Time magazine had an article a few weeks ago, Should Kids Be Bribed to Do Well in School?, discussing a controversial study that shows a positive result on paying kids to study: “Statistically speaking, it was as if those kids had spent three extra months in school, compared with their peers who did not get paid.”

The kids in the study, without exceptions, all welcome this new incentive program; most of the adults expressed worries, despite of the lack of precedent studies on this subject.

When asked about the psychologists’ argument that she should work hard for the
love of learning, not for short-term rewards, Chyna, one used to have behavioral problems but controlled herself for the paychecks, said, “We’re kids. Let’s
be realistic.”

Probably not by coincident, this bold scholar, Roland Fryer Jr.,
graduated from Penn State. His comment struck me hard: “One thing we
cannot do is, we cannot restrict ourselves to a set of
solutions that make adults comfortable.”

I frowned when my wife’s student’s parents paid him whenever he
practices his violin. I even had a lot of doubts as a kid, when, back in my
elementary school days, there was a movement to replace textbooks with
educational comic books. I even failed to see how Guitar Hero helps
one’s musicianship. However, what I didn’t realize is my prejudice
against the means that I am unfamiliar, or uncomfortable with, even before these methods are tried.

ETS has a lot of pilot projects. Some bold open minds creatively make them as crazy as possible, just to see what they can do; some, like me, have always shook heads on anything that’s different.

But now I am switching sides.

David Stong shared with me two articles about how Apple’s decisions
affect the industry and the drive behind them.

In Apple’s official statement, Thoughts on Flash,
Steve Jobs talks about several reasons behind the decision that they
stopped supporting Flash: openness, percentage of deployment,
reliability/security/performance, battery life, touch-based UI, and
efficiency of the native development tool.

Another post, Mac & the
iPad, History Repeats Itself, discusses how Steve Jobs’ decisions
have helped form how people use computers.

I agree that Steve
Jobs has his vision and great intuition about what people will like.
Apple’s high quality products have been the top choices of those who can
afford them and do not mind their proprietary products.  Or, their
products are so good that even those who mind proprietary products will
compromise — in Open Source conferences, most developers uses a
close-sourced MacBook and iPhone, and soon an iPad.

In this
regard, Apple sets the bar high for the industry and users can expect
that they will have better and better products to use.

However, I
am not sure that Apple has a real competitor.

Droid was expected
to provide a healthy competition against iPhone but Apple’s early
entrance in the market has solidify their territory.

Lala.com has
been a great service to music lovers: I could keep my collection of
music online for streaming and never had to worry about my local
storage, all at a very affordable price. Apple acquired Lala.com a few
months ago and just announced that they, as expected, will close it at
the end of May.

Some speculated that Apple acquired Lala.com’s
cloud technology to improve iTunes. While that is probably true, it is
unlikely that Apple will keep the price level of Lala.com.  Effectively,
Apple killed its competitor by acquisition.

Coming back to the
reasons Steve Jobs gave for leaving out Flash, I don’t find all of them
equally convincing. I agree that Flash is proprietary and has some
performance/security problems. However, Apple’s software, also
proprietary, have their vulnerabilities, too.  Steve Jobs statement, to
me, becomes, “We believe we’ll do a better job than that.” rather than
“We dump Flash because we think their product is irrelevant to users”.

Another
reason that Steve Jobs gave, that Flash is not designed for touch-based
use, is true, but not strong enough — Flash is also evolving. If Apple
managed to put a browser, which is used to view contents also designed
for mouse-based UI, onto a mobile device, there must be a way for Flash
to also work.

The argument about the battery life is even weaker.
Some types of use will consume more power than others. This is already
true for current iPad/iPhone, but we don’t see Apple turning off their
video support.

His claim that there while Flash is widely
adopted, HTML 5 is likely to change. And Apple stands behind the open
format.  I agree with that. However, then he gave the example that
“[t]here are more games and entertainment titles available for iPhone,
iPod and iPad than for any other platform in the world.” With Apple’s
strict app approval process, I don’t see Apple is providing a solution
that is promoting openness.

The last reason Jobs gave was to let
developers use the native tool to develop efficient applications, rather
than using Flash to develop something cross-platform but with abstract
layers to slow things down. From the fact that Flash runs fine in
multiple platforms and even old and slower computers, I am not very
convinced that Flash will slow things down significantly. As opposed to
providing Flash as an option, Apple bans it and forces developers who
want to write anything for iPhone/iPod/iPad to use Apple’s coding tool
to write something that only runs on their devices.  This will probably
start a cycle between developers and users who end up using Apple-only
products.

Again, it seems that Apple is trying to kill Flash.

With its fine products, Apple is likely to benefit from this bold move
and become an even bigger monopoly in the mobile computing market. 
However, the claimed nobility behind the revolution seems to target at establishing
its own nobility.