The Illusionist Brain: The Neuroscience of Magic

(Jordi Cami & Luis M. Martinez, Princeton, £22)

However closely I might watch the hands of a magician at work, I'll always miss what's actually going on. In The Illusionist Brain, Cami and Martinez examine how the brain works, and how practitioners of the ancient art of magic take advantage of these processes to make us see things that aren't there, or miss things that are.

Needless to say, the main aim of the book isn't to lift the lid on how various magic tricks are conceived and performed, but to instead elucidate the intricacies of cognition and memory. I was surprised to read some of the clearest explanations of neuroscience I've yet come across, such as the key concept of framing, and how magicians will utilise it when preparing their audiences to ensure certain outcomes.

Definitely a useful and highly readable book.

This review was first published in Teach Secondary magazine.

The Great Exchange: Making the News in Early Modern Europe

(Joad Raymond Wren, Allen Lane, £40)

This isn't a book about the history of newspapers, but of news itself, and the many ways in which it has manifested over time-from pamphlets and personal diaries to chronicles. Wren's key point is that what we think of as 'news' predated newspapers, which can be easily overlooked in the media-saturated present day.

In Wren's telling, the real history of the news isn't just a chronology of technological inventions, but one that encompasses the development of early postal services and establishment of trading routes.

It's also fascinating to read how our conception of an 'editor' began centuries ago, with individuals collating bits and pieces of news from different sources and writers — with no regard for copyright or editorial stances — in order to produce the first 'news' pamphlets.

This review was first published in Teach Secondary magazine.

This book holds little of interest for the Computing or ICT teacher, but I’m including the review here because it is interesting from the point of view of how hidden biases, perhaps even unconscious ones, can skew what we perceive as objective truth.

Nature's Memory: Behind the Scenes at the World’s Natural History

(Jack Ashby, Allen Lane, £25)

One would think that the stories told by the exhibits in natural history museums are reasonably objective and factual, but apparently not. Reconstructing the skeletons of long-dead species, for example, can often be a matter of guesswork based on our knowledge of the human skeleton.

That might seem reasonable enough, but as Ashby details here — amid interesting discussions of acquisition and animatronics — problems can set in when scientific assumptions affect public perceptions.

To illustrate this, he cites one case where female pronouns were automatically bestowed upon the fossils of two prehistoric creatures apparently preserved in the act of looking after their eggs, raising questions about how objectively true natural history museum exhibitions actually are — when even the preponderance of mammals in such locations can present a misleading picture.

Recommended.

This review was first published in Teach Secondary magazine.

“Oooh!” “Ah!” “Oh my!”. Such were the collective gasps emanating from the Freedman household when I unpacked the Dell Latitude 2110 Netbook I’d been sent to review. Slim, striking and silent (but enough about me), the Latitude certainly makes the grade as far as aesthetics are concerned. But how does it actually perform?

The Dell Latitude 2110According to the display on the bottom of the screen, the battery lasts for around 9 hours. I find that unbelievable – in the sense that I don’t believe it. At least, I think it may well last for 9 hours if you simply leave it on, but the more intensively it’s used, presumably the less time the battery will last. Nevertheless, I have to say that it did seem to last a very long time, which is just what you need in a school situation. As Angela McFarlane said in a talk entitled “The Myth of the Digital Native”:

Devices need to have a battery that would remain charged up for the length of a school day.

I have little doubt that this would fit the bill. Recharging the battery was remarkably quick: it couldn’t have taken more than two hours, and could well have taken less.

The Latitude (left) and the AsusI found it to be very light. It’s a little heavier than the Asus I have, but given the extra size, both of the keyboard and the screen, as shown here, for me it would be a price worth paying. But not everyone would agree. An elderly relative paid us a visit. “Here”, I said. “What do you think of this?”

“Too heavy for me”, she scowled. “And I can’t read the screen, it’s too small. And where’s the pointy thing?”, she demanded, jabbing her finger in the general direction of the netbook.

I pointed out to her that the pointy thing was unnecessary, given that it had a trackpad and in any case was a touch-screen device.

