I just posted the first blog post at the Reengineering Education blog.

I just finished uploading the first batch of Gliya curriculum to a forum post.  We’ll eventually make nice webpages to guide students through the curriculum, but for now this is over 100 pages of free curriculum that students worldwide can use to learn from.

In particular, much of this curriculum should be helpful to students studying for the AMC 8 exam and MATHCOUNTS.  It does not include the harder concepts and problems tested at state or national MATHCOUNTS, but it should be accessible to a wide swath of students — both contest problem solvers and otherwise.

This curriculum is currently in what I would call “semi-polished” form.  That’s fine with us because it’s best to be practical and help students learn now than to be perfectionist and wait months or years until its in its highest quality form.

We’ll gradually release thousands of pages of curriculum at many levels over the next year or two, and continue to polish our work, adding additional features to the site along the way.

It’s been a while since I blogged.  I’ve been busy developing a new company, Gliya, devoted to creating free educational resources for students worldwide.  We are starting with mathematics (as is my primary interest as an educator), but we plan to spread out to additional subject matter when we’re ready.

The current incarnation of the Gliya website will be short-lived.  It will evolve with some new resources over the next few months, but will change into something radically different next year.  Our goal is to leverage internet technology in targeted ways to make education easier to achieve, more enjoyable, and more accessible to students worldwide.

Our first free resource is the Gliya Network forums where I (and others) will be helping math students not only at MIST Academy, but others who join the forums as well.  Elementary, middle, and high school students are welcome to join as well as all others curious about elementary mathematics or math competitions.  We encourage parents to join as well.  See you there.

Two very bright guys I met while I lived in Southern California will soon host a television show on the History Channel called Invention USA in which they interview modern inventors and discuss their amazing inventions.  These invention experts are Garrett Lisi, sometimes known as “the surfer dude physicist” and Reichart Von Wolfsheild, perhaps best known as producer of the famous Goldfish Aquarium screen saver used at least partially to highlight the advent of modern computer/TV screen technology.

I suspect with good reason that the show will be very good.  While I only met Reichart once very briefly, he has a big personality and strikes me as an entertaining guy.  Garrett has become well known for his Theory of Everything — long sought after in physics — is a very comfortable public speaker.  Unfortunately I’ve been unsuccessful in finding a debut date for the show, so stay tuned.

No commentary necessary.

This is a good article on the potential pitfalls of normalizing the unusual students.

Why can’t we simply celebrate how differently we all see the world?  Is it that hard to see how beneficial diversity is?  Or at least how valuable the mental outliers are?

Last week a businessman and venture capitalist whom I am acquainted with sent me this link.  I’ve often wondered whether or not a city in the Southeast would make a run at becoming a real technology center.  I’ve wondered whether it could be an already larger city like Birmingham or whether the size and politics would slow down any such attempt.  Perhaps a medium-sized city like Chattanooga, surrounded by beautiful land, it a more logical home.  It seems they’ve gotten ahold of the infrastructure to give it a try.

The Lamp Post Group is holding contests for college students to attract Do It Yourselfers and Entrepreneurs to the area.  I think contests aimed at college students are a great idea.  If something like this can possibly take off in a city like Chattanooga it will require a mix of young people who want to live in a place where they can put their own stamp on the culture and have wide open freedom.  I’m interested to see how it goes.

I’m not sure of the answer to that question, but it’s not an unreasonable question to ask.

I rely on Google less and less for my daily dose of internet.  That’s not entirely true.  I’m using Google Reader as my blogospherical aggregator until a better option presents itself.  Part of the problem is that my search results have not been as crisp lately as they were two or three years ago when I’d find that the best option was nearly always at the top.  After a while I took that for granted.  But perhaps the business model known as content farming has changed the game.

So the game changes.  And here is what media needs to do to evolve with the times: stop pretending that any one of us is so special that others will tolerate us talking at them to the degree that mass media does.

The new media will look different.  It will be interactive.  It will be relationship based.  An article will be a starting point, not an endpoint.  Most articles that initiate discussion will be less polished, but will contain fewer of the political flags of practiced dishonesty.  Manipulation will still exist, but at more subtle levels in the communication process and the level of honesty inherent in most communication will rise.  Mistakes of facts will be honest mistakes and we’ll all correct them and move on within a community with no blame or shame because we’ll have practiced the routine over and over and we’ll all like it better that way.

Until everything evolves again.  Then our interactive media will be AI based and we’ll be the property of our robot masters who provide our media and make us into good pets.  Either that or we’ve already chosen our existential endgame.  I hope I make a good pet.

My friend James Johnson sent me this interesting article about how the Allied forced determined information about German tanks during World War II.

One thing I noticed during the article is the tank production number: 256 is 2 to the 8th power.  I have to wonder if that’s coincidence or if there is something about the production process that forces binary exponentiation — at least to some degree.  I also wonder if Hitler’s freakish dependence on symbols led him to order “nice” numbers to be produced.

Richard Rusczyk and I had the exact same thought on IBM’s latest little human-vanquishing monster.

I think that IBM’s latest achievement comes at the perfect time.  Now scholar’s bowl/academic bowl/list game activities can be removed from Tiger Mom’s list of acceptable goals, and social time clearly rises on the list of “challenging activities worth pursuing”.