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How Bayes' Rule Can Make You A Better Thinker - 1 views

io9.com/you-a-better-thinker-471233405 criticalthinking
shared by anonymous on 09 Apr 13 - Cached
  • To find out more about this topic, we spoke to mathematician Spencer Greenberg, co-founder of Rebellion Research and a contributing member of AskAMathematician where he answers questions on math and physics. He has also created a free Bayesian thinking module that's available online.
  • Bayes’s Rule is a theorem in probability theory that answers the question, "When you encounter new information, how much should it change your confidence in a belief?" It’s essentially about making decisions under uncertainty, and how we should update or revise our theories as new evidence emerges. It can also be used to help us reach decisions in those circumstances when very few observations or pieces of evidence are available. And it can also be used to help us avoid common mistakes and fallacies in our thinking.
  • The key to Bayesianism is in understanding the power of probabilistic reasoning. But unlike games of chance, in which there’s no ambiguity and everyone agrees on what’s going on (like the roll of die), Bayesians use probability to express their degree of belief about something.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • When it comes to the confidence we have in our beliefs — what can be expressed in terms of probability — we can’t just make up any number we want. There’s only one consistent way to handle those degrees in beliefs.
  • In the strictest sense, of course, this requires a bit of mathematical knowledge. But Greenberg says there’s still an easy way to use this principle in daily life — and one that can be converted to plain English.
  • Greenberg says it’s the question of evidence which he should apply, which goes like this:: Assuming that our hypothesis is true, how much more plausible, or likely, is the evidence compared to the hypothesis if it was not true?
  • “It’s important to note that the idea here is not to answer the question in a precise way — like saying that it’s 3.2 times more likely — rather, it’s to get a rough sense. Is it a high number, a modest number, or a small number?”
  • To make Bayes practical, we have to start with the belief of how likely something is. Then we need to ask the question of evidence, and whether or not we should increase the confidence in our beliefs by a lot, a little, and so on.
  • “Much of the time people will automatically try to shoot down evidence, but you can get evidence for things that are not true. Just because you have evidence doesn’t mean you should change your mind. But it does mean that you should change your degree of belief.”
  • Greenberg also describes Representativeness Heuristic in which people tend to look at how similar things are.
  • Greenberg also says that we should shy away from phrases like, “I believe,” or “I don’t believe.” “That’s the wrong way to frame it,” he says. “We should think about things in terms of how probable they are. You almost never have anything close to perfect certainty.”
  • “Let’s say you believe that your nutrition supplement works,” he told us, “Then you get a small amount of evidence against it working, and you completely write that evidence off because you say, ‘well, I still believe it works because it’s just a small amount of evidence.’ But then you get more evidence that it doesn’t work. If you were an ideal reasoner, you’d see that accumulation of evidence, and every time you get that evidence, you should believe less and less that the nutritional supplements are actually working.” Eventually, says Greenberg, you end up tipping things so that you no longer believe. But instead, we end up never changing our mind.
  • “You should never say that you have absolute certainty, because it closes the door to being able to revise your certainty in light of new information,” Greenberg told io9. “And the same thing can be said for having zero percent certainty about something happening. If you’re at 100% certainty, then the correct way of updating is to stay at 100% forever, and no amount of evidence can tip you.”
  • Lastly, he also says that probabilities can depend on the observer — what is a kind of probability relativity. We all have access to different information, so different people should assign different rates of probability to different things based on different sets of evidence.
  • anonymous on 09 Apr 13
     
    "Having a strong opinion about an issue can make it hard to take in new information about it, or to consider other options when they're presented. Thankfully, there's an old rule that can help us avoid this problem - and even help us make good decisions when we're uncertain. Here's how Bayesian Reasoning works, and why it can make you a better thinker."
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Virtual Shackles - TLDR: EA Sucks - 0 views

www.virtualshackles.com/400 critthink criticalthinking video games
shared by anonymous on 09 Apr 13 - Cached
  • anonymous on 09 Apr 13
     
    Deconstructing EA's claims in light of the recent poll that EA is America's worst company. This also functions as a *fantastic* guide to some crucial critical thinking tools.
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China's Expanding Drone Program | Stratfor - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...chinas-expanding-drone-program geopolitics china drones
shared by anonymous on 09 Apr 13 - Cached
  • In the security sphere, these machines are very useful for patrolling the East and South China seas, allowing Beijing to maintain a presence in the disputed waters, and play a role in China's anti-access/area denial strategy.
  • China's equivalent to a Global Hawk, the Soar Eagle, was introduced at Zhuhai in 2006. China already has drones that are comparable to the U.S. Predator and Reaper known as the Yilong/Wing Loong, or "Pterodactyl," and the CH-4. Like the United States, China also has many smaller drones, the most common being the ASN-15.
  • The United States and Israel are currently the leaders in this technology.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • While China's drones are not as advanced, tested or capable of the same ranges, they do allow Beijing to monitor its borders and waters more effectively due to extended loiter time.
  • They also help China deter countries from intervening in the area by helping detect and target potential violators of the area they are trying to deny. This is at the heart of the anti-access/area denial strategy and China's motivation for devoting resources to the program.
  • Beijing has plans to build 11 coastal drone bases by 2015 to increase its ability to survey the region for possible intrusions or threats.
  • Reports say the Japanese Defense Ministry hopes to introduce Global Hawks near the disputed islands by 2015 in an attempt to counter Beijing's increasingly assertive naval activity in the area.
  • According to some reports, Chinese drones similar to U.S. models are cheaper. China has exported several types to countries including Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates, although Pakistan has also purchased some from the United States.
  • anonymous on 09 Apr 13
     
