Freedom from Hunger, the pioneering microfinance institution where I once worked, is in a competition to win $23,000 from a local management company. If you feel like helping out, you can go here to vote for them (up to once per day). The voting form is at the bottom of the page. Please feel free to send this link, or the Facebook counterpart, out to your network.

NASA’s Kepler mission has discovered over 1,200 possible planets outside our solar system. The tally includes 54 planets in the “habitable zone” of their star – the area where conditions for life as we know it are present. Of those 54 potential planets, five are about the size of Earth. Here is a very nicely done animation of all the planet candidates found mapped to our own solar system.

I say possible planets here because of the way Kepler detects potential planets. The space telescope measures very small decreases in the brightness of stars as the object passes in front of them (that is, in between the star and Kepler). The potential candidates for planets are all of these decreases in brightness, but they have to be checked using other methods to make sure there isn’t some other explanation for them. One method of verification is to wait for three transits of the planet in front of the star, but this could tak as much as three years, since it depends on the length of the planet’s year.

This is extremely exciting stuff (NPR called it “historic“) because Kepler was only looking at a small portion of the sky (see the “field of view” animation on the NPR page) and it can only see a small portion of the planets that might be in that little portion (since the planets have to be in an orbit that puts them between the star and the telescope). The following comment by MeFite eriko sums up the significance of this nicely:

What Kepler has done is told us, quite simpl[y], that planetary systems are not rare at all. It’s estimate[d] that Kepler is watching 145,000 main sequence stars, and in four months, has candidates around 997 of them. That’s .6% of the stars in view. If we assume that percentage, it means that there are 600 million to 2.4 billion planetary systems in our Galaxy.

Just amazing. And we can be certain that Kepler won’t see all of the planetary systems in its field of view — any system where the planets don’t eclipse the star from our point of view is completely undetectable by Kepler. If a copy of our system was placed in the field of view, with only the Earth in it’s normal orbit, there’s a .47% chance that the ecliptic would be in plane enough for us to observe the transit and detect the Earth. This chance varies some by the size of the planet and a great deal by the distance — close in planets will be much more likely to have visible transits. Assume that 5% of the systems with planets are correctly aligned so that we see transits.

That means, now, that those 600M to 2.4B systems represent 5% of the total, and we’re now looking at 12 billion to 48 billion planetary systems in our Galaxy — out of a total of 100 to 400 billion stars. Assume half the lower number, 6 billion planetary systems per galaxy. Current estimates of number of galaxies in the observable universe is on the order of 150 billion, so at 6 billion planetary systems per, that’ s 900 billion planetary systems in the universe.

And that’s a lower bound!

I can’t help but think about what news like this means to people who think we are alone in the universe, or specially created. Even without further proof, it is like maintaining the idea that you “know” you are going to win the lottery, and then win again several times in a row.

The NYT has a curiously titled article on the adoption of iPads by schools as a teaching device. It seems that school administrators are rushing to include the devices in their schools, but some people have their doubts about them. On the one hand you have educational experts questioning the efficacy of iPads versus traditional teaching methods and on the other hand there are people questioning why schools are buying Apple’s product rather than the raft of cheaper options out there. (2011 is already being touted as the year of the tablet after the preponderance of the category at CES, so perhaps the brand dependence will shift in the future)

I predict that the use of iPads, or other tablet computers, will make the job of educators easier, but won’t in and of itself improve educational outcomes. In other words, I’ve reached the (rather boring) conclusion that tablets have potential in the classroom, but only if they are used in the proper way.

What I expected to read in an article entitled “Math That Moves…” was something more along the lines of this TEDxNYC talk by Dan Meyer. [ted id=855]

In his talk, Mr. Meyer rails against the dumbed-down, by-rote, and thus entirely unappealing, didactic strategies that are in almost every math text used in our schools today. He focuses instead on getting students to think about real-world problems and how they can find out answers. Hint: use math. Notice how Meyer uses video to illustrate a concrete example of where math is useful in real life. This is exactly the place where iPads or similar devices could be a boon, providing rich, multi-modal educational experiences. How many of those thousands of apps actually do that?

In a recent blog post on NetSquared, Joe Solomon imagines the course of non-profits, social media and activism in the year ahead. His vision is really a call for people to make a shift from online organizing to offline in-person activism. In effect, Mr.Solomon is echoing the sentiments of Malcolm Gladwell, whose recent article in the New Yorker, Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted, pointed out the need and precedents for real social change happening in offline movements. In other words, the big social movements of history happen in real life, not on social networking sites.

I think there is a great deal of truth behind this statement, but it also belies a bit of old-fashioned fussiness over the sudden popularity of social media. Mr. Gladwell makes the case that online social networks involve low-strength connections – some to people you’ve never met- while actual revolutions involve smaller numbers of very strong connections – to best friends, family or tribe. Both writers take issue with the hype over social media as a force for change. Gladwell shows a study that proves that there was no “Twitter revolution” after the elections in Iran and Solomon criticizes a bevy of start-up “social networks for good” that fizzled.

There are two things wrong with this discussion, despite its necessity. One, hype is and always will be hype. A lot of social network startups are for-profit enterprises. They need a certain amount of boosterism to create the interest in, and the clients for, their products. We shouldn’t believe everything they tell us about how they are life-changing,course-of-history determining phenomena. Nor should we paint them with broad strokes as only weak connections of little worth. Two, some of those social networks, notably Change.org, have adapted to the needs and expectations of the activist social network sector. Change.org, and any other organization that is smart enough to know how to actually effect change, knows that there is a time and a place for online and offline activism and that one can sometimes bolster the other. They are changing their models to be able to provide non-profits with the right set of connections to drive their activist agendas. Mr. Solomon may want to revisit what some of those organizations are currently up to because they’ve either evolved into something that embraces real world change supplemented by online tools or they’ve fallen by the wayside.

I’m not entirely convinced that social media needs to try to move into the world of in-person interactions (Change.org merging with Meetup). Rather, existing social networks should continue doing what they are doing – serving as tools that connect the right people to the right causes. Social media does an amazing job as a communication platform, not so much as a revolutionary leader. The revolution will be tweeted – but only after it happens, by the activists who want to broadcast their offline success to their online supporters.

It was heartening to see the Clinton-era Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy repealed this weekend. I just don’t understand how such tacit, irrational discrimination could have existed for so long.  I’m happy to see one small step toward social justice made; it renews the spirit to keep pushing for the myriad more steps that need to be taken. Not surprisingly, old guard privileged white men, like John McCain, still maintained opposition to it. (The more I learn about McCain’s” beliefs“, the closer he approaches Palin in my increasingly lower estimation. I’m so glad we collectively dodged that bullet.) Thankfully, Congress ignored this minority of bigots in favor of the large majority of almost every pertinent group, including top military brass and even people against gays in the military,  that wanted to get rid of this broken policy.

Jason Linkin at the Huffington Post had an eloquent and moving response to the repeal. One thing that I learned from that article was that DADT was originally implemented after a gay U.S. Navy radioman was killed –beaten to death – by his fellow servicemen. This happened almost two decades ago and yet people are only now waking up to the very real danger of hate crimes against homosexuals – in the military and the general populace.

Now that a policy that the vast majority of people wanted repealed is gone, Congress will rest assured that it carried out the will of the people and get on with its other pressing business with lucid rationality, right? Oh, wait, I forgot we’re talking about Congress here.