This is cool. Hipstamatic released a bunch of new lenses. I got a notification on my phone last night, and grumbled something about camera apps spamming me with ads. Then forgot about it. This morning, I see a post from Nick, referring to the official Hipstamatic blog post on the lens:
The Tinto 1884 lens uses facial recognition to recreate a very shallow depth of field unique for each photograph. This is similar in some ways to what some apps do with tilt-shift or radial blur effects, but Hipstamatic’s effect is more customized for faces. Notice, for instance, that it will leave eyes and mouth unaffected, while blurring out the nose and forehead. If the app can’t detect a face, it just switches into a radial blur.
what a year. this is not a sappy end-of-year recap, but I needed to take a step back to see just what an epic year it’s been. in rough chronological order:
a bunch of LMS-related activities, to try to kickstart discussion about what to select
lost a friend, mentor, colleague (heart attacks suck)
realized that winter bike riding freaks my wife out, so decided to cut back on that. cue trainer. less woohoo, but still…
finished my thesis, passed oral exam, completed MSc.
continued working on the cat herding that is the LMS upgrade project, but stumbled closer to completion.
still working on the whole work/life balance thing. the loss and near-loss (and cancer scare and ambulance ride) kind of kickstarted a focus on fixing that. I struggle with maintaining a sense of perspective. the oldest surviving post on my blog, over a decade ago, is about the same thing (back then, triggered by impending dad-hood). so, yeah. balance.
Anil Dash’s recent post on the web we lost, and a follow-up post on rebuilding it, got me thinking about my own little corner of the web. In his follow-up post, he talks about creating public spaces:
Create public spaces. Right now, all of the places we can assemble on the web in any kind of numbers are privately owned. And privately-owned public spaces aren’t real public spaces. They don’t allow for the play and the chaos and the creativity and brilliance that only arise in spaces that don’t exist purely to generate profit.
FlatWorldKnowledge started out by being rather awesome - collecting and publishing a series of supposedly high quality1 books with a few options. If you want an eBook copy or PDF or even print, that’s available for a nominal fee. Or, you can have free access through the FlatWorldKnowledge website for free2.
A quick test, to compare Apple’s Maps app from iOS6 with the new Google Maps iOS app that was released today. All screenshots are roughly centred on the same spot around my office on the UofC campus, taken on a godphone 5.
normal map view. Apple iOS Maps on left, Google iOS Maps on right…
satellite view, Apple iOS Maps on left, Google iOS Maps on right…
Over 60,000 in one course. This will change everything! Except for the part about needing the same effective class size in order to support the handful of students that actually pass the course… Nice reorganization of the marketing hype published by Coursera.
So in the end, we have 107 students who got the more personalized attention (doing a project, getting feedback, being part of the Google hangout presentations).
This class had one professor and 3 TA, about a 1 : 27 teacher/student ratio.
I don’t usually have to put an explicit disclaimer on posts, but here goes. I’m not writing this in any official capacity, my university hasn’t approved the message. YMMV. IANAL. YHBH. etc…
I was at a presentation by Dr. Krishnaswamy Nandakumar on the impact of technology in education, and it triggered some thoughts on MOOCs1. I’d been avoiding thinking (or writing) about them, because the hype just seemed silly and pointless. But, combined by a recent nudge by Kate Bowles, I think it’s worth writing it now.
Giving people access to didactic lectures by a handful of elite professors at a handful of elite institutions is not the most important educational technology in the last 200 years. Not even close. Sure, it’s good. It’s fantastic that I can have access to the lectures and resources of some of the biggest and most famous institutions. Awesome.
But the most important ed tech in two centuries? Bull. Shit.
using textexture.com, thanks to a tip from Bryan Alexander. Doesn’t mean a whole lot at first glance, but it sure is purty. This is chapters 4 and 5 of my thesis (textexture choked on the whole thing):
