“…the perfect commonplace book, in which I will continue that proud Renaissance tradition of recording useful quotations, inspiring stories and intriguing snippets, but which will eventually, in a surprising modern twist and via a complicated but plausible chain of events involving bestsellerdom, successful film adaptation and a meeting of minds with the star during an on-set visit, end in a long and happy marriage to Jake Gyllenhaal. Is it any wonder I keep buying, when only an unlined leather notebook stands between me and all this?”

“The project team is conducting a study in a bid to find a way to prevent the transmission of dengue virus. They are seeking volunteers to bloodfeed mosquitoes in their Aedes aegypti colony. To bloodfeed the mosquitoes, participants place their arm in the colony cage for a period of 15 minutes.
Participants will receive a $10 … Gift Card for every cage they feed.”

Not my ideal way to earn ten bucks.

'Diagram of the Causes of Mortality in the Army in the East' by Florence Nightingale -- click to enlarge. Image from Wikipedia/Wiki Commons.

It’s common knowledge that in 1854  Florence Nightingale identified poor hygiene practices as the major cause of mortality in army hospitals in the Crimea. (In fact, she thought the problem was a combination of poor nutrition and over-work. A separate Sanitary Commission arrived six months later to clean up the drainage, improve ventilation and reduce the occurrence of infectious diseases. Florence became a champion of hospital hygience after she returned to England.)

Another popular fact about Nightingale is that she didn’t believe in the new ‘germ theory’ about how infections spread. (Actually, in the early 1880s she wrote an article advocating strict precautions designed to kill germs.)

Florence Nightingale became the first female member of the Royal Statistical Society in 1858. She developed the ‘polar area diagram,’ a form of pie chart, and was a pioneer in the use of what we now call infographics — visual representations of data that can be understood by non-specialists.

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References:

• Wikipedia article
• Lesson plan from the UK National Archives
• Florence Nightingale Museum
• Royal Statistical Society

[Tip o' the hat to London Daily Photo blogger Ham who photographed a statue of Florence and linked to her infographic.]

Ten innovative e-books that use interactivity to enhance your reading experience.

Photo, above: Delia Derbyshire in the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, with Desmond Briscoe. Photo from BBC Radio 3's web site.

Today, 24 March, is Ada Lovelace Day. On this day bloggers celebrate the lives and careers of women in technology.

In honor of the occasion, please allow me to introduce you to Delia Derbyshire and Daphne Oram, two Englishwomen who in the 1960s bridged the gulf between science and art to create something never before seen or heard in the world, and to Meredith Brooks, one of Australia’s top audio engineers.

Delia Derbyshire

Novelist Lili Wilkinson blogged about Delia Derbyshire and the Doctor last year, and that’s a good inroduction to Delia.

Ron Grainer rightly gets credit for writing the original Dr Who theme tune, but it was Delia Derbyshire who gave it the rollicking spookiness that made the theme so distinctive.

Derbyshire studied mathematics and music at Cambridge. She was a pioneer of electronic music and sound effects. She worked in the BBC Radiophonic Workshop during the 1960s and 70s, using what we now regard as antiquated equipment to produce complex sounds that would be at home in any nightclub or loungeroom today.

Daphne Oram

The Radiophonic Workshop itself owed its existence to another remarkable woman, Daphne Oram, who with Desmond Briscoe persuaded the BBC that it needed an in-house production facility for electronic music and sound effects.

Daphne Oram in the studio - photo from The Guardian

Oram was, like Derbyshire, both a musician and a scientist who used technology in innovative ways. Oram invented a sound synthesis system called Oramics, which enabled the composer to literally draw the parameters (amplitude, frequency, timbre, duration) of the music she was creating. The marks drawn onto synchronised strips of 35mm film; a series of photo-electric cells under the film generated electrical charges which in turn produced sound.

A BBC News article called her the unsung pioneer of techno.

The March 2008 issue of Sound On Sound has a lengthy feature article on the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and the innovators who worked there.

Meredith Brooks

Finally, a word of tribute to Meredith Brooks who with her partner Bill Syratt ran the Soundwarp music engineering studio in Sydney for many years. I met Meredith online in the late 1990s when we both joined the ABC’s Science Matters email discussion list.

Meredith is a woman of good humor and wit. She doesn’t blow her own horn much, but after several years I did discover that she’s one of Australia’s top audio engineers. She and Bill worked on some of Australia’s best-known (rock) music albums.

She also turned out to have remarkable strength of character and spirit: she rarely mentioned the serious illnesses she grappled with in the last several years, except when asking for help with finding practical, useful information about treatment options. Sadly, her beloved Bill succumbed to cancer in 2009.

When I wrote this blog post in mid-2010, the future of the Soundwarp studio was uncertain; Meredith was looking for a new business partner or investor, or perhaps someone to buy the studio outright.

Whatever she decides to do with the business, and whether or not she continues to participate in the online communities we’ve shared, I will always admire Meredith Brooks, both as a successful sound engineer in a business that generally undervalues women’s technical expertise, and as a remarkable human being.

