Archive for January, 2009
Saturday, January 31st, 2009
From BBC - Radio Labs - How we make websites comes this quote:
It’s nice if URIs are human readable. It’s also nice if they’re hackable. It’s an absolute prerequisite that they’re persistent.
Don’t sacrifice persistence for the sake of prettiness or misguided SEO. URIs are your promise to the web and your users - if you [...]
Posted in web | No Comments »
Tuesday, January 27th, 2009
In checking out some of the people mentioned in this posting by Seb Schmoller (which I learned of via Stephen Downes), I was led to consider where is the borderline between helping a student to learn and facilitating cheating.
Posted in education | No Comments »
Sunday, January 25th, 2009
This post at squareCircleZ (a very nice enrichment and support website for students and teachers of mathematics) raises the conundrum of how to define 0^0 if all positive x give x^0=1 and 0^x=0.
Posted in copyright, education, mathematics, world | No Comments »
Saturday, January 17th, 2009
Open Culture is a website developed by Dan Colman (who moonlights as the director of Stanford’s Continuing Studies program). It focuses on educational video offerings such as the Leonard Susskind
Physics Lectures, and includes
a page of links to other academic YouTube video collections.
Posted in education, web | No Comments »
Thursday, January 15th, 2009
In Sustainable Energy - without the hot air UK physicist David MacKay presents plausible back-of-the-envelope estimates of the scales of action needed under various strategies for reduction of global carbon fuel combustion. The numbers he uses are easily checked and his analysis can be re-run with revised parameters if needed. Only when a significant fraction [...]
Posted in climate, politics, sustainability | No Comments »
Thursday, January 15th, 2009
This article discusses the latest round of changes in the WNCP Math Curriculum. Somehow, after seeing perhaps half a dozen rounds of this game, the rhetoric of revolutionary change wears a bit thin.
Posted in education, mathematics | No Comments »
Wednesday, January 14th, 2009
The part I find most encouraging in Murray Bourne’s discussion of the latest TIMSS 2007 report on mathematics performance around the world is the distribution of gender differences - in particular the fact that the relative performance of females is stronger most especially in a number of Islamic countries. My top-of-the-head explanation for this is [...]
Posted in mathematics, social issues | No Comments »
Wednesday, January 14th, 2009
In contrast to this study (which I came to via Stephen Downes)showing that the internet just isn’t the danger to children it is often portrayed to be, we have Alec Couros reporting on Open Thinking & Digital Pedagogy » Blog Archive » Flickr Perversion, which is about the unpleasant experience of finding some of his [...]
Posted in social issues, web | No Comments »
Monday, January 12th, 2009
Philosophy Talk: The Blog: William James and the Squirrel Example.
Yes, James does seem to be confounding a number of issues in that lecture
His resolution of the squirrel dispute (“Which party is right,” I said, “depends on what you practically mean by ‘going round’ the squirrel”) looks more like linguistic analysis than anything else, and his [...]
Posted in uncategorized | No Comments »
Sunday, January 11th, 2009
I have always believed that disprportionate reponse is justifiable (if struck once I will strike back unpredictably harder if I can so that there is no future temptation to estimate expected value of an attack). And I understand that in the event of military action some level of “collateral damage” has to be expected (and [...]
Posted in world | No Comments »