it could.

Have I lost you?

Certainly, metatags are quite common on web pages, photos and for cataloging, categorizing and characterizing content objects. Each post on Serendipity35 is tagged with one or more categories and a string of keyword tags that help readers find similar content and help search engines make the post searchable.

A brief Q&A with Hofstadter published in Wired  in March 2007 about the newer book says that he considers the central question to him to be "What am I?."

His examples of "strange loops" include Escher's piece, "Drawing Hands," which shows two hands drawing each other, and the sentence, "I am lying."

Hofstadter gets spiritual in his further thinking and he finds at the core of each person a soul. He feels the "soul is an abstract pattern." Because he felt the soul is strong in mammals (weaker in insects), it brought him to vegetarianism.

He was considered to be an AI researcher, but he now thought of himself as a cognitive scientist.

Reconsidering GED, he decides that another mistake in that book's approach may have been not seeing that the human mind and smarter machines are fundamentally different. He has less of an interest in computers and claims that he always thought that his writing would "resonate with people who love literature, art, and music" more than the tech people.

If it has taken me much longer to finish Godel, Escher, Bach than it should, that makes sense if we follow the strange loop of Hofstadter's Law. ("It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.)

End Note: 
A self-referential situation is one in which the forecasts made by the human agents involved serves to create the world they are trying to forecast. http://epress.anu.edu.au/cs/mobile_devices/ch04s03.html. Social systems are self-referential systems based on meaningful communication. http://www.n4bz.org/gst/gst12.htm.

Swarming herring

I like to discover new words, new fields of study - new things in general. My new one for today is STIGMERGY. According to Wikipedia (an apt source or the definition, as I will explain) is stigmergy is a "mechanism of indirect coordination, through the environment, between agents or actions.” That is not a very clear definition.

The concept of stigmergy has been used to analyze self-organizing activities. Those activities cover a wide area: social insects, social media, robotics, web communities, and the wider human society.

One principle of stigmergy is that the trace left in the environment by an action stimulates the performance of a next action, by the same or a different agent. This can explain the way an ant colony operates. It can also explain how Wikipedia articles are created and changed.

Social insects, like ants and bees, have long been a model of collaboration. Global knowledge sharing through asynchronous collaboration is a newer example. I believe I may have heard this word a or concept more than a decade ago when "Web 2.0" was a new and much-talked-about idea. Now, I hardly ever hear Web 2.0 mentioned - and that's not because we got past it and into Web 3.0.

The word is not all that new. It was coined in 1959 by French biologist Pierre-Paul Grassé in reference to termite behavior, from the Ancient Greek stigma, "mark”, “sign" + ergon "work”, “action."

You might hear the word used in a conversation about swarm intelligence. Swarm intelligence (SI) is the collective behavior of decentralized, self-organized systems, natural or artificial and it is employed in work on artificial intelligence and applications such as cellular robotic systems. It has been studied in the natural world in ant colonies, bird flocking, hawks hunting, animal herding, bacterial growth, fish schooling and the somewhat scary world of microbial intelligence.

The World-Wide Web is the first stigmergic communication medium for humans. The earlier telephone and even email don't count as stigmergic communication since they are only readable by the people on either end. Stigmergic communication means the messages are readable by everyone. And radio and TV don't fit the definition because they are read-only mediums for most people (until the Web emerges and the read/write of Web 2.0 takes hold). 

Wikipedia with its millions of contributors is an example of stigmergy. Its editors are a good example of how these traces of articles and edits left in the wiki environment stimulate the performance of a next action, by the same person or a different person(s).

I discovered (or possibly rediscovered) stigmergy from an episode of the playswellwithothers.org podcast with guests Katherine Maher, the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation and Clint Penick, an ant researcher and assistant research professor in the Biomimicry Center at Arizona State University.

FURTHER READING
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Stigmergy
"Stigmergy as a universal coordination mechanism I: Definition and components" 

Amazon is committing $50 million to computer science education in the United States with new programs supporting high school and early undergraduate students. Part of this includes financial aid to help schools bring AP computer science courses to their students. They have recently expanded this initiative into K-8.

