"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
--Ben Franklin - "In the twenty-first century, he thinks, the next revolution will be driven by cheap sensors coupled to microprocessors and lasers."
--Michio Kaku on Paul Saffo in Visions - From motion and heat sensors that keep school buildings intruder-free at night to chemical sensors that keep airplanes terrorist-free at all times of the day or night, sensors are becoming an increasingly important presence in everyday life. Increasingly important, in part, because they are becoming increasingly automatic, increasingly compact, increasingly transparent. The aim of part one of this project is for students to become increasingly aware of these harbingers of (what science fiction writer David Brin has called) The Transparent Society.
- Of course, dynamical systems are not limited to the sensory. In general, the class of dynamical systems rests on the interdependent tripod of sensing, "thinking", and controlling. (Note this tripod in Paul Saffo's prediction about "the next revolution": cheap sensors provide sensing; microprocessors provide "thought" (or "intelligence" in David Fogel's sense); and lasers provide links to other sensors and to the control apparatus.) If sensory systems evolve according to a security-oriented sensibility, are control systems that forcibly ensure safety far behind? It is in light of this query that Ben Franklin's famous quotation on the inverse relationship between "Liberty" and "Safety" touches netizens of the Information Age. The second part of this project, "Motor Magic," will tackle the control side of the sensory-motor (aka S & M) equation.
- "The limitless, anarchic possibilities of the telecosm contrast sharply with the limits to growth we now encounter at every turn in the physical world."
--Peter Huber, Law and Disorder in Cyberspace
- Foothill High School in Pleasanton, California, is suffused with motivated students and supportive parents. With the arrival of new Mac G3s (why not even newer G4s?) on site, they are poised to take (nearly) maximal advantage of the "limitless, anarchic possibilities of the telecosm." May the cyberdeities smile upon them! (For, obviously, the computer sales reps did not.) In particular, may pupils perceive the permanent import of processing opinions with paper and pencil when this project is past! Further Deponent Sayeth Not.
- "We must prepare for parting and leave taking,
- Or else remain the slaves of permanence."
--Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi
- César Chávez Middle School in Union City, California, is a school in transition. Fifth graders and fifth-grade teachers bid the school a fond farewell at the end of the 1998-99 school year. Sixth graders and sixth-grade teachers are due to leave next for the elementary level, at the end of the 2000-01 school year. But all is not "parting and leave taking"; the ninth graders and ninth-grade teachers from James Logan High School will become one with César Chávez at the beginning of the 2001-02 school year. In the meantime, the middle school is now hosting the New Haven Unified School District (NHUSD) transition school, which went into operation during the 1999-2000 school year. (Whether the transition school remains in operation remains to be seen.)
"What o'clock is it?" --Prince Hal, Henry IV, Part I "A wise man knows what time it is." --Zen Proverb - This part of the project will take about a month and a half to complete: one week for students to become familiar with the project; one month following that for students to research the sensor technology that interests them most; then a week following that for students to present their results.
- Students will be able to explain the systems-oriented view of a sensor (as a transformer of physical, chemical, or electromagnetic differences in the environment into meaningful information for a system) and outline a taxonomy of sensors that emphasizes their particular research area. The aim of these outcomes is for students to familiarize themselves with the vast potential of modern sensor technology (MST). The systems-oriented view of MST (including the fact that sensors do not discover free-floating information so much as they create it -- but only in the sense that every interpretive act is creative) will lead naturally to the theory that sensors are theory-impregnated.
- It is important for students to tackle problems, rather than to investigate "subject areas." Subjects or topics are convenient administrative units, but they have nothing to do with the growth of knowledge. Each group of students will formulate a practical problem (involving drugs, education, freedom, health, money, politics, privacy, safety, war, etc.) the solution of which requires MST. The group will consider, in addition to the feasibility of its solution (highly infeasible solutions being, in general, self-eliminating), some unintended consequences of implementing its solution.
- Problems do not exist in an intellectual vacuum. Instead, they tend to come in (sometimes extended) families that are embedded in an even larger, ongoing discussion called the problem situation. Hence, first, students have to find a problem that interests them. They should be able to identify their problem as such; they should be able to explain why their problem is, indeed, a problem. Second, their research should uncover the current state of public discussion on that problem, including especially discussion on obstacles to solving it. Third, students should introduce their MST solution into the public discussion of the problem situation. Fourth, and finally, they should explain how their solution alters the state of the discussion, how it alters the problem situation.
- To guard against plagiarism, each group will have to tackle its problem by "inventing" a hypothetical sensor, by combining two or more extant sensors in a novel way, or by describing a novel application of sensor technology. In any case, novelty is the antidote to plagiarism.
