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Old School Tech: Eastern State Penitentiary

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Click the photo for the entire photo album

 

Eastern State Penitentiary is truly one of Philadelphia's great places to visit.  A huge prison in the middle of the city!  It took quite a bit of tech to keep this institution running for almost two hundred years.

A little background from the website: 

Opened in 1829 as part of a controversial movement to change the behavior of inmates through "confinement in solitude with labor," Eastern State Penitentiary quickly became one of the most expensive and most copied buildings in the young United States. It is estimated that more than 300 prisons worldwide are based on the Penitentiary's wagon-wheel, or "radial" floor plan.

Some of America's most notorious criminals were held in the Penitentiary's vaulted, sky-lit cells, including bank robber Willie Sutton and Al Capone. After 142 years of consecutive use, Eastern State Penitentiary was completely abandoned in 1971, and now stands, a lost world of crumbling cellblocks and empty guard towers.

From a technology perspective, the building was a marvel for its time.  By "confinement in solitude with labor", every prisoner was completely isolated within its own cell, with eighteen-inch thick walls providing near total silence.  To complement this, architect John Haviland created an entire infrastructure of indoor plumbing, running water, and central heat that was virtually unrivaled even in the home of wealthy Americans.  Amazingly, not even the first warden had running water in his living space.  The thought of having this in a huge building in the early 19th century is akin to driving a car when most people had horse and buggies.

 The "radial" floor plan mentioned in the summary (also known as "wagon wheel") refers to the prison being designed with a center point with prison hallways extended from it.  One guard could monitor all corridors by standing in this middle point and spinning around (as I did when I visited). Below this hub lied the gravity-fed plumbing system and supported the central heating system.  Remember, this is 1820!

I hope you like the photo above. The rest are in my Google+ / Picassa album and can be accessed by clicking the photo or clicking here.

For additional information, please see the following sites

 - Eastern State Penitentiary Website

 - VisitPhilly's Eastern State Penitenitary Site

 - New York Times Special: Voices from Eastern State Penitentiary

 

 

Tech in Education: Keeping Us Ahead of the Curve


Nowadays, it's very easy to satisfy the desire to learn something by logging in to the Internet. While there are a number of paid services, free is the word of the day! Whether you are currently in school or simply interested in a topic, you have your choice from several sources. Here are three of my favorites.

MIT OpenCourseWare
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology offers a large number of courses online for free. A class can include a combination of lecture notes, exams, labs, background reading, and even video. Many of the popular classes are the typical MIT topics such as engineering and computer science, but there are also liberal arts classes available as well as classes from its Sloan business school.

Khan Academy
Khan offers a variety of videos each dedicated to a single educational topic. I've personally found it to be an excellent way to reinforce concepts for children. I tutor students in Algebra, and its a great resource to ensure that I am up to speed on alternate ways to attack a concept. Additionally, it's a great resource for my students to browse between our tutoring sessions. Think of it as YouTube for education. Wired recently had a great story on this resource.

Online Tutoring
If a traditional one on one role is needed, there are several websites that connect people with tutors via text or video chat. They often offer an online whiteboard to be able to work out specific problems with students. Communication is through text chat, with the option for voice chat. These services cover various classes, from science to English to history. The example given, Tutor.com, provides free access in several participating libraries in the US.

Any other cool sites?
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Google+ and Twitter: A Month In

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Every time I leave Google+ and duck back into the Twitterverse, I get frustrated at a few things:

1) Lack of stickiness. It is way too easy to miss posts. I have a bunch of Twitter lists that help, but I still end up doing a lot of scrolling. Messages that can fit in what G+ message are only broken up into dozens of tweets, filling my stream. This also has the opposite effect - if I tweet, I usually get all of the responses that I'm going to get within an hour or so. My G+ posts get responses, likes, and shares days after I post them.

2) Spammers. I'm sure G+ will get its fair share of spammers and bots, but I haven't seen any yet. I hate when i get an @ reply based on one of my posts matching some random bot algorithm.

3) Lack of visualization. Twitter's stream of text is beginning to look boring. I really, really love how visual G+ is, with pics and videos (yes, and animated Gifs) right in the browser.

These are issues that I learned to deal with before Google+, mainly because Twitter is so much better than alternatives like Facebook when it comes to having a conversation. But now, they stick out like a sore thumb.

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Google+ For iPhone: Needs a Bit More Time In The Oven

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 The Google+ app has replaced the Calculator on my home screeen

 

Google finally released an iPhone app for its Google+ social network. However, there are a few things that are missing - things that make it hard for me to depend on the app for my mobile social networking needs.

 

Photo Problems

The good news is that I can take a photo on the iPhone and upload it directly to Google+, which is great for random daily shots. However, the pics automatically go into its own album.  If I have an existing album that I want to add photos to, I can't.  Also, I can't create an entirely new album and add photos to it.  These are all things that I can do in the Facebook app, and really helps to keep track of photos taken during a trip.

 

Post Management

Tagging people in posts is totally borked. It brings up a list of random users that I may or may not be connected with, instead of prioritzing people that I've already added to circles like the desktop version of Google+ does.  This is especially inconvenient when commenting on posts whcih a large amount of existing comments.

When I'm Twitter, I'm a constant retweeter.  I believe in spreading info that people have already provided, which also gives them credit.  Unfortunately, I can't do that in the Google+ app. I can vote up (or +1) posts that I like, but I can't +1 individual comments. 

 

Other Annoyances

Most icons within the app do not change at all when you press them.  If I press a button, I can't tell if the app has frozen, if the app didn't register my touch, or if the app is just taking its sweet time to load. It's incredibly annoying.