matsu

The value of autonomy

I’m often reminded of my third and fourth grade teacher, Mr. Reis.  We went to our summer holidays after the second grade in shock when we learned that he’d be our teacher for the next two years – for he was known to be the most strict teacher in our school.  He was already 76 years old when I became his student, and he had also been my father’s teacher thirty years before.  And yes, he was a no nonsense teacher

This story is almost 25 years old, and fortunately I still had the privilege to meet him and his son by accident a few years ago before he passed away, to thank him and tell his son how important the lessons he taught were for me and the person I am today.  It was not what he taught though, it was how he did it.

Now that I see it through the eyes of an adult, his system was brilliant.  The only thing that had a scheduled time of the day was dictation (obviously), the rest was our responsability.  Yes, he gave eight year olds responsability.  He’d write up on the blackboard the day’s chores and exercises on the various subjects, and transcribing it to a specific notebook was the first thing we did in the morning.

It was then up to us to follow whatever order we wanted to accomplished the set tasks.  If we finished everything before the day was over, we had a bookcase full of classic comic books we could read (Tintin, Asterix, Blake and Mortimer, Lucky Luke, etc.); if we didn’t finish, whatever was left was our homework.  He changed the amount of work from day to day, both in amount and complexity, to allow all students to experience the excitement of not having homework, and to slowly goad us into greater productivity; other days he gave enough work that nobody could ever avoid taking it home.  He was quietly present in the background, correcting the previous day work, there to answer all questions we might have.

At the time we couldn’t really understand the value this system had, it was more of a drag (even with the possible reward) than anything else.  It was only years later that I realized how much of a difference those two years made on everything else later in my life.

Thank you, Mr. Reis.

Dual purpose water-electric solar panels

This little lamp appeared in my head: when you have a limited area (such as roofs) to mount solar panels on, wouldn’t it be great to have a dual-purpose light/heat collector solar panel? The upmost surface would be the photo-voltaic cells, and underneath you’d have the water channels for the primary water circuit. This wouldn’t hurt the efficiency of the photo-voltaic part, and a lot of the re-emited infrared “waste” energy could be absorved through the water for water heating and climatization, I’m sure the overall efficiency would be worth it.

I haven’t been able to find anything similar online, has anyone ever heard of it? (see update below)  With the advancement of the production techniques and the subsequent lower costs, you could have whole houses/buildings covered in modular dual-purpose tiles like these.

Update (May 18th, 2008):

Reader Andreas Mühlmann has pointed out there’s already a product like I proposed, although there are some problems with the concept.

Kiva – global micro-funding project

My friend Ana has written on her blog about this very interesting project: Kiva.org – it’s a system that allows people in developing countries to receive micro-credit from anyone who wants to “invest” online with them, through local platforms.  You can browse the many small projects around the world on their website, and you can start lending from as little as $25 USD.  Each project will show how you will get repaid, the repay rate for each borrower, and a memo about the project itself.  A small, interest free credits market.  You can also add a donation to what you lend.  After lending:

100% of your funds will be sent to our local partner who will disburse your loan

You’ll receive periodic updates showing the impact of your loan

Once your loan is fully repaid, you may withdraw the funds or sponsor a new entrepreneur

They work with Paypal and credit cards.  If you usually donate money, or if you don’t donate money because you follow the “give them fishes vs. teach them to fish” motto this might be an excellent addition or alternative to making this a better world for all.

Interesting Twitter Apps

Four new applications that use the enormous amount of information that can be found on twitter.com have come to my attention this week.

The first two are the brainchildren of my friend Luis Figueiredo (T/B), Alpha Twitter and TwitSpam.  The first shows which individual URLs have been shared by the greatest number of users, a good way to check what is hot right now online.  The second does the reverse, showing the top single URLs “shared” by a single user spammer. Although you can always choose not to follow anyone, it’s a good way to see who is trying to use twitter as a “spamming” platform.

The two other applications are Tweet Clouds and TweetStats.  The first generates on the fly a word “cloud” based on the frequency certain words are used on a certain user’s (public) twitter timeline.  TweetStats collects a certain user’s twitter timeline on the fly to generate statistics of when, how, and to whom we tweet.

With twitter being the most used “micro blogging” platform, all these applications give different insights on the community and individual users and how they use the system.  If you don’t know what twitter is, click here.