In the twinkling of an eye

From Stanford to a startup, for education

Via Slashdot:

One of the most amazing things I’ve ever done in my life is to teach a class to 160,000 students. In the Fall of 2011, Peter Norvig and I decided to offer our class “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” to the world online, free of charge.

We spent endless nights recording ourselves on video, and interacting with tens of thousands of students. Volunteer students translated some of our classes into over 40 languages; and in the end we graduated over 23,000 students from 190 countries. In fact, Peter and I taught more students AI, than all AI professors in the world combined. This one class had more educational impact than my entire career.

Many professors are wary of on-line education as it is typically put forth, primarily because they see the potential of their course material being co-opted by their employer and rendering them redundant.

I guess Thrun is pointing out an alternative way that doesn’t involve the middle man.

Interesting times for education, indeed.

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Impact of iPad on Learning

With all the noise and data-less discussion about Apple’s recent textbook and education announcements it is useful to see some results on educational outcomes that can flow from technology. From AppleInsider:

A yearlong pilot program with digital textbooks on Apple’s iPad found that students’ algebra scores increased by 20 percent when compared to a curriculum with traditional books.

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Xcode and Lion

Sitting down to work and calling on my handy makefile I am greeted by:

  serge:spatialEconometrics/ $ make vol1                                [9:08:36]
  zsh: correct 'make' to '_make' [nyae]? n
  zsh: command not found: make
  serge:spatialEconometrics/ $      

Oh, maybe I neglected to install Xcode? First up The App Store. It tells me I’ve already installed it. Ok, but there are no signs of Xcode anywhere. So….

Google dance where I find a solution.

Quitting iTunes and then killing iTunes helper in the Activity Monitor followed by a search in spotlight for Install Xcode did me right.

Two nights in a row with Lion woes. Make the madness stop.

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All that glitters is not gold

I’ve heard recent rumblings about apparent rough edges in Lion, but up until today hadn’t experienced any. Tonight when working on a project I did what I often do and grabbed a screenshot to describe a bug or result. When I went to preview the image before I emailed it I get:

The file was fine as an attachment but the glitch is annoying and very unMac-like. Preview is a core app on this OS and for it to behave like this is not a Good Thing.

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Instapaper

David Sparks with yet another excellent overview of one of my heavily used apps:

I consider Instapaper a transformative technology. It changed, for the better, what and how I read. I have a collection of RSS feeds and twitter friends that throw interesting links at me every day. From all of those sources I quickly select bits and pieces for reading later, in Instapaper. Both my twitter client (Tweet Bot) and RSS reader (Reeder) make this painless. I’ve taken the time to create folders in my Instapaper accounts so whatever I’m feeling like reading, I just need to tap a button and my own self curated magazine appears.

Yup, definitely has been a transformative app for me.

Posted in Mac OS X | No Comments »

Love, friendship, and a home

Brother Gregory:

But a man cannot live, no, on riches alone. He needs love, friendship, and a home, or he is all alone.

I remember being 13 years old at a swap meet and randomly selecting an 8-track that had a version of Oncoming Traffic. First time I listened to it I was moved.

Still am.

Posted in Random synapse firing | No Comments »

Apple tax

Recently I replaced my daughter’s aging macbook with a new 13” Macbook Pro. The occasion had me thinking about the Apple Tax: the claim that Apple builds in a nice profit for its hardware.

I have no argument with the nice profit angle, as there is plenty of evidence supporting this. Plus, I experienced this first hand as I did the in-store-pickup thing and had never seen such a crowd. Almost impossible to walk without bumping into a customer or someone in one of those red shirts.

What I might take issue with is the implicit criticism in that there is a disconnect between the price of the hardware and its quality. My own experience has run counter to this as any Mac hardware I purchased has resulted in one of three experiences:

1. I kept and heavily used it until I ran it into the ground and/or felt the need to upgrade. Said machine was passed on to friend/family or server/experimental duty.
2. Something better looking came along, shortly after purchasing the hardware, so I sold it to close to, or in some cases above, what I originally paid.
3. There were problems with the hardware but these all occurred during the first year, or within the period of Apple Care and were promptly set right by Apple.

All in all, never felt as if I didn’t get my money’s worth buying Apple hardware.

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todo.txt for iOS

The iOS version has arrived.

A couple of thoughts. First, it is cool to see an application that got developed on the terminal first, then for Android, followed by iOS. The sequence reflects the classic path of developers scratching their own itches, and only then turning to a wider market.

Second, having used the Android app a while back and, since yesterday, the iOS app I am not overly excited about the third coming here. Getting all kinds of sync-gone-conflict messages from Dropbox. I’m coming around to the view that todo.txt is really meant for the terminal – it is brilliant there. On mobile devices it just feels like there are too many speed bumps.

Finally, it is early days on the iOS app, and since it is an open source project things will improve, no doubt.

I’m keeping an eye on it and looking forward to its evolution.

Posted in Random synapse firing | 2 Comments »

Sculptured by Weights and a Strict Vegan Diet

From the NYTimes:

Denny Kakos, the president of the International Natural Bodybuilding Association, said he had no vegan bodybuilders entering his competitions in the late 1980s and early ’90s. Today, vegans make up a sliver of the approximately 6,000 people who compete through the group each year, but they have been a steady, small presence since the 2000s, Kakos said.

I’m trying to envision the Venn diagram for the intersection of these two subsets of the population – vegans and body builders. It is no doubt a thin lens. Given that a “small sliver” of competitive (natural) body builders are vegans, I’m guessing the percentage of all humans that are vegan body builders (of the natural bent) amounts to essentially rounding error. Nothing against those in the rounding error – indeed my interest stems not from the body building angle but rather the vegan focus. Been a vegetarian on and off for most of my adult life, but today marks two months of going vegan. Very much a work in progress, but the juxtaposition of these two groups in this article just struck me as too quirky not to comment on.

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A Mammoth Perspective

Doc’s Searls:

Still, knowing the provenance of Long Valley and Mammoth gives the observer reason to pause and wonder — not only at the hugeness of Earth’s formative events, but of our species’ oblivity to them.

Don’t know how many times I have driven down the backside of Mammoth – I’m guilty of my fair share of oblivity.

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