- Each group will present its findings to the rest of the class, using a PowerPoint schematic. After a short Q & A period, the class will follow the S & M rubric to authentically assess the presentation.
- After all class groups have presented their results, students will discuss the evolution of their understanding of MST.
"Let us not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments." --William Shakespeare, Sonnet CXVI
- The student scenario reads (roughly) as follows:
"Pretend that you are an adolescent living at the edge of the twenty-first century.
"Computers now process and remember millions of times as much data -- millions of times as quickly -- as they did when you were born. However! ... the Computer Revolution, as significant as it was, pales in comparison to the Information Revolution. In the first revolution, the value of a device was a function of speed, memory, reliability, and so on; intrinsic measures all. In the second (still ongoing) revolution, the value of a device is still partly a function of reliability, of course, but bandwidth and connectivity count for much more. (Indeed, networks are replacing devices as the predominant processors of the Information Age.) In the second revolution, in other words, a device is valued mostly for extrinsic reasons, for its almost sensory linkage to the rest of cyberspace. The Information Age is the Age of the Sensor.
"How do sensors affect the way you live? How do they affect the lives of your loved ones? How do they affect the lives of people you have never met and probably will never meet? And how is that you know about them at all?As you go through the rest of the day, as you go home, as you read a newspaper or magazine, browse the web, watch television, or put your younger siblings to bed in a darkened room where no watchful, caring adult also sleeps, find examples of sensors that have an important impact on the way people live now... or on the way they soon will live. Be prepared to explain your discoveries: how do these sensors function and why should we care about them?
"If nothing else, upon due reflection, one may respond by asking, 'Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?' (That is, 'Who Watches the Watchmen?' -- an ancient (Roman) question asked anew in Alan Moore's graphic novel, The Watchmen. -- Only now the question has become, 'Who Senses the Sensors?' -- an important question that David Brin raises (and for which he provides a most disturbing answer) in his eye-opening book (mentioned also in the Abstract, above), The Transparent Society.) Indeed, one may choose any of a number of points of departure to open the Pandora's box of modern sensor technology (MST), but some points of departure lead to the immunological dimensions of MST more quickly than others, though it would be a mistake to confuse these points with former President Bush's 'thousand points of light' (which arose as part of his vision of 'The New World Order,' following the collapse of the Soviet Union and preceding the collapse of the Bush Administration). There are considerably more than a mere thousand of these points, and many of them -- far from being 'points of light' -- are better characterized as "points of death".
"Consider, for example, biological warfare. From the perspective of public choice (quasi-economic) theory*, the more appropriate Latin quotation for examining the demand for MST is not 'Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?' -- but rather 'Cui bono?' -- i.e., 'Who profits?' Given that, worldwide, U.S. troops are (and will remain) stationed in over a hundred countries, which in turn abut hundreds more -- not all of which are thrilled by the proximity of American military might, the list of 'profiteers', though they may not be oriented mainly toward pecuniary rewards, is, for all practical purposes, endless.
"For all practical purposes, the more pressing question is not 'why' but 'where': the mere fact that urban populations are relatively less mobile, less martial, less disciplined, less well-protected, and larger than troop populations makes U.S. cities relatively more attractive objects of subtle, biological terrorism. How much does bioterrorism cost to produce? Unfortunately, less than ever before. And the more affordable bioterrorism becomes, the more at risk American civilians become.
"Of course, to an extent, the particular question is less important than the fact that any appropriate question leads inexorably to the discovery that the world of MST is vast in its potential to help or to harm, to compete or to collaborate. It provides eyes, ears, and noses where none exist; it extends the reach of senses where they do exist; and it offers a degree of coordination in human affairs that formerly required the intervention of a deus ex machina in the Greek and Roman comedies of old ... though out of the machinery of MST the godlike powers of ancient mythology may be precisely our blessing -- and our curse, or at least our cross -- for the modern age."
*One may get a (better) feeling for public choice theory by examining the words and works of its founder, Nobel Laureate economist James Buchanan.
- "A sensor is often defined as a 'device that receives and responds to a signal or stimulus.' This definition is broad. In fact, it is so broad that it covers almost everything from a human eye to a trigger in a pistol."
--Jacob Fraden, Handbook of Modern Sensors (2nd ed.) - How do virtual sensors (fax machines, for example), whose environment is a (sometimes storm-wracked) sea of information, differ in form and function from actual sensors (motion detectors, for example), whose environment is initially uninterpreted and therefore not theory-impregnated?
