Was I the only one to be surprised by Apple this week announcing the arrival in the summer of yet another new version of OS X?  It’s my belief OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion doesn’t represent an Apple triumph but is more damage control and preparing us for iTV.

This OS X release was not only unexpected, it’s an aberration in Apple’s relentless process of showing that it isn’t Microsoft with Redmond’s tortured OS releases.  A new OS version from Apple has come every 18-24 months, yet here we are with Mountain Lion — POW! — less than a year after the launch of OS X 10.7 Lion. What gives?

For all the hype, Lion has been less than the success Apple hoped it would be. Support has been a pain in the ass for this release that still feels like beta software.  Maybe Cupertino decided that a whole new release, rather than a service pack, was required.

Further, I’ve heard that customers have complained about iOS features they don’t see in Lion and wish were there.

Certainly Apple will be rolling into Mountain Lion all the cool touchscreen, digital media management, and distribution features along with hardware support for iTV and other new hardware platforms. This virtually guarantees, I guess, that the TV is on its way for Christmas 2012.

If this is the big OS X/iOS merge, what happens to those separate products?  If distribution, backups, and updates are all through iCloud, maybe it doesn’t matter.

Some of YouTube’s more popular producers of original videos are quietly reporting their viewership numbers have suddenly dropped. The problem isn’t that viewer habits are changing. We’re still in love with cute kittens and people in pain. The problem is click fraud and online video producers are finally getting busted for it.

I was told last week that least some of the numbers generated by more than a few YouTube video makers who deliver hundreds of thousands of views on a regular basis come from banks of servers and zombie PCs pretending to surf. Such click fraud was a huge issue a few years ago for the Google search engine, but YouTube has separate management, remember, and maybe has different values, too.  Ever bigger numbers approaching a billion total views per day have been part of the YouTube mystique, so looking the other way may have been part of the YouTube M.O., not that advertisers will be cheered.

I remember in the late 1990s Microsoft honcho Steve Ballmer telling me how Redmond wanted back then to be the most pirated software company. Though I’m sure he wouldn’t say that today as CEO, Ballmer’s logic was clear: piracy is free distribution with zero support costs and once a country can be made to enforce copyright laws huge bucks almost instantly follow as penalties are paid. So too, YouTube benefited from click fraud by showing huge numbers that discouraged competitors and attracted advertisers, even though advertisers were actually getting less for their money.

But now it appears that YouTube is ready to grow up. Pumping Google’s own cash into professional content for the first time, the company may no longer be willing to tolerate video click fraud since it would be stealing from itself.

Some producers report views per-video that are down as much as 90 percent. All it takes is for YouTube to apply a filter that rejects clicks coming too fast from the same IP or MAC address. No citations are issued, just an algorithmic reduction of numbers. And no producer fights it because, of course, they are in the wrong to do so.

Yet many successful YouTube producers who do this trick mistakenly think it isn’t against the rules or even wrong to do.

Kids.

So the YouTube ecosystem is in flux.  It will be interesting to see how YouTube changes in coming months as producers, if they are to remain in business, have to get viewers the old fashioned way, by earning them.

More news later today on my new/old book project, but for a moment let’s look at what’s happening in Greece, because I’ve become quite convinced that markets have gone completely mad and the world economy is about to suffer for that madness. In fact I am sure of it. That’s because stocks are up today on word of a second debt bailout for Greece — a bailout that has no more hope of standing than the one before it. Greece is bound to default, beginning a likely fall of economic dominoes across Europe. And while that news is not explicitly about technology, it will certainly affect all of us interested in technology, because Greece is screwed along with much of southern Europe.

Here are the facts — not my opinions, facts.

In January, Greece’s tax revenue from its Value Added Tax (VAT) collapsed by 18.7 percent from a year earlier.

The VAT rate for food and drink rose from 13 percent to 23 percent in September to comply with demands of the European Union, European Central Bank, and International Monetary Fund.

The effect of this boosted tax revenue has been overwhelmed by the contraction of Greece’s economy with overall tax receipts (not just the VAT) falling 7 percent compared to a year ago when they were also considered to be terrible, just not quite as terrible as they are now.

Meanwhile, 60,000 small firms and family businesses have gone bankrupt in Greece since the summer, this in a country with only 11 million people. Imagine a quarter of all businesses disappearing from Ohio over just three months, because that’s the equivalent.

The Greek budget deficit is stuck near 8-9 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) because the country’s economic base is shrinking so fast.

Yet shares are rising on markets across Europe supposedly on the idea that Greece will this time fulfill its obligations under the new debt accord — obligations that will continue until 2020 when the country will still be prostrate with public debt at 120 percent of GDP — if everything goes perfectly?

