If luck favors the prepared mind, as Louis Pasteur is credited with saying, we’re in danger of becoming a very unlucky nation. Little of the material taught in schools today is relevant to the future. Consider all the science and economics that has been updated, the shifting theories of psychology, the programming languages, political theories, and even how many planets our solar system has. Much, like literature and history, should be evaluated against updated, relevant priorities in the 21st century. So, what can we “teach” our students to prepare them for the future?

1. The fundamental tools of learning and analysis, as well as basic concepts

2. Knowledge of a few generally applicable topics

3. The skills to “dig deep” into their areas of interest in order to understand how these tools can be applied to one domain and to be equipped to change domains every so often

4. Preparation for jobs in a competitive and evolving global economy

5. Preparation to continuously evolve and stay current as informed and intelligent citizens of a democracy

To me, the fundamental tools of learning stem (no pun intended) from science, technology, engineering, and math. This updated curriculum should eclipse the archaic view of liberal education still favored by institutions like Harvard and Yale based on a worldview from the 1800s. Critical subject matter should include economics, statistics, mathematics, logic and systems modeling, current (not historical) cultural evolution, psychology, and computer programming. Furthermore, certain humanities disciplines such as literature and history should become optional subjects, in much the same way as physics is today (and, of course, I advocate mandatory physics study).

Finally, English and social studies should be replaced with the scientific process, critical thinking, rhetoric, and analysis of current news—imagine a required course each semester where every student is asked to analyze and debate topics from every issue of a broad publication such as The Economist, Scientific American, or Technology Review. Such a curriculum would not only provide a platform for understanding in a more relevant context how the physical, political, cultural and technical worlds function, but would also impart instincts for interpreting the world, and prepare students to become active participants in the economy. After all, what is the job of education?

Should we teach our students what we already know, or prepare them to discover more? Memorizing the Gettysburg address is admirable but ultimately worthless; understanding history is interesting, but not as relevant as topics from the Economist; a student who can apply the scientific process or employ critical thinking skills to solve a big problem has the potential to change the world or at least get a better-paying job. No wonder half the college graduates who fill jobs actually fill jobs that don’t need a college degree! Their degree is not relevant to adding value to an employer. Often, in my view, it is even less relevant to being an intelligent voter in a democratic economy. Most graduates cannot read the Economist and separate “facts,” “assumptions by the writer,” “biases,” “projections,” or “conclusions and their validity” in a critical way.

I’d also suggest tackling several general and currently relevant topic areas such as genetics, computer science, systems modeling, econometrics, linguistics modeling, traditional and behavioral economics, and bioinformatics (not an exhaustive list). Not only do these topics expose students to a lot of useful and current information, theories, and algorithms, they may in fact become platforms to teach the scientific process—a process that applies to (and is desperately needed for) logical discourse as much as it applies to science, and of much future learning in general. Even if the specific information becomes irrelevant within a decade (who knows where technology will head next; Facebook, Twitter, and the iPhone didn’t exist in 2004, after all), it’s incredibly useful to understand the current frontiers of science and technology as building blocks for the future, more so than understanding history or Kafka.

If we had enough time in school, I would suggest we do everything. Sadly that is not realistic, so we need a prioritized list of basic requirements because every subject we do cover excludes some other subject given the fixed time we have available. We must decide what is better taught during the limited teaching time we have, and what subjects are easier learnt during personal time or as post-education pursuits. For instance, passions like music and its history may be best left to self-pursuit, while exploring the structure and theory of music may be a way to teach critical tools!

For some small subset of the student body, pursuing passions and developing skills in subjects such as music or sports can be valuable, and I am a fan of schools like Juilliard, but in my view this must be in addition to a required general education. It’s the lack of balance in general education which I am suggesting needs to be addressed. Setting music and sports aside, with the critical thinking tools and exposure to the up-and-coming areas mentioned above, students should be positioned to discover their first passion and begin to understand themselves, or at the least be able to keep up with the changes to come, get (and maintain) productive jobs, and be intelligent citizens.

