Form Factors

As a game developer, what shape technology takes is of a huge concern to me, and I spend a lot of time with my other techie buddies accurately predicting what kind of technology people will be using in the future. I see three main media consumption platforms prevailing in the near future:

1. The box on top of the TV: OUYA, Steambox, etc.
2. The 11 inch laptop: the netbooks/ultrabooks ranging from 10 to 13 (with the median being 11 inches) with no optical drives.
3. The Phablet.

The biggest threat to the longevity of an individual platform is developers access to that platform. In today's world that is a question of the platform being "open source" or "proprietary" (the former giving the developer more access.) A few years ago I would not have given the box-on-TV good odds for long term survival (though Microsoft did do a good job of reaching out to indy developers on the X-Box for a while.) However the OUYA came along really driving Android to the TV, and now Valve is introducing both the Steam OS and the Steam Box not only as open, but being very closely related to the most popular form of Linux (Ubuntu.)

Contrast this to Nintendo's behavior where they actively chase off indy developers and each new box-on-TV is just an excuse to resell nearly exactly the same games over and over again (Mario, Zelda, Smash Bros, tons and tons of side-view-jumping garbage no matter how innovative the controller or 3D the graphics.) Nintendo's mentality is so closed that they don't even let people watch DVDs on the Wii, even though it's a DVD player - that mentality would have eventually killed off the box-on-TV form factor, and Google TV wasn't saving it. However OUYA and now Steam Box are.

Laptops used to cost $1,000 and have lots of moving parts that broke easily. Then the Netbook came along and changed all that. Then the Tablet came along and took over the low-end-device market. But Netbooks didn't die off - now most laptops are cheaper, have less moving parts (no floppy or DVD drives), have longer battery life, and have smaller screens. The $200 Chrome books have permanently carved this niche into the market, and there are lots of Linux and Windows computers that still follow this form factor.

WHY here is important: the reason WHY you have 11 inch as the standard size now is because that is as small as you can get and still type comfortably on the keyboard. It has almost nothing to do with screen size. Of these three form factors this is the only device where a lot of meaningful work gets done, and if the keyboard doesn't feel right then the computer isn't portable - to be put in the same pile of bricks as the tower-based PCs - and 10 inch tablets (I have never met a touch screen keyboard I would be comfortable doing a blog post with, least bit getting any real work done.) 10 inches is a little cramped for a physical keyboard, and 13 inches is almost inconveniently large to be carrying around, so from here on out work computers are 10 to 13 median 11 inch netbooks (even if by another name.)

So now we get down to the tricky part - the device scene. This has been a huge question since the iPhone and iPod touch hit the scene. People thought that the dominant tablet would always be the iPad for a few years. Then Amazon stepped up to the plate with the Kindle - and mark my words here Amazon is THE player driving the form factor of the tablets - by combining the e-Reader size with the open-source Android, the Kindle Fire burned alive the idea that 10 inch mammoths were going to dominate the device scene in the future.

I have had an Evo and a Nexus 7. The Evo's screen wasn't big enough to be a useful e-reader to me. The Nexus 7 was too large (and too fragile) for me to be significantly more convenient carry around than a Netbook - I still needed a backpack, I couldn't just slip it into my pocket. However it was very socially convenient that the Nexus 7 looked like an e-Reader, and NOT a phone or a computer - pulling out phones and computers in meetings (and other discreet places) is antisocial behavior, but an e-Reader suggested real group participation.

Now enters the phablets, the big phones. These devices are cell phones ranging from 5 to 7 inches. The first thing to realize here is that Kindle is still driving the form factor, as the latest Kindle Paperwhite has a 6 inch screen. So two questions:

• Is 6 inches portable enough?
• Is 5 inches big enough to be an e-Reader?

Over the holidays my relatives busted out not one, but two Samsung Glaxy S4s. In both cases they had leather-ish e-Reader-style cases, and they easily passed as small e-Readers, even though I am sure neither one of these relatives ever uses e-Readers. This looked like a device I could use. It's not unique in the market, the Nexus 5 has a very similar form factor:



We don't need "swiss army knives too big to fit in our pockets" (7 inch+ tablets,) or portable media players too small to be e-Readers. The device size is solidifying around the following constraints: big enough to be an e-reader, small enough to fit in a pocket. That's going to be between 5 and 6 inches, and then all these radical changes in phone/tablet screen sizes will have concluded and we will have a universal 5-6 inch gadget screen size in the near future.