Now my opinion: Greece is screwed. The new debt accord won’t hold, austerity measures won’t be fully implemented, and the Greek government will formally default within six months.  And stocks are rising as powerful people and organizations prop up share prices just long enough to unload their own positions, leaving the little guys to drown.

Far better to just let Germany take over the payments and own that Greek jalopy outright.

But that’s just one geek’s opinion. What the heck do I know? Yet I must speak up because I sure don’t see any of this in today’s business press.

Today is the 200th birthday of author Charles Dickens, yet also an oddly appropriate moment to announce a new edition of my book Accidental Empires in a very 21st century format.

Late last year a reader pointed out to me that 2012 is the 20th anniversary of Accidental Empires which was, in its own way, a pretty influential book. Accidental Empires was my attempt to blatantly apply the breezy style of Adam Smith’s The Money Game to the personal computer industry. And somehow it worked, because the book was eventually published in 18 languages and was a bestseller in several countries including the U.S. and Japan.

The book was also the basis for my 1996 TV miniseries Triumph of the Nerds, which has aired in more than 60 countries.

My reader wondered why there wasn’t an eBook edition?  Good question. The printed book technically remains in print, yet there is no eBook.

Well it turns out that eBooks had yet to be invented in 1989 when I signed the original contract with publisher Addison-Wesley, and there were no sharp-eyed lawyers working that day to claim all rights on all platforms, invented or yet to be invented.  So the eBook rights are mine.

Now here‘s my dilemma. I could rip up a pristine copy of the “updated” 1996 paperback edition, run that through my Fujitsu SnapScan scanner, and have the bones of an eBook edition almost instantly. Or I could spend a year or more to update the book for today’s readers, adding pictures (the original book had none) and some new chapters.

We’re not talking about a work of art here, but this is a book that some people feel pretty strongly about.  Dozens of company founders have told me over the years that they read it more than once on their way to the top (and sometimes back again). Hundreds of people have told me the book inspired them to find careers in technology or they used it to explain to their clueless loved ones what all the fuss was about. I could mess with the original text, sure, but doing so would surely upset someone.

And then it came to me — a whole new way to publish a new edition of Accidental Empires or any older but still popular book for that matter.  In an eBook edition I could add new material yet give readers the option to read the original text as published back in the 90’s or an updated text for today or even toggle back and forth.

But wait, there’s more!

Here’s where Charles Dickens enters the picture.  When his stories first appeared back in the 19th century, Dickens’ David Copperfield and Oliver Twist weren’t sold in bookshops, they were serialized in newspapers, unfolding one chapter at a time over weeks or months. The books came later.

I’ll do a 21st century version of the same thing, serializing Accidental Empires on the web.

So next month I’ll be starting a second blog with its own URL just for Accidental Empires.  I, Cringely will continue right here as ever (no changes at all), but on the book blog I will over several months publish — a chapter or so at a time — the entire 100,000-word book for the world to read, free of charge.

Like most blogs, this new one will allow reader comments. And it’s those comments I’ll use in part to update the work when it later appears in eBook form.  What happened to these people?  What stories do you remember? Where did it go from here? 

Once the entire book has been serialized, my friend and eBook expert Parampreet Singh (he of the Toronto Singhs, of course) and I will pick the best of these reader annotations along with several thousand words of new material I’ve been saving-up and publish what ought to be an enormous number of electrons — Accidental Empires Rebooted.

This will be, as usual, both a grand adventure and a crap shoot. To minimize our financial risk I’ll run ads on the new blog. But to avoid pitching adult diapers and electrolyte replacements alongside my life’s work I’d rather sell out the entire blog to a single tech advertiser like a Cisco or a Salesforce.com.

If you know any outfit that might like to participate in what should be an amazing publishing adventure, please pass it on.

Facebook last week announced its Initial Public Offering — exactly the event I said wouldn’t happen in one of my controversial predictions for 2012. But I’m sticking with my call on this one since we’re 2-3 months from the actual event and a lot can happen to screw things up between now and then. I’m pretty sure Facebook shares will be trading sometime this year, I just don’t think the company will have a traditional IPO.

Companies go public for three reasons: 1) to raise capital for various corporate purposes like acquisitions and paying down debt; 2) to secure the wealth of founders, giving their kids something to fight over, and; 3) because they have over 500 investors, secondary trading of shares is picking up and if they don’t go public under a process they control the SEC will force them to go public in a less-profitable event.  Facebook in its prospectus says reason one — the most cited reason by far for companies going public — does not apply to them. They don’t really need the money and plan to park it in T-bills, which if you think about it can only drag Facebook earnings down given current low interest rates.

Give us your money and we’ll do nothing with it.  Not only that, we’ll also use your money to hurt the value of your shares.

