Mathing…

I’m liking Undercover Boss a lot, but not because it’s great entertainment. It is basically great PR for companies. CBS created a 40 minute ad for companies that people want to watch. Forget product placement. This is better. This is doing for Waste Management, Hooters, and 7-Eleven what Cast Away did for FedEx.

The best part is that it shows how out of touch many leaders are with the realities on the floor. Sadly, the worst things presented in each show aren’t really that bad. I mean, how realistic is that? Oh noes.. there’s a missing light or we’re tossing stuff out unnecessarily or our sick workers have to work hard in a fast paced environment. Somehow there’s always a hero in each episode. Someone who has a tough background and who works hard and maintains a positive attitude despite all the challenges, and the CEO ends up emotional (proving they’re human) and helpful (proving they’re decent humans). Not saying they aren’t, I just get the impression that things are done for the camera. It ends with CEOs having some kind of epiphany, some realization about how their decisions affect people on the ground level and how the experience will forever change how they make decisions. Right…

There are some very resilient and positive folks out there (see clip below), to be sure, but within those same companies there are probably hundreds more who work just as hard but who won’t get any recognition or rewarded, people who don’t have the great back stories, average folks who aren’t any less deserving. The general feeling I get for most companies is that folks do the best they can in a system with ridiculous rules and expectations. Most CEOs didn’t quite cut it as a foot soldier within their own companies. I suspect, this is probably true of education.

I’d like to see an episode where our educational leaders work in our schools as teachers. Maybe conditions will improve faster like they do in the show. Maybe policies will be informed by reality in the field. Maybe all it takes is for someone high up to get into a parked van and make a phone call.

I doubt it though. The show will probably devolve to the PR vehicle that it is. Nothing will be learned. We’ll all just get warm and fuzzy feelings for 15 minutes.

Last thought: In the 7-Eleven episode, the CEO claims in the end that “they [customers] are not coming to 7-Eleven to buy our coffee. They are coming to buy it from Dolores.” Dolores is one of the amazing workers who knows her customers by name and does her job with vigor despite undergoing dialysis. It’s a great line for a CEO, but it got me thinking. Do I have students who are not particularly interested in math, but will learn it because they are learning from me? Am I making the kinds of connections with students that will get them to want to come back to my class to learn?

UPDATE: Embedded trailer and clip.

I’ve recently added links to the right to my twitter account @mrhodotnet, my Google Buzz page, and my Google Reader Shared Items.

I won’t be posting to this blog unless it’s something more substantial or original or something that requires latex.

I started using twitter because I found great links to resources and articles that the teacher bloggers whom I follow are posting on twitter but not to their blogs. I even started using brizzly after it was recommended by one of the teachers and I liked the improved interface at brizzly.com. One of the things Brizzly did was that it resolved the links from the URL shortener sites to the actual URLs. Better, but still not great.

I find the Google Buzz is a better tool for sharing these links and articles. Instead of entering a link on say bit.ly and then copying and pasting to twitter, I insert the link to Buzz and add comments and quote relevant sections. Buzz will even find the pictures on that link and ask me which one I’d like included in the Buzz post. This Buzz post took me less than a minute. Anyone who sees that Buzz post can quickly decide whether it’s worth their click. On twitter you don’t know this until you click the link. The same thing can be done on a blog but with much more effort. My initial reaction to Buzz was somewhat negative, but I’m definitely warming up to it.

If you follow this blog please also add me on Google Buzz (preferred), especially if you don’t mind sharing your Buzz or shared items from Reader with me. If you like to just see my shared items without using Buzz, simply visit my Buzz page or point your RSS agregator to the RSS of my Buzz posts at http://feeds.feedburner.com/googleapis/csIT (you don’t get full posts on this feed).

Here’s the update to Origami Chopstick Rest that I mentioned earlier (click on the link to get to the pics).

I tried following some of the tips on (PDF) Origami Diagramming Conventions: A Historical Perspective by Robert Lang.

This is what I have so far.

One problem I’m having is how to diagram the last step where I create a saddle like shape from the straight edge.

It is not the standard straight line fold. A quick search and image search for origami, origami notation, origami diagram didn’t yield what I was looking for; most examples were of straight line folds.

Any origamist or origami diagramist (is that a word?) know how to show that in a diagram?

Have you ever touched the table surfaces at your local Chinese restaurant? There’s a reason why they invented the chopstick rest.

You don’t have to buy one can carry it around with you. Next time you’re waiting the 10-20 minutes for your food, take your paper chopstick wrapper and make an origami chopstick rest.

Here’s a sample:

Many chopstick wrappers are open on one end. However, some wrappers may cover the chopsticks completely.

It may be necessary to rip open one of the ends. You can tear it off completely. I choose to leave it on (no bits of paper to throw away).