I’m told that I did much the same thing as a baby. Even when cot-bound and too young to read, if I awoke before my parents I would reach for a book and tell myself a story while turning pages — in the dark if necessary.

Thus are nerds bred and nurtured :-)

University of Melbourne Vice-Chancellor Glyn Davis opened the conference. He spoke for 15 minutes and for the next three days other presenters kept quoting his remarks.

Glyn mentioned:

• Clark Kerr, a long-serving President of the University of California, who was criticised by Ronald Reagan as a ‘dangerous liberal’ for his stance on free speech and political protesst. Kerr wrote memoirs about his time at UC and a survey of the higher education and research landscape called “The Uses of the University.” Managing universities “is not for the fainthearted.”
• Geoff Garrett and Graeme Davies’ book “Herding Cats: being advice to aspiring academic and research leaders.”
• Deregulation of student numbers; some Australian universities increased their student numbers by one-third this year.
• Crown Casino is largest employer in Melbourne, universities are second and third largest
• Education is the largest export industry in Victoria.
• Only 23 per cent of Melbourne University’s income is sourced directly from the federal government: in Europe, Melbourne’s funding balance would see it classified as a private institution.

Rather, those are the questions you answer in hindsight, once the business is running and you need to demonstrate success. Those are the questions Poirot asks rhetorically in the drawing-room as he explains how the crime was committed.

When forming a business strategy and a plan, you need to ask different kinds of questions: the kinds of questions Poirot asks in order to solve the case, questions about why and how and what’s missing from our understanding of the situation. Venkat at Trailmeme explains:

“…Real questions, useful questions, questions with promising attacks, are always motivated by the specific situation at hand.  They are often about situational anomalies and unusual patterns in data that you cannot explain based on your current mental model of the situation… Real questions frame things in a way that creates a restless tension, by highlighting  the potentially important stuff that you don’t know. You cannot frame a painting without knowing its dimensions. You cannot frame a problem without knowing something about it. Frames must contain situational information.”

In a recent blog post he explores the combined potential of a national schools curriculum and the advent ofthe iPad.

Through the National Curriculum, he says, “every educator and every student throughout the nation can be drawing from and contributing to a ‘common wealth’ of shared materials, whether they be podcasts of lectures, educational chatrooms, lesson plans, and on and on and on.  As the years go by, this wealth of material will grow as more teachers and more students add their own contributions to it.  The National Curriculum isn’t a mandate, per se; it’s better to think of it as an empty Wikipedia.  All the article headings are there, all the taxonomy, all the cross references, but none of the content.  The next decade will see us all build up that base of content, so that by 2020, a decade’s worth of work will have resulted in something truly outstanding to offer both educators and students in their pursuit of curriculum goals.”

To achieve this potential, we need to change how we think about teaching, about students, about the education process itself. We must recognise teachers and students as creators of value.

“Educators spend endless hours working on lesson plans and instructional designs – they should be encouraged to share this work.  Many of them are too modest or too scared to trumpet their own hard yards – but it is something that educators and students across the nation can benefit from.  Students, as they pass through the curriculum, create their own learning materials, which must be preserved, where appropriate, for future years.

“We should do this.  We need to do this.  Right now we’re dropping the best of what we have on the floor as teachers retire or move on in their careers.  This is gold that we’re letting slip through our fingers. We live in an age where we only lose something when we neglect to capture it. We can let ourselves off easy here, because we haven’t had a framework to capture and share this pedagogy.  But now we have the means to capture, a platform for sharing – the Ultranet, and a tool which brings access to everyone – the iPad.  We’ve never had these stars aligned in such a way before.  Only just now – in 2010 – is it possible to dream such big dreams.  It won’t even cost much money.  Yes, the state and federal governments will be investing in iPads and superfast broadband connections for the schools, but everything else comes from a change in our behavior, from a new sense of the full value of our activities.  We need to look at ourselves not merely as the dispensers of education to receptive students, but as engaged participant-creators working to build a lasting body of knowledge.” [Pesce's emphasis]

“Well-known speakers are too accustomed to longer speeches, with room for anecdotes and the introduction, and should be avoided for this service in favor of young lawyers and business men who will present messages within the four-minute limit…”

The volunteers attended cinema screenings and spoke during the interval while the projectionist changed reels. It took, on average, four minutes to change a film reel: hence the time limit for speeches on topics such as the Red Cross, food conservation, “Why We Are Fighting”, the importance of speed…

The entire program cost US$102,000. They certainly got value for money:

“During the war there were about 75,000 Four Minute Men, who gave an estimated 755,000 speeches to a total audience of 314 million people. The average audience was 416 people. On the average everyone in the US got to hear 3 speeches.”

Garber summarises tips for public speaking that were published in a newsletter for these volunteers. The tips are as relevant to today’s Powerpoint presentation as they were to last century’s propagandists.