The Evil of MLM

My biggest pet peeve is Multi-Level Marketing. I had a nasty run in with one of these companies in the early 90's , and it boggles my mind that these get-rich-quick schemes are still tolerated by our governments in 2013. Here's a nice video on the subject: http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000140029

This Qualoots article sums up the facts on Multi-Level Marketing nicely:  http://www.quatloos.com/mlm/mlm.htm

I set up a Facebook group (STOP Multi-Level Marketing) for discussing this problem more in depth. If your are interested in this topic and haven't read the following yet, make sure that you do: http://www.vandruff.com/mlm.html

Here's one last video on the subject, by Salty Droid that is very insightful:

Fighting Stance & Tai Chi?

Two items I wrote for Tres Espadas after Knol went down in flames are now pages on the side bar of this blog:

• What is Tai Chi? - Here I explain what to look for in a good internal martial arts school. "Good" and "internal" are almost an oxymoron in martial arts, so this is a question I have to answer regularly.
• Fighting Stance Analysis - I have learned a lot about fighting stances and how to predict strategy over the years, and I have learned even more about this in Tres Espadas. 

Pleasantry of the Peasantry

Some of Jack Whyte's work had me interested in midevil community leadership and the starkly different roles of knights and priests in those communities. This led me to wonder about the 3rd role, the peasant. On the battlefield they were known for being archers, and while looking into this I found this on Wikipedia:

 ...all "citizens, burgesses, free tenants, villeins and others from 15 to 60 years of age" should be armed.^[64] The poorest of them were expected to have a halberd and a knife, and a bow if they owned land...

Interesting, because archer's close range strategy would have been to parry with the bow in their left hand while stabbing away with a long knife in their right hand, and one major strategy for dealing with close range encounters with a long weapon is to draw a knife and stab away. So this suggests an alternative fighting style for peasants compared to knights: knights have an expensive high quality one handed weapon combined with a shield (even their long weapon on a horse is one handed), while the Peasant instead uses two handed weapons (including projectile weapons and polearms), pulling their one handed knives at close range.

My background in long weapons is about a year of Bokenjitsu as it is practiced in Aikido, and studying the single-and-double-ended staff in Doc Fai Wong's system. From there I started experimenting with long weapons technique at Tres Espadas:


Ultimately I deduced a long weapon style very similar to the one displayed in this NOT-Tres-Espadas video:


Or in other words (see "Naginata KO" for "1st match"):


In all cases we have the unexpected condition where when you have long weapons, you are more likely to grapple. One place this is mentioned by historians is in the "push of pike":

One of my speculations on the martial arts is that all cultures have some form of grappling, and grappling in various midevil cultures took place. Weapons designed for non-professional warriors like peasants would have had a strong grappling component. As expected, the formal documentation of halberd technique of that time suggests numerous take downs:


Notice that in some of the above examples:

• the knife keeps coming out and
• the Halberd/Pole Ax is a double ended weapon like the staff, and not as single ended as most spears. 

The clichés in Robin Hood make a lot sense in this context: the staff grappling on the log bridge over the stream, practiced by the same cut-throats doing the archery, while the knights become simple victims of a peasant revolt in spite of their more expensive weapons, horses, armor, training, etc.

Knols Completed: Education & Leadership

I have finished updating this blog with my old knols. Effective Management 101: A) my introduction to management theory and B) a good summary of my personal views on leadership, for those who are new to either A or B.

The big take away I have from this project so far is a question: why did the Knols get moved to WordPress, instead of to the in-house Google blog system (blog spot)?

Diagnostic Portfolios

Introduction

I worked at the Seattle campus of Antioch University from 2004 to 2008.  Though I eventually got into Sakai training, my first two years as a graduate assistant (enrolled in the graduate management program) were focused primarily on student-learning outcomes-assessment.Understanding the ways schools know what their students are learning is critical to helping Antioch University in their various attempts to do online learning.