“That’s no good: it’ll get filthy in no time.” she harrumphed. Soon afterwards she got on her broomstick and left, but she had made some valid points. Perhaps children at the younger end of primary schools will find it too heavy, and there’s little doubt that the screens will get pretty dirty very quickly, so there’s a management issue there, concerning cleaning the screens, that would-be school purchasers will need to work out. But I think she was wrong about the screen. You can, after all, increase the size of the text in many if not all applications. Also, I looked at the screen from the side, and it’s perfectly readable, meaning that it should be easy for youngsters to collaborate using it.

Returning to the touch-screen for a moment, I had my doubts at first, but was quickly converted. I usually find trackpads quite difficult to use when it comes to moving and copying files around. I often end up deleting File X when what I wanted to do was copy File Y. Being able to  drag it with my finger was simply wonderful.

The built-in webcam in actionIt has a built-in webcam, as do most new computers, which was easy to use, and with a very acceptable quality. It’s a pity that the video I recorded to test this facility, what with its unflattering angle, my five-o-clock shadow and my speaking incredibly softly so as not to wake anyone up, makes me appear as if I’m on the run from the police. However, if you ignore all that and just focus on the quality of the sound and vision, I think you’ll agree that they’re not bad at all.

The video software also has a time-lapse feature which you can set up for seconds, minutes or hours. In theory this could be quite useful, although I’m not sure how sensible it would be to leave a laptop on unattended for hours on end while it took snapshots.

In terms of price, this device is very attractive: just £279 + VAT, which State schools don’t pay anyway (except for Academies). Also, it feels quite sturdy, which is a big plus point when it comes to using it in school.

Would I buy it myself? That’s a tricky one. This website is hosted by Squarespace, and blog posts can either be sent by email or (my preferred method), entered into a template on the Squarespace site. Unfortunately, that template is impossible to use properly on small-screen devices except, I discovered recently, the iPad. Squarespace has developed an app which makes the template usable on an iPhone, iTouch and, as I say, iPad. I haven’t used an iPad yet, so until I do I will have to decline to say which of the two devices, the Latitude or iPad, I’d prefer, since being able to blog easily from wherever I happen to be is quite important to me. However, if that is not a consideration for you, or you don’t have the template with small-screen problem I’ve described, the Dell Latitude 2110 is most certainly worth looking at.

I recall one head of an education technology department in a government agency telling me that at his son’s school the technicians changed the internet filtering password every day to prevent kids looking at stuff they shouldn’t. His son had usually cracked the password by the start of the morning break and shared it with all his mates.

As it happens, there was a 15 year-old boy in one of my computer programming classes, in a school in which I was a teacher, head of department, IT co-ordinator and network manager (the school certainly got value for money) who was incredibly skillful at breaking through every single firewall I set up to stop him hacking into it. After a couple of weeks of this cat and mouse malarkey I decided to enlist him as my network assistant. I proposed to him that his role would be to monitor the network and close any security holes he identified, and to make sure nobody managed to hack into it. He accepted the offer: problem solved.

I overheard a great conversation yesterday. Two girls were chatting behind me in the queue in the Post Office. From their discussion about school options and examinations, I’d say they were around 14 and 15 years old. Here’s part of the conversation, it really made me smile.

Girl #1: My mum doesn’t even know I’m on Facebook.

Girl #2: Oh gosh, you’re on Facebook too? So am I. My parents don’t know either; my mum doesn’t like the idea of me being on it.

Girl #1: I have to wait till my mum’s gone out shopping to use the computer. She hasn’t realised that I know the password. I cracked it six months ago.

Girl #2: It’s passworded?

Girl #1: Yeah, my dad put a password on it. It took me a while to work out what it was, but it wasn’t that hard: his name and date of birth.

Now, I’m probably wrong for thinking like this, but I find it very uplifting to be reminded that youngsters of today are just as rebellious as kids have always been. Also, it made me chuckle to think of these parents, blithely going about their business, secure in the (false) knowledge that they are several steps ahead of their kids.

There’s hope for us all yet!