Alvin's Educational Technology Blog

You may not know this, but I am a scientist. I have two degrees in Chemistry. Part of my graduate work was in Analytical Chemistry. I have seen, used and built a lot of scientific instrumentation. So the whole Al Gore thing interests me as a scientist. I did a little research. I didn’t have to go far before I found this: “The Great Global Warming Swindle”

I did a little checking and found that Al Gore isn’t a scientist, but these guys are. That shouldn’t automatically discredit Al Gore. He did have scientists working for on this project.

Here is something “The Great Global Warming Swindle” points out. The above graphic is from Al Gore’s documentary. The red line (top) is CO2 concentration in the atmosphere and the blue line (bottom) is the surface temperature of the earth. It is clear the two are related. Al Gore says that when CO2 goes up, the temperature goes up. The scientists in “The Great Global Warming Swindle” say that a rise in temperature causes CO2 concentrations to go up (scroll in to the twenty minute mark).

They say the CO2 concentrations increase hundreds of years after the temperature increases. They show a graph with a much more granular time axis so you can see the lag of the CO2 concentration. With Al Gore’s chart showing 50,000 years at each clip, it is difficult to tell. Al Gore makes a point of saying that zero scientists dispute this relationship between CO2 and temperature. He failed to say that some scientists think it is the other way around.

I’m looking for a reliable resource (other than these videos) for the breakdown of the percentage contributions of different greenhouse gases. I would really like to know how much the average volcano emits compared to all the cars in an average sized metropolitan area. I’ll keep you posted on what I find.

I’ve been searching through Google Video looking for good presentations that I can use as resources.  I am mainly looking for presentation styles, but much of the content has been interesting.  Here is one I stumbled across today.

Luis von Ahn, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, is talking about Human Computation.  He looks at several things that computers just can’t figure out yet.  One of those things is a captcha.  This is a term coined by Prof Ahn.  You have probably seen a few of them during your browsing.  They look like this:

Humans can read the letters, but computers cannot.

Here’s the first really interesting statistic from the presentation. 

9 Billion Human-Hours of Solitaire were played in 2003. 

That is billion with a B.  In comparison, the Empire State Building took 7 million (with an M) human-hours to build.  That is equivalent to 6.8 hours of the world playing Solitaire.

Ahn’s goal is to put this wasted Solitaire time to good use.  He has devised a program that is fun and competitive that will help correctly label pictures on the web.  Before showing the game, he went to Google Images and searched for “dog”.  There were a lot of dogs, a rabbit and a guy wearing a blue suite.  This is because the image identification process cannot analyze the picture to identify a dog.  Instead, Google relies on the file name and words around the picture to try and identify a picture.

The ESP Game solves this problem.  The game pairs two anonymous people and shows them both the same picture.  As quickly as possible both players (without seeing what the other is typing) must try to type a word that identifies the picture.  As soon as the two players have a common word, points are scored.  Here’s the twist.  Certain words are “taboo” words.  Generally those are the obvious things in the picture.  It requires the players to look at all the items in the picture in choosing descriptive words.

The end result is a very accurate list of descriptive words for each picture in the database.  Plus the players can get millions of points (the top ten are listed on the site).

Ahn estimated that all the pictures in Google’s database could be accurately tagged in about two months if about 5000 people were to play this game around the clock.  He pointed out games in Yahoo and MSN that average 5000 players all the time.  The whole project is an interesting way of using human brain power.

Once you master the ESP Game, give Peekaboom a try.