I'm pretty sure the research shows that, rather than stick to a consistent routine, you should vary your routine. Creates new neural connections and avoids the use it or lose it effect. Also, this works for exercise too...you need to change it up. Make a calendar and limit your appointments or meetings to no more than what will fit in the block....three, max.
Remember the old thing about organized data = information, and information that can be used in multiple contexts is called knowledge. The older you get, the more cognitive templates you have, patterns against which you can match problems. This is supposed to make up for the less firm grasp on every tiny detail. Wisdom, the school of hard knocks.
Also, when someone asks for something and you are away from your external memory devices like calendar or journal or Blackberry, ask them to send the request in email, with more details! It's up to them to remember to ask again!
Taking formal courses is fun and challenging....take up something you loved in school and put aside....the A's will come easier because you are better at prioritizing, and have a richer matrix into which you can hang the facts. Quiet place to study is crucial, and take advantage of the textbooks' websites, etc.
Do you know CPR? First Aid? Take a class and become a Red Cross volunteer or EMT or something else equally useful, to help out in the event of a big disaster. Learn to garden, or cook. Have a great time!
Read what the younger folks around you are reading, and check out some of their music, so you have a common framework. If you are good at not being condescending, you can often provide the history or context for something they may not know about. Heck, you were around when the Beatles were recording....or when hip hop was born.......or when AIDS started cutting its swath thru the world...or when Marc Andreesen demo'd Mosaic at Illinois....but limit yourself. Better to be asked than to monologue.
Get a passport and travel abroad. Fifteen minutes a day, consistently, of a foreign language and you will be fluent enough to carry on a conversation in a year. By now you should know what your learning style is...take advantage of it!
When I read Robot Magazine, I am thrilled to see girls in the some of the competition team pictures. I just wish some of the kits and projects were a little more aesthetically pleasing (no, they don't have to be pink), that there was less emphasis on combat bots and more on other types of applications and tasks..... and more evidence of women as sponsors and team advisors.
It doesn't matter who goes to grad school in the "hard" sciences, if the people teaching kids science at the elementary school level are not pushing all students to study science by their own example of passion for these fields, we'll never get more women in these fields at the top levels.
whose new book, "Creating a world without poverty: how social business can transform our lives" is #1234 on Amazon right now in the hardcover edition, explains quite simply that a social business is one that differs from a profit-making business in that it repays the investors their capital, continues to provide ownership to investors and to the disadvantaged, has a social mission, and does not pay dividends but returns the profits to the organization or to the community that it serves. Social businesses can indeed have paid employees, and would probably have an intermediate tax status between a profit-making business and a non-profit. As almost everyone on the planet probably knows, Yunus won the Nobel prize, together with the Grameen Bank that he founded, for their work on microfinance.
If your campus uses Blackboard, one answer is to set up a discussion forum on the course Blackboard site. When a student asks a question about the homework, everybody gets to see the answer. If the student asks via email or IM, the professor can answer the question and post the question and answer to the Blackboard site for the course.
Many other courses are using software that customizes problems for each student. You can help each other out with figuring out HOW to do the problem, but copying the answer gets you a zero. Sharing how to do the problem is what real study groups are all about. Aplia, for example, is one that is commonly used in econ courses.
I notice that Facebook has an application called Study Group. Was the group at Ryerson using this app?
In many academic environments, Blackboard is used for many courses, as a way to get course information, turn in assignments, and communicate. Take tests, sometimes. Students with brandy-new Vista machines were unable to post to class discussion boards or take part in surveys or online tests. They haven't figured out the problem yet, but it does not seem to be the Active-X issue which is an ongoing problem from recent Explorer upgrades. About a year ago, Blackboard was saying that it wasn't yet Vista compatible. Still seems not to be.
At the big box stores, it is easier to collude with an employee than at a closely-watched mom and pop shop. Talk to any former store manager at the big chains and they can tell you how often they got ripped off by employees. Of course, the disincentive has to be pretty strong to keep a minimum wage employee from completing their holiday shopping "on the house"...but most of the actual policies pay lip service to loss prevention and don't stop the really big stuff, like fake purchase orders, etc.
