(This post is part of a continuing series.  For the last article, click here).

One of the first sights for many visitors to Jeju is the unique statuary that was created by the indigenous civilization on the island.  While Jeju is and has been part of Korea, the distance of the island from the mainland Korean peninsula allowed the local culture to develop relatively independently, and thus the local dialect and food is quite distinct from other regions of Korea.  These statues are made from the local volcanic rock available on the island.  The actual character depicted is typical for this type of statuary, and has symbolic meaning.

An example of the unique statues that cover the entire island.

One of the unique natural rock formations visible on the island are the hexagonal columns of volcanic rock that form during the cooling process.  The design’s geometric pattern is simply breathtaking, and seems almost alien in the natural ecosystem.  These particular photos were taken on the south side of the island, in one of the more well-known spots.

A birds-eye view of the hexagonal lava columns

A level-view of the hexagonal lava columns, emphasizing the columns

Other areas of Jeju also demonstrate natural erosion forces from the sea.  This next picture is also located on the south-side of the island.  If you look closely, you can see a mobile harbor for ocean vessels that was (I was told) developed by researchers at KAIST in the bottom-right corner.

Natural erosion forces have weathered this rock into a subtle pattern

As my photo from last week showed, it was quite snowy during my trip to Jeju.  While the island is generally regarded more tropical than arctic, the somewhat rare falling of snow did provide several excellent photo opportunities.  Here, snow covers a series of ash rock formations.

Not snow-capped mountains, but impressive next to the sea

Finally, there are several unique rocks that have been provided names.  One of the most famous is a rock that looks like a Black Dragon on the north side of Jeju, but the snow and wind were too strong for me to take a photo.  That site is particularly popular this year due to 2012 being the Year of the Dragon in the Chinese Zodiac calendar.  However, another rock is well-known of a lady on the the mountain.

The "lady" looks up the mountain, ahem, face

The island is mostly known as a sort of lush paradise island (it is not classified as tropical, although at times the published pictures may lend Jeju that description).  However, that was not my experience traveling there this Winter.

My tropical island vacation – more like a winter wonderland

While the cold and snow were quite dreadful (plus the wind is downright deadly, maintaining around 30mph due to the nearby shore), the snow did provide for some beautiful photography against the ashen colored volcanic rocks widely seen in the island’s geology.

One of the most famous natural attractions on Jeju is the Manjanggul Lava Tube, a winding cave beneath the ground that was hollowed by molten lava that flowed through here thousands of years ago.

The entrance to the lava caves (ironically covered in snow)

Only a portion of the caves are available to tourists, but the available section is quite dramatic (enhanced by upgraded lights and bridges that have been placed in the past 5 years by an emboldened local government).

The tunnel inside the caves. I played video game music to heighten the mood.

An example of some of the unique stratigraphy in the rocks of the tunnel.

Once done with the caves, I travelled to the southern end of the island to visit some of Jeju’s renowned waterfalls.  They truly are breathtaking, and the color of the water is certainly helped by the feeling of the crisp winter air.

This is one of three waterfalls that are part of this river in southern Jeju

Another waterfall on the river. Snow flakes are just starting to fall again.

More pictures to come in the upcoming days.

At the heart of the holiday is a certain introspection regarding one’s age and ancestors.  Since the Korean age system is based around New Year’s day (one’s age increases for everyone in the country simultaneously on New Year’s day, as opposed to on birthdays) Acknowledging and honoring one’s ancestors is at the heart of the event, and many Koreans will trek back to their ancestral hometowns to visit grave sites of previous generations of their family.  At the same time, it is a time to commemorate another year of life and the continuing passage of time.

I participated in the traditions with a friend of mine here in Korea.  The celebration began in the early morning with the cooking of a banquet feast, including 떡국 (Tteokguk), which is the traditional food eaten only during New Year’s.

A colorful feast of fruits and various Korean staple dishes

In the same room as the food are pictures of the family’s ancestors on the wall.  Before the food is eaten, the men in the family (sons and fathers) performed a series of traditional bows to honor the ancestors before enjoying the breakfast.  Due to the small dining room, this particular family had men eat first, before leaving and allowing the women to eat as a group.

