EUA: um modo inventivo de producao - Scientific American

In today's excerpt -- in the first half of the 1800s, the Industrial Revolution was in full swing, and America had become a nation of inventors. In 1845, a new publication -- Scientific American -- was founded to take advantage of this new fever to invent.  

"Alfred Ely Beach was born into a prestigious family on September 1, 1826, in Springfield, Massachusetts, an hour west of Boston. ... He dreamed of striking out on his own. In 1845, another young man from Massachusetts named Rufus Porter presented him with that chance. Porter had just published the very first issue of a weekly magazine he created called Scientific American. Four pages long, it sold for a subscription rate of two dollars a year. The first edition included a note from Porter explaining how useful he believed his publication could be. 'As a family newspaper,' Porter wrote, 'it will convey more useful intelligence to children and young people, than five times its cost in school instruction.'

"Scientific American was published every Thursday morning and filled with original engravings of new inventions, improvements, or ideas, along with scientific essays, poems, and even things completely unrelated to science, like moral and religious musings. But Porter ... quickly lost interest in a magazine devoted to science, and, barely ten months after, he founded Scientific American, [he] went looking for a buyer.

Click to read Scientific American Series 1, Volume 1, Issue 1

  

"Beach was twenty years old and ... [with friend] Orson Desaix Munn who moved to New York, in July 1846 the two of them paid $800 for the tiny, obscure technical magazine and its subscription list of two hundred names. ...

"Scientific American had only a few hundred subscribers under Rufus Porter. But as Alfred Beach and Orson Munn learned once they took it over, inventors of the day saw real value in the magazine. The inventors wanted help from like-minded dreamers who saw the potential in their ideas. Beach and Munn had barely settled into their offices in 1846 when they were besieged with letters from inventors, or sometimes with unannounced visits. The requests were always the same: Help me apply for a patent and secure it, and I'll pay whatever it takes. Beach and Munn realized that Scientific American was more than a magazine. It was a trusted brand. ...

"Beach and Munn were able to quickly resurrect the magazine by focusing its content less on the highly technical science stories and more on what they knew best: curious inventions and practical, interesting patents. Simply by printing a weekly list of patents given to them directly from the U.S. Patent Office, Beach and Munn increased the number of subscriptions to Scientific American, and it took off: by 1848, not even two years after they bought it, the circulation exceeded ten thousand readers." 

The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway

Author: Doug Most

Publisher: St. Martin's Press

From Delanceyplace, February 4, 2014

Toda crianca agora tem um smartphone? Hum... Para decorar nomes de presidentes? Hummmm...

Have smartphones in every pocket made memorization obsolete?

By David Pogue

Scientific American, August 2013

When my father was growing up, his father offered him 25 cents to memorize the complete list of U.S. presidents. “Number one, George Washington. Number two, John Adams …”

A generation later my dad made the same deal with me, upping the reward to $5. (The prize had grown, he explained, “because of inflation and because there are more presidents now.”)

This year I offered my own son $10 to perform the same stunt. My son, however, was baffled. Why on earth should he memorize the presidents?

Nowadays, he argued, “everybody has a smartphone” and always will. He'll probably turn out to be correct; 2013 is a tipping point, in which, for the first time in history, smartphones will outsell plain ones.

In other words, having a computer in your pocket is the norm. Google is always one tap away. So there's very little sense, as far as my son is concerned, in memorizing anything: presidents, the periodic table of the elements, the state capitals or the multiplication tables above 10.

Now, parents in my generation might have a predictable reaction: dismay and disappointment. “Those young kids today! Do we have to make everything easy?” we say. “If they don't have enough facts in their heads, they won't be able to put new information into context.”

That's an understandable argument. On the other hand, there is a powerful counterargument: As society marches ever forward, we leave obsolete skills in our wake. That's just part of progress. Why should we mourn the loss of memorization skills any more than we pine for hot type technology, Morse code abilities or a knack for operating elevators?

Maybe memorization is different than those job skills. Maybe having a store of ready information is more fundamental, more important, and thus we should fight more fiercely to retain it.

And yet we've confronted this issue before—or, at least, one that is almost exactly like it. When pocket calculators came along, educators and parents were alarmed about students losing the ability to perform arithmetic using paper and pencil. After hundreds of generations of teaching basic math, were we now prepared to cede that expertise to machines?

Yes, we were. Today calculators are almost universally permitted in the classroom. You are even allowed to use one—encouraged, in fact—when you are taking the SAT.

In the end, we reasoned (or maybe rationalized) that the critical skills are analysis and problem solving—not basic computation. Calculators will always be with us. So why not let them do the grunt work and free up more time for students to learn more complex concepts or master more difficult problems?

In the same way, maybe we'll soon conclude that memorizing facts is no longer part of the modern student's task. Maybe we should let the smartphone call up those facts as necessary—and let students focus on developing analytical skills (logic, interpretation, creative problem solving) and personal ones (motivation, self-control, tolerance).

Of course, it's a spectrum. We'll always need to memorize information that would be too clumsy or time-consuming to look up daily: simple arithmetic, common spellings, the layout of our hometown. Without those, we won't be of much use in our jobs, relationships or conversations.

But whether we like it or not, we may as well admit that the rest of it will probably soon go the way of calligraphy, the card catalogue and long division. Whenever we need to access abstruse facts, we'll just grab our phones—at least until we implant even better technologies right into our brain.

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ONLINE
Six ways that brains trump tech: ScientificAmerican.com/aug2013/pogue

Smartphones Mean You Will No Longer Have to Memorize Facts:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=smartphones-mean-no-longer-memorize-facts

This article was originally published with the title The Last Thing You'll Memorize.