Chris Ballard has an excellent essay on the art, history, and mystery of the dunk.

Like a sizable chunk of sporting America, I remain intrigued by the dunk, even if I'm not always sure why. After all, I've seen a million of them, replayed on the highlight shows and casually dropped in on NBA layup lines and shoved down my throat by anthropomorphic mascots hurtling off trampolines. Yet I can't look away.  For men, it's like cleavage; we've seen acres of it, but that doesn't stop us from looking again. It's part instinct, part the lure of the unattainable and part the hope that we'll see something spectacular.

The dunk is the easiest shot in basketball, really, but also one that relatively few can make, requiring a combination of height, youth, leaping ability and coordination. A 60-year-old can run a marathon, and almost anyone can get lucky and hit a hole in one or a half-court heave, but no one lucks into a dunk. Either you can do it or you can't.

Julius erving once said, "When you feel yourself go up above the rim for the first time and put the ball through, there's nothing like it. You want to do it again and again and again." Wilkins says throwing down made him feel like a king.

...maybe that's the ultimate appeal of the dunk. Close our eyes, and all of us can imagine doing it. Most of us never will, though, so we live vicariously through those who can, reveling in their ability to make the impossible look easy. We wish we could become one of them. Inevitably, they will become one of us.

I tried to get my body back into shape about this time last year for a push at dunking, but I came up unsuccessful, utlimately.  Mostly due having a hard time losing weight and probably putting on too much mass with weight training.  It was fun training for it, however; it definitely helped by pick up game in so far as being better at grabbing boards and sending ill-timed shots back into the shooter's face >:) (there's nothing quite like the satisfaction of emphatically blocking somone's jumpshot, though I imagine posterizing someone to be equally, it not more, exhilerating).

Worth a read for any fans of the game.

As the spouse of a teacher, I know first hand the challenges that many young teachers face in the US today.  From waning parent interest and participation to lack of administrative support to poor professional development plans.  Of course, there is also the issue of compensation; let's face it: $40,000 just doesn't go very far.

I'd like to think that my wife is one of those teachers that takes her work very personally and always takes the initiative to help her students.  As Claudia Wallis writes in "How to Make Great Teachers", she writes that one of the key characteristics of successful teachers is "an unshakable belief in children's capacity to learn."  Indeed, I think my wife has a certain stubborness when it comes to her students in that she doesn't accept excuses for failure and always pushes her kids.  I'm constantly surprised by the number of parents of former students who come up to her and tell her how she's changed their children's lives, especially when it comes to the topic of mathematics.

One thing that amazes me is the incredible cost of education for teachers in the US and how much of that burden falls on the shoulders of America's teachers and their families, especially for post-graduate education.  For example, my wife's graduate school loans total over $25,000!  Her commitment from her school district? $750 per year.

Linda Darling-Hammond comments:

All teacher candidates in Finland, Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands, for example, receive two to three years of graduate-level preparation for teaching, at government expense, plus a living stipend.  Unlike the U.S., where teachers either go into debt to prepare for a profession that will pay them poorly or enter with little or no training, these countries made the decision to invest in a uniformly well-prepared teaching force by recruiting top candidates and paying them while they receive extensive training.

For certain, it seems like the US doesn't treat teaching like a first class profession.  Contrast this with Singapore's approach:

To get the best teachers, the [National Institute of Education] recruits students from the top third of each graduating high school class into a fully paid four-year teacher-education program and puts them on the government's payroll.  When they enter the profession, teachers' salaries are higher than those of beginning doctors.

Aside from the greather respect for the teaching profession, it seems like many countries also take a different approach to continued on the job professional development.

[In Singapore,] the government pays for 100 hours of professional development each year for all teachers.  In addition, they have 20 hours a week to work with other teachers and visit on another's classrooms.

Most US teachers, on the other hand, have no time to work with colleagues during the school day.  They plan by themselves and get a few hit-and-run workshops after school, with little opportunity to share knowledge or improve their practice.

Harold Stevenson noted that "Asian class lessons ae so well crafted [because] there is a very systematic effort to pass on the accumulated wisdom of teaching practice to each new generation of teachers and to keep providing teachers the opportunities to continually learn from each other."

