Google Chrome - Download a new browser After several bad experiences with Google world, we're loath to tell you to run out and use the newest Google offering. However, we've heard some experts say that the underlying Webkit is leaps ahead and on a better path than Gecko (the underlying technology of Firefox).
So, if you're reading this and are a developre, you might jsut download and try.
Why History Isn’t Learned, and How Story Helps Change That | Beyond School Clay Burell talks about what kids really know at the end of the usual suspect social studies classes, and how to cure that. You'll find such words buried in this site, yet Burell puts them together wonderfully and explains that web media isn't at all essential to the task.
To Happy Grounds, Prof. Michalski I just discovered that the professor who most amazed me, Ryszard Michalski, died of cancer last fall. If you look on my profile for favorite books, Machine Learning: An Artificial Intelligence Approach, is at the top. As a technologist who is better than average with words and long fascinated with logic and the future, no other class quite caught my interest as much as his Machine Learning lectures. I was supposed to be on campus to study business--yet here was this genius teaching the very incarnation of science fiction itself! Artificial machines which could not just deduce, but invent!! How remarkable!
And the underlying math and mechanics! Who knew that there were so many types of logics? That logic might preserve truth--or might not!? That learning itself could be classified and taxonomified?
Alas, I didn't have the CS background to excel in this class, everyone else was in the dept., and I a lone transplant. A certain vocabulary and programming sophistication were assumed. Yet Ryszard was kind enough to respect the desire to learn--his lectures were far more human than most--and still honor the necessities of grading. Most members of the class produced a working ML program of some sort; he left open the option of a final, which probably I alone took. I doubt he needed the extra work of writing and grading it.
Via con Dios, Ryschard Michalski. I wager many, many past students celebrate your excellence.
The Monty Hall ProblemNew York Times Can't recall now where I first heard this, but it completely engrossed me at the time --and I am not much given to such puzzles. The challenge is one of those non-intuitive results that statistics gives us to a situation we all think to be perfectly obvious: Does it matter if you change your mind once Monty Hall opens a door on Lets Make a Deal?
Here, the times has turned the problem into a cool little animated interactive which lets you play for yourself.
Alas, it doesn't go the step further of doing an interactive with the math behind the problem.
[Copied verbatum from my post on Fireside Learning]. The Newshour this week continues its reports with John Merrow on education, and DC and New Orleans districts. New Orleans before Katrina was one of the poorest districts in the nation, but it also didn't have much of what we recognize as good education practices. DC has long been well funded, but notorious in its waste, and pathetic in its results.
I'll ask you to ask the questions about this. One I have is, can you tell from the videos which schools are going to need new leaders? Is there a certain energy level -physical, not just mental-necessary to transform a school to succeed?
Reputation Patterns Yahoo Developer Just found this interesting. Maybe not so if you spend most of your time coding or around CS types. Yet here are nine different patterns of how a user in a community can, over time, earn a quantifiable reputation.
Secrets of the Dead ? Sinking Atlantis | PBS Secrets of the Dead gave us some of the earliest good examples of using web media to learn history. What's notable here today? The complete lack of any web content whatsoever. There's a trailer--nothing else.
The Open History Project is an online community, and an
open source developer organization. It is also backed by a 501(c)3 organization
to raise and oversee funds for developer contests. The organization
is chartered under the laws of the state of Ohio, for the purpose of
advancing education. Yeah, we need contributions, or contacts with grantmakers.
e-mail Ed
