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Contents contributed and discussions participated by Lawrence Hrubes

Lawrence Hrubes

Can Writing on a College Entrance Exam Be Properly Assessed? - Room for Debate - NYTime... - 1 views

  • n revamping its SAT test for college admission, the College Board is making the essay portion optional. The written assessment was controversial since it was introduced in 2005, with some college officials expressing little confidence in what it demonstrated or how it was scored. But since an increasing number of college students are taking remedial reading and writing classes, shouldn’t the essay be mandatory? Is the bigger question, how can, or should, writing be judged?
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - Astrologers look to the stars to help Indian businesses - 4 views

  • It is another busy day for Abhishek Dhawan in Delhi. His phone has not stopped ringing and he has a series of business meetings. Many of his business clients want to know when is the best time to release their products. Abhishek has been studying a number of factors and charts to try to help them. But he is not a marketing guru or an economist - he is an astrologer and he uses the position of the stars and the planets as a guide to help businesses maximise their profits.
  • When I ask Abhishek what his success rate is, he answers immediately. "Eighty per cent - this is like a science and when we make mistakes it is because people do not provide us with the correct information."
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Future - Qwerty keyboards: Time for a rethink? - 0 views

  • Q-W-E-R-T-Y. Six letters that define so much of our waking lives.
  • In some ways, these six letters are a triumph of design. They’re wired into our brains, replicated on keyboards, phones and tablets across the world – and have changed very little since Milwaukee port official Christopher Sholes used the layout to stop mechanical levers jamming on a 19th-Century typewriter.
  • Some things simply seem to be too deeply and universally engrained to be susceptible to change, even if there would be numerous advantages in doing so.
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  • Most obviously, the future of interfaces like the Seaboard’s lies in applying its principles to other musical instruments. Beyond this, though, it also seemed to me to represent something far larger: the possibility of everyday computer interfaces able to respond to human hands with something of the incredible sophistication they themselves possess.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Future - The truth about technology's greatest myth - 1 views

  • Many optimists believe that technology can transform society, whether it’s the internet or the latest phone. But as Tom Chatfield argues in his final column for BBC Future, the truth about our relationship with technology is far more interesting.
  • while technological and scientific progress is indeed an astonishing thing – its relationship with human progress is more aspiration than established fact. Whether we like it or not, acceleration cannot continue indefinitely.
  • We may long to escape flesh and history, but the selves we are busy reinventing come equipped with the same old gamut of beauties, perversities and all-too-human failings.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Future - Why the world is awesome in 60 facts - 0 views

  • Earth Unplugged crew give you epic facts that show why the world is awesome.
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    8-minute fast-paced video with brief, interesting facts about the planet, animals and humans, from physics to biology to chemistry; good for a stimulating end to a class...
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Future - The power and beauty of data visualisation in science - 0 views

  • An exhibition at the British Library in London reveals the importance that visualising data has had on the scientific process – from 19th Century ship logs that still influence climate science, to models used to forecast the 2009 influenza pandemic.These images not only aid scientific progress, but also help to change the world.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Future - How to learn like a memory champion - 1 views

  • As Cooke first set out developing his idea, he turned to his former classmate at Oxford University, Princeton neuroscientist Greg Detre, to help update his tried-and-tested techniques with the latest understanding of memory. Together, they came up with some basic principles that would guide Memrise’s progress over the following years. The first is the idea of “elaborative” learning – in which you try to give extra meaning to a fact to try to get it to stick in the mind. These “mems”, as the team call them, are particularly effective if they tickle the funny bone as well as the synapses – and so for each fact that you want to learn, you are encouraged to find an amusing image or phrase that helps plant the memory in your mind.
  • Unsurprisingly, it was the friendly competition element that captured the attention of Traynor's primary school pupils learning Spanish. “As soon as they come into the classroom, they want to see where they are on the leader board,” he says. And there are other advantages. Each lesson, Traynor tends to split the class into two – while half are doing the “spade work” on vocabulary learning on the school's iPads, he can teach the others – before the two halves switch over. By working with these smaller groups, he can then give more individual attention to each child's understanding of the grammar.Even more powerfully, Traynor recently began encouraging his class to record and upload their pronunciation of the words onto the app – which they can then share with their classmates using the course. The sound of their classmates seems to have spurred on their enthusiasm, says Traynor. “They're constantly trying to work out whose voice they're hearing,” he says. “So they're giving more attention to the different sounds. I think it's improved their speaking and listening dramatically.”Although most courses on Memrise deal with foreign languages, teachers in other subjects are also starting to bring the technology to their classroom. Simon Birch from The Broxbourne School in Hertfordshire, for instance, uses it to teach the advanced terminology needed for food technology exams, while his school’s English department are using it to drill spelling. "The benefits for literacy can't be overstated," Birch says.
Lawrence Hrubes

Airy Hill Studio | My studio practice through the lens of the sketchbook - 0 views