One large component of these festivities are gifts of money from grandparents and family relatives to the kids.  These came in envelopes from each of the families and were distributed to much excited yelling and screaming.

Later in the day, I travelled with the family out of Seoul into the surrounding countryside to visit the burial place of some more ancestors on the other side of the family.  Traditionally, wives visit their husband’s family in the morning, before visiting their own families in the afternoon (this transition is variable between families of course).  The grave site of the great-grandfather can be seen in the burial mound on this hill.  Behind it is another generation of grave sites, and they progress down the hill in linear fashion from oldest to youngest.

A traditional Korean burial mound on a hill

What was most impressive was the incredible view that these burial mounds overlooked. Unfortunately, the iPhone camera doesn’t really do the scene justice, but the view is spectacular in person.

A gorgeous view of the mountain ranges in Northern South Korea

[...] I firmly believe that we should embrace [gamification] and harness its best parts to drive the education of our children who grow up with online and mobile games.

But then we reach this sentence later in the essay:

And with points and stars and badges and the like both [types of students: the A and D students] are likely to want to spend more time participating, and will be more motivated when they do participate compared to today’s average classroom.

Vinod Khosla is wrong.  Dangerously wrong.

I want to start by saying that Khosla is certainly no small figure in the Silicon Valley community, and really, his track record of success is something to laud.  I also want to note that some of my closest friends from college are working on mobile games that teach arithmetic skills.  I think the work that they are doing is really interesting, worthwhile and useful.

Yet, there is a tremendous difference between having a game on a parent’s iPhone or Android and changing the entire U.S. education system to encourage the acquisition of arbitrary “points and stars and badges.”  It’s funny, but this approach has been tried for years in U.S. school districts, without success.  Those who want to read about it from an ardent critic can turn to the work of Alfie Kohn who rightly points out the incredible harm that this approach has on the development of children.

There is an incredible danger in the quantification of education.  Teacher accountability, student test taking, GPAs, points, rankings, percentiles.  The current trend is already moving toward gamification, except it isn’t really fun.  And that is just the problem with games as learning: they can’t really convince the unmotivated to learn, can they?  Sure, learning algebra by playing a mobile game may be better than reading a textbook, but no student is going to choose Math Blaster over Halo.  And no math game can be fun when you are required to get a certain score in order to pass (I certainly hated Mavis Beacon when I was little, and that had already been gamified.  And that was in 1995).

Dumping these sorts of entertainment toys into the toxic atmosphere that is American public schools is not going to solve our education problems.  In fact, it may even make them worse.  But that probably never occurred to Khosla, who like many ed tech pundits, is not and never has been a teacher.

At a time when creativity and originality are requisite skills for career success, why are we focused on developing technologies that take the creativity out of education?  Perhaps I get so angry and passionate about this because I just barely managed to get through public school before the current regime of test taking.  As I have discussed previously on this blog, it was the incredibly flexibility of my early teachers in elementary school that allowed me the opportunity to explore computers at a young age. Today, I am a product manager and majored in Mathematical and Computational Science with other interests in 3D animation, photography, writing and art.  No gamification needed.  To use Khosla’s example of A and D students: A students don’t need games and games won’t help D students.

Khosla does make a valid point regarding breaking up the lock-step approach of education progression.  He sees games as a potential avenue for changing that model, but then again, nearly every technology developed for education has personalized learning as one of its major motivations.  This personalization is going to change the way people learn and completely alter the role of the teacher in the classroom, but its success is still dependent on a willing and passionate student to get the most value.  Games are just a subset of this trend.

If start-ups in education want to make a difference, focus on enjoyment, not fun.  Games are fun: you can turn off your mind and lose a few hours shooting vampires or building human civilizations across the ages.  Enjoyment comes from accomplishment and developing something original, realizing that you have the ability to challenge and change your world.  To put it in concrete terms – don’t play games, make them.  But that requires a level of confidence in children that American prisons public schools just have not been able to possess.