To be fair, sometimes companies go public just because they can. Remember the dot-com bubble?  In that period of irrational exuberance companies went public and their shares soared for awhile without regard to profitability or even having a real business model. So sometimes you take the money because it is obviously stupid money and if you don’t take it now you may never get another chance (yes, I’m talking about you, Webvan).

But that’s certainly not the case with Facebook, which is profitable and growing, has no debt, and has $3.5 billion already earning next to nothing in the bank.

Reason two for having an IPO — to secure the wealth of founders and early investors — is the reason Facebook gave for going public and that makes sense. After eight years of hard work everyone involved would like a liquidity event so they can buy a new house and car. There’s nothing wrong with this motivation except, given the lack of actual need for capital, it shows a misalignment of interests between Facebook management and new Facebook investors.  We are actually investing in their Ferraris.

Now maybe Facebook is the IPO of the century and none of this matters, but as a narrative for big institutional investors it’s a little shaky, especially when you see that after the IPO Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who is younger than the IBM PC, will still control 57 percent of Facebook’s voting shares, in effect placing total voting and managerial control of a major public company in a single executive.  This is unprecedented for a company at this scale; even Bill Gates only owns 20-odd percent of Microsoft and had to answer to investors when he was CEO.

So this isn’t just the Facebook IPO, it is the Zuckerberg IPO.

Something similar to this happened back in 1988 when Dell Computer went public. Michael Dell was the Mark Zuckerberg of his era. At 24, Dell was even younger than Zuckerberg is today. Dell was smart and he was full of himself — but not so full that he thought he could carry the company offering on his shoulders alone.  With the encouragement of his investors and board, Dell hired some seasoned managers to help him take the company public, then later fired them all and went back to running the company as he saw fit.

Mark Zuckerberg wants to do the same thing that Michael Dell did, just minus the pro forma hiring and firing of suits.

It’s going to be a slog for Zuckerberg. For the next 2-3 months he’ll have to be everywhere, kissing ass while not appearing to be kissing ass, answering tons of boneheaded questions from people he doesn’t respect — people who will be primarily questioning his vision and fitness to lead.

Zuckerberg is going to hate this process and might explode as a result. He’s going to be under a journalistic microscope, too, and some bad information about him may come forth (I don’t have any, by the way, but powerful people often have powerful enemies). Throw in some bad business news for Facebook or some good news for Google and a $100 billion IPO starts to look pretty iffy.  There are lots of ways this process could fall apart.

What’s a geek to do?

Well just as there are three reasons for companies to go public there are also three ways to do it. The normal way is to follow the traditional path Facebook and Zuckerberg have embarked on now — hire investment bankers, do a road show, pay $500 million in fees, go public. That’s how Dell did it in 1988, though that company raised only $30 million, not $5 billion, so the fees were significantly lower.

The second way to go public is to do nothing at all yet have more than 500 investors and a brisk secondary trading market in private company shares.  In that case the SEC will do the IPO for you for free (well, they’ll fine you too, but not much) which sounds good in a way but must be bad because nobody ever does it.  Name a company that went public in this manner?  I can’t.

The third way to go public is by buying or merging with a company that is already public. This is viewed on Wall Street as the chickenshit method because it generates nowhere near as much in fees to investment bankers who, after all, are the cowboys driving this herd. To be fair, most of the time when companies back into going public it is because of weakness.  Certainly the public company they are buying is weak, often valueless.  The decision to use this method is often based on being unable to find an underwriter to go public by the usual route and not having the capital to wait for better times. Again, it’s hard to find a really big company that has done it this way, though little companies do this all the time.

But that’s exactly why I feel Facebook will abandon its present IPO course and instead buy a public company.

No road show for one thing.  Zuckerberg’s agony ends. The idea that acquiring a weak public company would drag down Facebook shares is ridiculous because Facebook is so big and available public shells are so small that the dilution effect would be vastly less than that $500 million in banker fees.

Here’s an idea: Facebook might actually find a public company it wants to buy.  Yeah, that’s the ticket.

And while buying a public company would limit the amount of money Facebook would be able to raise initially, the point isn’t to even raise money, remember?  The negative effect of all those T-bills would be avoided.

That’s why I think Facebook will change course and back into being a public company. It’s cheaper, easier, and accomplishes the same result.  Five years from now nobody will even remember how they did it any more than they can explain Google’s Dutch Auction IPO in 2004.

This is my third and (I hope) last column in a series on education. If things work as planned this is where I’ll make some broad generalizations that piss-off a lot of people, incite a small riot in the comments section, after which we’ll all feel better and switch to discussing the Facebook IPO. So let’s get to it. I believe that education is broken in the U.S. and probably everywhere else, that it is incapable of fixing itself, and our only significant hope is to be found in the wisdom of Sharon Osbourne.