In a paper titled Speeding Up Team Learning, Edmondson, Bohmer, and Pisano write, with regards to their study on surgical teams learning new procedures and practices in the area of cardiac surgery:

Teams that learned the new procedure most quickly shared three essential characteristics.  They were designed for learning; their leaders framed the challenge in such a way that team members were highly motivated to learn and the leaders' behavior created an environment of psychological safety that fostered communication and innovation.

I think we can take some of these ideas and merge apply them to the teaching profession as well by identifying what Darling-Hammond terms "expert teachers" and emphasizing the fostering of these individuals into drivers for team and mentor based professional development.  Furthermore, I think greater structured team based learning and communications would greatly enhance the experience of young teachers learning the craft.

I'm pretty sure this is the most awesome thing I've seen in a long time:

"Some Team Disguised as the Nets Beats the Mavs by 19"

Time has an interesting article summarizing a study done at Perdue University on animals and how their bodies responded to artificial sweeteners.  More specifically, how their metabolism responded.  The results are a bit surprising:

When an animal eats a saccharin-flavored food with no calories, however — disrupting the sweetness and calorie link — the animal tends to eat more and gain more weight, the new study shows. The study was even able to document at the physiological level that animals given artificial sweeteners responded differently to their food than those eating high-calorie sweetened foods. The sugar-fed rats, for example, showed the expected uptick in core body temperature at mealtime, corresponding to their anticipation of a bolus of calories that they would need to start burning off — a sort of metabolic revving of the energy engines. The saccharin-fed animals, on the other hand, showed no such rise in temperature. "The animals that had the artificial sweetener appear to have a different anticipatory response," says Susan Swithers, a professor of psychological sciences at Purdue University and a co-author of the study. "They don't anticipate as many calories arriving." The net result is a more sluggish metabolism that stores, rather than burns, incoming excess calories.

So does that mean you should ditch the artificial sweeteners and welcome sugar back into your life? Not exactly. Excess sugar in the diet can lead to diabetes and heart disease, even independent of its effect on weight. But it's worth remembering that when it comes to counting calories, it's not just the ones you eat that you have to worry about. The calories you give up matter too, and they may very well reappear in that extra helping of pasta or dessert that your body demands. Your body may actually be keeping better count than you are.

I'm pretty sure that if they were bigger, humans and primates would never have made it to the top of the food chain.  Check out this awesome video:

Awesome.

My knowledge of physics isn't that great (most of it has been purged since completing my college physics courses ), but one thing that I do know is that perpetual motion, according to Newtonian physics, is thought to be impossible in the real world.  Thane Heins seems to have come up with a contradiction to Newtonian physics and the first law of thermodynamics :

In an interview with the Toronto Star, [Dr. Riadh] Habash was cautious but matter-of-fact with what he's seen so far. "It accelerates, but when it comes to an explanation, there is no backing theory for it. That's why we're consulting MIT. But at this time we can't support any claim."

It's now Jan. 28 – D Day. Heins has modified his test so the effects observed are difficult to deny. He holds a permanent magnet a few centimetres away from the driveshaft of an electric motor, and the magnetic field it creates causes the motor to accelerate. It went well.

Contacted by phone a few hours after the test, Zahn is genuinely stumped – and surprised. He said the magnet shouldn't cause acceleration. "It's an unusual phenomena I wouldn't have predicted in advance. But I saw it. It's real. Now I'm just trying to figure it out."

I'm just as skeptical as the next guy, but I'm going to keep my eye on this and see what comes of it.  It's also a pretty amazing story for Heins if science can legitimize his discovery.

Michael Kinsley has some sobering commentary on the economic stimulus package idea that's floating around in Washington right now, perhaps one of the most hairbrained ideas to come out of DC in recent years.  Kinsley's subtitle says it all: "We need a 'fiscal stimulus' the way a drunk needs another drink.  Let's sober up first."

Kinsley brings up the core reason why this idea is doomed to failure: in a time of impending recession, it is only natural that a good portion of the beneficiaries of the rebate will act responsibly and save it or use it to pay down debt instead of instantly pumping it back into the economy.

"Direct government spending is a more efficient stimulus than an equivalent tax cut because all of it gets spent.  When actual people get hold of the money, a few might have an unpatriotic tendency to save some of it."

Kinsley further chastises this proposal by pointing out the obvious:

"My gripe is that telling Americans that they need to borrow and spend just a little bit more to get us past this recession -- and then reform their ways -- is like telling an alcoholic he needs one more drink before sobering up."

