Writing Clearly - Crashing into Mars

I want to write a lot about software and software business. And I have to restrain myself to stick to my target audience, you : young students and  your parents. This post is about software but you will find it easy to understand and useful to your study.

Writing clearly is very important. How important? Not doing so can crash expensive space crafts, like the crash of Mars Climate Orbiter in September 1999. That just cost NASA US$ 125 million.

I got this example from Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making. It's a wonderful book, full of inspiring examples for young scientists, students and entrepreneurs.

What the Crash Had to do with Clear Writing?

Mars Climate Orbiter's software mixed up between English units and metric units, between feet and meters.

Kindergarten mistakes?

Not so fast.

The authors of that software borrowed some pieces from the software of a previous mission called Mars Global Surveyor. The part that caused the problem is called "the thruster equation", which does conversion between feet and meters. That must be a very simple, clear, short piece. What so special about conversion between feet and meters after all?

Pieces of software are just like paragraphs in a long story.

If you write clearly, they read like paragraphs in a good story. You know what each means, which parts of the story are where and so on.

If you are careless, undisciplined or irresponsible, any reader will trip, slip and fall among your lines and paragraphs.

And your software may down a plane, shut down a bank and a hospital, or even crash some space missions.

So, why not start a good habit now. Let's write a bit more clearly starting from today!

Mars Global Surveyor with s a bit messy software.

Mars Climate Orbiter that crashed into mars.

Math Education for Real

How do you want your kids to learn Math? I don't have a formal education in Math. And if you don't too, these books can help you. At least, you will be able to teach your kids to relax. Just a few minutes for each difficult book!

Work hard, intensely, compulsively, obsessively and of course, productively and insanely?

Work in balance, work having a life and productively too?

You have a choice, your kids too have a choice.

Perfect Rigor: A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century

A Strange Wilderness: The Lives of the Great Mathematicians

Henri Poincaré: A Scientific Biography

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character)

How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method (Princeton Science Library)

George Ploya book pdf

How to Read Difficult Stuffs

When you have to read difficult stuffs, remember this useful advice, by Geraldine Price and Pat Maier in Effective Study Skills, 2007, page. 271.

1. You should "assess the knowledge you bring to" the text you're using now. Is your background knowledge, prior knowledge sufficient for the reading task at hand?
2. Instead of persisting too much, too long, you should switch to "a text which gives you more help and briefer, more broad-stroke explanations." They give as examples: Idiot's Guides, "A" level texts (the authors are writing for university students.) Their special examples are Sattre and Heidegger. My examples are early-day linguistic books and Java, Visual C++ books in the late 1990s . Such books were written before the fields were mature and thus the authors themselves were unsure of their knowledge. In other words, they were bluffing. This happens in every field of study though.
3. How to Be a High School Superstar, by Cal Newport, 2010 : Read a different textbook.

The key lesson here is : Find something more digestible for you.

If the going gets really tough, here is another advice, by Heather Cooke in Success with Mathematics, 2003, page 37-38.

1. "try to do it [a worked example] yourself without looking at the book's solution"
2. "To understand something new, ... write it down ... "
3. Write out a difficult passage.

The key lesson here is : Slow down, take your time, relax.

Here is another advice, by Peter Levin in Conquer Study Stress, 2007.

1. Regard reading as a treasure hunt: Look for clues, checking our their helpfulness, and keeping your main aim in mind all the time.
2. Read breadth-first. Skim for the gist, scan for key details.
3. Take notes breadth-first.

One more advice from Take Notes by Ron Fry, 1997, for reading technical texts.

1. Backtrack a lot as you must expect a lot of wrong turns. Go trail and error mode.
2. Slow down and tie up what you've just read and understood.
3. Translate formulas, numbers etc into different words. Explain your understanding to a toy or a friend.
4. Sketch, draw, doodle.
5. Play around to uncover different paths to the solution.

From something we've read:

1. casual reading : newspapers, friendly personal mails, sales letters etc.
2. careful reading: reports, poetry, science texts
3. slow reading : technical articles. Here, you pause a lot more often, and you consolidate your intermediate understandings more often.

Consolidate What You've Just Read

In one experiment, the researchers divided the students into 2 groups:
(a) 25 % time spent in reading + 75 % time in reciting
(b) 100% in reading

Group A fare better than the Group B in the tests that followed the reading period.

Taking Breaks During Your Study

Secrets of Getting Better Grades, by Brian Marshall, 2002, 2nd edition.

After every 15 minutes of study, take a 2-min break.
After every 50 minutes, take a 10-min break (same as in "How to Win at College," by Cal Newport, 2005.)
After every 3 hours, take  a half-hour break ("How to Be a High School Superstar," by Cal Newport, 2010 )

Ace Any Test, by Ron Fry, 2000, 4th edition.

1. Study when you are fresh.
2. Use time blocking.
3. For a psychological boost, reduce the pile of books, papers etc into simple notes.

How to Win at College, by Cal Newport, 2005.

1. Keep a work-progress journal. Every night, jot down scheduled and actual accomplishments. This practice helps to hold you accountable and to hurt your ego.
2. Relax at least half an hour before you go to bed.

Proven Memory Principles

Mike Evans, in How to Pass Your Exams, 3rd edition, 2009, recommends developing your memory through active revision:

1. Make sense of the key ideas in what you read or hear.
2. Recall and review periodically.

How to Be a High School Superstar, by Cal Newport, 2010 endorses the same approach:

1. Quiz yourself and answer loud.

Memory Principles at HopeHero Software Works

1. Arouse desire for what you want to remember.
2. Chunk and encapsulate. If necessary reformat the input.
3. Make sense, find meaning, relate new materials to your existing knowledge..
4. Make a cue to easily re-activate what you've just remembered. e.g mental pictures, mental movies, tunes, rhymes, acronyms, etc.
5. Recite. Practice active recall.
6. Use it, apply it in real life.
7. Avoid distraction, intervention, interference.
8. Rest and sleep properly.

Types of memory

1. Audio loop e.g the way you remember phone numbers.
2. Imagery, pictures, snapshots
3. Episodic, films, movie-like events
4. Semantic, symbolic, verbal, language-related.

We will elaborate on each of these principles later.

Reading Math

When you have to read math textbooks, workbooks etc, remember this useful advice, by Randall S. Hansen and Katherine Hansen in Idiot's Guide to Study Skills, published in 2008. I lifted the following points from page. 130.

1. Read in order. When you find something tough or confusing, the usual culprit is that your have skipped over some points before this one. Go back and study those points in detail, and then come back to the current problem set.
2. Pay attention to illustrations, formulas, proofs, theorems, definitions, etc. These save you a lot of explorations that you will otherwise have to do on your own.
3. Work the sample/example/practice problems.

Learning Styles --- Part 1

Can I change my style? Can I improve my style? Can I learn or acquire a new style? Which style is best for what learning task? Don't ask a good question. Because scholars, researchers, book writer usually leave them for you yourself to answer!

What Styles Are There?

1. Left-brained, right-brained?
2. Prefer to see, hear or do?visual,auditory,reading/writing-preference,
   kinesthetic/tactile?
3. Deep vs surface
4. Holistic/Integrative vs atomistic/itemized
5. Single/alone vs team/social/cooperative learning
6. Converger,Diverger,Assimilator,Accommodator
7. Field Dependent or Independent
8. Concrete or Abstract

"What is my style?"
"Do we have more than one style?"
"Can I change my style?"
"Can I improve my style?"
"Can I learn or acquire a new style?"
"Which style is best for what task?"

As I have warned you before,  you yourself will have to to answer these very good, and useful questions.

We'll come up with more help in later posts on this blog.