These conclusions are based on my experiences as a teacher, a parent, on the content of those two previous columns, one visit to OzzFest, and on my having this week read a couple books:

The Learning Edge: what technology can do to educate all children, by Alan Bain and Mark E. Weston.

Teaching Minds: How Cognitive Science Can Save Our Schools, by Roger Schank.

The first book was a pain to read as academic books often are. It’s like the writers think that making their work harder to read will make it be taken more seriously. So to save you the pain I’ll give you the short version: 1) computers haven’t helped much, if at all, in education despite our spending $8.6 billion per year on them just for schools; 2) they don’t work because teachers won’t use them and administrators don’t know how they should be used; 3) there is, however, a body of research beginning in the 1970s that says (that proves the authors maintain) it is possible to shift student performance (whatever that means — they never really explain) by two standard deviations in the good direction; 4) alas, this technique is too labor intensive to be practical, and 5) the authors have figured out how by using cool software a single teacher can achieve that two-sigma objective for an entire class.

These authors, one of whom works for Dell, talk a good game but their argument doesn’t work for me. They illustrate how poorly we use computers in education and why (it puts too much of a burden on the teachers who don’t really want computers and therefore don’t use them much), but the authors then lay out an entirely new way of doing things that is an even bigger burden on teachers, though the authors say it isn’t.

I say if it looks like a burden it probably is a burden, and even if it isn’t actually a burden nobody is going to stick around long enough to find that out just because it looks so bad going in.  Worse still, there isn’t a single example in the book where the needle is actually shown to move more than 0.58 standard deviations, much less 2.0.

If this stuff works, then give examples that show it working.

But that’s not the worst of it. They spend several pages describing how an expert teacher at an elite private school uses these techniques to teach an elegant course in projectile motion — a course that is defined in the first sentence as being five weeks long. This teacher is a rock star and really has his mojo working, but there are two conditions that are left completely uncovered in the example — both conditions that I have experienced vicariously through my son Cole, age seven.

Condition #1 — Cole gets bored after the second week. This is a second grader who is reading on an 8th grade level.  Keeping him focused after he’s run through it a few times is almost impossible. Yes, you can make him a tutor or a helper or even the teacher, but five weeks? Yet only by taking five weeks is all that laborious curriculum and software development justified for the teacher or the school.

Condition #2 — At some point in the elegant presentation, another child in the class grabs Cole by the crotch, or spits in his face, or humps him from behind, or calls him any number of hearty Anglo-Saxon slang terms we don’t allow in our house. A day or an hour pass and then it happens again — same child, same actions. It’s hard to put on a good show when the theater is burning down.

You might think condition #2 is rare but it has occurred (and continues to occur) in the classrooms of two out of my three sons. Yes, we’ve been to see the Principal. This is a good public school with well intentioned teachers and administration, but the district doesn’t believe in taking disruptive children out of regular classes unless they are proved to consistently (dozens of times) act in a manner that physically endangers their schoolmates.  None of those actions I described are considered dangerous, though they contribute to Cole’s reluctance many days to go to school.

Computers have nothing to do with this, but the graceful works of computer-assisted academic art described by Bain and Weston won’t survive such outbursts. Theirs is a Utopian vision and Utopia isn’t anywhere near Santa Rosa.

But my greatest criticism of this approach is that — even if it worked — it takes too long to accomplish anything. Yes, teachers don’t like computers, so we have to somehow replace teachers who don’t with teachers who do and that’s going to take, what, 20 years? Education researchers can think 20 years in the future but I’m fixated on next year.  No make that this year.

In this sense I, as a parent, approach the problem like any modern CEO would, thinking a quarter or a year ahead and looking for measurable improvements in that time.

The second book was better written and a lot more fun. The gist of it is this: school is bunk so stop teaching information and instead teach skills and how to learn. This is coming from a pretty famous professor of computer science, mind you, who admits that he hates teaching almost as much as he hated being a student.

Teach skills not stuff is an interesting idea. We teach stuff (information) because it is easy to test, not because it is more useful to know. If you look at the work of Sal Khan at the Khan Academy, his screencasts are all about how to do something.  When my kids are learning how to do something, they can be entirely engaged for hours, even the five year old.

Many kids watch Khan lessons for fun. And Sal, quite wisely, gives no tests.

My conclusion, then, is that schools serve a limited social and cultural function but our kids mainly learn despite them. My own experience is that I learned a lot about learning from half a dozen teachers in my life, so those relationships are both rare and essential. But are they reliable enough to even justify modern schools?  I don’t know. What I do know is that if I want to improve the educational environment for my children in the next year or two, I’ll probably have to come up with my own solutions.