Fold the wrapper in half.

Fold it again in half.

This next step is optional. I re-fold so that there’s no hanging torn bits on the outside.

Fold in half along the length.

Fold triangularly along one of the corners.

Do the same for all 4 corners.

Fold them together and you get.

At this point you can stop. You’ve just created a simple chopstick rest that’s fairly functional. The first time you try this you may find the food arriving on your table when you finish. As you become more adept and folding them, you may want to modify this base to create fancier and in some cases more functional chopstick rest. I’ll give an example below.

You may notice that the above chopstick rest may rock back and forth. The middle support section is a little longer than the sides. One way to fix this is to fold the middle support section.

Do it again for the other side and you have a more stable chopstick rest.

One last thing about this rest is that it is straight along its length and the chopstick may slide off the sides. To avoid this, we can create a saddle, a slight curvature down the middle like the real chopstick rests.

Here’s the final rest in action:

I’ll probably update it later with instructions in traditional origami notation.

So you might have gotten wind that I started tweeting. I’m trying to think of ways of using it productively or at least I’m trying to justify the amount of time I spend on it to myself.

So far I’ve met some very knowledgeable folks and had some interesting conversations (as much as 140 characters will allow). Meaningful conversations can be hard on Twitter. Maybe one day I’ll learn to be more effective with words and to communicate with more precision while using less words. For now, I am using Twitter more for link discovery than anything else. I’ve retweeted some interesting links and I’ve noticed that just about everyone uses an URL shortener.

I’ve never been particularly fond of an URL shortener. Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror has expressed some of my thoughts better on Url Shorteners: Destroying the Web Since 2002, but that’s a whole other post there.

So far I am aware of about 4 URL shortener services frequently used on Twitter. They are:

• bit.ly
• ow.ly
• im.ly
• is.gd

Bit.ly is the first one that I used. One nice benefit of the service is that you can see the number of times that people have clicked on your link. You can even see the number of clicks from your shortened link compared the the number of total clicks on other shortened links to that same URL. No other service on my list seems to provide this information. But I digress.

I used the 4 URL shortener services to shorten this post’s URL: http://mrho.net/blog/?p=868. There results are below.

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Bit.ly produced http://bit.ly/7hFVX7. Seems like it uses 6 upper case, lower case, and number (alphanumeric character) combination to uniquely identify a link. Whether not they will increase to 7 alphanumeric characters when 6 runs out is unknown. Re-entering the same link into the service produces the same shortened link.

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The next service is Ow.ly. One nice “feature” of this service is that it uses one less letter in it name than Bit.ly.

The service produced http://ow.ly/Otn1 for this post’s URL. It seems the service uses only 4 upper case, lower case, and number combination to uniquely identify a link. Re-entering the same link into the services produces a different shortened link in a predictable order. This is an interesting “feature” especially for a math class. Some additional testing and we can see the minimum number of alphanumeric characters it will take is 3.

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The next service is Im.ly

The service produced http://im.ly/b1fc5/. It seems to use only 5 lower case, and number combination to uniquely identify a link. Re-entering the same link produces the same shortened URL.

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Lastly is Is.gd

The service produced http://is.gd/5wSXx. Relatively speaking, it has the more spartan interface of the services in this list. The service uses 5 upper case, lower case, and number combination to uniquely identify a link. Entering the same link again produces the same shortened URL.

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Summary of URL Shortener Services
Service	ID Length	Upper Case	Lower Case	Numbers
bit.ly	6	Y	Y	Y
ow.ly	4 (so far)	Y	Y	Y
im.ly	5	N	Y	Y
is.gd	5	Y	Y	Y

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Questions to students:

• Which is the best service? (how do you define best?)
• Which service would you use and why?
• Which service can hold the most links?
• Can we tell how many links are stored in the service as of now? If so how many? (hint: Ow.ly is the only one)
• How many more links needs to be shortened before Ow.ly needs 5 alphanumeric characters?
• Can any service shorten the links to all the pages in the entire web?
• Can any service shorten all the links in the entire web in 5, 10, 20, 50, 100 years? How can you find out? (assuming same rate of growth)
• Is it OK to recycle links like we do with license plates? What are some potential issues? What happens if a service is gone?
• How many unique links do we need to have to accommodate everyone in the world? What if we recycle the links?
• Are there ways to maximize the number of links?
• Could we use a word shortener to “increase” the information density in a single tweet?
• If the alphanumeric characters represent a positional numeral system, what would be its base? What is one hundred/thousand/million/billion/trillion in this base? How does allowing or disallowing upper case and lower case change these numbers?

What other questions would you ask? How would you support students to answer some of the questions above?

UPDATE: A reader points out a WCYDWT (What Can You Do With This) series by Dan Meyer on license plates.