Exploring Everyday Things with R and Ruby

Exploring Everyday Things with R and Ruby
Sau Sheong Chang

This book came out recently. Somebody had suggested it might be fun, so I read it. Sure enough, it is fun. It introduces a lot of really good stuff, perhaps briefly and imperfectly (and you will read "lot" instead of "plot" in at least one place) but it conveys a sense of wonder and possibility. It reminded me of the books of science experiments that I grew up with. This book is structured a bit like they were, with about eight investigations into various things. It guides you through building a digital stethoscope and processing the data it produces - and then it does the same for using a digital camera to take your pulse by reading differences in red intensity as a result of varying oxygen concentrations in your blood. It's really quite neat.

The focus is not really on building physical objects though - it's on the computer side, for simulation and analysis. The techniques weren't really new to me - and in fact in one place the author spends nearly a full page explaining the Pythagorean Theorem - but the spirit of boldly applying techniques to interesting problems is a good one. I would feel pretty good about recommending this book to a middle or high school student with an interest in technology, and any others with curiosity. To be fair, there were good pointers to things I wasn't intimately familiar with, like the Shapiro-Wilk normality test, and while not novel or very deep, the introduction to and work with ggplot2 in R is definitely widely applicable. I'm still not sure I like Ruby more than Python, but you can quickly get a feel for doing things in Ruby as well. It's a fun little book for getting you thinking, and then hopefully looking for more information and working on your own experiments.

Memorization vs. Understanding is really Breadth vs. Depth

It is more difficult to think and communicate about things without names. Almost always, when learning something it is helpful to attach useful language. Importantly, by far the more time-consuming task is the understanding of the concept, not the learning of the term. For any given learning then, there is no real advantage to avoiding the details of terminology.

For example, students could in theory learn about evolution without learning the term "evolution" - but it would not be a better way to learn. Students could learn about a president's decisions without learning the president's name - but again, this would not be an improvement.

It is possible to memorize terms without fully understanding underlying concepts, and even if this allows a student to pass a poorly-designed exam, it is clearly not an admirable learning goal. If there are a very large number of things to learn, however, it may seem that there is only time for learning their names.

Memorizing terms alone is not a complete education. But the apparent alternative, somehow learning without learning terms or details of place and time, is not a strong alternative. We should embrace the language that accompanies learning. It may be that we need to focus on a smaller corpus to allow time for deep understanding, but that understanding will not live long without the words to discuss it.