Which brings me to Sharon Osbourne, wife of Ozzie. Sharon has, not surprisingly, a couple troubled kids in Jack and Kelly. Both have been in rehab, both dropped out of high school, yet both appear to have landed with successful careers. I’m sure it helps some to have wealthy parents. But I think Jack and Kelly have actually done better than we might expect given the raw materials they are built from.

I think Sharon very consciously two-sigma’d her kids right into their current lives.

The 1970s education research that showed a two-sigma improvement was even possible was conducted by a guy named Benjamin Bloom and the technique that worked was individual instruction. One teacher per student led consistently to a two-sigma improvement.

What educators have tried to do ever since is to find a way to achieve the two-sigma without requiring the one-to-one ratio.  Sharon Osbourne, on the other hand, simply created in her own way that one-to-one relationship for her children.

Watch old episodes of The Osbournes on Hulu and you’ll notice the kids are never alone. There is always a friend — slightly older, definitely smarter, and marginally cooler — for each kid. Over the course of several episodes it becomes clear that these aren’t friends at all but employees functioning in the role of friend.

We’re about at the point where technology, best exemplified by Apple’s Siri digital assistant, can go quite a way toward providing through electrons much of what Sharon Osbourne bought for her kids with blood and treasure. Imagine a device, a Bluetooth friend in the cloud with whom your kid could converse, ask questions, laugh, be monitored and advised.

“I’m sorry, Dave, but you’ve had too many beers, I can’t let you start the car…”

It’s not a substitute for school but a whole new category of educational device. It’s not a person, it’s both better and worse. It would work in my kids‘ interest but for me. And I know my kids, at least, would embrace it. Heck, Fallon (age five) carries with him much of the time a stuffed killer whale toy named Fifi.

Time to teach Fifi to talk.

Last week we heard from my new hero Steve, an electrical engineer turned high school math teacher, with his reservations about technology as a motivator for student success. Notice this week I can use Steve’s first name, though not his last name or the name of the school where he teaches. This alone says volumes about the prickly state of teaching today where saying the truth out loud can hurt a career. And I understand why Steve might be concerned, because this time he’s talking not about how technology doesn’t often enable better learning, but how it actually gets in the way.

“Now, consider what happens if you inject into this scenario an iPad into the hands of every student in the classroom,” Steve continued.  “Certainly, for some students who are intrinsically motivated, this will unlock great learning options and it may, due to its more engaging nature, bring in some students who weren’t very interested and help them become more interested in learning.  But many students will not use the technology this way.  Many will choose to use the iPad as just another distraction (and a very compelling one) instead of focusing on learning the class content.  

“I witnessed this myself the last time I took a summer course at my local community college.  I was in a classroom paying attention to the professor, taking notes (on paper no less) and learning, while around me all my peers had their laptops open.  Were they taking notes electronically?  No, every screen was either open to Facebook or to some online game.  These students were convinced that they could effectively multitask and learn while being distracted by the technology, but in the end, of the people around me, I was the only one who got an A on the final exam in that class.”

Steve’s solution for these technical distractions is institutional control of Internet access in the classroom. Limit surfing and apps the way I try to keep my kids doing constructive things with their computers at home. But as we all know, that doesn’t really work. The tools are too crude, the kids are too clever, and who are we to say, really, what’s learning and what’s messing around?

Still, I wish parental controls were better. Understand my control efforts go deeper than most since I have placed limitations on the individual workstations as well as global limitations on the network through my ClearOS (formerly Clark Connect) gateway, which has powerful content filtering capabilities. Kids can’t go to a web page, for example, that my DNS server deliberately knows nothing about. Our gateway is of course named Sergeant Schultz.

Forget the software for a moment, though, and let’s consider what’s at work here with all this goofing off, which is the simple avoidance of academic effort. It takes place at all levels.

From my first job at Triway High School where I taught biology, chemistry, physics, and vocational agriculture to my six years at Stanford I was continually amazed at how grateful students were for any class disruption, with a class cancellation being the best news of all.  It’s like they wanted less for their parents’ money. Some (like John McEnroe, who dropped my class after the second week) would have been happiest with nothing for their money at all.

Education is a peculiar labor market.  As a teacher I managed my students and required output from them (their product) which was paid for with grades from me. But if they didn’t do the work and their product sucked as a result, there was little effect on me as a teacher because their product never truly entered commerce. It was all just a game.

A reader from Sweden, reacting by e-mail to last week’s column, cited Victor Vroom’s Expectancy Theory as governing student behavior. Expectancy Theory (I hadn’t heard of it, either) says behaviors arise from motivations and motivations are based on expected outcomes. This makes sense, I guess, if McEnroe’s expected outcome was an NCAA tennis singles title, not passing my class. The experience wasn’t real for any of us but only McEnroe acted on that knowledge.

