I'm Learning About Digital Technologies and Could Really Do With Your Help

My last foray into the world of academia was way back in the heady days of '06 - '07 when I completed my PGCE in Mathematics (with A-Level Accreditation, dontcha know). This was at the tail end of those dark times when PGCEs didn't come with any Masters credits. I've always been interested in continuing my own education. For the past decade or so, it's been self-directed studying, reading the odd paper and half-completing Futurelearn courses. I've also built up a network of astonishingly accomplished friends and acquaintances in the worlds of mathematics, education, museums and heritage, and all conceivable intersections of them, and I'm never quite sure how they keep up the pretence of being pleased to bump into me at conferences.

Back in the Ring

Now, though, I have started on an actual accredited course! Last week I attended my first online session for the distance learning Postgraduate Certificate in Digital Leadership with the University of Northampton (kindly funded by my employer). It was mostly an orientation session, with introductions to the course leader (the fantastic Helen Caldwell) and the other coursemembers.

The course, in short, "will give you professional recognition and equip you with the subject knowledge, teaching skills and critical understanding you need to lead positive change as a digital leader in your setting" and includes two modules: Developing Digital Literacy, which will involve research into digital technologies and practices with a view to bringing my own understanding of the sector up to scratch; and Developing Digital Leadership, which will empower me to take what I've learnt so far and pass skills, knowledge and understanding on to peers and colleagues.

I'm going to be blogging as I go along and I'd really appreciate not only support and encouragement but also the benefit of your experience.

My first task is to come up with a key research question, so I'm going to be thinking about how digital literacy could impact upon my own job role and those of others, both within my organisation and related roles outside it. That'll probably be the subject of my next post on this subject.

Help!

For now, though, I'd really like your help! Either in the comments below, via twitter, or any other method of communication you may have for me, I'd very much appreciate some answers to the following questions. If you could provide some idea of your own job role or other reason for being interested in the topic that'd be really useful too:

• Everyone:
• What does "digital literacy" mean to you? (Please respond to this tweet!)
• Is there anyone I should be following (blogs, podcasts, twitter, etc) who's really doing this stuff right (or provoking thought)?
• Teachers (thinking about museums, but thoughts from other angles welcome):
• What do you want/need from digital resources? What gets in the way? What's the dream?
• Do you already use digital resources from museums? Which ones/ where/ what?
• Please post links to anything that's getting it right!
• Museum educators:
• What digital resources do you provide?
• What are your main barriers to producing them?
• What digital resources do you want?

What are the Chances: Lucky Tourist Cracks Safe Code

I've been trying to figure out the forgotten combination
for this lock for months. Maybe Mr Mills can help?

A friend sent me a link to this article on the BBC's website about a lucky tourist who opened a combination-locked safe for the first time since the 1970s.

The article briefly goes into the chances of guessing the combination correctly with one attempt, but doesn't really say how they were worked out. I thought I'd post with my thoughts on that as it may make a nice puzzle.

Just the Facts

The safe has a dial with the numbers from 0 - 60. Turn it three times clockwise to get to the first number; twice anticlockwise to get to the second; and once more clockwise to choose the third.

My initial thought was that the second number couldn't be the same as the first because the dial has to turn (ditto for the third number compared to the second), but then it goes all the way round anyway so I don't think it matters.

What are the chances?

If we assume that the numbers were chosen randomly in the first place, then there are 61 possibilities for each one (the numbers 1 - 60 inclusive, and also zero), and they're all equally likely to be chosen.

The First Number

There are 61 options for the first number. That's easy.

The Second Number

There are 61 options for the second number. Easy! However, looking at the first two numbers together, there are 61 options for the first, and then 61 options for the second for each of the possible choices for the first number. That makes 61 * 61 = 3,721 possible options.

The Third Number

There are 61 options for the third number, but extending the reasoning in the previous paragraph, we have 61 * 61 * 61 = 226,981.

Altogether now!

So, 226,981 different possible combinations. My tiny mind can't really comprehend that, however, so I like to come up with a spurious context to help it along a bit:

If you employed someone to systematically work through all of these possibilities, assuming they were pretty quick and could try one per second it would take them just over 63 hours. That's about two weeks of working full-time hours*.

But wait!

Award-winning statistician Professor Jeff Rosenthal (mentioned in the BBC article) says that these sort of locks have a certain amount of "wiggle room". Using the suggestion in the article that there might actually be a "three digit leeway" (I'm taking that to mean that the "correct" number and the one either side of it will work), that means there's not just one combination that will work to open the safe.

How many are there, then?

Using similar reasoning as I did earlier in this post, there are 3 "correct" positions for the dial for each of the three numbers in the code, so there are 3 * 3 * 3 = 27 solutions that will unlock the safe. That means that 27 out of the 226,981 possible combinations will work, or about 1 in every 8,406 ish. Or 1 in 8,000 even-more-ish, as quoted in the article.

But wait a bit more!

The winning combination was actually 20-40-60. It's entirely possible that was chosen randomly, but think about your own "random" passwords, padlock combinations and the like. How many of them are really random? Humans are rubbish at random, so often use patterns and personal information to set passcodes that they can remember easily.