There are three ways to evaluate what a student is learning: 1) grades, 2) capstone projects, and 3) diagnostic portfolios.  Before we get into the virtues of each type of student evaluation we have a few things to consider first: A) the pressure on university systems, B) it’s the faculty conversation about student learning that matters, and C) if there are two evaluation processes, one always trumps the others.

Pressure

Universities are frequently under attack from “small-government” political organizations, who question if any given University is worth the resources it uses.  All Universities are dependent on federal money, regardless of how “private” they claim to be.  In order to prove that Universities are worth while, there are various accreditation organizations who spend their time making sure Universities either know what they are doing, or lack the “accreditation” that would count them as an officially “worth while school.” 

What accrediting organizations want to know is “how does this specific Universityknow what their students are learning.“  They want to know what the process is that leads faculty to pay attention to what their students are learning, and what conversations the faculty are having with each other about how to improve how well the over-all university system is teaching it’s students what it claims to teach those students.  Accreditation is not permanent, it usually has to be redone a few times a decade. This is not a joke: fail to express effectively how your university’s faculty interact together to improve their over-all student learning potency, and your institution is likely to fail it’s next accreditation attempt. 

The question of “how well are our students learning what we are trying to teach them” can only be answered once we can tell what individual students are learning over the course of their student career at our University.  The basic student evaluation tool (grades, capstone projects, or diagnostic portfolios) is central to faculty having conversations about how they can improve student learning. (Indeed, this IS the main reason why any of these tools exist at Antioch University.)  Some of these tools are more impressive than others to accrediting organizations:

Grades

As a college graduate and  citizen of the USA, it’s very unlikely that you have ever seen “grades done right.”  Grades-done-right as we know it today was evolved primarily in Asia and has not made the transition into the USA for the most part.  Let’s use Indonesia (based off of China’s system) for example: A grade below a “C” means the student does not get credit for taking the course.  A “C” grade means that the student mastered all of the required material for the course.  A “B” grade means that in addition to fulfilling the requirements of a C grade, the student is able to “synthesize” the material, using it effectively in projects not related directly to the course, and developing new ideas related to the course subject.  An “A” grade means that in addition to fulfilling the requirements for a C and B grade, the student is able to critically analyze the course material, pointing out it’s flaws and suggesting appropriate alternatives.  Notice that under this system, a GPA of 2.5 is a very respectable GPA that implies the student is solid and worthy of further learning opportunities.

In addition to these grades having important qualitative meaning not found in the USA system, there are a sort of “grade cops” that go around randomly sampling student assignments and course grades, making sure that the instructors are grading as required.  In the USA grades aren’t considered suspect unless a student complains, but in Indonesia it’s recognized that grades must mean something much more than “70%, 80%, 90%” to prove that students are mastering the course material in exceptional ways, and that this takes considerable effort on the part of the instructor.  The USA essentially has no grading quality enforcement what so ever.

(Imagine if we were to apply this to my 1st grade math grade: a “C” would mean “Benjamin can consistently do addition and subtraction, while a B would mean “Benjamin applies addition and subtraction to material from outside of class, comparing how large his favorite teams of superheroes are to each other from his Saturday morning cartoons,” while an A would mean “in addition to Benjamin applying his math to subjects outside of class, he has pointed out limitations of basic addition and subtraction, and has suggested alternatives involving estimations and recognizing abstract patterns instead.”  Further more, any grade I got would have a chance to be evaluated against my school work by someone witch-hunting for instructors who aren’t sticking to the established norms for the letter grade system.)

So to say the least, the way grades are done in the USA are highly suspect, and have begun to be frowned upon by various accreditation institutions.  Fortunately Antioch University, like the Evergreen State College, has never been into grades.  The two main alternatives are Capstone Projects and Diagnostic Portfolios.

Capstone Projects

A “Capstone Project” is a single piece of work that shows that a student has the abilities his degree title implies he should have.  A professional portfolio (which is not the same thing as a “diagnostic portfolio”) showcasing a student’s best work is an example of a Capstone Project.  The most common type of Capstone Project is a master’s thesis or doctoral dissertation.  Some capstone projects have multiple aspects to them, such as a professional portfolio including a required thesis.

There is one extraordinarily significant limitation to the Capstone Project approach: the student’s worthiness of having the degree is proved, but NOT that he actually learned anything from his school.  There is no evidence of where the student’s skills started off when he entered the program, so potentially he may have learned nothing at all from attending the school.  This makes capstone projects less than ideal for having conversations about student learning. 

