Moving to a Staff Blog. One school benefits by ditching mass emails and keeping all communication between staff on an internal blog. The information is archived, searchable, and comments beat the heck out of traditional email.
Month: February 2011
Status
Just helped fund The Manual on Kickstarter. Sounds like a great project to produce a high-quality print magazine about design on the web.
The new Gizmodo
I missed this when it launched but the new Gizmodo design is live. Like previewed it has the featured story area to the left and the more traditional blog column on the right.
Besides the fact that they had to write a blog post explaining how to use the new site (not a good start) there’s a glaring UI issue with the blog column.
Glancing at that column you might think I’m at the top of it. Instead I’ve scrolled down past a dozen stories or so. The problem is, there’s no visual indicator of how far I’ve scrolled or how much remains in the section.
The browser’s scroll bar registers progress in the left-hand column but there’s no equivalent for the blog stream.
It feels like a sleazy casino where they don’t want you to know how far in you’ve come and they definitely don’t want to tell you where the exit is.
Status
WordPress plugins with no configuration settings make me really happy. Hooray for decisions.
The new AP sounds like a good step
Last month the New York Times published a feature on the changes coming to Advanced Placement courses. 1
I finally got around to reading it and found it pretty interesting. They mention the following change, among others, for the biology course and exam:
College Board officials say the new labs should help students learn how to frame scientific questions and assemble data, and the exam will measure how well they can apply those skills…The board plans to cut the number of multiple-choice questions nearly in half on the new test, to 55. It will add five questions based on math calculations, and it will more than double the number of free-response questions, to nine.
It is not a perfect exam but it sounds like a good step forward in many ways.
In the AP U.S. History course I took during my Junior year we had to copy definitions for all the glossary terms to index cards that counted as a significant part of our grade. These index cards then made up a good chunk of the test material for class and, theoretically, the AP exam.
Ultimately I could rattle off dates and dictionary like definitions without really understanding the greater context and relevancy of events. It was nothing like the American History course I took Freshman year in college.
If cutting the number of multiple-choice questions in half means fewer students have to mindlessly re-copy glossary definitions then that’s progress. 2
Notes:
- H/T to Lauren. ↩
- Until we have our perfect system that is. 🙂 ↩
The Great Cyberheist. A totally fascinating story about how Albert Gonzalez mislead the United States Secret Service and eventually stole over a hundred million credit cards. He was even able to hack into the point of sale devices used by stores.
You are what you eat. If you want to get hired to do something then you should already be doing it. Potential energy is difficult to judge but if you take the initiative to turn it into a tangible product you’re miles ahead of others.
Smoke Signals. A manifesto for making the next one billion seconds about distributed, open, and secure software platforms. We should no longer surrender our most vital personal details to a closed-source system. It’s your social data, own it.
Identifying a billion Indians. What it looks like to try to issue biometric-based identification cards to a country with over a billion people. Contractors have already created a database of 1 million people, only 0.1% of the total population.
What really happened on Easter Island?
I headed down to Portland State last night for a talk titled “What (Really) Happened on Easter Island?” What follows are my notes from Terry Hunt’s talk about life on Easter Island and what caused the population to disappear.
Much of Hunt’s subject matter will be in his upcoming book, “The Statues that Walked,” as well as his contributions to “Questioning Collapse”, a series of essays questioning Jared Diamond’s ideas around cultural collapse. Popular ideas of the remote island society, 4,000 kilometers from Chile, that Europeans met in the 18th-century are based on evidence that Hunt says is outdated and often blatantly wrong.
Hunt disputes the idea that Easter Island’s society collapsed as a result of ancestors’ imprudence. He does not think they cut down an ancient forest and committed ecocide before first contact with Europeans, who came later in 1722.
Hunt says that the island had a disparate population who was resourceful and careful with their population management. He posited that building statues was perhaps a way to divert energy away from food production. This served as an indirect limit on population as a portion was devoted to building, transporting, and planning the statues. The layout of the island and placement of agricultural areas was not likely to have created a central village or a central chief on the tiny island.
The island’s lone forest, which is generally thought to have been cut down to provide the logs needed to move the Moai statues, was actually lost to a more natural disaster. The Polynesian settlement of the island introduced rats to a native population devoid of predators.
As Hunt said, “When you introduce rats to an island you introduce teeth for the first time.” This rat population, which could double every 47 days in the ideal conditions Easter provided, was more likely to have caused the deforestation. By eating the seeds of the native palm trees the rats would have destroyed the forest in a matter of years. Hunt referenced a similar phenomenon that occurred on the Hawaiian islands after settlement.
Ultimately Hunt believes Easter Island’s residents were far more careful with their environment than many believe. Their greatest achievement was creating a society that survived for 500 years on a barren island devoid of natural streams and only receive irregular rainfall.