Khosla provides some interesting ideas, but we have to be vigilant of thinking that there is an immediate technical solution to a problem of human psychology and human society. Maria Montessori believed that students, when given an open canvas on which to learn, will learn masterpieces.  That philosophy helped to create the Google founders, and it is exactly the kind of attitude the United States needs to educate students for the 21st century economy.

I visited Gwangjang Market a few days ago, which the Korea Tourism agency bills as the “first” market in the country (not really sure on how they define that though).  The place is also apparently known for its hanbok wedding gowns (the formal and traditional dress of the wedding couple) and thus it serves up many stores with these gowns available in a dazzling palette of colors.  Outside of the shopping, numerous food vendors were dispersed throughout the walkways offering snacks for the shoppers.

In addition to shopping, I managed to get a wonderful picture of large-flake snow falling in Korea.  The snow, when it isn’t making the place dangerous, can be quite beautiful at times (although it is still not enough to get me to leave California permanently!)

Sign to the opening of Kwangjang Market

Walkway in the market (and the ceiling colors are conspiratorially similar to the colors of the clothes)

Sale signs beckon from another walkway at the market

Colorfully bold Hanbok formal dresses are widely available at the market

Shoppers can purchase raw fabrics across the second floor

Random picture of snow (too bad I am too lazy to use Instagram)

Yet, there is something still missing from this discussion.  Why is it that Android still seems laggy after years of development?  This is not a minor discussion, but goes directly to the quality of the user experience of the device.  Dianne’s main argument (she has several of them) is that Android’s API model ensures that every app is sandboxed, and that the ability to optimize the graphics is difficult because the hardware is just not there.

I don’t buy that argument.

Instead, I think she nibbles on the right argument near the end of her piece.  In the penultimate paragraph, she describes the similar experience between programming for iOS and programming for Android:

One final thought. I saw an interesting comment from Brent Royal-Gordon on what developers sometimes need to do to achieve 60fps scrolling in iOS lists: “Getting it up to sixty is more difficult—you may have to simplify the cell’s view hierarchy, or delay adding some of the content, or remove text formatting that would otherwise require a more expensive text rendering API, or even rip the subviews out of the cell altogether and draw everything by hand.”

There is a more fundamental reason why Android is laggy compared to iOS: culture and tools.  The iOS development culture is built around cool design.  The Wow Factor is a major component of being highlighted on the front of Apple’s App Store, since the company loves to draw attention to new products with novel interfaces.  This also comes out with the major awards Apple releases each year at WWDC: the Apple Design Awards.  The mission statement alone makes this self-evident: “The Apple Design Awards 2011 recognize outstanding achievement and excellence in iPhone, iPad, and Mac app design. Each year, winning products set new standards for the developer community to follow. Read about what made this year’s winners stand out above the rest.” [italics added]

Yet, Apple doesn’t just encourage good design, they actively make it easier to attain it through their comprehensive and quality development tools.  As TechCrunch recently discussed, Apple’s tools are vastly superior to the tools offered for the Android ecosystem.  That means that more effort can be made at producing a high quality application, and less to just get the application off-the-ground and running.  This doesn’t mean it is exactly a pleasure to learn Objective-C and its somewhat unique language features.  Nonetheless, the lower bar to program Android with Java has not done it any immediate favors.

There is even a more fundamental point to be made though: both tools and culture are driven by the underlying model of both ecosystems.  With Android, the goal of openness has meant that it is nearly impossible to develop quality applications for the full range of devices (and their enormous variety of features and capabilities) that run Android.  How do you emulate an Android device for development and verify functionality and user experience for the vast majority of users?

Compare that to the walled garden of Apple: there have been a total of 5 iPhone models released in history.  When one wants to emulate an app, it is easy to decide if the user experience will work for nearly all users.  Thus, the model of the two companies has changed their development patterns, which by extension have affected the tools that are available from the two companies.