A related problem is that this worthiness can easily be faked: graduate students at Antioch University have been known to hire “writing coaches” to help them write thesis, and some of their capstone “change projects” took place so far away that no faculty, staff, or even fellow students ever met anyone involved in the supposed change projects.  It seems possible at this point that some Antioch University Capstone Projects may have been completely fabricated all together, and in some cases we have no way to prove it one way or the other.

Diagnostic Portfolios

A “diagnostic portfolio” is a matrix, with various skills a student is to master on one axis, and depth of skill on the other axis, with evidences of student learning for each skill and depth listed in each empty square of the matrix:

Diagnostic Portfolio Example	Depth 1	Depth 2	Depth 3	Depth 4
Skill A	evidence of skill A, depth 1	evidence of skill A, depth 2	evidence of skill A, depth 3	evidence of skill A, depth 4
Skill B	evidence of skill B, depth 1	evidence of skill B, depth 2	evidence of skill B, depth 3	evidence of skill B, depth 4
Skill C	evidence of skill C, depth 1	evidence of skill C, depth 2	evidence of skill C, depth 3	evidence of skill C, depth 4

The Diagnostic Portfolio intentionally captures the student’s flaws and documents them, especially early on in the student’s skill depths, so that there is real evidence of skill development. Only the final depth in the Diagnostic Portfolio would be expected to be “perfect” work, and probably only the last few skill depths would contain material a student would include in a “professional portfolio” after they graduated.  This allows students to organize their work (and instructor feedback on that work) in a way that shows what they learned over the course of their studies. This is a meaningful way to evaluate students as far as “proof of student learning” is concerned, and is the hip way to do student evaluation in today’s USA. This approach was pioneered and developed first and foremost by Alverno College, over the last three decades.  For most of this time the diagnostic portfolio was kept in paper form, but they eventually developed their own web-based tool around the same time Antioch University Seattle imitated this system for their PsyD program. (I know because I was the one who imitated it for the original prototype of the PsyD ePortfolio, at the suggestion of various faculty members.)  Alverno eventually joined forces with the OSP, which has joined forces with Sakai.  Now Antioch is using Sakai.

There Can Be Only One

The key to understanding how grades, capstone projects, and diagnostic portfolios work together, is to realize simply that they do not work together: one always trumps the others.  For example a Law program may have grades in it’s classes, but the capstone project of passing the bar exam would completely trump grades in the eyes of the students, if passing the bar was required for graduation.  In my case, in my undergraduate Human Services program at Western Washington University had until then recently been a non-graded program with a capstone-style portfolio, but had attempted to convert to an Indonesian-style grading system instead (with the requirements for A & B reversed and absolutely no “grade cops.”)  The portfolio was still there, and we were encouraged to hold on to our course syllabus and key assignments and keep a binder showing our student learning, but in the face of the grades, these portfolios meant absolutely nothing to us students. In the end the portfolios had less than a one letter grade influence on only one class in our program, in the final quarter.  Regardless of our best intentions, when it comes to student evaluation tools, there can be only one master tool in the end, because one tool will eventually be seen as a means to achieve the other.

For techs working for Antioch University, it should be very good news when a program asks for a matrix-based diagnostic “ePortfolio in Sakai,” because it means that Antioch University’s accreditation has been made one step more certain in the future (and thus the funding behind the tech’s long-term career-prospects one step more stable.)  In my humble opinion, the future of adult education generally is going to be the diagnostic portfolio: I think pursuing evidences for the diagnostic portfolio will eventually completely replace having quarters and semesters, with every class being a permanently opened shop for students to pursue specific evidences in.  Semesters, school years and quarters may melt before the might that is the future of the diagnostic portfolio: behold it’s glory and wonder!

Choosing a Martial Art

INTRODUCTION

I am frequently asked about what martial arts school a friend or my friend’s child should attend.  I myself have attended several different schools and have strong opinions about how to find a martial art school for you or your child.  I do indeed believe that many martial arts schools are complete wastes of time.  The considerations you should focus on when choosing a martial arts school are:

1. Aesthetics
2. Quality
3. Perspective

AESTHETICS

When you think of “martial arts school”, what do you have in mind?  What do you want to learn?  Do you have a specific culture you are trying to become exposed to?  These are the kinds of questions you need to think about first.  For more information about what kinds of martial arts are out there, see the appendix “Categories of Martial Arts” below.

