Khan Academy is revolutionizing education. Gates is rebuilding education around video. And yet…
Derek Muller completed his doctoral dissertation by researching the question of what makes for effective multimedia to teach physics.
What did Dr. Muller find?
In experiments, he asked subjects to describe the force acting upon a ball when a juggler tosses it into the air. Then he showed them a short video that explained gravitational force.
In tests taken after watching the video, subjects provided essentially the same description as before. Subjects said they didn’t pay attention to the video because they thought they already knew the answer. If anything, the video only made them more confident about their own ideas.
Gina Trapani, on maintaining control as future-proofing legacy:
For me, publishing on a platform I have some ownership and control over is a matter of future-proofing my work. If I’m going to spend time making something I really care about on the web–even if it’s a tweet, brevity doesn’t mean it’s not meaningful–I don’t want to do it somewhere that will make it inaccessible after a certain amount of time, or somewhere that might go away, get acquired, or change unrecognizably.
Yeah. Well. That didn’t work out so well. The iCloud syncing never worked well for me. Not sure if I subscribe to more feeds than it can handle, but there you go. Constant issues with getting feeds and state synced across a couple of computers. But, that’s not the end of the world. It was the interface just doesn’t work for extensive use. It’s like the Pepsi Challenge thing. It seemed great on the screenshots, and with initial usage, but it just didn’t work with lots of feeds, over a couple of weeks.
The second annual climb for our growing group. Not a long ride (only 18km from the west winter gate to the summit), but a hell of a lot of climbing - 629 meters (2063 feet) climbed over those 18km. Awesome.
I just installed the GoAccess apache log processing application on the Hippie Hosting Co-op server, giving users a way to watch the stats for their sites in realtime, without having to rely on privacy-invading analytics bugging software. This software works on the command line, so just SSH into your account and type:
goaccess -f statistics/logs/access_log
That tells goaccess to load with the logfile at the specified location. You can feed it other logfiles, but the default one for a Hippie Hosting account should be at statistics/logs/access_log.
Sharps punched a button on the phone console. “Larry. Get us some coffee, please.” He turned back to Harvey. “Damndest thing,” he said. “Whole nation depends on technology. Stop the wheels for two days and you’d have riots. No place is more than two meals from a revolution. Think of Los Angeles or New York with no electricity. Or a longer view, fertilizer plants stop. Or a longer view yet, no new technology for ten years. What happens to our standard of living?”
I saw the new Pulp app for Mac and iPad, and thought it looked interesting enough to try out. I started on the Mac side, importing a bunch of feeds that I’d exported from my FeverËš reader. It’s definitely different, but I think I like it.
Here’s the “home” front page - similar to the “Hot” section in FeverËš - it mines the items in the subscribed feeds, to find trends and more-linked-to items.
When driving in an active school zone, with school buses and kids in the area, you find yourself behind a cyclist. He is only going 35km/h in the marked 30km/h zone, and is riding in the middle of the lane (the other lane is for parking, and has cars and buses etc… along it). What do you do?
a) Realize that you are speeding, slow down to 30km/h, and continue as though nobody shat in your breakfast. Which is nice, because it’s a beautiful spring morning.
In the Reclaim project, I’ve been struggling to find a way to properly access my files from anywhere - Dropbox has that problem solved handily.
I’ve been watching ownCloud for awhile, and it’s getting to the point where it’s just about ready to use as a self-hosted Dropbox replacement. Previous versions had web- and webDAV interfaces, but didn’t have the ability to sync files to each computer I use. The web interface worked, but was too awkward to actually use for anything. And using webDAV directly was so frustratingly slow that it was basically a non-option (saving a large file to webDAV has to upload the entire file each time you hit command+s, which can lock up the application you’re using until it’s done. not fun).
We had a good group of riders for a nice “gentleman’s ride” out to Cochrane and back, via Big Hill Springs. It’s a hard ride because of the hills (and headwind) but is totally worth it.