- From a Parmenidean perspective, it is impossible to truly define anything, because doing so requires us to tell what a thing is NOT. (And, obviously, it is an infinite task to tell what something is not, both because what something is not embraces nearly the entire universe and because everything a thing is not must in turn be defined in terms of the rest of the universe.) However, it is possible and frequently useful to distinguish between a thing and the conceptual kissing-cousins with which it might be easily confused. For this reason, Jacob Fraden notes that a "sensor should be distinguished from a transducer. The latter is a converter of one type of energy into another, while the former converts any type of energy into electrical." Indeed, the problem of distinguishing between a thing and what it is not, or -- more precisely -- between 'self' and 'other', turns out to have enormous practical consequences for the evolution of sensor technology. (For more on the practical importance of self-other distictions from an immunological perspective, see our Cutting Edge Research page.)
"The play's the thing..." --Hamlet "A sensor does not function by itself -- it is always a part of a larger system which may incorporate many other detectors, signal conditioners, signal processors, memory devices, data recorders, and actuators. The sensor's place in a device is either intrinsic or extrinsic. It may be positioned at the input of a device to perceive the outside effects and to signal the system about variations in the outside stimuli. Also, it may be an internal part of a device which monitors the devices' own state to cause the appropriate performance. A sensor is always a part of some kind of a data acquisition system. Often such a system may be a part of a larger control system which includes various feedback mechanisms. To select an appropriate sensor, a system designer must address the question: 'What is the simplest way to sense the stimulus without degradation of the overall system performance?'"
--Jacob Fraden, Handbook of Modern Sensors (2nd ed.)
"... to catch the conscience of the king." --Hamlet - Hence the following learning curve - cum - "mousetrap":
- "Surprisingly, there's no evidence that a mouse learns anything about a maze, no matter how long it wanders about in one, until it first reaches the reward. That is, during its exploration of the maze, the mouse isn't developing a map of the maze. Nevertheless, once success is achieved, the mouse does rapidly improve its performance in subsequent trials. It achieves reasonably good performance without acquiring any conceptual understanding at all. But it can't , through its own behavior, eliminate all its errors. This is remarkably similar to the behavior of a student in a physics laboratory -- or in most other learning situations -- who can't achieve error-free performance without intervention from a teacher."
--Alan Cromer, Connected Knowledge - Students will choose (or "create") the sensor, the sensor's environment, and the PowerPoint schematic to represent both. Students will begin by viewing the sensor website and by learning PowerPoint. Then students will use the web to investigate sensor technology and will use PowerPoint to start working on their schematics -- after their ideas for the schematics have gotten the teacher's approval. (Remember, the schematic must include both the sensor and the environment in which the sensor functions.) Finally, after getting appropriate feedback at appropriate junctures, students will finish their schematic, prepare their talks, and make their presentations.
- Sensor technology, much like the students who study them, is guided more by short-term adaptations (adaptation to the moment) than by long-term, detailed predictions. The environments in which sensors function are complicated, complex, or both. Such environments are largely unpredictable (especially from within, given the possibility that sensors may alter their behaviors in the face of other sensors and the fact that sensors partake of the environments under examination). Fortunately, even when it is impossible to predict an environmental system in detail, it is still possible to adapt to it.
"All life is problem solving." --Sir Karl Popper "A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject." --Winston Churchill - Sometimes students get stuck. Generally, in a science project, intellectual viscosity is not only good; it is essential. The ease with which a group of students gets unstuck will be largely a function of the straightforwardness of the sensor problem it takes on. (Following David Brin, author of The Transparent Society, groups with a taste for the Byzantine world of conspiracy theory will tend to adopt problems with high viscosity indices. See also the Abstract, above.) It will be the teacher's task to match groups with the appropriate level of viscosity.
"What a dump!" --Betty Davis (by attribution) Students will present a (relatively static) PowerPoint schematic of a (relatively dynamic) sensoring process to the rest of the (hopefully conscious) class.
(NB: In case the reader is distressed by the relative brevity of this section, it behooves us to mention that our apparent lack of concern about the products of our students's efforts may be, from a Freudian perspective, a healthy attitude for a teacher to adopt.)
"I used my little grey cells." --Hercule Poirot How much genuine science (in the sense of Popper's falsifiability criterion of demarcation between scientific and nonscientific theories) will these schematics contain? To a large extent, the answer to this question will depend on the science background of the teacher.
