Large Assortment of Statements
Sep. 27th, 2008 11:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
semiotic_pirateFrom ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ginmar's discussion about the book Twilight, saoba said:
Twilight is Romantick, artificial romance with all that icky person-hood removed from the female. And it sucks.
Romantic, on the other hand involves awareness.
Romantic is remembering what day the trash goes out and not making a big deal about it. Romantic is calling when you know she's going to be on her way home from a rough meeting or appointment to ask how it went. Romantic is telling your boss you need to leave early to do laundry for a business trip and seriously not getting it when a co-worker asks if your partner can't just do it for you because you've never thought it was someone else's job to keep track of whether or not you have clean shorts. Romantic is getting the on-call schedule swapped so you aren't on-call the week of her birthday without being prompted. Romantic is taking 30 minutes out of a 14 hour day at work to swing by the store and drop off more juice and soup for your partner who is coming down with a cold.
The Twilight stick figure character wouldn't know romantic if it ws dropped on him from a great height- nor would his lust object.
Statement: The rest of the post is a jumble of emails I sent to myself from work with an idea of posting... running backwards in time over the last few days. So if it seems jumbled... Er, yeah, it is supposed to seem that way because it is an assortment of unassociated emails.
------------------------------
Ode to the C-words - Bank Director (Magazine) 1Q2003: Here; it is rather prophetic in a doom shall fall upon us if we don't change the way we do things kind of way... (why do we never learn?)
Great article from Wired about rewilding the world.
----------------------------------------------
I am contemplating using the pro version of this software to improve my efficiency. Neato for multi screen users. It's already been quite helpful.
To more expensive hard-core geek hardware… Like when they say pot is a gateway drug, Peek is a gateway device. Used to lure unsuspecting people into the use of mobile devices. First you get this to check your email occasionally, then you upgrade to the harder stuff so you can browse the web, do Google searches, read the news, make phone calls, listen to music, sync and check your calendar, find your way around town, take pictures, text, chat, blog… the list is endless.
Wall Street Journal review here.
Hell… I am actually contemplating getting this for CoB's Mom for Christmas. What do you think? Twenty a month isn't bad, compared to cell phone rates. If you communicate better in the written word rather than the spoken? This is an excellent option. Grapevine says wait until the second generation version comes out in November.
The New York Times' article is titled Nontechies, This One's for You. HA!
Mobile Devices Today mentions that this product is being aimed at a different demographic than your typical uber-gadget-geek.
A review on Wired by the Luddite had this to say (in its first paragraph):
"Sometimes, Freud said, a cigar is just a cigar. In an industry that offers an endless supply of tarted-up gadgetry as phallic substitutes for Freud's cigar, the Peek handheld represents a refreshing, if puzzling, exception to the rule that says, the more crap you can cram into a small device, the better."
Speaking of the Luddite: I love his reference to the Speaker's Corner
Sent to myself with a subject line "More techie goodness" was this article.
-----------------------------------
Campbell's FFA Donations made by clicking on the Red Barn
Starting September 29, you can visit this site and click on the red barn to help support the future of American farming. Each time that you click the red barn, Campbell Soup Company will donate $1* to the National FFA Organization, which is dedicated to developing our future leaders through agricultural education.
---------------------------------
Note to self, upload one of the rat icons to use for this post:
Using this interactive graphic, test your intuitive number sense. After taking the test 25 times to get the "good estimate" they mention, I was correct 92% of the time, much higher than the 75% average of most adults. Cool. If you intend to take the test, realize that it is conducted on Adobe Flash, emphasis on the flash. The test is a series of slides with varying numbers of yellow and blue dots flashed on a screen for 200 milliseconds each — barely as long as an eye blink. You are given less than a second to assess the situation. Capish? Reminds me of a scene from The Fifth Element where Bruce Willis's character peeps around the corner onto the bridge and correctly determines how many of the aliens are and where they are positioned around the room. The related article can be found here, though for the link averse I have it below the cut. One excerpt: "One research team has found that how readily people rally their approximate number sense is linked over time to success in even the most advanced and abstruse mathematics courses…" tests are showing that "your evolutionarily endowed sense of approximation is related to how good you are at formal math." That must be the explanation for my string of A grades in calculus...
Here there was to be a screen capture of the results I refer to above... No dice, it didn't come through.
September 16, 2008
New York Times - Science Section
Gut Instinct’s Surprising Role in Math
By NATALIE ANGIER
You are shopping in a busy supermarket and you’re ready to pay up and go home. You perform a quick visual sweep of the checkout options and immediately start ramming your cart through traffic toward an appealingly unpeopled line halfway across the store. As you wait in line and start reading nutrition labels, you can’t help but calculate that the 529 calories contained in a single slice of your Key lime cheesecake amounts to one-fourth of your recommended daily caloric allowance and will take you 90 minutes on the elliptical to burn off and you’d better just stick the thing behind this stack of Soap Opera Digests and hope a clerk finds it before it melts.
One shopping spree, two distinct number systems in play. Whenever we choose a shorter grocery line over a longer one, or a bustling restaurant over an unpopular one, we rally our approximate number system, an ancient and intuitive sense that we are born with and that we share with many other animals. Rats, pigeons, monkeys, babies — all can tell more from fewer, abundant from stingy. An approximate number sense is essential to brute survival: how else can a bird find the best patch of berries, or two baboons know better than to pick a fight with a gang of six?
When it comes to genuine computation, however, to seeing a self-important number like 529 and panicking when you divide it into 2,200, or realizing that, hey, it’s the square of 23! well, that calls for a very different number system, one that is specific, symbolic and highly abstract. By all evidence, scientists say, the capacity to do mathematics, to manipulate representations of numbers and explore the quantitative texture of our world is a uniquely human and very recent skill. People have been at it only for the last few millennia, it’s not universal to all cultures, and it takes years of education to master. Math-making seems the opposite of automatic, which is why scientists long thought it had nothing to do with our ancient, pre-verbal size-em-up ways.