Well, we are all dying...some just take longer than others. Every day past 21 years is gravy. But it sure is hard to live in the moment wearing that red vest when I'm 83. Hope my bones hold up. Don't anyone shove a shopping cart at me.
Here, here on the grad school. Trust me on this, in ten years or 15, there may be a whole new field that you decide to investigate....you won't have had any courses in this subject in your undergraduate degree, or hardly anything applicable, and the GPA and test scores will be the only signal to the admissions folks as to your capability. However, most grad school admission committees (at serious schools, not fly-by-night degree mills) take the GPA and test scores as less important the older you are and the longer you have been out of school (within limits---don't try to go to med school at age 50 having flunked every science course)
Proving that they hold applicants to certain minimum GPA and test scores is usually part of the accreditation process for universities in the US; the school can pick its own standards for admissions but then must stick with them and give proof of that to the accreditors, who visit every three to five years or so. Your folder becomes evidence in that accreditation audit. They usually have some small percentage of admissions decisions that (say 5%) may be made outside of these standards. Sometimes geezers are part of the exceptions. And having kept in touch with your old profs helps, too.
But who owns it? Are you the owner of it or does the web site take ownership? What if I have a gene for shiny hair and somebody wants to copy it someday? Just wondering.....who will get the royalties?
At least the ten year old's get to have some recognition of their competence...much of our society, for legal reasons, has shut down many other opportunities that kids used to have to show their competence and earn respect. For instance, Civil Air Patrol does fewer actual rescues (thanks to emergency beacons) and they don't do recoveries...at least the kids aren't allowed near the downed planes. And they can't do search and rescue operations in the boonies because they might run into pharmaceutical entrepreneurs' booby traps. Many organizations have stopped hiring anyone under 18 for liability reasons, or you have to be an employee's child to get in the door. Tried applying online for any jobs and had the website tell you "so long, and come back when you are older"...? Ah, well, that really encourages the youngsters to look forward to paying my social security.
Don't worry, the insurance companies already know. There are several good (so far, science fiction) novels exploring what happens when a company does find out.
A lot of places are still trying to hire people for end user support that has been decentralized. I don't mean pulling cable to new cubicles, because that stuff has been outsourced for a long time at a lot of shops. What I mean is, can you produce database tools for managers or sales people that help them better understand their jobs and sell more stuff? This usually means having some kind of ERP knowledge and a great background in Excel and Access. Sometimes it means building web-based things on their intranets. Doesn't hurt to read a lot on interface design and also everything by Ed Tufte and similar authors. What I am talking about is the very unglamorous stuff like taking whatever budget tools they are using and adapting them for lower levels of management that don't get to play with the licensed copies of the budget stuff. Companies still haven't figured out how to hold the vendors accountable for the implementation screwups when things don't work according to plan, and so they end up fixing a lot of things. Do a few different projects like this and move around and you get a real good idea of how the company actually works and how the software and hardware tools should be working for them. It's fun, and it pays pretty well.
Now, is free trade in the labor market good for the global economy? Most economic models say yes. Is it good for the US economy? The answer is less clear, though the answer leans towards it being good for the US economy. Is it good for technology workers? Probably not, as with new competition they will have to accept lower wages.
The models at the simplest level show that it is good for the US economy, too, and try to show that it is good for the workers in the long run. Supposedly, the lower wages will free up capital to be invested in more profitable industries and incent the newly-freed up workers to move to industries with higher pay and higher productivity. The typical example is the television factories that closed in the US and the big pharma manufacturers that replaced them. We all know that tv assemblers can't easily shift to big pharma jobs; maybe their kids will be better off. Can't forget, though, that the models all were based on David Ricardo's model, which assumed no free movement of labor and no impact on income distribution as a result of trade changes. And that recent attempts to get those who benefit from freer trade to help compensate those who lose (by paying for retraining, etc) have not been very successful. And that changes in the risk-sharing between worker and stockholder as well as holes in the social safety net make the losses come down heavily on the side of the worker.
Sure. It seems so obvious a target for an open source project. And there are many kids (and adults) who aren't eligible for EPGY or CTY programs, or can't afford them unless they are fully-funded, but who could benefit from such an opportunity. Just as the world cries out for more math and science knowledge, the universities are becoming more and more unaffordable. (MIT's Open University project amounts to throwing open the syllabi, which only works for a certain segment of the population.) In my dreams, this open source math project becomes self-regenerating as the students get so into it that they learn to program, do further study, and add ideas, content and problems to it.