The most important of these questions is “what kind of moves do you want to learn?”  The dark side of this question is “what kind of moves do you want to learn to endure the pain from?”  There is no substitute for executing the moves on others while they are trying to resist, and there is no substitute for learning how survive having a martial arts technique executed on you than having this happen to you while you are resisting.  (This is an important consideration if you are picking a martial art for your child: A) are these the kind of moves my child can handle being attacked by, and B) are these the kind of moves I want my child doing in a self-defense situation?  For this reason, grappling arts are generally preferable for younger children.)

For example, one of the best ways to learning punching is boxing.  First, you will get lots of practice punching at a moving target.  Second, you will get lots of practice getting punched.  Therefore, an important question about “what kind of moves to I want to learn” is “what kind of moves do I want to learn to get used to.”

QUALITY

Regardless of aesthetics, the quality of martial arts schools vary greatly. The poorer the quality of martial art school, the more it is a total waste of your time.  Regardless of the martial art techniques a school claims to teach, there is one universal factor when it comes to judging the degree to which they are able to teach it, and this is their sparring practices.  Sparring should:

• NOT be “stop and go”, martial arts students should fight continuously without being interrupted for minutes on end.  Sparring time is wasted when opponents spend a lot of time posturing or restarting on a line, and martial arts that do this are known to produce inferior self defense practitioners.
• Be full-contact.  Some light-contact sparring is fine, but students should frequently spar fully executing their techniques as they would in a fight, so that they can learn to land and defend against these techniques in a real fight.
• Be sane: a reasonable amount of safety equipment should be involved (mats in grappling arts, at least mouth pieces and cups in striking arts.)  Sparring should focus on the techniques the martial art claims to teach, and should be monitored closely by an experienced instructor.

The best case scenario is that the martial arts school has a full contact competition they train for in which their students test their skills against students from other schools.  There are so many style-independent full-contact amateur-competitions out there that even if your style doesn’t have a built-in competitions (like Judo or Muay Thai,) a good martial arts school should find some kind of San Shou, Sport Jujitsu, Pankration or other tournament they can participate in at least annually to test their basic self-defense athletic ability against others who are doing the same.

For example, my least favorite martial art is Tae Kwon Do.  Most Tae Kwon Do schools practice very poor quality sparring, and focus on extremely unrealistic self-defense techniques (especially high kicks.)  However some schools of Olympic Tae Kwon Do follows my sparring three points above, and insofar as a Tae Kwon Do school participates in that system’s regular competitions, these Olympic Tae Kwon Do schools are likely to teach students how to really knock down opponents attacking with high kicks, using high kicks.  If the sparring quality of the Tae Kwon Do school is high, then the students will really know how to use the moves the style claims to teach (kicks above the belt.)  But the same is true for any style: most Kung Fu schools are poor quality as well, unless they embrace serious full contact sparring (the quality of the Kung Fu is guaranteed to be higher if the students participate in serious full contact competition.)

PERSPECTIVE

You can know if your potential school’s sparring goes far enough by using Mixed Martial Arts competition as a lens.  You should be able to see professional Mixed Martial Arts fighters use moves in their fights that are like some of the moves you use while sparring. 

Tai Chi is a great example.  Tai Chi has sparring called “push hands.”  Most Tai Chi schools do some kind of “stationary push hands” where opponents stand still and try to get each other off balance to the point where one has to move their feet.  This drill is a skill building exercise, but by itself does not constitute sufficient “sparring,” as no one in MMA stands still while trying to get others off balance enough to move their feet.  This is why good Tai Chi schools also practice “moving step push hands” were much more aggressive stand up grappling is allowed.  You can tell if a Tai Chi school’s sparring is going far enough if you can see some of the the same clinching, sprawling, and other martial arts techniques that you see in professional Mixed Martial Arts competition.