I think this goes a long way toward explaining what some folks like Peter Thiel are calling a bubble market for education, where grades are inflated, tuition continually rises, and the real world relevance of any of it is as subjective as the value of 16th century tulip bulbs.

Like all bubbles, this one is aspirational — driven by those who aspire to acquire something in limited supply that they perceive to be of value whether it actually is valuable or not. Being glad that class was cancelled just defines the underlying values more clearly. The term will still end whether class is held today or not, a grade (and ultimately a degree) will still be earned, so let’s all head to the O for a beer.

Where does technology come into this? It doesn’t. I think Peter Thiel is wrong, by the way, as I’ll explain in our third and final section to come tomorrow. Technology is essential, yet so far inconsequential in the calculus of education.

I guess that explains why all these computers haven’t made us particularly smarter.

I received an e-mail last week from someone who is sure to become one of my heroes — an electrical engineer turned high school math teacher. He was concerned about the proper use of technology, especially iPads, in the classroom, and had quite specific suggestions for what to do. We’ll probably get to that in my next column but here I’d like to consider his more fundamental idea, which is that technology in schools can be, in many ways, more a distraction than a solution.

“The problem is that I’ve found that all these things that are purported to improve student learning ignore the number one factor in student success, which is the student’s attitude toward learning and motivation,” wrote my new friend the math teacher.  “The truth is that if students are motivated to learn, they will learn, pretty much regardless of the specific format or technology that is used in the lessons themselves.  Conversely, if a student is not interested in learning, the details of how lessons are presented, technology, etc. don’t matter very much…the student will find whatever way is available to avoid learning…they may socialize with their neighbors, or frequently ask to leave the classroom to go to the bathroom, or simply try to tune out and take a nap during class.  Thus, while we focus on how teachers teach, I’m finding that the real key to student success is not so much how you teach but how you go about motivating students to want to learn, and how the systems you use in the classroom help support and encourage students to succeed even when they are not intrinsically motivated by the subject.”

He’s correct. In an ideal world students want to learn and teachers want to teach and the two meet in a common space where knowledge is transferred. Except how often and how well does that really happen?

It happens all the time in some places, like at Stanford where my students used to chase me back to my office after class arguing over some point or other. But not every school can be a Stanford and even there, as at many research universities, much of the faculty doesn’t really want to teach.

Ironically, there was a time when I taught simultaneously at Stanford and Foothill College, a junior college just down the street and a million miles way.  I used to joke that Stanford students couldn’t write but at least they could read. But you know that was unfair to my students at Foothill, many of whom were just as dedicated and hard working, though with different expectations.

A lot of this comes down to expectations. And our expectations of technology in education more often than not come down to it being a tool for compensation, either working like an instructional Hamburger Helper to stretch teachers across more students or to literally teach what the present faculty cannot.

One sure-fire success would be a truly great calculus teacher in a box. What would that be worth? Maybe $50,000 per year times 5,000 high schools? There’s your educational startup idea.

Which brings us to costs. Steve Wozniak, who spent a decade and several million dollars working two days a week in the Los Gatos Public Schools when his kids were students there, taught me an important lesson about the price of educational technology.  “A desk lasts 25 years, a textbook lasts a decade, and a computer is good for maybe three years: which of those costs the most?” he asked. It was only by putting a decade of educational technology on his credit card that Woz was able to create an ideal environment in Los Gatos, giving every student a notebook computer and Internet access, yet even he would be hard put to say with certainty that it made a consistent difference in student outcomes.

School administrators hate technology, whether they admit it or not, because they don’t understand it and it takes funds away from hiring more teachers. If we go back to our math teacher’s quote, above, you can see why.  Because technology for technology’s sake is a crap shoot while hiring teachers who are known to be good at their jobs of inspiring students to learn is pretty close to a sure thing.

Fortunately two things are happening to change these facts of educational life. Technology is getting cheaper, better, broader, and deeper. It’s not good enough or cheap enough yet, but the school PC of today has five times the utility for one fifth the price of 25 years ago (not Moore’s Law numbers, but this is utility, not cycles, we’re talking about).  That 25-to-1 improvement is a trend that is only going to get better faster, but I’d say we are still a decade away from the critical mass needed for a true educational renaissance, which I’ll describe below.

The other thing that’s happening is parents are changing. I’ve written about this before but it bears repeating. This week I’ll turn 59, but my kids are 9, 7, and 5 and I talk to the other parents — many of them young enough to be my children — as we wait to get our kids from class or band practice or chess club or science club or basketball practice, or Odyssey of the Mind. Parents aren’t the same as they used to be.

