Brighter Flames Arrayed

Right now, somewhat outside of work (basically, when I don’t need a tablet or the software I have installed on it) I use a 13″ ultraportable Acer Timeline laptop. The idea of having a low power consumption, exceptionally light yet powerful-enough-for-Photoshop laptop for the price of two netbooks is actually a really wonderful thing; kind of like having a MacBook Air for a third the price. But this post isn’t about the laptop itself. It’s about buying the laptop.

To be more precise, my laptop is an Acer Aspire Timeline AS3810TZ-4925. Every single one of those numbers is somehow important. If I wanted a 6415 I would need to pay a different price. The only difference, besides the model numbers, is that they come with slightly different processors, hard drives and memory and maybe some of them don’t have bluetooth. I’m not really sure. Some part of that model number governs the screen size as well. I’m not really sure which part it is because, frankly, I didn’t want to bother.

If someone who has two degrees in mathematics and a mild dose of OCD doesn’t want to make sense of patterns and numbers then I seriously doubt that your average consumer will.

It seems that Asian companies are all pretty guilty of this model number business. Lenovo offers nine different lines of laptops and netbooks, each with three to five different submodels. Acer boasts enough models to fill up my screen, and remember that each of those models have about 4 to 6 submodels. Toshiba and Asus were equally infuriating—even within one model line—during my laptop search. Dell is slightly less infuriating since it attaches names as opposed to numbers or, in the case of Lenovo, letters—and remember that these numbers and letters do not actually map in a reasonable way to function!—to the different laptop lines and first ask you if you’re a home or business user. Even with widescreen monitors it’s pretty much impossible to compare all the laptops within the scope a consumer may want from one company side to side.

Oh. Also. Don’t get me started on Oriental MP3 players and cameras. Once, in the electronic mecca of Hong Kong, I swore that I’ll never buy a Korean or Japanese or Chinese MP3 player since it was impossible to distinguish between all the models. Phones are equally absurd but at least phone companies in the US always tend to sell you some flagship models that you can easily choose from. I’m pretty sure that comparing forty different incomprehensible model numbers is a culturally acceptable thing to do across the Pacific but I think I’ve grown a little too impatient over the years to deal with things like this.

The thing about this whole experience is that it makes me miss buying Apple products. Not actually using Apple products, but the process of buying them. When you want an Apple laptop you go “I want the good white Macbook” and poof, there it is. It makes buying electronics actually rather easy as long as Apple makes that product and you want it. I’m pretty sure that it’s much easier to say “I want a black Macbook for Christmas” than to say “I want an Acer Aspire AS3810TZ-4925 for Christmas”. Of course, that clarity is part of the services provided by the Apple price tag. Given that I don’t mind the spelunking for a bargain I think I came out ahead. Of course, not everyone is like me.

The question then is why aren’t companies simplifying their product lines like Apple did? Dell is doing it and the result seems to be that every not-tech-savvy person I know who has a laptop either has a Macbook or a Dell Inspiron. (And every not-tech-savvy person I know who has a lot of money has a Macbook Pro or a Macbook Air.) The exception are students who bought their laptops in Asia. Like the student who showed our IT folks the first low cost ultraportable laptop they’ve seen: the Toshiba Satellite T135-S1307. One of the 13s stands for “13 inch screen”, and not-very-regrettably I have forgotten which one it is. If you want to know, you’ll have to do your own research.

Wing :: Dec.29.2009 :: Posts :: No Comments »

Reading this article on who needs tablet computers anyway brings back some memories; specifically, memories of myself asking that exact same question years ago while working with Devindra (the author of the Pingdom blog article) himself at a college IT department. My answer back then was, really, nobody. Of course, now I tote a tablet PC around all the time and use it around 80% of the time when I teach. Yet I still see the question here: who needs to use tablet PCs?

If you look at the Lenovo tablet PC site you’ll notice that it’s not for consumers. Really, consumers, it’s not for you. You don’t need to poke and stab and draw on newyorktimes.com. You don’t really need multi-touch to zoom in on things. You certainly do not need to pay $1,500 for it. Leave it to the teachers and doctors and engineers. The thing is though that lots of companies are now willing to bet that consumers would pay $500 for it. Maybe a little less, even. Do consumers really need it? No, I doubt it. But I do hope that enough consumers buy them because I do.

Imagine outfitting every student with a tablet PC that can be used as an e-book reader, a notepad and a desktop computer (either by having the device be a convertible tablet/netbook or via an external keyboard/stand) for less than $500 per student. The software is here already; all the device needs to do is to be able to run OneNote and a web browser at the same time, a task that my netbook could do easily in its default configuration. You’ll also need a good network connection to a central local server and maybe some stuff on the Internet. Some schools have already done this and the result is a classroom with instantaneous, collective knowledge sharing between everyone in the room; the stuff of science fiction, except folks are figuring out how to do it right now. The biggest problem is that to do this right now each student needs a $1500 computer. If these netbook-styled tablets take off then we can do this for the price of 1.6 netbooks per student. It’s still expensive, but the goal is that much closer within reach. Also, a $500 one-to-one program is a little easier to sell than a $1500 one.

