Posted in Ideas, Opinion, People on Mar 11th, 2010 No Comments »
Building a Better Teacher
But what makes a good teacher? There have been many quests for the one essential trait, and they have all come up empty-handed. Among the factors that do not predict whether a teacher will succeed: a graduate-school degree, a high score on the SAT, an extroverted personality, politeness, confidence, warmth, enthusiasm and [...]
Posted in Ideas, People, Video on Feb 21st, 2010 No Comments »
Ways into Shakespeare’s Othello
English teacher Sabrina Broadbent leads a masterclass on Shakespeare, using her expertise to engage a group of Year 10 students.
Let me state up front, I’m a poor reader, was a poor student, hated Shakespeare, and at this point in my life I’m as cynical as ever about education.
But, I have to say, [...]
Posted in Copyright, Ideas, Social Software, Tech Stuff on Feb 21st, 2010 No Comments »
Insight
I first learned about Insight through this post at Signal to Noise: “Smart” pasting at The New Yorker site.
If you copy text from a site that has Insight installed, when you paste it the paste will include a link back to the original post. That link is easily deleted if you don’t want it but [...]
Posted in Ideas, Music on Feb 21st, 2010 2 Comments »
Playing musical instruments may improve reading
Learning to play a musical instrument could help to improve children’s reading and their ability to listen in noisy classrooms, according to new research.
“Our eyes and ears take in millions of bits of information every second and it is not possible for the brain to process all of that, so [...]
Posted in Ideas, Opinion, People on Feb 20th, 2010 8 Comments »
‘Family Guy,’ Palin and the Limits of Laughter
This is an excellent piece by New York Times writer Dave Itzkoff.
Andrea Fay Friedman has her act together as does Gail Williamson, executive director of the Down Syndrome Association of Los Angeles:
“Within ‘Family Guy,’ the character was fully included, well-rounded, dynamic, not dealing with stereotypical Down syndrome issues,” [...]
Posted in Creativity, Ideas, People on Feb 19th, 2010 No Comments »
Frugan Living
Excellent collection of ideas for living cheaply off the waste of others. It helps that the author, Fairfax is an attractive woman.
[via Boing Boing]
Posted in Ideas, People, Video on Feb 19th, 2010 10 Comments »
Bill Gates gives a well constructed and clear talk on how climate change and energy innovation fits into his work on global poverty and then goes further to discuss an idea he has for nuclear power. Fascinating, well worth watching.
Posted in Ideas on Feb 16th, 2010 No Comments »
Rock Groups
Steven Strogatz has a great column in The New York times on arranging rocks (or any objects) in patterns to better visualize arithmetic.
I’ve been coming back to this particular column the past week and enjoying scanning and rescanning it. I’m still a mathaphobe but I do like patterns so thinking of arithmetic this way [...]
Posted in Ideas, Yoga on Feb 16th, 2010 2 Comments »
India inmates do yoga to reduce their jail sentences
Practice yoga for three months, cut jail time by 15 days. Makes perfect sense.
[via Boing Boing]
Posted in Creativity, Ideas on Feb 12th, 2010 No Comments »
Overcoming Creative Block
This is a brilliant collection of all types of ideas from thinking directly about it to cooking to sketching to going on vacation, sitting in cafes, listening to music, taking long showers. Great post, great ideas.
[via Kottke.com]
Posted in Ideas, Social Software, Tech Stuff on Feb 12th, 2010 6 Comments »
Facebook Login
John Gruber and many others have commented about this in the past day and I’d let it pass me by if I hadn’t seen examples of it first hand in people I know.
Read Gruber’s post and the link to ReadWriteWeb’s initial post: Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login and the comments under [...]
Posted in Ideas, People, Tech Stuff, iPhone on Feb 11th, 2010 2 Comments »
Meet the guys behind Pocket God
This is an interesting development story: two guys make a quick and dirty iPhone game app, it’s not very good, users post terrible reviews and give them feedback on how to make it better. The two developers take the feedback and release version 2 quickly, incorporating many of the suggestions. [...]
Posted in Ideas, Macintosh, Opinion, Tech Stuff, iPad on Feb 5th, 2010 No Comments »
Microsoft’s Creative Destruction
Former Microsoft employee Dick Brass on how the company has failed to innovate over the years.
Some of us have seen this pattern brewing at Microsoft for years. Couple this with the idea that the release of Apple’s iPad seems to be less about hardware, more about a statement that some (maybe many) users [...]
Posted in Ideas, Opinion, Politics, iPad on Feb 1st, 2010 2 Comments »
Why are you so terribly disappointing?
I calculate it took about seven minutes, give or take, after Steve Jobs finished introducing the shinypretty iPad before the whiny attacks on the wondergizmo began flooding in, how it didn’t have this or that expected feature, how it can’t do live video chat, doesn’t have Flash, the bezel is [...]
Posted in Ideas, Macintosh, Opinion, People, iPad, iPhone on Jan 30th, 2010 No Comments »
Steve Jobs and the Economics of Elitism
Steve Lohr has written an excellent piece discussing the back story on how Jobs thinks and works.
…Apple products are known for being stylish, powerful and pleasing to use. They are edited products that cut through complexity, by consciously leaving things out — not cramming every feature that came into [...]
Posted in Ideas, Macintosh, Organization on Jan 23rd, 2010 No Comments »
BumpTop Mac
While I don’t think I’ll ever try this, I love watching the video. Watching how smart people invent great things to facilitate personal organization is like a hobby of mine. I’m like a lurker for stuff like this even though I don’t try much of it out.
Watch the video, it’s fun.
Posted in Ideas, Opinion, Photojournalism on Jan 22nd, 2010 9 Comments »
Does Haiti’s Crisis Call for a New Photojournalism?
Michael David Murphy ponders a number of interesting questions for photojournalists. I think many of these questions overlap what makes me uncomfortable about street photography even under the best of circumstances.
Posted in Ideas, Macintosh, Tech Stuff on Jan 22nd, 2010 No Comments »
Mouse pointer track after 3 hours of working in Photoshop. Black circles are pointer stops (not clicks).
Flickr user Anatoly Zenkov has written a java applet for the Mac that tracks his mouse movement over time. Fascinating.
[via Edward McKeown]
Posted in Ideas, Opinion, Tech Stuff, Tools, iPhone on Jan 21st, 2010 No Comments »
Pen vs. Keyboard vs. Newton vs. Graffiti vs. Treo vs. iPhone
This is a great review. It’s not a scientific test but it explores these different methods of getting text into a device in a way that will help anyone think about the future of text encoding on a variety of devices in a broader way.
The [...]
Posted in Cartoons, Humor, Ideas, Politics, iPhone on Jan 18th, 2010 No Comments »
Slowpoke: The Terminatrix
Jen Sorensen is a genius, no doubt about it.
Note: If you’re not familiar with The Terminator this will make little sense. If you are I’m sure you’ll agree: it’s genius.
iPhone = Skynet
Palin = Terminator
Obama = John Connor
Jen Sorensen = Genius
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