These parents all use computers every day. They grew up with computers. They don’t know a world without computers. And so they may be frustrated by technology as all of us are and may always be, but they aren’t afraid of it and they see its potential. A decade from now one of those parents will be running the school system and another will be running the state department of education. Only then will things really change. And the cool part is that’s about when I think the technology will finally be where it needs to be.

A decade from now technology will be cheaper and the lubricity of acquiring knowledge will be dramatically improved. I think time and space will cease to be factors in the educational experience with the result that the best teachers and the best students will have a far better chance of finding each other. But for the best that’s, what, maybe a 10 percent improvement? After all, these are the already motivated we’re talking about, not the kids who need a little help or a lot.  It’s the very normal kids I hope will gain the most from technology, far more than 10 percent.

This goes back to my math teacher quote, above. Motivated students succeed, but since every student is different and every student has a different way to learn best, unless we can design an individual curriculum for each kid, the system won’t be optimized.

My kids go to the best public school in Sonoma County. I know that because I chose my house based on that research. But when Cole finishes his math problems in a quarter the time it takes anyone else in the class, his teacher has him insert a wait state by putting his head down on his desk.  Conversely, when some other kid never quite gets the problem set finished, ever, well he/she never gets a rest and never masters the material, either.

The current system is unfair to both kids.

The only solution I can see is one teacher per student. And the only way something close to that is going to happen is through technology.  And it’s coming.

How many times yesterday did you do a web search that led you to a Wikipedia page that then didn’t load because of that site’s SOPA protest?  I didn’t notice the effect immediately but once I did I was later able to go back through my browser history and see that I tried and failed to open a total of 13 Wikipedia pages so far.  Whether you give a damn about SOPA or public protest, this experience has given me a whole new respect for the role Wikipedia has come to play in my life and probably yours.

As a result I made a small donation to Wikipedia around lunchtime then cursed it the rest of the day for failing me seven more times.

As for the SOPA/PIPA protest itself, I sympathize. But in my view what we have here is mainly a conflict of business models, dying industries, and really, really poor design that will work itself out over time.

Remember the record album — the LP?  Some were great, most were not. Too many B tracks if you ask me. The music industry has long had a problem of value.  The groups I liked sometimes didn’t have many good songs.  The record companies would put one or two good songs on an LP or CD, then throw in 10 more that weren’t so good.  There were no warning labels which matter to me now that I am a parent.  All we wanted were good songs at a reasonable price, which didn’t mean the 15-20 percent yield we were getting from albums.

Then came iTunes and all those problems went away.  iTunes did more than just sell the songs the record companies were pushing: they sold whole collections of music.  As a result, more, not less, music was sold, most of it the good stuff. Music — if not the recording industry — is better as a result. Steve Jobs proved thinking about the consumer is very good business.

Now we have SOPA and PIPA.  I would like to have the same ability to build an online movie library as I have done with music, but there are big problems with this, starting with Windows Media Center and, yes, even iTunes — pretty good products in their own right that protect the copyrights of stored content.  That part is okay.  But they have very little third party support.  Then there is the problem of content.  I can buy only a fraction of what I’d like to get and it is scattered over several suppliers.  If the movie and TV industries think I am going to subscribe to 5-10 services for $10-25 a month each, they’re nuts.

The movie and TV industries are doing now exactly what the recording industry did before iTunes.  SOPA and PIPA will die but they’ll be replaced with something just as bad because lawmakers are stupid and producers are afraid of the future — a future that’s coming no matter what the entertainment industry does.  For the money they are spending on lobbying, a design team could develop a new system that would make more money by exposing more content, not less, enabling new business models in the process.  At least that’s my take on it.

Changing subjects, Jerry Yang recently got his choice of replacement CEOs again (Jerry’s fourth CEO — fifth if you include choosing himself in 2007) then almost immediately bailed from his every Yahoo connection: what’s up with that?  I wish I knew, but I have some suspicions.  An intervention, perhaps?  Jerry was such an obstructionist to Yahoo moving forward in almost any direction that someone on the inside may finally have told him to sit down and shut up, which I am sure Tim Koogle wanted to do many times.

I can see Jack Ma making a preemptive move like that, saying he’ll pay $1 billion more for Yahoo’s Alibaba stake if Jerry takes a hike first.

Nah, sounds too simple.  More likely Yang finally got tired of playing the bad cop and decided to retire to his private golf course.  I’ll be very interested to see what his next career move will be.  Off the board and owning less than five percent of the company (no SEC reporting requirements) it could be trying to make money trading on what’s sure to be a wild ride for Yahoo over the next several months.