    "China is rapidly expanding its research into and production, deployments and sales of unmanned aerial vehicles, colloquially known as drones. The primary role of this growing program is to help Beijing control and monitor disputed territories in the Asia-Pacific region."
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Ferocious, Weak and Crazy: The North Korean Strategy - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...nd-crazy-north-korean-strategy geopolitics north korea weak ferocious crazy
shared by anonymous on 09 Apr 13 - Cached
  • North Korea has been using the threat of tests and the tests themselves as weapons against its neighbors and the United States for years. On the surface, threatening to test weapons does not appear particularly sensible. If the test fails, you look weak. If it succeeds, you look dangerous without actually having a deliverable weapon. And the closer you come to having a weapon, the more likely someone is to attack you so you don't succeed in actually getting one.
  • Developing a weapon in absolute secret would seem to make more sense. When the weapon is ready, you display it, and you have something solid to threaten enemies with.
  • North Korea, of course, has been doing this for years and doing it successfully, so what appears absurd on the surface quite obviously isn't.
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • On the contrary, it has proved to be a very effective maneuver.
  • North Korea is estimated to have a gross domestic product of about $28 billion, about the same as Latvia or Turkmenistan. Yet it has maneuvered itself into a situation where the United States, Japan, China, Russia and South Korea have sat down with it at the negotiating table in a bid to persuade it not to build weapons.
  • There is brilliance in North Korea's strategy. When the Soviet Union collapsed, North Korea was left in dire economic straits.
  • Naturally, the goal of the North Korean government was regime survival, so it was terrified that outside powers would invade or support an uprising against it.
  • It needed a strategy that would dissuade anyone from trying that. Being weak in every sense, this wasn't going to be easy, but the North Koreans developed a strategy that we described more than 10 years ago as ferocious, weak and crazy.
  • First, the North Koreans positioned themselves as ferocious by appearing to have, or to be on the verge of having, devastating power. Second, they positioned themselves as being weak such that no matter how ferocious they are, there would be no point in pushing them because they are going to collapse anyway. And third, they positioned themselves as crazy, meaning pushing them would be dangerous since they were liable to engage in the greatest risks imaginable at the slightest provocation.
  • In the beginning, Pyongyang's ability to appear ferocious was limited to the North Korean army's power to shell Seoul.
  • The point was not that it was going to level Seoul but that it had the ability to do so.
  • since nothing was worth a nuclear war, enraging the regime by trying to undermine it wasn't worth the risk.
  • Many nations have tried to play the ferocity game, but the North Koreans added a brilliant and subtle twist to it: being weak.
  • This was a double inoculation. The North Koreans' ferocity with weapons whose effectiveness might be questionable, but still pose an unquantifiable threat, caused its enemies to tread carefully. Why risk unleashing its ferocity when its weakness would bring it down? Indeed, a constant debate among Western analysts over the North's power versus its weakness combines to paralyze policymakers.
  • The North Koreans added a third layer to perfect all of this. They portrayed themselves as crazy
  • As in poker, so with the North: You can play against many sorts of players, from those who truly understand the odds to those who are just playing for fun, but never, ever play poker against a nut. He is totally unpredictable,
  • So long as the North Koreans remained ferocious, weak and crazy, the best thing to do was not irritate them too much and not to worry what kind of government they had
  • Hence, we have North Korea's eternal nuclear program. It never quite produces a weapon, but no one can be sure whether a weapon might be produced.
  • Interestingly, North Korea never does anything significant and dangerous, or at least not dangerous enough to break the pattern. Since the Korean War, North Korea has carefully calculated its actions, timing them to avoid any move that could force a major reaction.
  • The North's positioning is superb: Minimal risky action sufficient to lend credibility to its ferocity and craziness plus endless rhetorical threats maneuvers North Korea into being a major global threat in the eyes of the great powers.
  • Over the years, the United States, Japan and South Korea have looked to the Chinese to intercede and persuade the North Koreans not to do anything rash. This diplomatic pattern has established itself so firmly that we wonder what the actual Chinese role is in all this.
  • It is impossible for us to know what the Chinese are thinking, and we have no overt basis for assuming the Chinese and North Koreans are collaborating, but we do note that China has taken an increasing interest in stabilizing North Korea.
  • For its part, North Korea has tended to stage these crises -- and their subsequent Chinese interventions -- at quite useful times for Beijing.
  • It should also be noted that other countries have learned the ferocious, weak, crazy maneuver from North Korea. Iran is the best pupil. It has convincingly portrayed itself as ferocious via its nuclear program, endlessly and quite publicly pursuing its program without ever quite succeeding. It is also persistently seen as weak, perpetually facing economic crises and wrathful mobs of iPod-wielding youths. Whether Iran can play the weakness card as skillfully as North Korea remains unclear -- Iran just doesn't have the famines North Korea has.
  • I do not mean to appear to be criticizing the "ferocious, weak and crazy" strategy. When you are playing a weak hand, such a strategy can yield demonstrable benefits. It preserves regimes, centers one as a major international player and can wring concessions out of major powers. It can be pushed too far, however, when the fear of ferocity and craziness undermines the solace your opponents find in your weakness.
  • Diplomacy is the art of nations achieving their ends without resorting to war. It is particularly important for small, isolated nations to survive without going to war.
  • anonymous on 09 Apr 13
     