(NB: A frequently overlooked aspect of Popper's methodology concerns the logical asymmetry between the (so-called inductive) verification and the (genuinely deductive) falsification of a scientific theory. -- For example, apart from conventional rules about the acceptability of a given set of experimental results, Einstein's Theory of General Relativity and Freud's Theory of the Censor stand in different (and contrasting) logical relationships to falsification vis-a-vis potential observartion statements. Unsurprisingly, professional attention paid to the highly testable theory that avoided falsification by passing crucial experiments (like Eddington's) has led to a number of surprisingly* fruitful results, including the work of Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose on black holes, which Einstein did not expect and Eddington frankly doubted; whereas professional attention paid to the theory that avoided falsification by being highly untestable has unsurprisingly led to a black hole of scholarly proposals, grants, and research. -- Since most critical discussions of the falsificationist approach to scientific theory hinges, wrongly, on the uncertainty of conclusive falsification (instead of on the logical assymetry between verification and falsification tasks), little of intellectual interest has come out of them. See Popper's Realism and the Aim of Science on the methodological role of falsification in the growth of scientific knowledge.)
*See John Allen Paulos's Innumeracy for a concise explanation of the idea that one should not be surprised that surprising things (not specified in advance) occur; that, in fact, it would be exceedingly surprising if they did not.
"The end justifies the means." --Niccolo Machiavelli - Sensor technology is evolving too quickly for students to avoid using the World-Wide Web, unless they were to subscribe to professional journals (which would be both costly to obtain and almost impossible for them to understand). However, we do not choose this technology because it is essential -- except in the limited sense that we have a limited amount of time to get the job done; instead, we choose this technology because is easier to use or more affordable (in the strictly personal sense that X is easier for MY students to use or more affordable for ME, or both) than the available alternatives.
- Just as it is inappropriate for students to fraudulently borrow finished web products without acknowledgement or attribution, so it is inappropriate for teachers to fraudulently borrow unfinished, web-based, educational projects without acknowledging that they are turning students into guinea pigs and without attributing the pressure to adopt such high-tech projects to current educational fashion. "Best and Brightest Use" determinations still lie far in the future. At a rough guess, a society or culture has not attained the "Best and Brightest Use" of a technology until that technology has become invisible to most users -- that is, until long after most users have ceased to worry about the question of "Best and Brightest Use."
- In any event, are teachers the "best and brightest" ones to make "best and brightest" technology determinations?
- Part of the determination of whether a given project is optimally technological or not depends upon knowledge that public school teachers simply do not have: How much does the technology proposed for the project cost in toto? In the absence of (pricing mechanisms that provide) such information, cost-benefit analysis upon which an optimization determination depends will remain forever beyond both the abilities and, frankly, the interests of most teachers.
- One must wonder, likewise, whether explicit, large-scale "best and brightest" determinations are possible, even in theory, in the absence of a true philosopher-king (which prima facie may include a Stalin, a Hitler, and a Mao as easily as a Pericles, a Richard the Lionhearted, and a Louis XIV). Historically, all attempts to choose (or create), through utopian social engineering, the one best way of doing things have foundered, because (among other things) no central controlling agency is capable of collecting and managing the aggregate information necessary to coordinate the actions of disparate agents with different (and often competing) agendas. (Ironically, the philosopher-king of Plato's Republic explicitly denies the beneficence of social (and, therefore, presumably technological) evolution. See Popper's Open Society (vol. I) for details.)
- Finally, we should note that the evolutionary path of sensor technology has hardly devoloped according to an a priori vision of the one best way to do things. To the contrary, the control side of S & M technology stresses adaptation at the expense of (extensive, detailed, long-term) planning. What else should one expect? When one walks or drives from place to place, one does not (beyond the most rough-and-ready sense) plan the steps one is to take from A to B. One keeps ones eyes open on the sidewalk or behind the steering wheel precisely because one wants to remain attentive to behavior-altering feedback. For similar reasons, one does not plug one's ears on the sidewalk or behind the steering wheel: one does not know ahead of time the channel through which behavior-altering feedback will come. Unsuprisingly, "intelligent" sensors tend to be multi-channel and flexibly responsive, rather than single-channel or responsive only in the most narrowly automatic sense. (See Manfred Schroeder's Computer Speech and Robert Axelrod's Harnessing Complexity for details.)
"The heights that great men reached and kept
Were not attained by single flight.