You might want to think about what your values are, and how your investments can support them. For example, if you want to keep programming jobs in your home country, you would want to invest in companies that are doing so.
Another great book to read is
Your Money or Your Life
by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin. They give great basic advice, although they are very conservative in terms of where to keep your investments. Their contention is that you make very rational decisions regarding allocating your most precious resource (your time!)and after five to seven years, you should be more free to choose to work when you want, and spend the rest of the time devoted to causes of your own choosing, like open source development, community development, running a soup kitchen that teaches programming skills on the side, or whatever. It's worth a read!
.... to develop educational software that could take a person from basic math (k-8 level) through algebra and on to calculus and beyond.
Most kids don't learn well from chalk-and-talk lectures that seem to begin at ever younger ages in our teach-to-the-test school system.
My ideal math system would be for anyone who needs a little bit more structure than simply reading a book by themselves can provide, whether they want to pursue a single topic or a general march through maths.
What I'm thinking of is a program that would do everything from assessing the starting level to suggesting further areas to explore in various applied topics. You would have to be very careful not to incorporate any kind of prorietary testing or content, but there are tons of older and classic math texts to mine that are already in the public domain.
This would solve some of the problems with math instruction by non-mathematicians. Think about kids in space. How did they learn math in children's science fiction of the early space age? Some kind of software that customized instruction for each learner.
What I envision is something like the best of Stanford's EPGY math courseware without the Math Races (or you could opt in for math drill if you like). One of the beauties of the EPGY math program is that it is multi-threaded. You can move ahead in areas that are strengths and catch up on other things that need more work.
I've been looking at commercial packages, especially those designed for homeschooling and I'm not finding anything as user friendly as what I have in mind. It would also provide multiple starting points and paths through the material. Say a kid (or adult) gets interested in trajectories as a result of hearing about potato launchers, or from reading Backyard Ballistics or another Ballistics website. A math newbie of whatever age would have to get through at least early algebra. Some people could start right in and play with simulations or be directed to local groups with launch-related activities. (Hmmm...hopefully not groups on some homeland security watch list...) Links in the system would bring them back to the goal topic of interest from time to time to see their progress, or would send them on to other areas.
Another feature of this program would be to incorporate the potential for multiple styles of learning. Also, once a concept was grasped, mindless repetition would not be needed in the form of worksheets and drill. Instead, you could move right along to the application of the concept.
Certain paths could follow the content outline for things like AP calculus, providing equivalent instruction to a good AP math course in a traditional classroom. Those craving external assessment (or trying to save money on college tuition) could then take a test and prove to the world that they had conquered AP Calculus.
I'm thinking that Python might be a useful starting place...any ideas?
My other idea is to have a city-wide or national or global math problem of the day, with the radio anchors yukking it up about possible solutions the same way they talk about the weekend's new movies. Problems could be on different levels, something to intrigue a different group each day.
4. I think the greatest misuse of spreadsheets is in using them to consolidate financial data. It's seductive. You get to see what you are doing, you get visual feedback, but
a. data is not protected against alteration
Arrrghhhhh! If you've ever lived through an entire department sharing an evolving unprotected spreadsheet with a new tab per month, used to generate monthly, quarterly and annual management reports and criefings for senior management, and had some *helpful* person decide to *update all links*, you have truly known the meaning of despair.
It looks like the software that I'm looking for (dreaming of???) would go in a separate "Section", say #5 after "Expositions." The Expositions appear to be the sort of content that would be behind the software that I have in mind.
*But* LaTex is a document preparation system, and what I'm looking for is more along the lines of a mathematical learning MOO, something like the old educational one that ran at MIT's Media lab for a while. Or like the well-known close-in reaches of LambdaMoo's dungeons (Cookie, anyone?).
I used Tex and LaTex years ago, but I know very little about how they are used today, and how the interface with websites and software. To wit, could content from PlanetMath be easily integrated with programming that would weave it together and add in exercises, drills, testing, etc? Are the same sort of folks who are contributing to PlanetMath likely to be ones who also do coding of this interactive sort just described?
