{"id":14829,"date":"2014-05-21T17:42:25","date_gmt":"2014-05-21T22:42:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/?p=14829"},"modified":"2014-05-21T17:42:25","modified_gmt":"2014-05-21T22:42:25","slug":"a-young-ladys-illustrated-math-tutor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/?p=14829","title":{"rendered":"A Young Lady’s Illustrated Math Tutor"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday I read in the New York Times about Tabtor<\/i><\/a>, a math tutoring app with an unusual pricing model: The first two weeks are free, but the app costs $50 for every month thereafter.<\/p>\n

This steep price helps to support the app’s most distinguishing feature: Up in the Cloud, your child’s work going through these math problems is being monitored by a human tutor. Unlike a computer, this person offers notes and encouraging voice memos, assigns new worksheets, and checks in via weekly video conference calls.<\/p>\n

To my surprise, the writer of the article, whose own kids use the app, didn’t make the obvious literary connection, which I suspect will be evident to many readers of this blog.<\/p>\n

Tabtor<\/i> is, of course, a concrete step toward perhaps the most tantalizing idea in Neal Stephenson’s prophetic 1998 science fiction novel “The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer”.<\/p>\n

A central plot point of that novel revolves around a young girl named Nell, who gets her hands on a futuristic cyber-textbook that helps her grow intellectually to the point where she eventually becomes the smartest person in the world.<\/p>\n

The key to the Primer’s effectiveness for Nell is the fact that a human, a woman named Miranda, is up in the Cloud, acting out its simulations. Although the two never meet in person, Miranda takes a personal interest in Nell, and her nurturing presence ends up greatly amplifying the educational effectiveness of the Primer.<\/p>\n

In a sense, this plot-line is a disquisition on the Turing test: Stephenson is clearly saying that no matter how advanced A.I. becomes at simulating human knowledge, the presence of another actual human will always make a decisive difference.<\/p>\n

And now it seems, people are finally trying out his theory in the real world!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday I read in the New York Times about Tabtor, a math tutoring app with an unusual pricing model: The first two weeks are free, but the app costs $50 for every month thereafter. This steep price helps to support the app’s most distinguishing feature: Up in the Cloud, your child’s work going through these … Continue reading “A Young Lady’s Illustrated Math Tutor”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14829"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14829"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14829\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14830,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14829\/revisions\/14830"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}