Group items tagged

"Users of Social Networking sites frequently discuss events which will occur in the near future. By annotating Named Entities and resolving temporal expressions (for example "next Friday"), we are able to automatically extract a calendar of popular events occurring in the near future from Twitter. "

"We will be live-streaming this event using YouTube's Live Event service. Below is a list of the sessions, and you can watch the individual sessions on their respective "watch pages". Each has its own unique page, complete with chat, so be sure to return here to click the link to each individual session."

I wonder how often this opportunity is there but the person isn't . . . seems like the very definition of computational thinking. "In the end, the tool was very crude but accomplished something very useful: It had a flow that ensured all the reports required by people on the ground, and above, were sent in a timely and orderly manner. Each step of that flow was almost entirely automated. Each button filled a template and put the text in the clipboard for copy-pasting in the chat. Events were timed automatically. Distances and time of travel were computed automatically. A dropdown menu facilitated entering common values. Big warning signs were visible when a time critical step was ongoing, or some important data was missing."

"It's not that my memory improved but, instead, that I started archiving these events and ideas with my phone, as photographs. Now, if I want to research the painter whose portraits I admired at the museum, I don't have to read through page after page of my chicken scratch trying to find her name. When I need the title of a novel someone recommended, I just scroll back to the day we were at the bookstore together. Looking through my photo stream, there is a caption about Thomas Jefferson smuggling seeds from Italy, which I want to research; a picture of a tree I want to identify, which I need to send to my father; the nutritional label from a seasoning that I want to re-create; and a man with a jungle of electrical cords in the coffee shop, whose picture I took because I wanted to write something about how our wireless lives are actually full of wires. Photography has changed not only the way that I make notes but also the way that I write. Like an endless series of prompts, the photographs are a record of half-formed ideas to which I hope to return."

" IN the coming weeks, two million Americans will earn a bachelor's degree and either join the work force or head to graduate school. They will be joyous that day, and they will remember fondly the schools they attended. But as this unique chapter of life closes and they reflect on campus events, one primary part of higher education will fall low on the ladder of meaningful contacts: the professors."

""Twitter is really useful for simultaneous monitoring of events in real time," says Witze (who is also on TON's Board of Directors). At another meeting, the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston in March 2015, she went to a session about the MAVEN mission to Mars. She used real-time Twitter feeds to get a sense of what the scientists in the room thought was important, and wrote up this story while the speakers were still talking. The real-time feedback she got from Twitter was "like having a small army of smart people helping out," Witze says. And following the live tweets provides "a whole other level of commentary" that can be valuable for identifying sources to interview for a story. "

Faculty development as indoctrination and humiliation

Wow. Worst thing ever.

On the function side, Google intends to make the news as balanced and objective as possible with options including comparisons of the same story from multiple, competing news sources, news only from eyewitnesses, and a graphic coverage timeline to track the progress of reporting as well as the events of the story.

Embrace imperfection. Makers are more interested in learning and experimenting rather than perfection and that's OK. They try (and fail) often to perfect their projects and to make lots of small bets which eventually lead them to THE BIG IDEA. Makers do it for the fun first and iterate and refine as they go.

Love the process. A focus on trusting the process rather than outcome is essential to the Maker mentality. Creativity and making is an ongoing rhythm, a lifestyle which is more a way of being than a hobby or isolated event.

Other thoughts on this interesting link. Writing a grant focused on the iterative process of improving health care this is exactly what the funders are looking for. How to set up teams (with the 'right' mix of individuals) that are working in an environment where they can fail (without hurting anybody) and improve processes both for the team and the rest of the organization. The later is much harder - how to disseminate good processes that others can then improve upon in complex organizations. But yes the goal is to always work on the process improvement (the makers mentality as it is called in this piece).

"In short, says Stahl, "[infants] take surprising events as special opportunities to learn." This theory, that we're born knowing certain rules of the world, isn't new. We see evidence of it not only in humans but in lots of others species, too. What's new is this idea: that core knowledge seems to motivate babies to explore things that break those rules and, ultimately, to learn new things."

"Design thinking is an approach to innovation that combines human desirability, business viability, and technical feasibility to develop solutions to society's everyday problems. By putting people at the center, designing thinking and the human-centered design process ask innovators and leaders to tackle problems from multiple perspectives, especially those of people whose needs and desires are at the core of any problem. "

Someone asked about mapping from the calendar to a spreadsheet. This is a pretty dead simple option using IFTTT.