After grasping the fundamental tools of learning and some broad topical exposure, it’s valuable to “dig deep” in one or two topic areas of interest. For this, I prefer some subject in science or engineering rather than literature or history (bear with me; I’ll explain in a minute). Obviously, it’s best if students are passionate about a specific topic, but it’s not critical as the passion may develop as they dig in (some students will have passions, but many won’t have any at all). The real value for digging deep is to learn how to dig in; it serves a person for the duration of their life: in school, work, and leisure.

If students choose options from traditional liberal-education subjects, they should be taught in the context of the critical tools mentioned above. If students want jobs, they should be taught skills where future jobs will exist. If we want them as intelligent citizens, we need to have them understand critical thinking, statistics, economics, how to interpret technology and science developments, and how global game theory applies to local interests. Traditional international relations and political science are passé as base skills and can easily be acquired once a student has the basic tools of understanding.

Back to history and literature for a moment; these are great to wrestle with once a student has learned to think critically. My contention is not that these subjects are unimportant, but rather that they are not basic or broad enough “tools for developing learning skills” as they were in the 1800s, because the set of skills needed today has changed. Furthermore, they are topics easily learned by someone trained in the basic disciplines of thinking and learning that I’ve defined above: this isn’t as easy the other way around. A scientist can more easily become a philosopher or writer than a writer can become a scientist.

Besides, physics is a much more important tool to understand the science and technology that drives modern life than history is, not to mention that it’s far more useful in helping someone understand how her car or refrigerator works. This makes it all the more concerning that many states don’t require physics to graduate from high school but do require many years of history classes—a lopsided and poor use of student time. University education continues this tradition, especially as students flock to the “easier/less work” courses. If subjects like history and literature are focused on too early, it is easy for someone not to learn to think for themselves and not to question assumptions, conclusions, and expert philosophies—this can actually do a lot of damage. On the other hand, with the right critical lens, history, philosophy, and literature can help creativity and breadth by opening the mind to new perspectives and ideas. Still, learning about them is secondary to learning the tools of learning.

In the end, school is a place where every kid should have the opportunity to become a potential participant in whatever they might want to tackle in the future, with an appropriate focus not only on what they want to pursue but also, pragmatically, what they will need to do to be productively employed. By embracing thinking and learning skills, and adding a dash of irreverence and confidence that comes from being able to tackle new arenas (creative writing may have a role here, but Jane Austen does not make my priority list), hopefully they will be lucky enough to help shape the next few decades or at least be intelligent voters in a democracy and productive participants in their jobs. At the very least they should be able to evaluate how much confidence to place in a New York Times study of 11 patients on a new cancer treatment from Mexico or a health supplement from China and to assess the study’s statistical validity and whether the treatment’s economics make sense. And they should understand the relationship between taxes, spending, balanced budgets, and growth better than they understand 15th century English history.

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More than anything, they should be studying math, including statistics and probability, and programming. No matter what the subject, we will have huge amounts of data about it, and will need these tools to get meaning from the data. The areas I’m thinking of include medicine, genetics, nutrition, and neuroscience; human behavior; energy management and consumption; materials science (so that we can use our personal 3D printers more effectively); aerospace and cosmology (so we can find asteroids, whether to deflect them from an earth-bound path, to mine them of valuable minerals or terraform them for human habitation); and of course biology, so that we can enjoy the company of animals, grow food, and ultimately create human-friendly living conditions on other planets and asteroids. It would also be great to get better at modeling and managing economic fluctuations!

But in the meantime, don’t forget to read world literature so you can understand your place in history and know how to be a human being.

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Y Combinator unleashed its latest class of startups on the world yesterday at its summer Demo Day in Mountain View. The famed venture incubator, which provides mentorship, networking, investor access, and a modest cash stipend in return for an equity stake in each company, admitted a record 63 startups this time around. That’s up from 43 in the winter 2011 batch, and 34 in summer 2010.

To accommodate all those entrepreneurs, Y Combinator has had to expand, literally. For the second time, the organization has moved the signature orange wall in its common room about 30 feet to the west, roughly doubling the amount of space for work tables—and for Demo Day seating for investors and journalists, which is always at a premium.