Slashdot Mirror
Geeks rule, especially in emergencies!
I'm pretty sure the research shows that, rather than stick to a consistent routine, you should vary your routine. Creates new neural connections and avoids the use it or lose it effect. Also, this works for exercise too...you need to change it up.
Make a calendar and limit your appointments or meetings to no more than what will fit in the block....three, max.
Remember the old thing about organized data = information, and information that can be used in multiple contexts is called knowledge. The older you get, the more cognitive templates you have, patterns against which you can match problems. This is supposed to make up for the less firm grasp on every tiny detail. Wisdom, the school of hard knocks.
Also, when someone asks for something and you are away from your external memory devices like calendar or journal or Blackberry, ask them to send the request in email, with more details! It's up to them to remember to ask again!
Taking formal courses is fun and challenging....take up something you loved in school and put aside....the A's will come easier because you are better at prioritizing, and have a richer matrix into which you can hang the facts. Quiet place to study is crucial, and take advantage of the textbooks' websites, etc.
Do you know CPR? First Aid? Take a class and become a Red Cross volunteer or EMT or something else equally useful, to help out in the event of a big disaster. Learn to garden, or cook. Have a great time!
Read what the younger folks around you are reading, and check out some of their music, so you have a common framework. If you are good at not being condescending, you can often provide the history or context for something they may not know about. Heck, you were around when the Beatles were recording....or when hip hop was born.......or when AIDS started cutting its swath thru the world...or when Marc Andreesen demo'd Mosaic at Illinois....but limit yourself. Better to be asked than to monologue.
Get a passport and travel abroad. Fifteen minutes a day, consistently, of a foreign language and you will be fluent enough to carry on a conversation in a year. By now you should know what your learning style is...take advantage of it!
Ask the Canadians, who have done a much better job of figuring out how to do this than the Americans.
When I read Robot Magazine, I am thrilled to see girls in the some of the competition team pictures. I just wish some of the kits and projects were a little more aesthetically pleasing (no, they don't have to be pink), that there was less emphasis on combat bots and more on other types of applications and tasks..... and more evidence of women as sponsors and team advisors.
It doesn't matter who goes to grad school in the "hard" sciences, if the people teaching kids science at the elementary school level are not pushing all students to study science by their own example of passion for these fields, we'll never get more women in these fields at the top levels.
whose new book, "Creating a world without poverty: how social business can transform our lives" is #1234 on Amazon right now in the hardcover edition, explains quite simply that a social business is one that differs from a profit-making business in that it repays the investors their capital, continues to provide ownership to investors and to the disadvantaged, has a social mission, and does not pay dividends but returns the profits to the organization or to the community that it serves. Social businesses can indeed have paid employees, and would probably have an intermediate tax status between a profit-making business and a non-profit. As almost everyone on the planet probably knows, Yunus won the Nobel prize, together with the Grameen Bank that he founded, for their work on microfinance.
If your campus uses Blackboard, one answer is to set up a discussion forum on the course Blackboard site. When a student asks a question about the homework, everybody gets to see the answer. If the student asks via email or IM, the professor can answer the question and post the question and answer to the Blackboard site for the course.
Many other courses are using software that customizes problems for each student. You can help each other out with figuring out HOW to do the problem, but copying the answer gets you a zero. Sharing how to do the problem is what real study groups are all about. Aplia, for example, is one that is commonly used in econ courses.
I notice that Facebook has an application called Study Group. Was the group at Ryerson using this app?
In many academic environments, Blackboard is used for many courses, as a way to get course information, turn in assignments, and communicate. Take tests, sometimes. Students with brandy-new Vista machines were unable to post to class discussion boards or take part in surveys or online tests. They haven't figured out the problem yet, but it does not seem to be the Active-X issue which is an ongoing problem from recent Explorer upgrades. About a year ago, Blackboard was saying that it wasn't yet Vista compatible. Still seems not to be.