Some say that this attitude towards martial arts fails to teach the “philosophy of the Martial Arts.”  However, the philosophy of the martial arts is found first and foremost through sparring.  When I was doing kickboxing, as a short guy I was very effective when I charged straight in and blasted away with hooks to the body.  From learning this strategy I learned to be more aggressive in my personal life outside of the ring as well. 

Then one day a friend of mine who weighed over 300 pounds decided to join the class, and three months later was ready to face me in the ring.  As I used my normal tool for taking on opponents, he leveraged his reach and weight against me and more or less dribbled me like a human basket ball.  8 Ibuprofen later I still had the worst headache of my life.  From this painful learning experience my instructor was able to get me to learn a wider variety of tools, especially circular side stepping.  I was able to use this side stepping in other informal challenges to be much more successful against opponents significantly outweighing me.  In real life, this taught me that though being aggressive was always an option, it also payed to be patient while under pressure, and to “stay off the opponent’s line of attack” when I am not taking a challenge head-on.

CONCLUSION

To find the best martial art, you should first figure out what it is you have in mind when you think of martial arts.  Then you should find a school that does what you have in mind, but does it with a lot of good full-contact continuous-sparring.  This sparring will allow you to have the mental benefits that martial arts are known to give people.

APPENDIX A: CATEGORIES OF MARTIAL ARTS

Martial Arts are usually categorized based on cultural origins.  Unfortunately cultural origins are one of the least effective ways to understand martial arts, since cultures other than your own are inherently difficult to understand.  Instead I’ve invented a story about a generic village developing martial arts in the same order that martial arts were popularized in the USA.  This construction does a lot to illustrate the trends we see in the martial arts, so that we can easily grasp “what kind of martial art” we are looking at in a transcultural way.

The Story	Real History	Examples
Once upon a time there was a village that they had a need to study the art of self-defense.  “Just fighting” each other was very dangerous, so they invented a form of sport fighting that effectively showed who had the best general qualities of a warrior, called “wrestling.”  They made a stage, and which ever wrestler could throw the other wrestler down onto the ground or push him off the stage first won.  This contest effectively showed who was biggest, strongest, most aggressive, and had the best grasp of how to use leverage in hand to hand combat.	The early Anglo settlers of North America brought with them various wrestling games based on trying to throw or pin the opponent. As the West encountered Asian martial arts, the spectacular “Mongolian Wrestlers” and gigantic “Sumo Wrestlers” made a lasting impression of the cultural significance of “Asian martial arts.”	Besides numerous indigenous martial arts throughout the globe that resemble this contest, Mongolian Wrestling,Sumo, Folk Wrestling and some would say American Football fit in this category of martial art.
After a while, warriors complained that while the wrestling contest did build admirable qualities in a warrior,  this kind of training did not teach the moves needed to finish a real unarmed combat confrontation.  They experimented to see exactly where the fine line was between what real-life combat moves could safely be added to the wrestling without killing all of the wrestlers. Wrestling down on the ground combined with some limited punching, kicking, choking and joint locking was added to the wrestling, with a new aim of forcing the opponent into non-lethal unconsciousness or submission.  They called this new wrestling “submission.”	Back when Folk Wrestling was taught along side Boxing in American high schools and colleges, these two arts together would have been such an art. When Americans encountered Judo, it became the most popular Asian martial art in the USA for decades, and Judo Clubs are still one of the most common types of martial arts schools here.	Martial Arts that fit this general description are Jujitsu, Mixed-Martial Arts competition, Pankration,Judo, and Sambo.
Some village warriors noted that the techniques that dominated “submission” did not represent most of the moves they needed for the battlefield, where wrestling down on the ground was bad for staying in formation, and striking techniques that could be used with weapons were needed.  Starting from the original wrestling rules, they made a new competition in which punching, kicking, and some limited weapon sparring was allowed, which they called “boxing.”	Boxing has always been a popular sport in the USA’s military.  Tae Kwon Do and Muay Thai have become the basis for their respective country’s military’s unarmed combat training. Throughout the 70′s and 80′s Asian striking arts became popular starting with Karate,  eventually culminating in a Muay Thai fad in the early 90′s.	Most of the martial arts schools you are likely to run into are in this category:Karate, Kung Fu, Tae Kwon Do, Kickboxing, Kempo etc. These are the arts most likely to involve “martial dance” (forms/katas) as a type of conditioning.  (Without sparring, martial dance is all these arts can be.)
Non-warriors in the village noted that the most important battle field skill was the use of a weapon, and that just-learning-to-use-the-weapon could give the average villager a high degree of actual self-defense ability.  They called this new weapon-only martial art “fencing.”	As the limitations of self defense training became obvious, non lethal weapons training has become more popular in the form of Filipino stick fighting starting in the 80s.  During this same time philosophical literature on the Japanese Samurai culture has become popular.	These martial arts are easy to identify, such as Kendo, Fencing, Iado, Kobudo, Paint Ball or any other weapon-only martial art.
As warriors and citizens grew old, they developed martial arts that helped them with their health, including developing self-defense techniques that maximized the advantage of skill over strength.  They called this martial art “internal.”	Though martial-dance inspired by Tai Chi has been in the USA since the 70′s, only recently have these schools emerged willing to prove their effectiveness through full contact sparring competition.	Aikido, Tai Chi, Pa Kua, and others fit solidly into this category of martial art. These are the arts most likely to involve “qi gong” (Chinese yoga) as a type of conditioning.  (Without sparring, qi gong is all these arts can be.)
Some more cynical villagers tried to figure out how to focus on techniques “too dangerous” to practice on opponents with, which they called “reality based.”	There seems to be a large amount of “unorthodox” self defense videos for sale on the internet recommending “dirty fighting” as a self-defense system.	Ninjitsu, Dim Mak, rape prevention and other notorious arts claim to teach “self defense” while not focusing on the actual athletic skills proven successful in close range combat.