It is amazing that, quite possibly, a large percentage of Americans must think that money comes out of thin air and the gubmint can just print more of it; personal and government fiscal responsiblity is a distant reality, someone else's problem.

Like adhering to that New Year's resolution to lose weight or start saving more money, if the promise of a magic pill or surefire investment seems too painless to be true, it probably is.  There is still no substitution for daily exercise and, likewise, financial responsibility.  Kinsley points out:

"If we must have a fiscal stimulus, let's make sure it's not too enjoyable."

Spending our way out of a recession driven by a debt crisis just seems too enjoyable to work.  It is the proverbial magic diet pill or instant get rich scheme...doomed to fail.

Nothing against the OLPC project, but I like Bill's idea a little bit better.

Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates announced a new direction Friday as he pledged $306 million in grants to develop farming in poor countries and leading the charge for for corporate responsibility at a major meeting of business chiefs.

"If we are serious about ending extreme hunger and poverty around the world, we must be serious about transforming agriculture for small farmers, most of whom are women," Gates said.

I'm not much of an anthropologist or historian, but it just seems like common sense that in order to help the most impoverished nations, the right way to go about it is to develop sufficient agricultural infrastructure and supply (and of course, cheap, renewable sources of energy (solar, wind) and clean drinking water).

As much love as Steve Jobs gets from the hipster crowd, I think Bill deserves some dap as well for his truly humanistic altruism.  If anyone can make some true headway in solving some of the most difficult humanitarian problems in the world, it's Bill Gates.

One of the favorite classes that I took in college was an introductory course to Chinese philosophy. 

From time to time, I found one or two passages from The Analects that I could apply to my computer science major.

One of my favorites is passage 13:3:

Tzu-lu said, "The ruler of Wei is waiting for you to serve in his administration.  What will be your first measure?"  Confucius said, "It will certainly be the rectification of names."  Tzu-lu said, "Is that so?  You are wide of the mark.  Why should there be such a rectification?"  Confucius said, "Yu! How uncultivated you are!  With regard to what he does not know, the superior man should maintain an attitude of reserve.  If names are not rectified, then language will not be in accord with truth, then things cannot be accomplished.  If things cannot be accomplished, then ceremonies and music will not flourish...."

"Therefore, the superior man will give only names that can be described in speech and say only what can be carried out in practice."

To me, this applies to software engineering in the naming of classes, methods, properties, variables, and so on.  As McConnell writes in Code Complete,

The smaller part of the job of programming is writing a program so that the computer can read it; the larger part is writing it so that other humans can read it.  let [the reader] use their brain cells to understand the larger question of how your code works rather than the syntactic details of a specific expression.  You write readable code because it helps other people to read your code.

Indeed, sensible naming is a big part of this idea of legibility.  What I dig about Visual Studio 2008 is that the installed documentation includes excerpts from Framework Design Guidelines by Cwalina and Abrams which aims to include some of the key naming and design best practices into the core literature on the .NET Framework.  It's a necessary and needed move to help forward the education of the legion of .NET developers who continue to perpetrate terrible naming practices carried over from VB.

I mean seriously: if I have to read one more method name as a noun (or a property as a verb or a class as a verb), I'll just have to start researching a way to let me reach across the Internet and punch someone in the face -- nothing ruins my morning quite like finding a new class in source control named as a verb.  I'm also midly irritated when developers choose unconventional names for object types.  For example, the use of "Checker" as opposed to "Validator" -- ugh!

Admittedly, some artifacts are just really hard to name.  But in such cases, proper naming is probably even more important since if it's hard for the writer of the code to come up with a proper name, the wrong name will make the artifact even harder to understand for secondary readers.  There have been times where I've spent days trying to come up with a suitable name for a class (I'll name it, but I'll continue to mull it over through restless nights (true story) and refactor it once I do come up with a suitable name) since the last thing I want to do is to give something a cryptic, hard to understand name.

One of the easiest ways around this is to spend some time digging around the SDK and look for similar patterns in naming and see how the .NET framework designers structured their class and member names.  I also think that Cwalina and Abrams' Framework Design Guideline is a stalwart component of any .NET developer's library.

So the next time you're about to write a class name or create a new member, just remember,  "If names are not rectified, then language will not be in accord with truth, then things cannot be accomplished.  If things cannot be accomplished, then ceremonies and music will not flourish". I mean, who doesn't want their project to end with ceremonies and music