Summaries of the YC startups’ pitches start below, one paragraph each. But fear not—you won’t have to wade through 63 paragraphs. That’s because a record proportion of this year’s startups, 33 out of the 63, asked to stay off the record, meaning they haven’t launched their services or they’re not ready to have it known that they took part in Y Combinator. Also, I just couldn’t get through all 30 summaries last night, so I’m dividing up this debrief into two parts. Today it’s A through Mo; tomorrow, Mu through Z.

I’m trying something new this time around. As in the past, each listing contains a link to the company’s website, the names of its co-founders, the tag line provided by each company (when there is one), and my summary. What’s new is the final line—my quick personal take on each startup. The presentations were admittedly brief (about three minutes each), so I’m not ready to form final judgments about any of these companies. But as they say, first impressions matter.

Aisle50

Chris Steiner, Riley Scott, George Korsnick

“Groupon for groceries.”

The founders of Aisle50 argue that newspaper circulars are losing their effectiveness and that large food manufacturers are looking for new ways to promote their products, including e-mail and the Web. Whereas the incumbent digital coupon provider, Coupons.com, simply reduces an entire circular to a few Web pages, Aisle50 crafts a single, custom page for each promoted product and features one discount per grocery chain at a time. When a member buys the currently featured product via credit card at the Aisle50 website, a matching credit is applied to his or her store loyalty card. The startup is currently working only with the Lowes Food chain in North Carolina, but will soon add hypermarket chain Meijer. A “giant pot of money” is waiting to migrate from paper coupons to digital platforms, the startups says, and it wants to become “the premier way for food manufacturers to market their product.”

My take: Reminiscent of YC S10 startup Anyleaf, which is also out to kill the supermarket circular, but Aisle50 has the Groupon twist. Y Combinator seems to return to certain themes again and again, as if searching for the right solution.

Bushido

Sean Grove, Kevin Zettler

“An app store for the cloud.”

To get their Web or mobile apps distributed, developers have to worry about lots of things outside their areas of specialty, such as hosting, authentication, and billing. Bushido says it can take an app written using the Rails programming framework and “wrap” it in a software package that takes care all of that, liberating developers to focus on their software. Over time, the startup says it will accumulate “all the apps, all the users, and all the data,” giving it an understanding of a “data graph” that will be as powerful as Facebook’s social graph.

My take: Probably the brashest and most cryptic pitch of the day. The company clearly hopes to bask in the glow of Heroku, the Ruby on Rails hosting service that was part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2008 term.

Can’tWait

Eric Florenzano, Eric Maguire

If the names Eric Florenzano and Eric Maguire sound familiar, it’s because these are the same two Erics who worked with Leah Culver to launch Convore, a YC W11 company that specializes in IRC-style group chat. That probably makes them the first startup founders to participate in two consecutive terms at Y Combinator. This time around, they’re going after the movie business—specifically, trailers. The startup’s iPhone app (coming soon to Android) lets users browse and watch movie trailers, share their favorites with friends, and set reminders so they won’t miss out when the movies hit theaters. Florenzano calls it “the best marketing platform Hollywood could hope for” and predicts studios will pay the startup handsomely to feature their trailers. In the future, the company plans to take on video games, consumer electronics, and other product categories where pre-orders are prevalent.

My take: It will be interesting to see what company Florenzano and Maguire start for YC W12.

… Next Page »

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Cambridge, MA-based IT startup Typesafe announced yesterday that it had pinned down $3 million in a Series A financing led by Greylock Partners, with participation from individual investors who have worked for Facebook, VMWare, Oracle, Google, and more.  Typesafe offers a platform for working on the Scala programming language, which is interoperable with Java and is designed for hardware and cloud infrastructures.

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Although computer science may be one of the most applicable academic tracks to pursue today, teachers are having a hard time convincing students—and administrators—that the subject is worthy of a place in K-12 curriculum. Figuring out how to entice student, parents, and school districts to embrace and support computer science curricula in public education was a topic at center stage at the University of Washington Computer Science and Engineering Department’s CS4HS event last week.

Around 50 high school teachers from Washington and its surrounded states packed into the fifth annual three-day Google-sponsored conference, which brings math and science teachers together with computer science professors, alumni, and professionals for lectures, workshops, and discussions focused on how to better teach and integrate computer science in K-12 education.

