FriendFeed and Twitter are a terrific source of articles about how New Media technologies are Changing Everything. The latest example is Sebastian Paquet’s The Fate of the Incompetent Teacher in the YouTube Era, in which he declares that the recorded lectures of Salman Khan are the beginning of the end for bad teachers: Even assuming,… Continue reading Lectures Are a Small Part of Learning
Category: Technology
Adventures in OA
The abbreviation here has a double meaning– both “Open Access” and “Operator Algebra.” In my Quantum Optics class yesterday, I was talking about how to describe “coherent states” in the photon number state formalism. Coherent states are the best quantum description of a classical light field– something like a laser, which behaves very much as… Continue reading Adventures in OA
Ah, Windows…
So, I upgraded my desktop at home recently to a machine running Vista. One of the minor annoying features of this is that it defaults to requiring a password whenever it wakes up, so if I walk away for half an hour, I come back and rather than just moving the mouse to wake it… Continue reading Ah, Windows…
The Delete Key Is Your Friend
As a veteran of Usenet, I’ve only grudgingly come to accept the practice of putting all responses to an email in a lump at the top, with the quoted text below. I much prefer to have the responses interleaved with the original points being responded to. I’ve pretty clearly lost this one, though, and I’ve… Continue reading The Delete Key Is Your Friend
Even the Queen
“So what do I need to do, again?” “First, you have to pick a username. So people know who you are.” “OK. How about ‘Emmy the Magnificent, Queen of Niskayuna and Surrounding Regions.’ That should do the job.” “Ah, no. That’s 64 characters. Nobody would ever reply to you with a username that long. How… Continue reading Even the Queen
What’s Missing From This Art Project?
Via Bora on FriendFeed, a cute little art project from MIT that takes a name, scans the Web for mentions of that name, and produces a color-coded bar categorizing the various mentions of that name. Here’s what you get if you put my name in: You can click on it for a bigger image, that… Continue reading What’s Missing From This Art Project?
Pimp Me Digital Cameras
The vast majority of the SteelyKid pictures posted here have been taken with our Canon PowerShot A95 camera, which is around five years old at this point. It’s served us well, but is getting old, and has a few sub-optimal features, in particular the lag time between pushing the button and actually taking the picture–… Continue reading Pimp Me Digital Cameras
MJ, Fame, Writing, and More
If you’re desperate for something to fill your Friday afternoon, and not the comment-leaving sort, you could do a lot worse than spending an hour and a half (give or take) with Chuck Klosternman and Bill Simmons in their two part ESPN podcast. It’s nominally about sports, but they spend a good bit of time… Continue reading MJ, Fame, Writing, and More
Wikis Are Not the Answer
Matt Leifer had a good comment to yesterday’s post about how the editing function, in my opinion, adds considerable value to a book that you don’t get with a blog. I got distracted and didn’t reply to it, and since a day in blog-time is like a week in the real world, I’ll promote it… Continue reading Wikis Are Not the Answer
Why Traditional Publishing Is Better Than Blogging
There’s another round of “science blogs will make traditional journalism obsolete!” going on in connection with last week’s World Conference of Science Journalists— see Mad Mike, for example. This wouldn’t be interesting except that it happened to collide with my reading Unscientific America, and it struck me that the book is, in many ways, one… Continue reading Why Traditional Publishing Is Better Than Blogging