  • Airy Hill Studio My studio practice through the lens of the sketchbook
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    Cory Wanamaker is a professional artist and sometimes-international-school teacher, part of the ISP community for several years (2012-2015+). This is his blog on process... and many aspects of the real work of being an artist.
Lawrence Hrubes

Why Does Google Glass Annoy People? : The New Yorker - 0 views

  • There are also privacy concerns. The general public doesn’t seem aware of exactly how Google Glass works, and people often assume it’s recording at all times.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC World Service - Exchanges at the Frontier, Exchanges at the Frontier, Kay Redfield ... - 0 views

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    "Kay Redfield Jamison is a clinical psychologist with a rare insight. She is a world leader in the study of bipolar (manic-depressive) illness, a condition that she herself has had since adolescence. As a highly regarded clinician with direct experience of the illness she treats, she has a special perspective on the debilitating nature of this psychiatric disorder and its seductive but disastrous highs, depressions and disordered thinking. She tells A.C.Grayling and an audience at Wellcome Collection in London about mania, creativity and the best medicine for an extraordinary condition."
Lawrence Hrubes

Elizabeth Kolbert: When Grownups Take the SAT : The New Yorker - 1 views

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    "Whatever is at the center of the SAT-call it aptitude or assessment or assiduousness or ambition-the exam at this point represents an accident. It was conceived for one purpose, adapted for another, and somewhere along the line it acquired a hold on American life that nobody ever intended."
Lawrence Hrubes

The Wrong Way to Teach Grammar - Michelle Navarre Cleary - The Atlantic - 0 views

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    "A century of research shows that traditional grammar lessons-those hours spent diagramming sentences and memorizing parts of speech-don't help and may even hinder students' efforts to become better writers. Yes, they need to learn grammar, but the old-fashioned way does not work."
Lawrence Hrubes

Joshua Foer: John Quijada and Ithkuil, the Language He Invented : The New Yorker - 1 views

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    "Languages are something of a mess. They evolve over centuries through an unplanned, democratic process that leaves them teeming with irregularities, quirks, and words like "knight." No one who set out to design a form of communication would ever end up with anything like English, Mandarin, or any of the more than six thousand languages spoken today. "Natural languages are adequate, but that doesn't mean they're optimal," John Quijada told me. Quijada had spent three decades inventing in his spare time. Ithkuil had never been spoken by anyone other than Quijada, and he assumed that it never would be. In his preface, Quijada wrote that his "greater goal" was "to attempt the creation of what human beings, left to their own devices, would never create naturally, but rather only by conscious intellectual effort: an idealized language whose aim is the highest possible degree of logic, efficiency, detail, and accuracy in cognitive expression via spoken human language, while minimizing the ambiguity, vagueness, illogic, redundancy, polysemy (multiple meanings) and overall arbitrariness that is seemingly ubiquitous in natural human language." Ithkuil has two seemingly incompatible ambitions: to be maximally precise but also maximally concise, capable of capturing nearly every thought that a human being could have while doing so in as few sounds as possible. "
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - The medicine in our minds - 0 views

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    "They are the miracle pills that shouldn't really do anything. Placebos come in all shapes and sizes, but they contain no active ingredient. And yet, mysteriously, they often seem to work."
Lawrence Hrubes

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The danger of a single story | Talk Video | TED - 0 views

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    "Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice - and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding."
Lawrence Hrubes

Is Atheism Irrational? - NYTimes.com - 3 views

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    AP: "I think there are a large number - maybe a couple of dozen - of pretty good theistic arguments. None is conclusive, but each, or at any rate the whole bunch taken together, is about as strong as philosophical arguments ordinarily get. G.G.: Could you give an example of such an argument? AP: One presently rather popular argument: fine-tuning. Scientists tell us that there are many properties our universe displays such that if they were even slightly different from what they are in fact, life, or at least our kind of life, would not be possible. The universe seems to be fine-tuned for life."
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - Mathematics: Why the brain sees maths as beauty - 2 views

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    "Brain scans show a complex string of numbers and letters in mathematical formulae can evoke the same sense of beauty as artistic masterpieces and music from the greatest composers."
Lawrence Hrubes

There Are 177,147 Ways To Tie A Tie | Popular Science - 0 views

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    "Mikael Vejdemo-Johansson, a mathematician in Stockholm, recently led a small team on a quest to discern how many tie knots are possible. Their results, uploaded to arXiv, say there are 177,147 different ways to tie the knot of a necktie. That is 177,062 more ways than were found in 1999 by Cambridge mathematicians Yong Mao and Thomas Fink, who arrived at 85 possible ways to tie a tie. Why the discrepancy?"
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - World War One: 10 interpretations of who started WW1 - 1 views

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    "As nations gear up to mark 100 years since the start of World War One, academic argument still rages over which country was to blame for the conflict. Here 10 leading historians give their opinion."
Lawrence Hrubes

International School of Prague: Mission & Strategic Plan - 2 views

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    "Purposeful: In developing a deep impulse and capacity for life-long learning, we learn to make considered choices and work towards meaningful goals, which provide direction, focus and purpose to our lives."
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