The key is getting teachers in subjects other than computer science to find ways to utilize CS in their classrooms, according to Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at UW, and organizer of the CS4HS conference.

“We’re trying to get teachers from outside fields that are underrepresented. We’re not looking for CS teachers,” Lazowska says. “We have a many teachers here who were in other fields for 20 years, and are now going into teaching.” This, he says, makes them perfectly primed to showcase the real-life applications of computer science within the classroom, rather than the common misconceptions that pigeonhole CS classes to a smaller, niched group of students.

At a Tuesday morning session entitled “Computing Careers Panel,” four University of Washington computer science alumni shared their experiences as post-grad CS students, touching on the burgeoning job market, and ideas for making CS more appealing to younger students. One of the topics on the minds of many of the teachers present was how to break down the common academic and the real world misconceptions that keep many students from taking an interest in CS. Here’s some of what the panelists had to say.

Misconception: The only job out there for CS graduates is programming.

Of the four panelists present, only one spends a large portion of the day programming on a regular basis. The others work heavily in more conceptual design, product development, and team management.

“It’s a common misconception that computer science is programming. It’s problem solving—it’s building, building, building,” said Margaux Eng, a 2004 UW CSE students who now works at Amazon in the project development and retail systems department. “There’s really a whole world of other problems that people are solving out there.”

Misconception: CS jobs are solitary and require sitting in front of a computer all day long.

In fact, the panelists emphasized, CS is a highly group-oriented activity.

“The environment that my job is supposed to resemble is a kindergarten classroom,” said Tam Armstrong, a 2004 UW CSE graduate and character engineer at video game developer Bungie, the company behind the extremely popular first-person shooter Halo. Armstrong says he talks all day long.

“It’s never that scenario where I’m alone at my desk all day—there’s probably only 20 minutes in my day where I get uninterrupted work in,” he says. “I program all day, but it involves a lot of social skills and group working…there are times I will sit at my desk and write code—barring those interruptions I was talking about before—but any time I’m architecting a system or designing a new feature, that always involves other people.”

Misconception: Only top-tier math and science students will excel in CS.

“I was definitely not the strongest math student by any stretch, because I didn’t know why I should care about it in particular, and I attributed my own lack of interest to … Next Page »

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Microsoft has announced a new program for Web developers and small companies (with fewer than 10 employees) that build websites and Web applications for others. The program, called WebsiteSpark, follows in the footsteps of BizSpark for startups and DreamSpark for students. It offers free development software and support for three years, after which participants have to pay an exit fee or pony up for the software licenses. Microsoft’s program competes with free, open-source software from Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Python.

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Proving that the blogosphere isn’t all about Paris Hilton or even Perez Hilton, Waltham, MA-based Interactive Supercomputing this week launched a new multi-author blog on high-performance computing called Parallel Lounge. With contributors including MIT computer scientist Alan Edelman and Cray Research veteran Steve Reinhardt, Interactive Supercomputing’s vice president of joint research, it’s the only Boston blog where you are likely to find such gems as:

Compare element-wise multiplication in a for-loop

for idx=1:n
y(idx) = 2*x(idx);
end

to a vectorized multiplication

y = 2*x;

In the for-loop, a command is sent from client to server in each iteration. This totals 1000 client-server calls, slowing down the code. Not only is the vectorized code simpler, but it requires only one client-server call.

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The iPhone is about to morph into something much more important than a phone or an iPod. And because the next chapter in the device’s history will be all about new software applications created by developers outside Apple, there’s no reason why Boston-area programmers and entrepreneurs shouldn’t be leading characters in the story. We at Xconomy have a modest proposal about ways to ensure that the Northeast plays a big role in the emerging iPhone ecosystem. For that, read to the end of this article.

Of course, the iPhone was never just a phone or a music player. Even calling it a “mobile computer” is a bit derogatory—as if it were just a small, keyboardless laptop. The way I see it (and forgive me for waxing rhapsodic for a moment) Apple has established an entirely new category with the iPhone: the information instrument, a device with just as much affinity to a Stradivarius or some other musical instrument as to a traditional computer or mobile phone. It responds to the human touch and the human imagination in a way that elevates information-handling to something between art and play.