    "Editor's Note: George Friedman originally wrote this Geopolitical Weekly on North Korea's nuclear strategy on Jan. 29. More than two months later, the geopolitical contours of the still-evolving crisis have become more clear, so we believe it important to once again share with readers the fundamentals outlined in this earlier forecast."
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Didn't do the reading? With digital textbooks, your professor can prove it - 0 views

arstechnica.com/...ks-your-professor-can-prove-it
shared by anonymous on 09 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • The article cites a couple of examples where professors attribute students’ low grades to the CourseSmart-provided proof that the student never, or rarely, opened their books. The engagement index shows not only what, but when, students are reading, so if they opt not to peruse the textbook until the day or night before a test, the professor will know.
  • Students know that the books are tracking them, but it’s still unclear to all parties involved whether the “engagement index” is a fair or valuable metric.
  • anonymous on 09 Apr 13
     
    "There exists a textbook that will report back to your professors whether you've been reading it, according to a report Tuesday from the New York Times. A startup named CourseSmart now offers an education package to schools that allows professors to, among other things, monitor what their students read in course textbooks as well as passages they highlight."
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In China, a New Bird Flu Emerges - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...china-new-bird-flu-emerges
shared by anonymous on 10 Apr 13 - Cached
  • anonymous on 10 Apr 13
     
    "The first three human cases of H7N9, a new strain of bird flu, were reported in eastern China at the end of March. The emergence of a new disease in China can bring back the fears associated with the 2003 outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS. But there are key differences in this case, including the mode of infection and the governmental response. Any impact will be from preventative or reactive actions and not from the disease itself. "
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Stratfor-founder George Friedman slams Tea Party in leaked emails from March 2010 - 0 views

politicalgates.blogspot.com/...der-george-friedman-slams.html geopolitics stratfor
shared by anonymous on 10 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • ----- Original Message ----- From: "George Friedman" To: "Analyst List" Sent: Thursday, March 25, 2010 10:18:35 PM GMT -06:00 US/Canada Central Subject: Re: [OS] US/CT/CALENDAR- Teabagger protest at Harry Reid's house 3/27 The economics of this is far less important than the social and political implications of the response. The lack of civility on TV has now spilled over into the streets. Physical attacks on people and places you don't agree with has become acceptable. The fundamental and absolute principle of a democratic republic is that while your position may be defeated, and you can continue to argue your point, you do it without demonizing your opponents and without ever threatening harm. Whether this is a small fraction of the movement or large is unimportant to me, as is the argument about healthcare. This behavior is more frightening that the largest deficit I can imagine. We use fascist and communist casually, but he definition of each was that it did not absolutely abjure political intimidation. I have not seen anything like this since the segregationists in the south and the anti-war movement in the 1960s.
  • Both triggered massive political counteractions fortunately, and the segregationists and anti-war movement was politically crushed. I certainly hope that the Tea Party has the same fate. You are both supposed to be students of geopolitics. Approach this geopolitically. You are living in a country where disagreements degenerate into massively uncivil behavior. Yet you are both still arguing the issue. That issue is trivial compared to the way the losers are responding. I find the language they use offensive in a civilized polity, and the intimidation tactics of some of them is monstrous. You should both be far more worried about the political dimension than the economic. We will survive the economic. We can't the political. And as a practical matter, this is the best friend the Democrats have. I'm pretty hard right and I'm offended. Imagine how people more moderate than me look at this. These people are guaranteeing Obama's re-election.
  • If this is not educational, I don't know what is!
  • anonymous on 10 Apr 13
     
    "Stratfor-founder George Friedman slams Tea Party in leaked emails from March 2010: "I'm pretty hard right and I'm offended", "You are living in a country where disagreements degenerate into massively uncivil behavior", "Physical attacks on people and places you don't agree with has become acceptable" - Friedman compares Tea Party to "Hitler and Lenin", other analysts also make comparisons to Nazi-movement"
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Once Upon a Time in Syria - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...once-upon-time-syria
shared by anonymous on 10 Apr 13 - Cached
  • Though the term "Arabist" has been used far more broadly, during the Cold War in Washington it often came to refer to people at the State Department.
  • They tended to have come of age during World War II, were educated at the best private schools in New England, were in some cases descendants of American missionary families in the Middle East in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and by mastering Arabic in their twenties and thirties, spent their entire foreign service careers in one Arab country after another.
  • Syria was often their lodestar: the essential Arab country.
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  • Syria was the throbbing heart of Arabism, the most steadfast country in its refusal to compromise with what, in Syrian eyes, was the post-colonial monstrosity known as Israel.
  • For a U.S. State Department Arabist, a posting to Syria was, in a thematic sense, fundamental to a successful career.
  • Given the fact of almost two dozen Arabic-speaking countries and only one Hebrew-speaking country to which one could be posted, an American diplomat's professional lifetime might be spent among Arabs much more easily than among Israelis. Not to develop sympathies would be inhuman.
  • The Arabists knew that it was a myth that Syria did not experiment with democracy like Israel. Syria had held three relatively free elections in 1947, 1949 and 1954, and all broke down more or less along ethnic, sectarian, tribal or regional lines, with military rule resulting after each failure.
  • The Arabists understood better than anyone else (except, that is, for the locals) that Syria was an artificial state built on a mass of contradictions.
  • It is tempting to deride the old-time Arabists of the Cold War era from the vantage point of 20/20 hindsight. After all, they dutifully communicated the diplomatic positions of one Syrian dictator after another to Washington, and especially so during the three-decade-long rule of Hafez al Assad.
  • But one is forced to argue: What else were they supposed to do?
  • the Arabists dealt with the political reality as they found it.
  • The tragedy of al Assad family rule in Syria is not that it produced tyranny: That tyranny, remember, produced sustained domestic peace after 21 changes of government in the 24 years preceding the elder al Assad's coup.
  • The tragedy is that the al Assads did nothing useful with the domestic peace they had established.
  • Citizens rise above sectarianism, whereas subjects have only sectarianism to fall back on.
  • The Arabists were in Syria and other countries not to plan American grand strategy or to tell dictators how to behave in the midst of a titanic struggle with the Soviet Union (in which America, perforce, supported many dictatorships) but to report perceptively on what was going on in their parcel of the world.
  • The Middle East, wracked by clan, tribal, ethnic and sectarian unrest, will always require area specialists with years of experience living in the region to help Washington make sense of it all.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 10 Apr 13
       
