For a long time I’ve thought that traditional media was heading toward collapse — at least as a business model, as in free enterprise.  I’m far from the first person to point this out, but the ways in which traditional media have made money are going by the wayside.

Take the newspapers for example.  They used to make a lot of money from classified ads.  Now we have craigslist.  They used to generate a lot of sales from the funny pages.  Now I have bookmarks to my half dozen favorite comic strips online.  Sports!  But why would I buy a New York Times to read sports when ESPN.com is far larger and more interactive?  Financial news?  We have several better dedicated outlets for that too, not excluding the Wall Street Journal.  Science?  Was science reporting ever good in newspapers?  Now we have science papers online — too many to skim in a thousand lifetimes, without the biased and ignorant reporting that often sensationalizes the worst research.

That leaves newspapers with local reporting and government reporting.  I think that it’s no coincidence that government reporting has become more and more a matter of sucking up to powerful interests and creating views to satisfy particular interests and ideologies.  Of course, online magazines and blogs better report on government too, and most people are starting to realize that.  My personal hope is that we see a complete changing of the guard with the advent of new technology that gets applied to media.  I suspect very strongly that we’ll see great niches for brilliant minds who won’t get bounced around between executives and talking heads.

Incentive structures represent great opportunities for mathematical problem solvers.  But first, one must convince oneself of the value of these opportunities.

There is a great post at Reason on the importance of property rights in protecting natural resources and therefore public health as well.

While property rights are a legal construct, they are often a positive one due to the incentives created.  Perhaps we wouldn’t need them in a universe of infinite resources and opportunity, but right now they seem essential to managing our limited lands and properties.  Somebody who owns a resource usually has the best incentive for managing that resource well.  There may be exceptions once externalities are taken into consideration, which is why good rule of law is essential to maintaining rational incentives.

Even so, incentive structures can be invented to make resource management better and better.  For instance, catch shares.  So long as government does not get in the way, I think we’re on the verge of seeing a great many problems solved through better incentive plans over the next few decades.  In particular, I hope to continue eating fresh sushi without worry of the world’s stock in fish collapsing.  My guilt has even led me to consider investing in fish farms.

I always enjoy watching David Attenborough videos and thinking about why and how evolution happens (he is fantastic at giving the story behind the process).  Mathematics often helps us understand better.  Take the Gomboc for instance.  It’s a patented shape/thing based on stable and unstable points of equilibria.  If money were no object, I would buy one (but I have better investments for the moment).  As it turns out, turtle shells are natural gombocs (or something very close).  Turtles need their shells as protection, and as they developed, many turtles probably found themselves upside-down and died.  In fact, this still happens to some turtles.  However, turtles do usually right themselves when flipped over, and it is easy to imagine that those turtles with differently shaped shells lost out in the natural selection process.

I’ve had some notes from Huntsville parents telling me that the students there miss me.  That’s always nice to hear.  More than a half-dozen Huntsville and Cullman students made the trip all the way to Birmingham to take classes here again this year.  It will be frustrating not to work as much with some of these students this coming school year as many of them are so bright and have such good attitudes.

One of the ones who has been driven to Birmingham for classes (commuting both ways every day) is one of the students who gives me a great deal of motivation.  His curiosity leads him to start writing proofs on his own and exploring beyond what we cover in class (which is a lot, so that’s saying something).  He’s one of the reasons why the top students in Alabama will be a stronger group in coming years.

For the most part, technology leads to greater freedom.  In fact, some technologies are aimed at creating greater freedom.  It will be interesting to see what greater freedoms do to China’s culture.  And its government.

One of my favorite places to go online is reason.com.  It’s one of the few media sources that consistently posts stories that I’m interested in most.  One example is this little piece about charter schools in New Orleans.

The first and perhaps biggest success of charter schools will be in poor neighborhoods.  If this success spreads and continues, our whole nation will benefit in ways that we might not yet comprehend.

I keep wondering if the second wave of charter schools will be in suburbia where some of the families want to get away from the choking conformity that plagues so many communities.  If that happens, the new charter schools may wind up serving many of the kids that magnet schools now serve.

There are a lot of flaws in education.  But it’s tough to talk about many of them.  Why?  Because there are a lot of good teachers out there who take it personally.  Then again, most of the good teachers I know don’t take it personally, and talk openly themselves about the flaws in education.  Though they sometimes do it under their breath if they don’t yet have tenure.

This is one of the better articles I’ve seen recently on many of the flaws in public education.  The incentives are all wrong.  The incentives for the administrators are wrong.  The incentives for the teachers are wrong.  Most importantly, the incentives for the students are wrong.

I sometimes wonder what the most influential people in education would have to say about these flaws.  That is, I wonder what the heads of the teachers unions think about the problems in education — not the problems they tell us about most often, but the problems outlined in the article above.  What would Paul Hubbert say?  And on whom would he lay the blame?

On another note, it’s interesting to me that one of the most influential men in Alabama has such a brief Wikipedia page.  Somehow his role in the Charlie Graddick/Bill Baxley mess goes unmentioned.

It’s been years since I’ve voted in a state election.  Not because I don’t value my community.  It’s because I haven’t seen a relatively close race in a long time in which my vote would make a difference and my time working is worth a lot within my community.  Voting isn’t necessarily the only way a citizen can make a difference with his time, and it’s only sometimes the best option.

But this time I’m going to vote Bradley Byrne for governor.  It’s not just that he strikes me as less corrupt than most politicians (he cleaned up the two-year college “employee” scam here in Alabama), but he’s for charter schools and he’s lined up against the AEA (teachers union).

The AEA is once again showing its political stripes.   During a year when schools cannot afford basic supplies (due both in part to sagging tax revenues and absurd contracts designed by the AEA), the AEA just spent $15,000 on fireworks for the fourth of July here in Birmingham (while the city of Birmingham spent that money on a bicycle race).  Politics is the AEA spending priority.

I’m not a Republican, but the Democratic leadership in Alabama often make me feel like one (until I remember how many differences I have with most Republican politicians).

If the AEA gave me the money they spend stocking Alabama with friendly public “servants”, I would make Alabama the nation’s model in math education.

Really, I’m only arrogant if you don’t stop to compare me to the average politician.

Programmable origami.

Students interesting in seeing just how deep geometry can get, and seeing just how much math surrounds the concepts involved in this year’s ARML Power Question, should take a look at this article by Naoki Sato, a former coworker of mine.