Part of the iPhone’s magic is in the hardware—things like the built-in accelerometer, the location-finding system, the high-quality camera, and the gorgeous display. An even bigger part of it is in the interface—the basic OS X beloved by Mac users as the core operating system, plus the multi-touch-driven application interface, which Apple calls Cocoa Touch. But most of all, the magic is in the individual software applications, which take familiar tasks like browsing the Web, finding an address, listening to voicemail, perusing a playlist, or flipping through photos and—by drawing on the aforementioned hardware and interface innovations—make them feel fresh and playful. (If you’ve never seen an iPhone and you don’t know what I’m talking about, go watch Apple’s guided tours, which explain novel features like flicking, pinching, spreading, maps, Visual Voicemail, the Wi-Fi Store, and Cover Flow.)

The applications that launched with the iPhone last June (on June 29th, to be exact, two days after Xconomy’s own launch) were cool enough: text messaging, a datebook, an e-mail manager, the Safari Web browser, a photo album, weather and stock-market widgets, a clock/stopwatch/timer, a calculator, a notepad, a YouTube portal, a Google Maps interface, and, of course, a camera, a video iPod, and a phone (including an address book and Visual Voicemail). But from the start, Apple designed the iPhone to be upgradeable via the iTunes desktop application. And the first major software update came in September, when the company added Wi-Fi access to the iTunes store, so that users could buy and download songs, TV shows, and movies wirelessly. A location-finding feature for the Google Maps interface (powered by local startup Skyhook Wireless‘s Wi-Fi Positioning System, or WPS) and the ability to customize the device’s home screen followed in January.

And much more is on the way—but from here on out, it won’t be just Apple offering improvements for the iPhone. That’s because the company is planning to distribute third-party applications for the device via a new feature called the App Store, starting in late June. (I would have predicted a June 29 launch for the App Store, but that’s a Sunday, so Apple might steal Xconomy’s own first anniversary on Friday, June 27). As Steve Jobs and other Apple executives explained yesterday during a much-anticipated announcement at the company’s Cupertino, CA, headquarters, the company is opening up the software developer’s kit or SDK used by its own programmers—including the crucial application programming interfaces (APIs) that enable applications to talk to the iPhone’s hardware and operating system.

That means any outside developer who wants to download the free SDK can get started now on developing programs that exploit the multi-touch interface, the accelerometer, Skyhook’s WPS, and other subsystems in clever new ways. Once Apple signs off on a new application—and it’s not clear how high a hurdle that part will be—its developer can then sell it or give it away through the App Store. At last, iPhone owners will be able to expand their devices’ capabilities without having to jailbreak them or rely on feeble Web-based apps, which are crippled by their lack of access to the device’s native operating system. (By the way, all of this news about the iPhone here is also true of the iPod touch, which is just an iPhone without the phone.)

What’s more, the Menlo Park, CA, venture firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers announced yesterday that it has set up a $100 million “iFund” specifically to aid developers of iPhone apps. The fund will invest amounts as small as $100,000 to seed small development efforts or as large as $15 million to expand existing mobile applications companies. (The iFund takes the idea behind the $10 million Android Developer Challenge, aimed at creators of applications for Google’s nascent Android mobile phone operating system, and significantly ups the ante—the only difference being that the Google awards have no strings attached.) “Developers are already bursting with ideas for the iPhone and iPod touch, and now they have the chance to turn those ideas into great companies with the help of world-class venture capitalists,” Jobs said of the fund.

We know the Boston area is rife with mobile application developers (just as it’s rife with Internet video developers, Web-based music distribution startups, and Facebook app developers). So, here’s a challenge to all you local mobile developers: We know you love your iPhones. Go get the iPhone SDK and create a cool iPhone app that builds on the device’s potential as an information instrument. Then let us know about it, and we’ll review it here on Xconomy. It’s the least we can do to get local developers and their apps in front of a receptive audience—maybe even including Kleiner Perkins. E-mail us at editors@xconomy.com. And have fun!