The program has begun offering free online lessons and funding summer camps to help students discover the "fun" of computer science. Amazon critics might say this a just a kind of farm system for training new employees. Their efforts may benefit the company, but those students are probably more likely to work for other companies. And yes, I would agree that $50 million dollars is a lot of money, but not a lot of money when spread across the country's schools.

Students who start computer science early (and this seems to especially be true for females) are more likely to say they like computer science and have confidence in their computer science abilities.

I'm sure many people would write about this as another STEM or STEAM effort, but their materials talk about how positive it is for everyone to understand how computers (and that word means so many things besides the traditional laptop or desktop computer we talked about just 20 years ago) work and how they are programed.

Most students will not end up working as programmers or computer scientists, but that technology will touch the lives in and out of the workplace.

The program promotes how programming will aid not only the understanding of computers, but other technology and also a student's understanding of logic, precision and creativity.

Amazon Future Engineer Pathway is a partnership with organizations such as Code.org and Coding with Kids.

The Amazon Future Engineer Pathway program aims to support 100,000 high schoolers in taking Advanced Placement courses in computer science. It also is set to award four-year scholarships and internships to a sizable group of students from under-represented populations who participate in those courses.

Amazon is accepting scholarship applications for the 2019 campus and classes.
Schools and districts may also apply on behalf of families

https://www.amazonfutureengineer.com/

https://code.org/

https://www.codingwithkids.com/amazon/

On Internships

I don't know that anyone wants to literally return to the one-room schools of the past. This one is from 1940 in rural Kentucky, USA. But the concept may have present day applications.

According to Wikipedia, one-room schools were once commonplace throughout rural portions of various countries, including Prussia, Norway, Sweden, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Spain.

In these rural and small town schools (some of which literally used someone's house), all of the students met in a single room. A single teacher taught academic basics to different aged children at different levels of elementary-age boys and girls.

I imagine that younger kids were hearing some of the older kids' lessons and older kids could get some remedial lessons when the younger kids were being taught. I think that could be an interesting model of learning. I also think it would be a challenging teaching assignment. It's a topic I delve into a bit deeper on my other blog.

Any debate about whether to group students by age or ability is hardly a new one. Terms like "performance-based" "ability grouping," "competency-based education" and "age-based instruction" pop up in lots of article, papers and dissertations. Classes and schools have been created around these ideas. And they still are being created - perhaps for different reasons than those that brought the one-room schools of the past into existence.

What is a school without grade levels? I read about a number of contemporary schools, including a district in North Dakota, that felt a drive to teach competencies meant eliminating age-based classrooms.

Back in 2016, I read an article in The Atlantic that asked "What If Schools Abolished Grade Levels?" Their panel concluded that sorting kids by age or ability creates problems.

What are some reasons to consider this approach to education?

In traditional classrooms, the learning is likely to be too fast or too slow for a good percentage of the students.

Rather than using "seat time" (students progressing through school based on the amount of time they sit in a chair), base promotion onward on mastery of competencies and skills.”

Allowing students to learn at their own pace, including progressing more quickly through content they truly understand.

Those sound good. Are there any potential problems with this approach?

Grouping by ability rather than age could increase social interruptions. Having taught middle school and high school, I would tell you that there are some big differences between a sixth grader (typically 11 years old) and an eighth grader (at 13). Even more dramatic would be a class with two very good math students that are 12 and 16 years old. I actually saw that happen several times when middle school students were allowed to go to the high school (or even local college) for advanced classes. I know it works on television for Doogie Howser and Young Sheldon, but maybe not so smoothly in real life. Maturity, socialization and self-esteem are all considerations. 

Scheduling and assigning courses for each student becomes more complicated. 

But even if you question the pedagogy of this approach, what about the andragogy? When we train adult employees or our returning adult undergraduates and graduate students, how do we group? Do we put the 45 year-old woman working on her MBA separate from the 26 year old? Of course, we do not. Through some screening or admission processes, we often put learners in groups based on ability. For example, an employee is brand new to the software so she will go in level one training whether she is 22 or 55 years old.

The old one-room schools were primarily for the lower elementary grade levels, and they very much were products of economics, supply and demand, and necessity. Perhaps, new one-room schools would also work better at those levels rather than at the high school level. We already see some of this arrangement informally or just be accident in higher education and we certainly see it in training situations. This might be the time to reexamine the formal use of ability grouping at different ages and in different situations.