      See also: Internet friend Ed Webb.
  • Supporters of the Iraq War lauded Crocker's efforts to help stabilize Iraq, even as Crocker himself had warned in a 2002 memo that an American invasion of Iraq would unleash internal and regional chaos.
  • The 21st century, in other words, demands individuals with a 19th century sense of the world: people who think in terms of geography, indigenous cultures and local traditions.
  • anonymous on 10 Apr 13
     
    "Once upon a time, Syria was among the most enthralling and beautiful countries on earth, without the forest of hideous concrete architecture that came to deface the outskirts of its cities, without the pollution, and, of course, without the violence and lawless roads of today. Syria was a stage set for the merger of the Bible and the Mediterranean: wind-ransacked plains, littered with archaeological ruins in all the earthen colors of a rich palette, in places like Palmyra and Qala'at Samaan."
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On SXSW 2013: Vanishing Interfaces, Wearable Tech, & AI's - 0 views

ragoodwin.blogspot.com/...2013-vanishing-interfaces.html
shared by anonymous on 10 Apr 13 - Cached
  • The last year has presented us with the vanguard of the Wearable Tech revolution.  Faced with products coming out of Kickstarter and perhaps most prominently, the Google Glass project, the equation is about to become very complex.
  • Krishna spoke specifically to the idea that we need to eliminate as many interfaces as we can in clever ways to enhance the User Experience.  The AI panel emphasized the changes coming to the User Experience as predicted by products like Siri and Google Now.  Together, they paint a picture of how building with an eye to streamlining interfaces with AI modules will build a new future for us - a future that is going to be increasingly filled with various devices.
  • what functions do your products have that best fit on those interfaces?
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The vanguard is already here in Siri and Google Now.  Each of these represents a type of agent that knows a few things about us.  Google Now will tell you, without your asking, the time it takes to get home from work.  Siri and Google Now both will take your voice input and perform actions that would normally be fairly complicated through a series of interfaces.
  • Not all of us have access to complex and robust voice recognition libraries and a network of camera-equipped cars.  Many of us are, however, in a position to collect or analyze large sets of data.
  • App collects data, sends output to wearable tech.
  • an interface can still exist behind this.  You can open the app and adjust parameters or inputs, but these interfaces become supporting elements, not the primary interface element.  Data that's collected becomes the primary input, done automatically.
  • anonymous on 10 Apr 13
     
    "Less than six years ago the Apple iPhone blew our minds with a new way to think of something we thought we knew really well:  the cellphone.  A couple years later, tablets crashed the party, giving us a big, rich interface to browse and connect with while leaned back in our recliners.  Technologists like myself have been scrambling all the while to find the best methods to utilize the capabilities of these new interfaces ever since."
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Magic trick transforms conservatives into liberals - 0 views

www.nature.com/...rvatives-into-liberals-1.12778 critthink criticalthinking politics
shared by anonymous on 11 Apr 13 - Cached
  • When US presidential candidate Mitt Romney said last year that he was not even going to try to reach 47% of the US electorate, and that he would focus on the 5–10% thought to be floating voters, he was articulating a commonly held opinion: that most voters are locked in to their ideological party loyalty.
  • But Lars Hall, a cognitive scientist at Lund University in Sweden, knew better. “His calculation, only zeroing in on 10% of voters, is a risky proposition,” he says.
  • When Hall and his colleagues tested the rigidity of people’s political attitudes and voting intentions during Sweden’s 2010 general election, they discovered that loyalty was malleable: nearly half of all voters were open to changing their minds. The team's work is published today in PLoS ONE1.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Hall’s group polled 162 voters
  • The person conducting the experiment secretly filled in an identical survey with the reverse of the voter's answers, and used sleight-of-hand to exchange the answer sheets, placing the voter in the opposite political camp (see video above).
  • No more than 22% of the manipulated answers were detected, and 92% of the study participants accepted the manipulated summary score as their own.
  • What is interesting about the latest study is that, on the basis of the manipulated score, 10% of the subjects switched their voting intentions, from right to left wing or vice versa. Another 19% changed from firm support of their preferred coalition to undecided. A further 18% had been undecided before the survey, indicating that as many as 47% of the electorate were open to changing their minds, in sharp contrast to the 10% of voters identified as undecided in Swedish polls at the time.
  • Eugene Borgida, a social and political psychologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, is not surprised that some people changed their minds in the experiment. “We know that when you ask someone to explain their views, it tends to temporarily destabilize those views,” he says.
  • But Borgida wonders how durable the results would be. “I suspect if left alone these people would drift back to their baseline affiliation.” The team, he says, “may be overstating the proportion of people who are malleable”.
  • And after the trick was explained to them, many were pleased to find themselves not so hidebound by ideology as to be unable to even contemplate another point of view. But they still were often relieved that they were not supporting the wrong party
  • anonymous on 11 Apr 13
     
