ALT Lab

""This is a musical experience, a meditational concentration experience," says Tod Machover, composer and inventor at the MIT Media Lab. He created Vocal Vibrations with architect and designer Neri Oxman and with the help of Al Grodzinsky, a bioengineer at MIT and an expert in biological tissue. "

"If we've let the fickleness of history and public policy describe the bizarre set of standards (looking at you, Math) and therefore the metrics that we'll measure all students against, you'll end up with a system designed for those metrics. Instead, if you define your own measures, and actually study longitudinally their validity, we'll end up in a place where perhaps we'll value the emotional-intelligence development of a teenager above their ability to comply with outdated curricula. Maybe we'll come to value the nuance of entrepreneurial thought opposed to attempting to cram a line of reasoning they stole wholesale from Reddit into five paragraphs 20 minutes before the paper is due. "

Watch all sorts of IP attacks live- pretty inspiring dataviz creation.

A different kind of YouTube comment . . .

Text analysis tool

By Chioke

Really cool mapping tools. *THIS* is what computing + the Web affords by way of augmenting human intelligence.

A novel made of GIFS! Enough said...

An interesting look at assessment in an Econ course. h/t Laura G.

"Criteria for Grades This course will revolve around exploring a question which is very current and for which there is no settled answer yet.  Therefore, we can't determine grades based on obtaining "the right answer" or even learning "the content."  There will be content to be learned, but learning content is not the point of the class, just a means to the end."

Some added dimension to the presentation conversation

"Before he operated on Violet, Dr. Meara wanted a more precise understanding of her bone structure than he could get from an image on a screen. So he asked his colleague Dr. Peter Weinstock to print him a three-dimensional model of Violet's skull, based on magnetic resonance imaging pictures."

"It's an annotator that you can carry around the web with you." h/t Gardner

Some impressive Vines

""Thank you," he wrote. "I love it when people are able to change their grammar based on a logical argument. I'm like that - in fact, I actually enjoy learning and adopting new grammar-but I frequently run into people so emotionally attached to their grammar that they will defend what 'sounds right' to the death.""

A WordPress parent theme for interactive maps and journalism