At the big box stores, it is easier to collude with an employee than at a closely-watched mom and pop shop. Talk to any former store manager at the big chains and they can tell you how often they got ripped off by employees. Of course, the disincentive has to be pretty strong to keep a minimum wage employee from completing their holiday shopping "on the house"...but most of the actual policies pay lip service to loss prevention and don't stop the really big stuff, like fake purchase orders, etc.
Well, we are all dying...some just take longer than others. Every day past 21 years is gravy. But it sure is hard to live in the moment wearing that red vest when I'm 83. Hope my bones hold up. Don't anyone shove a shopping cart at me.
Proving that they hold applicants to certain minimum GPA and test scores is usually part of the accreditation process for universities in the US; the school can pick its own standards for admissions but then must stick with them and give proof of that to the accreditors, who visit every three to five years or so. Your folder becomes evidence in that accreditation audit. They usually have some small percentage of admissions decisions that (say 5%) may be made outside of these standards. Sometimes geezers are part of the exceptions. And having kept in touch with your old profs helps, too.
But who owns it? Are you the owner of it or does the web site take ownership? What if I have a gene for shiny hair and somebody wants to copy it someday? Just wondering.....who will get the royalties?
At least the ten year old's get to have some recognition of their competence...much of our society, for legal reasons, has shut down many other opportunities that kids used to have to show their competence and earn respect. For instance, Civil Air Patrol does fewer actual rescues (thanks to emergency beacons) and they don't do recoveries...at least the kids aren't allowed near the downed planes. And they can't do search and rescue operations in the boonies because they might run into pharmaceutical entrepreneurs' booby traps. Many organizations have stopped hiring anyone under 18 for liability reasons, or you have to be an employee's child to get in the door. Tried applying online for any jobs and had the website tell you "so long, and come back when you are older"...? Ah, well, that really encourages the youngsters to look forward to paying my social security.
Don't worry, the insurance companies already know. There are several good (so far, science fiction) novels exploring what happens when a company does find out.
A lot of places are still trying to hire people for end user support that has been decentralized. I don't mean pulling cable to new cubicles, because that stuff has been outsourced for a long time at a lot of shops. What I mean is, can you produce database tools for managers or sales people that help them better understand their jobs and sell more stuff? This usually means having some kind of ERP knowledge and a great background in Excel and Access. Sometimes it means building web-based things on their intranets. Doesn't hurt to read a lot on interface design and also everything by Ed Tufte and similar authors. What I am talking about is the very unglamorous stuff like taking whatever budget tools they are using and adapting them for lower levels of management that don't get to play with the licensed copies of the budget stuff. Companies still haven't figured out how to hold the vendors accountable for the implementation screwups when things don't work according to plan, and so they end up fixing a lot of things. Do a few different projects like this and move around and you get a real good idea of how the company actually works and how the software and hardware tools should be working for them. It's fun, and it pays pretty well.
The models at the simplest level show that it is good for the US economy, too, and try to show that it is good for the workers in the long run. Supposedly, the lower wages will free up capital to be invested in more profitable industries and incent the newly-freed up workers to move to industries with higher pay and higher productivity. The typical example is the television factories that closed in the US and the big pharma manufacturers that replaced them. We all know that tv assemblers can't easily shift to big pharma jobs; maybe their kids will be better off. Can't forget, though, that the models all were based on David Ricardo's model, which assumed no free movement of labor and no impact on income distribution as a result of trade changes. And that recent attempts to get those who benefit from freer trade to help compensate those who lose (by paying for retraining, etc) have not been very successful. And that changes in the risk-sharing between worker and stockholder as well as holes in the social safety net make the losses come down heavily on the side of the worker.
imagine if these things got loose in the back of beyond..... The horror! The horror!
I'd be more worried about having to pay for a rush job on a new passport. Expensive, aren't they?
They've been telling us P is the answer for years!
Sure. It seems so obvious a target for an open source project. And there are many kids (and adults) who aren't eligible for EPGY or CTY programs, or can't afford them unless they are fully-funded, but who could benefit from such an opportunity. Just as the world cries out for more math and science knowledge, the universities are becoming more and more unaffordable. (MIT's Open University project amounts to throwing open the syllabi, which only works for a certain segment of the population.) In my dreams, this open source math project becomes self-regenerating as the students get so into it that they learn to program, do further study, and add ideas, content and problems to it.
