If you haven’t already seen it, check out this video that counts down from 100 using clips from 100 different movies. [via Ghost in the Machine] There’s not a lot to say except that it’s very clever. I didn’t think about it ahead of time, but as I was watching I was pleased that, where possible, famous scenes with numbers were used – of course 88 was the target speed of a time-traveling Delorean….
Tech for tech’s sake
I’d love to see additional details on how schools collected their data to conclude that giving students their own laptop does not improve learning. [via Arts & Letters Daily] There are many examples cited of the laptops being a distraction or being used for frivolous or illicit purposes. This isn’t at all shocking, and if laptops were otherwise improving learning this could likely be addressed through technological and disciplinary means. I’ve talked to someone at a small school that gives every student a laptop, and there are routine checks into the content on the laptop (no games or IM clients allowed) and laptop privileges are revoked if unauthorized uses are observed or detected.
However, that takes a broad school commitment to supporting laptops, and resources. And it seems like just the issues of repair and maintenance are a problem in many places – why do all schools seem to forget that part of the computing equation? It also doesn’t sound like equivalent resources have been invested in these schools in educating teachers on how to teach with technology. Just because you know how to use a computer doesn’t mean that you know how to teach to a room full of high school students with computers. Good schools hire someone, or any entire group of someones, who specializes in helping instructors integrate technology into their educational goals and style. Just purchasing hardware and putting it in the hands of students is not enough to expect improved education.
The thing that immediately jumped to my mind was whether these failures had any implications for the One Laptop per Child project that is building $100 laptops to distribute to children in developing countries. Clearly, education on their use is key, and it is my impression that that is being included in the project – these laptops aren’t just being sent in crates. But I also suspect that deploying these laptops in a setting where there is very little computing available will lead to a different attitude about the technology than in a setting where many of the children would have access to a computer (if only in a public lab or library) even if their personal laptop were taken away.
Pretty accurate, especially about the coffee
Sometimes, you just have to jump on a meme, and the Imagini VisualDNA at least looks pretty cool, and the process of choosing photos is sort of fun. Here’s mine:
Can you overdose on Ho Hos?
It’s odd enough that anyone decided to track which cities eat the most Ho Hos per capita, and it’s random that Pittsburgh tops the list, but the best thing about the Post-Gazette coverage of this “story” was apparently the lack of application of common sense or basic math literacy, allowing the orignal story to claim that the average Pittsburgher eats over 1.5 Ho Hos a day. It’s a little sad that this slipped through the editing process given how clearly ridiculous that statistic is. I particularly like the computation in the correction that, if their original statistics were correct, Pittsburghers together would be responsible for over half of the worldwide Ho Ho consumption.
Pretty, pretty food
I’ve seen this type of side-by-side comparison done for models, but this commparison of ads of fast food with photos of the real fast food as it is served is – well, okay, not very shocking at all – nobody expects fast food to look anything like the ads. But it’s still interesting to see quite how different the reality can be from what they are selling. [via Boing Boing]
Things I Do Not Need, But Want
Over the past couple of days I’ve come across a few things that I absolutely do not need, and absolutely covet – mostly because I am a huge geek:
- spicelab small magnetic spice rack – display your spices mounted in test tubes! I’d use up the spices that come with it and then use it to store the herbs I grow in my backyard….
- blossom lights – led lit branches with faux flowering buds are so pretty
- pretty much everything at Pololu, a new-to-me robotics shop – I suspect they even sell gears!
The Context of Art
This article describes an experiment where onne of the world’s top violinists plays for change in a subway station. The purpose is to determine if people recognize the quality of the performance out of context (spoiler: for the most part, no) but there is some interesting discussion of what this says about the current tempo of our lives and the ways in which we appreciate art. It would be really interesting to do the same experiment at the end of the day when the context is still the same but people are under less of a strict schedule, in general.
Free Software Advocacy
A couple of weeks ago, I was at a Free Software Foundation member’s meeting at MIT, and during the lunch break I overheard an interesting conversation. I cluster of five stereotypical geeks (male, bearded, pony-tailed, etc.) were talking. One of thm was regailing his friends ith a story of a clueless woman he had the misfortune of listening to talk about her computer usage. This woman was talking to a friend about typesetting a paper using LaTeX – it was later determined that she worked in some capacity in a physics lab. She described how it was good for equations and the friend asked if it was expensive. The woman thought and said that because they were part of the lab it was free, but that if you just had to buy it it was really expensive. She then thought a little more and noted that she knew someone who had it on their Mac and it was free, but she thought it didn’t seem as good and was probably a knockoff. The group laughed and generally concurred that this woman was painfully clueless and generally ought not be allowed computers at all.
When at all possible, involve a robot…
Two videos crossed my screen, via T, that represent what happens when students take their classroom experiences into their social world – though I suspect this isn’t precisely what the academic community is looking for when they hold up that goal. Down at Duke, a student modded a refridgerator to install an elevator platform and beer can launching arm that can be aim at, say, one’s sofa. Over at UC Berkeley, some mechanical engineers built a Beirut (Beer Pong) Robot that seems able to beat people, but also seems predicated on a pre-arranged table and cup layout. Both videos are pretty cool – though they don’t give quite enough information to answer the question of whether they are really robots or just cool mechanical devices.
Illustrating Tags
It’s been making the rounds quickly, but if you haven’t seen the Visual HTML Jokes pool over at flickr, it’s worth a browse. Some are just puns, but others actually do a nice job illustrating what the tags do, like the header tag/skyline one. I could see a selection of these actually making for a nice presentation of html tags in a class….