Another change of subject — remember my problem just after Christmas trying to upgrade Windows 7 Home Premium to Windows 7 Professional using one of those instant upgrade cards I bought at WalMart? Though I tried to do the upgrade every day, it wasn’t until this past weekend — two and a half weeks after I started — that the Windows Instant Upgrade website was no longer down for maintenance. I’m not making this up nor can I be the only person with this particular problem, yet run a Google News search and you’ll see I’m almost the only person to write about it. What’s with that?

Well it is certainly humbling for me: I’m clearly not the hotshot reporter thought I was or possibly use to be. But it also brings into question the whole idea of viral growth in news stories and why one story gets picked up and another doesn’t.  It beats the crap out of me why it happens.  One thing I don’t suspect, though, is any concerted effort by Microsoft to shape the news other than by simply ignoring me. I certainly felt no pressure from them.

Frankly, I wish I had been pressured by Microsoft.  That would have been fun.

And now that I have Windows RDP service to my thin clients from a brand new Windows 7 server, how is it working out for my trio of young users?  Terrible. Even elementary school gamers overload this system despite first 8 and now 16 gigs of DDR3 RAM. Thin clients (and thick — I’ve tried both) fail the FusionFall test.

multidimensional, get it?

I was watching this Bloomberg video the other day featuring Shawn Carolan, the venture capitalist who backed the Siri electronic personal assistant startup then sold it to Apple. His was the closest I’d heard to a technical explanation of how Siri works and it surprised me because it sounded a lot like technology I remembered from years ago at Excite, the long-defunct search engine.  Please look at the video and then meet me in the next paragraph.  The part that excited me (no pun intended) is about four minutes in.

Okay, he said they used linguistic techniques to map blocks of words against 10 possible domains of expertise to figure out what the heck you are asking Siri to do, with the real breakthrough being treating the entire user question or order as a single linguistic unit.

Now let’s jump back to 1994.  Eighteen years ago the search engine technology standard was set by Alta Vista, which spun out of Digital Equipment Corporation. Alta Vista pioneered web indexing with spiders dragging back web pages and it pioneered keyword searches. But if a keyword wasn’t present, Alta Vista would never return the web page you really needed because Alta Vista wasn’t smart enough.

Today the search engine standard is of course Google which uses PageRank to measure relevance by putting higher in the search results those pages that are linked to by more other pages.  Adding to this (yes, I know I’m over-simplifying — feel free to correct me) Google knows a lot about synonyms and how word meaning changes in different contexts — basic linguistic tools that were probably out of Alta Vista’s reach simply because of the processing power required.

And then there was Excite, which was completely different. When I first visited the company in 1994 it was called ArchiText and was six Stanford students operating from their Los Altos garage. I helped them find their first customer and their first venture capitalist, Steve Coit of Charles River Ventures. Vinod came along later.

Most of the ArchiText boys were semantic systems majors and they took a very different technical approach to search than did Alta Vista or that other up-and-coming search engine, Yahoo, which in those days did the task the old fashioned way — by hand.

ArchiText used spiders, too, and built its own web index, but from the start the company was dedicated to finding useful search results even if they didn’t include any search terms from the original user query — seemingly an enormous job.  Google does some of that through its elaborate algorithm, mentioned above, but Google’s technique is for the most part hard coded and brute force while ArchiText’s was very different and, well, elegant.

Here’s how the ArchiText (later Excite) search engine worked. Every query was stripped to its significant words — subjects, objects, verbs and adjectives — then each query became a vector in a multidimensional space with each unique word being a dimension.  “How do space rockets stay in orbit when they are flying through space?” would become a vector string one unit long for each of those words but two units long for the word “space.”  This bit of semantic DNA was then mapped against an index of millions of web pages that had all been similarly converted to multidimensional vectors.

Finding the most relevant results then became a simple matter of grabbing the N vectors (web pages) nearest to the query vector in that multidimensional space.  It was quick, scalable, concentrated the processing load on the indexing where it didn’t bog down retrieval, and could reliably return pages like “Why satellites fall from the sky” that might answer the question even though none of the same words were used.

Compare that to the description of Siri from the Bloomberg video.  Siri takes the entire query as a single block and maps it against a corpus composed of 10 domains of expertise looking for a fit, or perhaps for the best fit.

Technically it sounds darned similar to me, but then I’m forever condemned to remember old crap like this.

In the long run PageRank was more useful to the real world, Excite got sucked into @Home and the whole mess blew up with the dot-com meltdown, but not before all this technology was patented — patents owned today by Excite@Home’s creditors, which surprised me given that the original inventor, Graham Spencer, now works at Google.

Those old Excite patents, while nearing the end of their lives, could turn out to be very valuable to, say, a Google trying to compete with Siri on Android or even to an Apple trying to defend Siri from competitors.

I expect we’ll see those patents change hands sometime soon.