I alluded to a similar situation in a recent puzzle I set for the Today Programme on the theme of Enigma machines and their settings. Essentially, Bletchley Park's Codebreakers were trying to "guess" the settings that their enemies were using to set up their cipher machines. The underlying maths behind figuring out the scale of the problem is exactly what we've used here, and the considerations in the previous paragraph are equally applicable to the World War 2 cryptanalytic operation.

* Or about 4 days if you're a teacher.

Film Review: Mile 22

Friday night's cinema trip saw Mark Wahlberg monologuing his little socks off through this espionage-action-thriller. Catch up on the trailer below:

After some character introduction, scene-setting and plot exposition the movie eventually gets to the crux: an asset needs transporting twenty two miles (ah, right) to an extraction point. This (probably not a spoiler) doesn't go entirely to plan. John Malkovich tells them they need to get there quickly; no delays. There are plenty of delays and they, naturally, get there just in time.

It's a pretty violent film with guns, explosions, blood, death and some pretty impressive martial arts scenes courtsey of Iko Uwais (fans of The Raid movies will recognise this name). There's a decent core story delivered by some famous names (Lauren Cohen will be a lot more famous in my head once I've finally got around to watching The Walking Dead), and on the whole I enjoyed the experience.

That said, there's a lot of padding for such a short movie (94 minutes). There's a sort of narrative device which sees Wahlberg popping up every so often part-way through an interview which is evidently a post-balls-up inquiry. This goes nowhere. His character's super-intelligence and the fact that he's somewhere on the autistic spectrum is regularly mentioned, though this has no bearing on the plot other than to be occasionally used by the other characters to explain away him being an arsehole at points. There's a nuclear weapons/ terrorism backdrop which also doesn't really come to anything and appears to be a bit of a red herring to draw viewers away from the plot twist, which really isn't groundbreaking enough to require being drawn away from.

Also, it's pretty derivative. There's a street shootout that isn't quite Heat. Uwais runs around an apartment block decking people with cool moves, but it isn't The Raid. There's even a little Ronin in there somewhere.

Ignore all that, though, and it's not a terrible way to spend 94 minutes if you're into action movies and like a bit of Wahlberg. It's forgettable, a bit confusing at points, and probably has some enormous plot holes if you think too deeply about it, but if a bit of Friday night violence is your thing, it's better than heading into town and baiting the big guy at the bar, and you get a thick smear of psuedo-plot thrown into the bargain.

Film Review: The Little Stranger

It's Sunday night, and it's not unusual for me to head to the cinema. This week, based on a novel by Sarah Waters, it's The Little Stranger. The trailer (below) paints a picture of a spooky mystery; an evil presence in an old, run-down house.

The movie left me cold. It feels like a slow-burner that's going to kick off any minute, and then after a little less than two hours it just stops. There a a couple of moments that are seemingly intended to shock, but delivered so matter-of-factly, so stoic, British, stiff-upper-liply they barely moved me at all, other than to think "great, it's getting started now." But no. Back to plodding along until the next mildly unnerving moment in an otherwise sedentary story.

I had a lovely one hundred and eleven minute sit down, with each scene's background wonderfully evocative of post- World War II middle England: dreary and grey but somehow beautiful at the same time. There's some fantastic imagery surrounding the house, too: it's a gorgeous gothic mansion in the flashback scenes, a vibrant backdrop to a young and happy family; and then in the present day it's as dilapidated and unkempt as the older-than-their-years remnants that are fighting a losing battle on the inside.

None of this, however, detracts from the fact that it just doesn't give what the trailer promises. There are hints of ghost story, but this never develops into anything. A tease of family madness, but this, too is left largely unexplored. A dark past that's hinted at all too briefly and then left unresolved.

Maybe I missed something. Should I read the book?

Mental Health Awareness Day - Something We Can All Do

Today is World Mental Health Awareness Day, and there's a quick thing that you can do to help someone out. It's free and it's easy, but it can have an enormous effect:

If you've been meaning to get in touch with someone for a while but just haven't got around to it, do it now.

Seriously, you don't know how much of an effect just getting in touch can have. You don't have to say much. Just a simple indication that they're being thought about can change someone's day. It has brought me out of the depths of despair on more occasions than I can count.

Try it again tomorrow, too. And then the day after. And the day after that.

The specific focus of his year's Mental Health Awareness Day is mental health in the workplace. There's lots of advice on twitter today, but if you want one more thing to do to help your colleagues, then try this:

Ask a colleague how they are, and if you can help with anything. Mean it.

Last thing, I promise: don't try to aim the above just at people that you can identify as having mental health problems. Most people struggling on the inside hide it pretty well, and little if anything makes it out to the surface. If you think you don't work with anyone who has a mental health issue, it's almost guaranteed that you're wrong. Whoever you are, whoever you work with:

Go out of your way to be explicitly and repeatedly nice to people.

This strategy has absolutely no negative consequences and many positive ones.