Past and Future Worlds
This "Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math" "video prototype" for youth, includes :
- The video itself (duh!) - run each "scene" separately, using the links provided in the list a paragraph or so below (Introduction, What do you do with theories that are wrong?, etc).
- Quick notes for educators (below)
- Errata (below)
- Missing themes (below)
- Comments on the unorthodox style of the video
- Video prototype issues (below) - problems in producing the current video
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Background material for the scenes This shows a directory of Scenes, each listing [scripts with additional references (albeit vastly incomplete), images used but NOT videos due to copyrights].
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Programming [working spreadsheet, linux script files, QNial source code] - Documentation is limited to scant comments in the program code, and "notes" files made during programming, which may provide some help regarding how the various utilities were used and how problems were resolved.
At present, the full video (540 Mbytes) is too slow (dragging, deep voices, slow video), and is too cumbersome to go from one time to another. So until I convert to a different video [codec, contailer] formats (perhaps H.264 codec & .MKV container?) or find a video viewer that is better suited to large files, the videos for each scene are posted instead (see the listing below), giving better throughput and easy of going from one scene to another by separate loading. Microsoft Windows (and hopefully MacIntosh?) users can view this by downloading the VLC media viewer. "... VLC is a free and open source cross-platform multimedia player and framework that plays most multimedia files, and various streaming protocols. ..." At present, this full video cannot be moved forward and back within the video, something I will fix when I get the time, as the ability to go back over material and skip sections is particularly important with this video. In the meantime, the separate "Scenes" listed below can be used by moving back and forward.
The video is composed of eleven "scenes" that can be played individually. While these can be streamed via your browser, I recommend downloading the files (right-control and "Save link") to overcome slow internet connections and for practical use :
Quick notes for educators
This video is NOT intented as a purely, fun, inspiring viewing to be done in one shot. It is targeted towards youth who actually have some interest in, or curiosity about, the themes presented, and who will want to go back and forth over the details to think about the content. Viewers can [download, forward, backup] the presentation at their leisure from home to revisit details provided that are not directly included in the script, and to re-think what is presented.
I much prefer to go into the details of the [history, mathematics, science, technology], and I dislike [arm waving, sensationalising, trivial thinking] of our [media, prophets], which normally drowns out an hides the substance and reality of themes that touch us. There is an importnat role for the hype - at least it catches our eyes and invites us to delve more deeply into a subject, but it is a mistake to do so trivially, or to believe much of what is being said. You will note that this video fits into the arm-waving category, so take what I have said with a grain of salt, as you always should.
The presentation was intended for youth, but given my lack of [teaching ,training] background, I suspect that the jargon is far too specialised and the concept may be too foreign for many. Perhaps it is best suited to young "geeks" who love computer programming and crazy ideas. In that case,
Here are a few suggestions, and I'm sure educators can think of better ideas of how to use and adpt the content and experiments :
- Although this video was designed for a two hour session including the very simple "experiments", it may help to break it up into several different sessions over a period of a week or two, with interactive questions and discussions.
- Skip over the more conceptual parts, leaving for later : Wrong theories, Expanding Earth is wrong?, Computational Intelligence - a quick intro (although the intro is the only context for the rest of the video).
- Use paper-mache cutouts of the continents to show mountain-building concepts (this is too long and too much work for a quick session).
- The "Hearing aids" video has a horible video-audio mismatch, meaning that viewers hear the answer before the educator gets a clue to pause the video so that students can provide their own answers. Pratice will be need to stop at the right points after each "garble sound" before the "cleaned" sentence is provided.
- Challenge what is stated in the video - as I mention in the "Errata" below, I have made quite a few embarassing mistakes in my comments and slides, but I have not yet properly documented them, so it coud be a fun exercise for viewers to pick these out.
- Use the Computational Intelligence section to lead into [discussions, debates, projects] on what the new technologies actually can do at present versus all of the hype and nonsense that dominates the media, blogs and even research communities. It seems that most people just want to discuss ethical issues and how to stop the progress - to me it is essential to start with a history over the last 350 years of how catastrophically and uniformly bad essentially all scientists (and ALL of society) have been at [predicting capabilities, opportunities, threats] of [science, technologies, industries], and how much worse everyone else seems to have been. Perhaps the rare science fiction writer has suceeded best (like Arthur C. Clarke's prediction of the importance of geostationary satellites, now complimentted by swarms of low-altitutde orbiting satellites that I don't think he mentioned. As I learning in the market research area : "... Prediction is a particularly hazardous occupation, especially when you try to apply it to the future. ..."