Recent reviews of Ice Cream Sandwich have shown some improvement to the issues of lag.  Nonetheless, that is not going to change the model by which Android and iOS operate.  The culture and tools are derivatives of the cultures chosen by Google and Apple, and hardware acceleration is really the last thing that is going to change this dynamic.

It is not too late to change this, and indeed, Google has emphasized that it wants to bring everyone on one platform.  Now, it needs to follow through by building tools to streamline application development and emphasizing quality in its product highlights, awards, and other means of free publicity it offers developers.  Google needs to thread the needle on this, and avoid getting bogged down in minutia over …. threads.

The response to this environment was in the New York Times:

The remarkably rapid progress of the tax revisions — without a public hearing or town-hall-style meeting — provided the most striking illustration to date of Mr. Cuomo’s policymaking strategy: information is tightly controlled, negotiations are carried out behind closed doors and the debate is limited to just a few people.

The tactics, derided by government watchdog groups and some lawmakers, have proved highly effective during Mr. Cuomo’s first year in office, as he has pushed, against long odds, to win passage of same-sex marriage, a property tax cap, a reworking of ethics rules and extensive budget cuts. And his efforts appeared likely to be rewarded again this week: The Senate approved the tax code changes on Wednesday night, and the Assembly was poised to follow suit.

While derided as anti-democratic, these sorts of tactics are beyond necessary in a media and political system that emphasizes outrage and focuses on the extreme.  Ideally, we elect politicians to solve society’s pressing problems through an open and fair process, where every citizen has the right to provide input and shape the final decision.  Realistically though, open and transparent government rarely provides the environment needed for politicians to actually do their jobs.

This is one of modern laws of democratic politics: transparency prevents things from happening.  If you want to shut down public schools, ensure that the data from those schools are easily available (while perhaps blocking access to the data from private/charter schools).  Journalists and academics, who are rewarded and incentivized to find the most salacious pieces of data, will publicize the most damning pieces to a wide audience.  You can pick any public policy issue and follow the same process.  This is why groups like the National Rifle Association work so hard to prevent the release of data on guns and public health.

When activists demand the governor’s schedule, it is not for pedestrian reasons.  Instead, it is to literally count the number of meetings with the opposing side in order to write vituperative press releases that blast him for having meetings at all.  The level of transparency demanded creates an environment in which just meeting with a constituency itself is political, despite that activity being one of the core functions of being a politician in the first place.

More importantly though, data that comes out of these government transparency initiatives are rarely complete.  There are immense politics to data, and all politicians and their aides are well aware that public opinion can be swayed by its careful release.  As I have said on numerous occasions and will repeat here: looking at data is great, but looking at what data is absent is even more important.  We analyze what we can see, and what we can see is often politically skewed (the Drunkard’s Search comes to mind).

I am not opposed to transparency.  Instead, I see it as a tool like any other policy to form and shape the political debate.  An overload of transparency prevents actions from occurring by providing data fodder for every interest group to build attacks.  Governor Cuomo understands this, and so pays respects to the ideas of transparency while doing little that is transparent.  That may not be democratic – but it sure is smart.

Protests in Korea are a relatively common occurrence, and have been known to become quite unruly.  Partly for this reason as well as other historical reasons, they are required to be registered with the government ahead of time.  Protests related to imports of beef from the United States drew hundreds of thousands if not millions of protesters in Korea, and the verve of the organizing groups has not slowed down.  The protest I observed in Kwanghuamun this past week were relatively peaceful when I was there, although later that night almost 50 police officers were in the hospital, having suffered injuries while trying to disperse the protesters.  An unknown number of protesters were injured as well.

An angry crowd attacks police for blocking disabled access points to Kwanghuamun

A public lecture discusses the potential damage of the FTA treaty.

The main protest crowd reassembled near shops after being blocked entrance to the main square

Dozens of police buses brought thousands of police officers to maintain orderPolice squads work their way through the crowds

Police blocked entrance to the protest site (and also prevented people from leaving – including me for a time)