Update 3/10/08 2:30 pm: Turns out Mobile Monday Boston is hosting an iPhone SDK Party at the Apple Store at the Cambridgeside Galleria on Monday, March 24. There will be a keynote talk by leading iPhone app developer Jonathan Zdziarski, and the organizers are inviting local mobile developers to demonstrate their iPhone apps —there’s information here about how to sign up to do a demo. I’ll definitely see you there.

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Many companies know that they need outside help evaluating software for security flaws, whether it’s code they’ve written themselves or software they’re considering buying from a third-party vendor. But few organizations (or their vendors) are willing to let the actual source code for their applications leave their premises, over concerns about potential copying and theft. Enter Veracode, a Burlington, MA, startup founded in 2006 as a provider of automated software testing services. Backed by $20 million in funding from Atlas Venture, Polaris Venture Partners, and .406 Ventures (as well as strategic investors Symanetic, Macrovision, and Telus), Veracode gets around customers’ confidentiality concerns by examining binary code—the stream of 1s and 0s into which source code is compiled before it’s actually executed by a computer’s logic circuits—rather than human-readable source code.

“Any company is scared to death of their source code getting pirated,” says Veracode CEO Matt Moynahan. “With binary format, you don’t have that issue. We can do outsourced security testing without having any insight into the source code.”

If you’re wondering how it’s possible to find security vulnerabilities in code—such as the “back doors” that programmers occasionally leave open, whether intentionally or not—without actually looking at that code, well, that’s the secret sauce Veracode is selling to customers such as Cisco Systems and Barclays Bank. In essence, the company tests every potential path for a piece of data through a program, to see whether it’s popping out in places it shouldn’t—almost like an electrical engineer testing every individual node on a circuit board.

Moynahan, trying his best to be non-technical, explains it this way: “We create a model of the application that replicates all of the interprocedural flows, runs scans against it, and traverses all possible paths almost infinitely, looking for all of the possible ways somebody could exploit those procedures.”

Presuming you can follow that, there’s an added advantage to Veracode’s approach, since binary code is what most hackers attack. And Veracode’s founders have plenty of experience dealing with hackers. Co-founder and chief technology officer Chris Wysopal wrote a famous Windows password auditing and recovery program called @stake and helped to develop the practices many software security companies now follow for exchanging information about software vulnerabilities. Chief scientist Christien Rioux founded a security consultancy with Wysopal (it was also called @stake) and authored the AntiSniff intrusion detection system. Moynahan came to Veracode from Symantec, where he managed the company’s $2 billion consumer and small business division (home of the widely used Norton Antivirus product).

“While I was at Symantec I saw us go from the 20th-most attacked application to the second-most-attacked,” Moynahan says. “I was the executive in charge of solving the application security problem, and ironically, even though I was sitting inside one of the world’s best security companies, I still couldn’t solve it. The reason is that there just aren’t enough people to go around. There is no class in any university that teaches how to write secure code.”

In the absence of a steady supply of programmers qualified to review code manually for security flaws, the only alternative is to automate the process, Moynahan asserts. “Large enterprises buy a lot of code, and insecure code leads to very expensive security breaches and fraud,” he says. “Sending binaries allows companies to take advantage of third-party risk assessment. Large buyers of code like Boeing or Barclays can request their vendors to get their code scanned and rated by Veracode before they buy it.”

There’s no doubt software security review is a burgeoning business. NetworkWorld named Veracode one of “10 IT security companies to watch” last October, and security bloggers such as Dave Lewis, publisher of the Liquidmarix Security Digest, have mentioned the company as a potentially attractive acquisition target for larger IT or consulting outfits. Indeed, IBM snapped up a similar company last June: Waltham, MA-based Watchfire, which makes software that searches for vulnerabilities in Web-based applications.

With 60 employees to go with its $20 million, Veracode has “nice momentum going into 2008,” Moynahan says. “A company could hire a consultant to manually review their code, but we are a faster path to the same destination, especially if they have some application they don’t want to send off-site,” he says. The company even makes suggestions about how to fix code with proven vulnerabilities. Says Moynahan, “We’re trying to bring security to the masses.”

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