    "'Choice blindness' can induce voters to reverse their party loyalty."
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Canada's Geographic Challenge - 2 views

www.stratfor.com/...canadas-geographic-challenge geopolitics canada geography
shared by anonymous on 11 Apr 13 - Cached
  • Canada became independent from the United Kingdom in 1867. The country is made up of 10 provinces and three territories.
  • A majority of Canada’s 35 million people reside within 100 kilometers of the U.S. border, where the climate and topography support meaningful populations. However this population is spread across a distance of roughly 7,000 kilometers, from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans.
  • Canada's primary geographic challenge is maintaining unity across its diverse population cores
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The economies of these population cores are geared toward external trade as they try to meet demand for their services, manufactured goods and natural resources like oil.
  • making Canada the world’s sixth-largest oil producer.
  • Because of its location, Canada is well within the U.S. sphere of influence and the country's freedom to act is constrained by U.S. interests.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 11 Apr 13
       
      This message brought to you by the department of the obvious.
  • anonymous on 11 Apr 13
     
    "Located on the North American continent, Canada is the world's second-largest country. Most of Canada is uninhabited wilderness, and Arctic temperatures make the northern territories inhospitable to large population centers."
  • Erik Hanson on 16 Apr 13
     
    Just play Hearts of Iron as Canada, and this issue will be un-overlookable.
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Please Take Out Your Cell Phones | CIRTL Network - 0 views

www.cirtl.net/7723 technology
shared by anonymous on 11 Apr 13 - Cached
  • I have a theory about digitial distractions, a theory that's supported by anecdotes from the mobile learning pioneers at Abilene Christian University and by data from CU-Boulder grad student Bethany Wilcox. My theory is that if all students are expected to do with their mobile devices during class is take notes, then they'll distract themselves with Facebook et al. because notetaking doesn't keep their minds busy enough.
  • Good notetaking is hard work. Listening to a presentation, making sense of the ideas, and recording those ideas in writing in ways that allow one to revisit them later take a lot of brain power.
  • This kind of notetaking doesn't take 100% of a student's mental energy. As a result, they have some spare cycles available for digital distractions.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • If my theory is true, then we can minimize digital distractions by giving our students more to think about and do during class.
  • How might we do that?
  • The term "digital ink" usually refers to the ability to draw using a digital device, typically with a stylus. If I could pass out stylus-equipped iPads to all my students, that would be great. Since I can't, I have students participate in "digital ink" activities on the cheap.
  • On a couple of occasions, I've sent my students a link to a Google Doc spreadsheet and asked them to contribute to it during class.
  • In my cryptography class the other year, I learned how to pipe the contents of a properly formatted Google Doc spreadsheet into an interactive, online timeline.
  • Crowdsourcing is a nice framework for thinking about the use of mobile devices in the classroom.
  • Again I asked students to work in groups, this time to identify arguments for or against various points of view in this debate.
  • I'm a big fan of teaching with clickers. (I did happen to write the book on this topic.) When I teach a course, I ask my students to purchase clickers because I know I'll use them regularly throughout the course.
  • anonymous on 11 Apr 13
     
    "When I talk with most instructors about cell phones or laptops in the classroom, I hear great concern about digital distractions. If you let students use mobile devices such as smart phones, tablets, or laptops, they'll surely start checking Facebook, watching ESPN, or shopping for shoes. (I don't know what's up, but when this issue gets addressed in the media, shoe shopping is ALWAYS mentioned.)"
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E-Reading: A Midterm Progress Report - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...260478 education ereaders research tablets
shared by anonymous on 14 Apr 13 - Cached
  • One good development in the past five years: more options for reading at night.
  • LCD screens are as glare-prone as ever: though there are some screen protectors that claim to reduce glare, I have yet to find one that has a significant effect, so if you're going to be reading outdoors the e-ink screens are still your best bet.
  • E-ink screens today have much better contrast that the earlier ones did. That's a big plus.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • E-readers still have limited typeface options and do a generally lousy job of handling kerning and spacing.
  • e-books tend to have far more errors than print books, especially older books that have been scanned using OCR software
  • But it seems to me that the most serious deficiencies of e-readers involve readers' interactions with books. In this respect we may be losing ground rather than gaining it.
  • Try that with a Kindle or Nook. It's impossible now, and it's not clear that anyone is interested in making it possible.
  • In fact, newer versions of the Kindle software are making it harder to annotate: the various versions of the Kindle Touch lack a physical keyboard, and invoking and using the virtual one is very slow and profoundly awkward.
  • Highlighting and commenting are much easier on LCD touchscreens, by and large, though I find that my iPad too often interprets my attempt to start a highlight as an attempt to turn the page -- very annoying -- and it continues to be impossible to extend a highlight across a page break
  • I also love the fact that Amazon records all these annotations and makes them available to me on their website.
  • It's really illuminating to scan a single webpage and see every passage I have annotated in a book.
  • for consumerist reading, e-readers have gotten better in some ways while stagnating in others
  • for engaged, responsive reading, they seem to be generally stagnating, or perhaps even moving backwards.
  • anonymous on 14 Apr 13
     