Right now, I have the #tablets tag on Gizmodo on the top of my browser history (not to say I bookmarked it, but I go there so often Chrome knows I want to go there if I type in “tablet”) and every time a new item pops up I ask “can it run OneNote and output VGA?”. I actually want one of these myself—though there are certainly things that my X60 tablet can do that these $500 things won’t (running full screen capture for an hour, for example)—since I’d like to use something less than 2 lbs so I can be even more mobile and be able to toss it around without feeling any guilt. Of course, if you can couple one of those with a wireless projector it would be perfect on the mobility font. The problem is that, in order to drive costs down and keep hardware requirements low, many of these tablets (like the JooJoo) use proprietary operating systems which makes adapting them for classroom use hard. Yes, you heard me, I’d rather they use Windows.

My biggest fear is that there new, small, net-tablets will be unsuccessful enough before they can find a niche in the education (and perhaps, medical, professional, etc.) market. In order for a sub-$500 tablet that has a decent processor to come out on the market people need to buy the first wave of small, tablet PCs and drive a price/manufacturing war like they did with netbooks. As Devindra pointed out I don’t see a rational reason for consumers to buy all that many of them. But given that Microsoft itself is coming out with Courier (even better than just a slate-style tablet) hopefully there will be enough momentum to get schools with the resources to start experimenting with this new generation of tablets.

Wing :: Dec.22.2009 :: Posts :: 1 Comment »

Last week my calculus class got up to optimization problems and they made a starling realization: the word problems in the calculus book had no names. Perhaps a farmer needs to fence off a rectangular area or a driver needs to find the shortest path between point A in a field and point B on a road, but those professionals are always anonymous and their only personality is that they had a problem to solve. My class (ranging from sophomores to seniors) was quite happy. This was a right of passage for them; they don’t need to be babied and told that they need to foster a fake connection with a throwaway character anymore. Besides, they never really liked the names anyway.

Then they moved on to how textbooks often forced diversity in the math classroom by inserting “ethnic” names into word problems. As one of my students put it, there always a Tyrone somewhere in a textbook.

The latest, 2010 edition texts—they’re from the future, you see—that I’m using for my lower level classes do in fact follow this method in every problem. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Once, a native rural-Vermonter who has never seen the name “Raul” in all fourteen years of life was shocked that such a name existed and asked me to pronounce it. Not having said that name in almost a decade myself—thanks to my migration to rural Western/Northern New England—and not being able to pronounce the “r” so close to the “l”—my colleague said that Raul is “one of the worst names for Asian tongues, just like mine, so I understand”—I managed to completely butcher it on the first go. Good thing the kids were just having too much fun trying to say “Raul” for themselves to notice.

Also, since one lesson we want to emphasis in introductory algebra is that we always want to give things names it does make sense to name our characters.

Here’s where it gets tricky: Sheniqua and Chen would both attempt a problem and you’ll have to figure out who did it wrong; the kids probably are too busy doing the problem to notice that I’m sweating and muttering “please don’t let Sheniqua be the wrong one that would be so racist and sexist at the same time”. I understand that if Ricardo is buying an MP3 player and needs to figure out what the discount is the students may identify with the problem better and maybe subconsciously think “okay Hispanic folks buy MP3 players too”, but when it comes to the “whose solution is better” type problems do we really need to call them more than Student A and Student B? Perhaps in this fictional universe within this algebra text African-American girls do better than white and Asian-American boys all the time, but then—you know what, why does the book even allow me to ask this question in the first place?

The biggest issue I have with our text is that only three out of so many pictures in the book contain interactions between folks with different shades of skin color. They are: a black woman beating a white woman in a (running) race, an Asian doctor attending a Hispanic woman and two pre-teen girls (one white and one black) texting on their pink cell phones. God forbid that the prom queen and king came from different cultural backgrounds or that people of different skin colors sit in the same log-cart in the waterpark

Look, I’m not really asking for much here. It’s not like I want an openly gay couple measuring their living room or a transitioning transgendered woman trying to calculate how wide her hips expanded or an imam, a rabbi, a priest and the local Atheist leader trying to figure out how much lemonade to serve in the community interfaith picnic. I’ll ask for those things in a few decades. Right now, I just want to see more pictures of a black dude and a white dude and maybe some other boys and girls of maybe different colors hanging out in a social setting—you know, like my students do? It doesn’t even have to be romantic; I understand that our nation is not 100% comfortable with that yet so I won’t push you on that. You do have to sell books to Louisiana.

On the bright side, at least pre-teen girls break the racial barriers that the rest of America(n textbook) holds so tightly; I only hope that they not only agree on Tyrone being the cutest boy in the class but that it’s okay for either one of them to date him but he won’t really pay them any attention anyway because he seems to always be in a math problem or something. Sigh.

Wing :: Dec.14.2009 :: Posts :: 2 Comments »