- Your Money or Your Life
by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin. They give great basic advice, although they are very conservative in terms of where to keep your investments. Their contention is that you make very rational decisions regarding allocating your most precious resource (your time!)and after five to seven years, you should be more free to choose to work when you want, and spend the rest of the time devoted to causes of your own choosing, like open source development, community development, running a soup kitchen that teaches programming skills on the side, or whatever. It's worth a read!.... to develop educational software that could take a person from basic math (k-8 level) through algebra and on to calculus and beyond.
Most kids don't learn well from chalk-and-talk lectures that seem to begin at ever younger ages in our teach-to-the-test school system.
My ideal math system would be for anyone who needs a little bit more structure than simply reading a book by themselves can provide, whether they want to pursue a single topic or a general march through maths.
What I'm thinking of is a program that would do everything from assessing the starting level to suggesting further areas to explore in various applied topics. You would have to be very careful not to incorporate any kind of prorietary testing or content, but there are tons of older and classic math texts to mine that are already in the public domain.
This would solve some of the problems with math instruction by non-mathematicians. Think about kids in space. How did they learn math in children's science fiction of the early space age? Some kind of software that customized instruction for each learner.
What I envision is something like the best of Stanford's EPGY math courseware without the Math Races (or you could opt in for math drill if you like). One of the beauties of the EPGY math program is that it is multi-threaded. You can move ahead in areas that are strengths and catch up on other things that need more work.
I've been looking at commercial packages, especially those designed for homeschooling and I'm not finding anything as user friendly as what I have in mind. It would also provide multiple starting points and paths through the material. Say a kid (or adult) gets interested in trajectories as a result of hearing about potato launchers, or from reading Backyard Ballistics or another Ballistics website. A math newbie of whatever age would have to get through at least early algebra. Some people could start right in and play with simulations or be directed to local groups with launch-related activities. (Hmmm...hopefully not groups on some homeland security watch list...) Links in the system would bring them back to the goal topic of interest from time to time to see their progress, or would send them on to other areas.
Another feature of this program would be to incorporate the potential for multiple styles of learning. Also, once a concept was grasped, mindless repetition would not be needed in the form of worksheets and drill. Instead, you could move right along to the application of the concept.
Certain paths could follow the content outline for things like AP calculus, providing equivalent instruction to a good AP math course in a traditional classroom. Those craving external assessment (or trying to save money on college tuition) could then take a test and prove to the world that they had conquered AP Calculus.
I'm thinking that Python might be a useful starting place...any ideas?
My other idea is to have a city-wide or national or global math problem of the day, with the radio anchors yukking it up about possible solutions the same way they talk about the weekend's new movies. Problems could be on different levels, something to intrigue a different group each day.
4. I think the greatest misuse of spreadsheets is in using them to consolidate financial data. It's seductive. You get to see what you are doing, you get visual feedback, but
a. data is not protected against alteration
Arrrghhhhh! If you've ever lived through an entire department sharing an evolving unprotected spreadsheet with a new tab per month, used to generate monthly, quarterly and annual management reports and criefings for senior management, and had some *helpful* person decide to *update all links*, you have truly known the meaning of despair.
Turns ordinary falls into fractures....
Exacerbates carpal tunnel syndrome....
Gets caught on stair rails and pulls your arm out of socket.....
yes, this is the fashion accessory I need!
I've just looked at it.
It looks like the software that I'm looking for (dreaming of???) would go in a separate "Section", say #5 after "Expositions." The Expositions appear to be the sort of content that would be behind the software that I have in mind.
*But* LaTex is a document preparation system, and what I'm looking for is more along the lines of a mathematical learning MOO, something like the old educational one that ran at MIT's Media lab for a while. Or like the well-known close-in reaches of LambdaMoo's dungeons (Cookie, anyone?).
I used Tex and LaTex years ago, but I know very little about how they are used today, and how the interface with websites and software. To wit, could content from PlanetMath be easily integrated with programming that would weave it together and add in exercises, drills, testing, etc? Are the same sort of folks who are contributing to PlanetMath likely to be ones who also do coding of this interactive sort just described?
Any ideas?
That's what the Paxil ads seem to suggest, anyway.