    "E-readers have been around long enough now that the novelty has largely worn off. To be sure, we still get the occasional article or blog post celebrating the smell of "real books" and denouncing the disembodied fakery of text on a screen, but not nearly as many as in recent years. E-readers are simply part of the reading landscape now -- the first Kindle was released almost five years ago -- and it's time for a midterm progress report. How is the technology developing? What has been accomplished and what remains to be done?"
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An E-Reader Annotation Mini-Manifesto - 1 views

www.teleread.com/...ader-annotation-mini-manifesto annotation education ereaders research tablets
shared by anonymous on 14 Apr 13 - Cached
  • This, in my opinion, is where digital annotation really becomes interesting: If we share what we highlight with other people, and bring a discussion right into the margin of a book, what do we have, and what have we done? We have added value to the digital reading experience. And looking at annotation in this way, there’s a clear reason why we should give it a little more thought.
  • 1. IT MAKES THE BOOK A SOCIAL OBJECT 
  • 2. IT KEEPS BOOKS ALIVE
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • 3. IT’S THE BEST WAY TO DISCOVER
  • anonymous on 14 Apr 13
     
    "I was fascinated to see an article here on Teleread last week regarding digital annotation. For me, this topic is one full of immense possibility. But after reading it through and looking at the comments, I came to the conclusion that, amongst diluted split opinion and some focus on hardware, many seemed to have missed the point."
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Readmill is a unique ebook reader for iPhone and iPad - 1 views

readmill.com annotation education ereaders research tablets
shared by anonymous on 14 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 14 Apr 13
     
    "Readmill is a unique ebook reader for iPad and iPhone that lets you read, share and discover great books. Sign up and download today."
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BioShock Infinite: an intelligent, violent videogame? - Read - ABC Arts | Australian co... - 1 views

www.abc.net.au/...s3733057.htm
shared by anonymous on 14 Apr 13 - Cached
  • Infinite has the difficulty of an inherited legacy: people like to point to the first BioShock (2007) as an example of how videogames made in studios by hundreds of people and financed by corporations can be artistic. It was, in a way, a beacon of hope for those who dreamed that the sheer industrial scale at the peak of the videogames business could translate into something worth taking seriously.
  • BioShock Infinite is a videogame with ideas. Set in 1912, it’s in part inspired by The Devil In The White City, Erik Larson’s 2003 novelistic account of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.
  • The city is beautiful, and possibly unparalleled in terms of visual design in a videogame: along with the expected white American neo-classical architecture, we get an astounding array of poster art and fashion, taking in both the decline of the strong silhouettes and Gibson Girl aesthetics of the 1910s, and the Art Nouveau movement, as well as Kinetoscopes similar to the illusionistic films of Georges Melies.
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  • Columbia, according to Infinite, is to have set sail at the 1893 Fair, thus opening up a ripe array of potential themes stemming from real world history and politics, all of which get at least lip service in the game: Manifest Destiny, American Exceptionalism, racism, and religious conflict.
  • This all occurs, as with the first BioShock, within the framework of a first person shooter.
  • The first major choice that players of BioShock Infinite are presented with is whether they would like to publicly punish an interracial couple or not. You may choose to throw a ball at the couple, who are tied up in front of a crowd at a fair, or you may choose to throw the ball at the man who is asking you to do so. The outcome of your choice is mostly the same.
  • Let’s think about that for a moment. BioShock Infinite, the game that many would hope to point to as an example of how art and subtlety might be found in expensive, mainstream videogames, sets up its moral stakes by asking the player if they would like to be a violent bigot.
  • Would you like to be for or against?
  • This is thunderously stupid, and an insipid example of how terrifyingly low the bar is set for ‘intelligence’ in mainstream videogames
  • In taking the game seriously, I want to be as clear as possible: BioShock Infinite uses racism for no other reason than to make itself seem clever. Worse, it uses racism and real events in an incredibly superficial way—BioShock Infinite seeks not to make any meaningful statement about history or racism or America, but instead seeks to use an aesthetics of ‘racism’ and ‘history’ as a barrier to point to and claim importance.
  • puts the lie to the claim that by engaging with these themes, BioShock Infinite is the place to find substance in mainstream videogames.
  • At the real Wounded Knee, over three hundred Native Americans—the Lakota Sioux—were massacred. Many of them were unarmed. Some of them were children. These were real people, with real lives and real families. The victims were buried in a mass grave, and many of the US Cavalry who led the massacre were later awarded the Medal of Honor, a decision that remains shameful today.
  • I am certainly not saying that a videogame has no right to engage with such events. What I am saying is that when you use such a horrific historic event in art—in any media—you have a responsibility to get it right, to use it to say something worthwhile, to make the invocation count.
  • Wounded Knee, I believe, is not something you get to invoke in 2013 without also making a statement of sorts. The idea of publicly punishing interracial relationships, something that of course has happened in reality, is also not something you get to invoke in 2013 without making a statement.
  • “[Letting] the player decide how they feel,” is not respecting your audience’s intelligence in these situations; it is a cop-out of the highest order.
  • For a game that so explicitly aimed to take on racism through its 1912 setting, the politics of BioShock Infinite are defined by evasion.
  • Such nihilistic disapproval is the absence of a political position masquerading as shrewd criticism. It may seem worldly, but it allows BioShock Infinite to be controversial to no-one by treating everyone with equal contempt.
  • Let us get one thing straight, then: despite its desperation to be taken seriously, BioShock Infinite is not an intelligent work of art. It is a history-themed first person shooter, and it deserves no more or less respect than any other first person shooter.
  • You can argue that the faults of BioShock Infinite are the latest and most unfortunate result of the first-person genre that found bedrock in both Doom (reflexes and gore) and Myst (architecture and mystery) in the mid-1990s, two sharply different trajectories that have been bound into problematic convergence ever since. While the two genres remain fruitfully exploited in separation, all attempts at marrying the two—and thus discovering the elusive union of the shooter’s popularity and the exploration game’s more literary aspirations—have remained ill considered. In a way, mainstream videogames are still completely dumbfounded by Edge magazine’s famous 1994 criticism of Doom: “If only you could talk to these creatures.”
  • Maybe this is really the central problem of the game—how do you merge any kind of intelligent thematic exploration while taking unrestrained pleasure in shooting people in the face?
  • Where do those two circles converge in a Venn diagram?
  • By its conclusion, BioShock Infinite quickly forgets that it ever engaged with ideas of racism and American Exceptionalism in favour of a tangled Christopher Nolan puzzle plot about time travel. This is the sound of a thousand popguns going off, taking up the silent report of a giant cannon that failed to fire.
  • it remains difficult to point to a single videogame that is both artful, subtle and a successful mainstream videogame, and BioShock Infinite only muddies the waters further.
  • anonymous on 14 Apr 13
     