To better understand the challenges with understanding martial arts through cultural categorization, see “all martial arts change .”

Modern Martial Arts

I have added my essay from the mid 2000's I originally posted on www.bullshido.org to the pages on this blog (see "All Martial Arts Change".) I have done many different martial arts, and have a lot to say on the subject. I am one of the founders of www.TresEspadas.org, an effort to establish a reasonably safe way to practice full-contact free-style weapons-based martial-arts sparring. While we are on this topic, here's a video I put together related to the "All Martial Arts Change" essay:

Dialogue Crash-Course

Here's my next most important Knol, a basic introduction to Bohm Dialogue as it apply's to today's management world. On the side bar it's called "Bohm Dialogue 101." Many people have a very hard time grasping the abstractness of what organizational development people call "dialogue," and this explains it nicely. (Fortunately this did not require any HTML just some cut and paste with a little adjustment using Abiword.)

You have been through this before: some strategic planning exercise involving "mission statements" and "values", to create a document for some great yet unclear purpose. The consultant keeps saying "the real value of this process is the conversation that takes place while we are going through this process. The point is to get you people talking about this, and keep the conversation ongoing after I leave." He's not trying to pull a fast one on you, he's trying to get your organization to dialogue.

At one point in my graduate studies I challenged ALL forms of strategic planning to simply be hosts for generating dialogue, and that they had almost no other value whatsoever. I am no longer that cynical about strategic planning, but I do think there is some truth to that rash statement of my youth.

One final thought is the warning in this Bohm Dialogue 101 is NOT strong enough. I have seen dialogue side rail long term projects, break up teams, and stir up incredible amounts of trouble in the workplace. It is "strong medicine" not in the sense that extra-strength cold-medicine is extra strong, but in the sense that morphine is extra strong. Dialogue is addictive and overdose prone, and you have been warned.

Masters Thesis Resurrection

This blog is for what I would have put on Google's Knol project before they quit that (like they quit everything else.) Instead of moving the Knols to their own in-house blogging service (this one I am using now,) Google moved the knols to a Wordpress site. This had the VERY unfortunate side effect of merging my knols with the Turning Institue's website, which is NOT one of my projects but I project I worked on in 2002 & 2003 related to providing support for caregivers. This blog is meant to remedy all that.

The most difficult part of this project has been converting my master's thesis over to very-clean HTML to make it easier to post on the web. If you look under my "pages" section in the side bar of this blog, you will see my master's thesis "Starting Worker Cooperatives Through Dialogue" in the side bar. If you click on "Cooperatives & Dialogue" you will see the results of many hours of mindless, tedious HTML editing and years of hands-on research at Antioch University.