But they, whilst others slept,
Were toiling upward in the night."--Aristotle, as interpreted by Robbie Burns
Teacher and students will jointly assess each presentation. Prior to the presentation, students will seek regular feedback from the teacher. Students will also maintain the website and make choices about how to do so.(NB: Because risk assessment is likely to be a feature of many student projects, probability theory will probably be of central importance for assessing the validity of those projects. -- For more on risk analysis, see Bernstein's Against the Gods. -- Unfortunately, for historical reasons relating to, among other things, Laplace's argument (e.g., Laplace's Demon.) for 'scientific' determinism against the background of Newtonian mechanics , the subjectivist interpretation of the probability calculus (i.e., the view that represents probabilities as degrees of belief, that is, as measures of ignorance about the world, rather than as measures of objective tendencies or propensities that make up the world, apart from any thoughts we might have about them) has arisen from a naive, and therefore uncritically held, deterministic presumption about the universe and even now dominates probabilty theory (e.g., Bayesian probabilty theory). -- For a comprehensive argument against 'scientific' determinism and the subjectivist approach to probability theory, see Popper's Open Universe. For an objective interpretation of the probability calculus, see his Logic of Scientific Discovery and World of Propensities. )
- "For when the One Great Scorer comes to mark against your name, He writes -- not that you won or lost -- but how you played the game."
"Winning isn't everything. It is the only thing." --Vince Lombardi - What is a successful or victorious project outcome? Or, how do we define winning? Are we in the grips of a zero-sum game here? For every victor must there be a corresponding victim?
- With regard to project evaluation, two zero-sum aspects deserve mention. First, space limitations preclude putting all PowerPoint schematics onto the sensor website, even if all of them prove to be excellent. How shall a class decide whether a student project should be incorporated into the S & M website? Probably the best approach will involve a collective decision guided by the teacher. Second, to avoid plagiarism, schematic ideas must remain distinct. Fortunately, project grading does not require a zero-sum approach.
- "The strength of leading universities is increasingly centered in the hard sciences and the research tradition they foster.... The social science groups stomp and raise a fuss that often provides internal legitimation without any regard to the actual achievements of these fields.... If a unified learning environment is to emerge, it must be in the name of science, not as a sop to ideology."
- --Irving Louis Horowitz, "In Defense of Scientific Autonomy: The Two Cultures Revisited", Academic Questions, vol. 2,1, Winter 1988-89
- "Intelligence is a property of purpose-driven decision-makers. It applies equally well to humans, colonies of ants, robots, social groups, and so forth. Thus, more generally, ... intelligence may be defined as the capability of a system to adapt its behavior to meet its goals in a range of environments. For species, survival is a necessary goal in any given environment; for a machine, both goals and environments may be imbued by the machine's creators."
--David Fogel, Evolutionary Computation - "Ideology is also why educators can advocate the different learning styles of students, while avoiding the whole question of intelligence. Intelligence ranks students, learning styles don't. Ranking is bad, difference is good. Wishes are facts, and ideology is reality. Educational theory, weak to begin with, has completely sunk into the swampy waters of potmodernist nihilism and relativism. And there are few educators who know enough arithmetic to balance a checkbook, let alone understand a mulivariate logistic regression."
--Alan Cromer, Connected Knowledge
- "Sensor and Sensibility," Part I of "Sensory-Motor Technology in Everyday Life," has ties to the following California Science Content Standards for 8th grade: 1 (motion sensors), 2 (pressure sensors), 3 (the energetics of sensors), 5-7 (chemical sensors), and 9 (sensors as data collectors). By the same token, it has straightforward ties to large parts of California's Grades 9-12 Content Standards for Physics, Chemistry, and Biology.
- Unfortunately, the WWW (Cutting Edge) links for "Sensor and Sensibility" link not (in superior fashion or otherwise) to LInCing to SUPER! (which is not to say that they ought to do so, since the SUPER! program no longer has any earthly connection to sensors, the World-Wide Web, or even itself) -- but some of them do, indeed, connect to Sandia's research websites.
- Why do (explicitly stated content) standards exist? What sense is there in having them (explicitly stated)? Any sort of sensible answer has to entail the following claim: "We set (and state) state standards to achieve (or, at least, to approximate) a sort of social orthogenesis." In other words, standards presumably allow us to control educational evolution in ways that would be costly, if not impossible, in the absence of standards. From the perspective of mathematical control theory, for example, observation -- or sensing -- is the first step to achieving control over evolutionary processes. Since adaptation is also a necessary (though necessarily later) step, it behooves us to ask whether we should assume that the current content standards are themselves impervious to the winds of change. Recent history suggests the contrary.
- Is it possible, then, to use sensors to control the evolution of state content standards? And, if so, in terms of what meta-standards (if any) should one invoke MST to control them? These sorts of questions lead naturally to "Motor Magic," Part II of this project, which will examine the motor side of sensory-motor technology.
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