Errata
There are many [spelling-grammar mistakes, erroneous comments, math & science alip-ups] in the videos, and a fair amount of my own personal [opinion, conjecture, perspectives] which have their won pitfalls. While the intent was to list these here, I'm out of time for now, so just a couple are listed.
- ExpandWrong : My comment about the seafloor going under the continent should have been about the seafloor going deep into the mantle of much higher density, as stated by Neal Adams
- Computational Intelligence introduction - My statement that Fuzzy systems were not naturally inspired is incorrect, as at least part of the inspiration was to use a more human-like style of reasoning.
Missing themes
While I have included a number of "themes" (essentially personal thoughts & opinions), in this once-through video prototype the following are missing :
- A good question is worth a thousand answers, in a similar but more profound than "a picture is worth a thousand words". And yes, there are bad questions. We sometimes phrase questions for ourselves that unconciously constrain our thinking an responses, and that "hide" many alternative paths to tackling problems, or that trap us within our own biases. In politics, bad questions are usually twisted around to divert and corrupt responses, lay false traps, and to change the subject.
- Many other themes - perhaps mentioned but not explained, including : Evolutionary computation, Multiple-conflicting hypothesis, non-[rational, logical, scientific] thinking and tools, Data-driven [analysis, modelling, prediction], [Science, non-Science, Nonsense], etc etc etc
Comments on the unorthodox style of the video
To me, a key purpose of a presentation is to provoke [thinking, questions, critique, debate]. No theory is a closed issue for me, and they all can be disputed. I would have liked to promote more of this in the video, but at least there is ample material for debate here.
You will note that many of the comment slides are not commented on at all by the script, and this is intentional. There is no way to read and pondeer those slides by simply viewing the video once-through, so the intent is to raise issues for futher careful reviewing of the video. I actually prefer to provide several background threads of [conflicting, alternate] concepts in the context of "mutiple conflicting hypothesis" but that would have requred more time for producing the video.
I have used popular songs as a background to most of the scenes, which is actually distracting, but on the other hand if someone finds a scence to be of lesser interest, then thay at least have something to listen to. It would be better to use theatrical background music, but that is for some future project.
Video prototype issues
This a "one-shot" production, without the cycles of script re-editing, major revamping of slides, correction of video and audio timings, etc that would normally be done. As such, while it is intended as a "stand-alone" video that can be observed at any time from home, it is not as "tight" as one would expect, and having someone on hand to help youth through the content would definitely help.
Unfortunately, there are issues with the functioning of the final video, as mentioned above, for example the video-audio streams have been slowed down for the scenes (sometimes severely), inabilitity to move and skip back and forth within the video. This is very bad for the "Hearing aids" scene. Re-processing of the audio and video streams 3 or 4 times is a contributing factor, forced by trading off quality to accomodate the limitations of my old 32 bit desktop computer. Another problem is premature termination of scenes, leading to the loss of the last few seconds of some of them.
Although some references appear in the text box at the lower right-hand side of the video, more appear in the scripts. Unfortunately, I have not provided an adequate listing, as many, many key references are not listed.
The QNial programming language was used to [direct, sequence, conduct, whatever] the video production, together with a LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet that acts as a great front-end for preparing code specific to the video sequencing. These can be found in the Programming code directory listing, and will be handy for anyone interested in the details of how I produced the video. I like to describe the QNial programming language of Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada as "... the beautiful child of a marriage between LISP and APL ...". It is not commonly used today, and even though it is an interpreted language, I always get frustrated with other languages that I also use, it's conceptual power always brings me back home to it. Bug hunting can be problematic if you don't build in bug taps and [structured, object oriented] capabiities, but for much of what I do I keep those chains to a minimum so I can use the full power of the language.
I spent a couple of weeks putting together the voice notes, images, videos and music, which is a small fraction of the 2.5 months required to produce it. Most of my time, roughly 5 weeks, was used to ugrade the QNial programming code (cleaning up by implimenting structured vartiables bordering on object-oriented capabilities). The other two weeks was required for voice recordings of scripts, iterative [changes, corrections] for the video sequencing, and searching for a few images etc to better illustrate concepts. Altogether, there should be double the number of images to make the text-voice-only section more informative, but again time was the limiting factor in producting this. Normally I would expect that 2 weeks to a month would be require to produce this kind of video.
A big issue is copyright for most of the video content. To some degree this is covered by :
- "Educational exemptions"
- Non-usability of most of the copyrighted material because of music overlays, and the distraction of other imagery
- The fact that there will be absolutely NO revenues (much less profit) coming from this video