Virtual Education, Hobson and Butterfly Effect in Quantum
Three recommendations from last week’s reading:
If you are interested in the future of virtual education, then this piece would help you understand the context better. It’s written by arguably the pioneer of distant learning, Sal Khan, who started the nonprofit Khan Academy. Khan believes that if we don’t fix distant learning soon, we will have an educational crisis at hand. Right away, he concedes that pure distance-learning is suboptimal since it misses the social-emotional experience that face-to-face interactions provide. For example, one loses few opportunities to make lifelong friends. To compensate, though again suboptimal, virtual sessions should aim to drive conversations instead of one way information download. Moreover, Khan believes that teachers’ time should not be spent in creating new content, for there is already so much content available online. Rather, their effort should be focused on promoting interaction through, for example, virtual breakout groups. As a result, he writes, “Teachers will also get more energy from interacting with their students than they do from spending time in a home recording studio”. After reading this piece I felt like revisiting some concepts that I had studied in school and had long forgotten. So, I logged into Khan Academy…
If you are searching for a good profile to read, then this slightly old one from 2015 on Mellody Hobson (yes double Ls) makes a good read. So, who is Mellody Hobson? She is the president and co-CEO of Ariel Investments, and sits on the boards of Starbucks and DreamWorks Animation among others. Though less heard about, Hobson, the youngest child of a single mother, is wildly successful. And what’s that trait that made her so successful — “The one thing I knew I could do is outwork everyone” she likes to say. In her childhood she has seen difficult times and about that she says, “I am haunted by those times and still work relentlessly”. There is a touching story about spelling tests and Girls Scouts cookies in the profile that alone makes it worth to read.
This short piece on analysing the ‘butterfly effect’ in quantum world came in The Economist last week. It briefly explains a recent experiment on whether a tiny change in quantum-mechanical systems can lead to dramatic changes. The answer is no, not significantly. While many ‘classical’ systems have high sensitivity to tiny changes, the quantum systems have the ability to ‘repair’ the anticipated changes from any meddling. Moreover, this ability improves with time, that is the more time such a quantum system is given to recover, better the chances are that it repairs itself to the original state. Practical life implications? Expect better reliability on quantum computing, a field that is seeing heavy investment these days.
A quote that I came across:
If you want to look good in front of thousands, you have to outwork thousands in front of nobody