    "Can mainstream videogame makers present an artful, intelligent thematic exploration about real world history within a game dominated by scenes of unrestrained violence, asks Daniel Golding."
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The Crisis of the European Common Market | Stratfor - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...crisis-european-common-market
shared by anonymous on 15 Apr 13 - Cached
  • The creation of a common market where people, goods, services and capital could move freely was one of the main goals of the Treaty of Rome
  • The free movement of people is the principle that allows EU citizens to travel to or live and work in any member country.
  • The creation of the eurozone put 17 countries with varying levels of economic development and competitiveness in a currency union. This has created significant trade imbalances between the less developed economies in the eurozone periphery and Germany, Europe's main exporter.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The European Union is trying to address the problems of its banking sector through the creation of a banking union -- a mechanism that would put all the eurozone banks under the supervision of a single entity, provide joint funds to rescue banks in distress and provide all banks with the common deposit guarantee.
  • This idea has been controversial since the beginning.
  • First, there was a debate regarding which banks should be supervised. In December 2012, the European Union agreed that only the largest banks in the eurozone would be put under supervision.
  • Second, the idea of a joint insurance mechanism and bank resolution fund was highly controversial because countries with strong banking sectors refuse to take responsibility for failing banks.
  • As a result, EU leaders decided to postpone the insurance mechanism's implementation.
  • anonymous on 15 Apr 13
     
    "The European Union was founded on the free movement of people, goods, services and capital. All of these basic freedoms are inextricably intertwined with the European crisis. The free movement of people is being questioned in numerous countries, while the free movement of goods and services is in part responsible for the current crisis. The free movement of capital has forced EU leaders to face the consequences of different national banking regulations that allow capital flight and tax evasion. While better oversight and collaboration make tax collection across borders easier, they do little to stem capital flight, which weakens banking sectors in already struggling economies."
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Companies won't even look at résumés of the long-term unemployed - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...es-of-the-long-term-unemployed generations companies résumés unemployed
shared by anonymous on 15 Apr 13 - Cached
  • Matthew O’Brien reports on a striking new paper by Rand Ghayad and William Dickens of Northeastern University. The researchers sent out 4,800 fake résumés at random for 600 job openings. What they found is that employers would rather call back someone with no relevant experience who’s only been out of work for a few months than someone with lots of relevant experience who’s been out of work for longer than six months.
  • Here’s what this looks like in chart form:
  • the long-term unemployed are struggling to find work no matter how many job openings pop up.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • there’s some ambiguity about whether companies are discriminating irrationally against the unemployed or whether they have good reason for screening out people who have been out of work for six months or more.
  • Dozens of states have been considering legislation that would make it illegal to discriminate against the long-term unemployed. Some proposals would even allow unsuccessful applicants to sue under the same discrimination laws that apply to race or gender bias.
  • These proposals have plenty of critics. But it’s also unclear whether they would have much impact.
  • The Obama administration, for its part, has proposed a few other ideas, including training programs and tax credits for businesses that hire the long-term unemployed. (The latter were even included in the American Jobs Act that Republicans blocked in Congress.)
  • Yet economists have argued that while these programs might help at the margins, they won’t necessarily bring down the overall unemployment rate. For instance, a company might just hire a subsidized worker over someone else.
  • It’s worth noting, as Matt Yglesias points out here, that long-term unemployment was a major structural problem after the Great Depression too. But as this old essay by Richard Jensen suggests, it took World War II to finally solve the problem: “The war, by removing millions of prime men from the labor market, by restructuring the work process, by subsidizing wages, and by massive retraining, finally gave the private sector the methods and the incentives to rehire the hard-core.” That’s not really an option today, but it underscores a bleak fact about the recession. When the labor market stays weak for years on end, the damage becomes long-lasting — and extremely difficult to reverse.
  • anonymous on 15 Apr 13
     
    "Here's one big reason why America's unemployment crisis may be here to stay. Thanks to the lasting effects of the recession, there are currently 4.7 million workers who have been out of work for at least 27 weeks. And new research suggests that employers will almost never consider hiring them."
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Moore's Law and the Origin of Life | MIT Technology Review - 0 views

www.technologyreview.com/...res-law-and-the-origin-of-life
shared by anonymous on 15 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • These guys argue that it’s possible to measure the complexity of life and the rate at which it has increased from prokaryotes to eukaryotes to more complex creatures such as worms, fish and finally mammals. That produces a clear exponential increase identical to that behind Moore’s Law although in this case the doubling time is 376 million years rather than two years.That raises an interesting question. What happens if you extrapolate backwards to the point of no complexity–the origin of life?Sharov and Gordon say that the evidence by this measure is clear. “Linear regression of genetic complexity (on a log scale) extrapolated back to just one base pair suggests the time of the origin of life = 9.7 ± 2.5 billion years ago,” they say. And since the Earth is only 4.5 billion years old, that raises a whole series of other questions. Not least of these is how and where did life begin.
  • Of course, there are many points to debate in this analysis. The nature of evolution is filled with subtleties that most biologists would agree we do not yet fully understand.
  • For example, is it reasonable to think that the complexity of life has increased at the same rate throughout Earth’s history?
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • They also point out that astronomers believe that the Sun formed from the remnants of an earlier star, so it would be no surprise that life from this period might be preserved in the gas, dust and ice clouds that remained. By this way of thinking, life on Earth is a continuation of a process that began many billions of years earlier around our star’s forerunner.
  • However, if life takes 10 billion years to evolve to the level of complexity associated with humans, then we may be among the first, if not the first, intelligent civilisation in our galaxy. And this is the reason why when we gaze into space, we do not yet see signs of other intelligent species.
  • There’s no question that this is a controversial idea that will ruffle more than a few feathers amongst evolutionary theorists.But it is also provocative, interesting and exciting. All the more reason to debate it in detail.
  • anonymous on 15 Apr 13
     
    "As life has evolved, its complexity has increased exponentially, just like Moore's law. Now geneticists have extrapolated this trend backwards and found that by this measure, life is older than the Earth itself."
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Things We Don't Know: The beast with a billion backs: Part 1 - 0 views

blog.thingswedontknow.com/...with-billion-backs-part-1.html
shared by anonymous on 15 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • We like to think of ourselves in the singular, but the reality is we are a swirling composite of thousands of species, more accurately thought of as an ecosystem than as an individual.
  • There is the core ‘us’, the cells that contain our DNA. But we are also like the land on which a rich forest might grow
  • Together they are our ‘microbiome’.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • in return for shelter and a share of the spoils from our meals, some make vitamins, liberate nutrients and energy from food, and protect us from their pathogenic cousins. Millions of years of co-evolution with our microbial horde have forged this relationship, shaping us both in ways whose significance we’re still trying to understand.
  • One of the biggest problems in unpicking the microbiome’s relationship with health is working out if the changes and differences are a cause, an intermediate step, or a consequence of developing a disease.
  • separating our environment from disease is proving hard.
  • Crohns disease is a good example
  • we know a disrupted microbiota is one of its features.
  • But we can’t yet say for sure if this is the cause or the effect.
  • If it starts with our own physiology, then we need to investigate treatments targeted at those changes, but if it starts with the microbiome our treatments will be different.
  • With so many branches it’s perhaps no surprise that so many other organisms can call us ‘home’.
  • In the past we’ve been well served by the one-pathogen-one-disease model for tracking, monitoring and avoiding infectious diseases. But do beneficial, or harmless, bugs in the microbiome spread like pathogens? If not, how?
  • It is important to understand this because of the number of links between the microbiome and a number of diseases like diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, food allergies, and even obesity.
  • An improved picture of how our communities of microbes – good and bad – come together and move through populations could help us to develop interventions to significantly reduce, or prevent, the numbers of people with these conditions. Or, at the least, find ways to hobble this trend.
  • Understanding both the flow of microbes and the factors which influence it may also be important for any treatments we produce.
  • We’ve been manipulating our microbial ecosystems for years, both naturally through our immune systems and, perhaps more worryingly, through a weapon of microbial mass destruction: antibiotics.
  • anonymous on 15 Apr 13
     
    "This post is by freelance science writer Gavin Hubbard. Gavin originally trained as a Medical Biochemist at the University of Surrey and spent over 10 years working in biotechnology, immunology and clincal trials. He writes both for industry and for a general audience, with a focus on health, immunology and pathology. He blogs at Sciencehubb.co.uk and can be found on twitter as @GavinHub"
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