Yet a host of new studies suggests that the two number systems, the bestial and celestial, may be profoundly related, an insight with potentially broad implications for math education.
One research team has found that how readily people rally their approximate number sense is linked over time to success in even the most advanced and abstruse mathematics courses. Other scientists have shown that preschool children are remarkably good at approximating the impact of adding to or subtracting from large groups of items but are poor at translating the approximate into the specific. Taken together, the new research suggests that math teachers might do well to emphasize the power of the ballpark figure, to focus less on arithmetic precision and more on general reckoning.
“When mathematicians and physicists are left alone in a room, one of the games they’ll play is called a Fermi problem, in which they try to figure out the approximate answer to an arbitrary problem,” said Rebecca Saxe, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is married to a physicist. “They’ll ask, how many piano tuners are there in Chicago, or what contribution to the ocean’s temperature do fish make, and they’ll try to come up with a plausible answer.”
“What this suggests to me,” she added, “is that the people whom we think of as being the most involved in the symbolic part of math intuitively know that they have to practice those other, nonsymbolic, approximating skills.”
This month in the journal Nature, Justin Halberda and Lisa Feigenson of Johns Hopkins University and Michele Mazzocco of the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore described their study of 64 14-year-olds who were tested at length on the discriminating power of their approximate number sense. The teenagers sat at a computer as a series of slides with varying numbers of yellow and blue dots flashed on a screen for 200 milliseconds each — barely as long as an eye blink. After each slide, the students pressed a button indicating whether they thought there had been more yellow dots or blue. (Take a version of the test.)
Given the antiquity and ubiquity of the nonverbal number sense, the researchers were impressed by how widely it varied in acuity. There were kids with fine powers of discrimination, able to distinguish ratios on the order of 9 blue dots for every 10 yellows, Dr. Feigenson said. “Others performed at a level comparable to a 9-month-old,” barely able to tell if five yellows outgunned three blues. Comparing the acuity scores with other test results that Dr. Mazzocco had collected from the students over the past 10 years, the researchers found a robust correlation between dot-spotting prowess at age 14 and strong performance on a raft of standardized math tests from kindergarten onward. “We can’t draw causal arrows one way or another,” Dr. Feigenson said, “but your evolutionarily endowed sense of approximation is related to how good you are at formal math.”
The researchers caution that they have no idea yet how the two number systems interact. Brain imaging studies have traced the approximate number sense to a specific neural structure called the intraparietal sulcus, which also helps assess features like an object’s magnitude and distance. Symbolic math, by contrast, operates along a more widely distributed circuitry, activating many of the prefrontal regions of the brain that we associate with being human. Somewhere, local and global must be hooked up to a party line.
Other open questions include how malleable our inborn number sense may be, whether it can be improved with training, and whether those improvements would pay off in a greater appetite and aptitude for math. If children start training with the flashing dot game at age 4, will they be supernumerate by middle school?
Dr. Halberda, who happens to be Dr. Feigenson’s spouse, relishes the work’s philosophical implications. “What’s interesting and surprising in our results is that the same system we spend years trying to acquire in school, and that we use to send a man to the moon, and that has inspired the likes of Plato, Einstein and Stephen Hawking, has something in common with what a rat is doing when it’s out hunting for food,” he said. “I find that deeply moving.”
Behind every great leap of our computational mind lies the pitter-patter of rats’ feet, the little squeak of rodent kind.
If you do follow the link to the test, let me know what you get as a score!
----------------------------------
This is a great article about how you can get "smoker's mouth" from drinking constantly out of sport's top bottles, camel-backs, and from straws constantly throughout the day for, um, years.
Interesting website that attempts to address the seemingly limitless source of scams out there about electronic gadget bait and switch sites.
A great NPR story... about what? I have no idea now - follow the link and let me know!
The Locust Principle: Described here.
Pirate Week - link inside article to a cool pirate story.
Hybrids & Motorcycle Rally (American made only).
Run Mac OS X on and Eee PC.
Effects of fearmongering? More political conservatives.
Yay! DarkMarket goes dark. I love me my white hat hackers but don't really appreciate the malicious types.
The origination of the emoticon - send to Steve (with a LOL): http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/09/dayintech_0919
ginmar's discussion about the book Twilight, saoba said:Twilight is Romantick, artificial romance with all that icky person-hood removed from the female. And it sucks.
Romantic, on the other hand involves awareness.
Romantic is remembering what day the trash goes out and not making a big deal about it. Romantic is calling when you know she's going to be on her way home from a rough meeting or appointment to ask how it went. Romantic is telling your boss you need to leave early to do laundry for a business trip and seriously not getting it when a co-worker asks if your partner can't just do it for you because you've never thought it was someone else's job to keep track of whether or not you have clean shorts. Romantic is getting the on-call schedule swapped so you aren't on-call the week of her birthday without being prompted. Romantic is taking 30 minutes out of a 14 hour day at work to swing by the store and drop off more juice and soup for your partner who is coming down with a cold.
The Twilight stick figure character wouldn't know romantic if it ws dropped on him from a great height- nor would his lust object.
Statement: The rest of the post is a jumble of emails I sent to myself from work with an idea of posting... running backwards in time over the last few days. So if it seems jumbled... Er, yeah, it is supposed to seem that way because it is an assortment of unassociated emails.
------------------------------
Ode to the C-words - Bank Director (Magazine) 1Q2003: Here; it is rather prophetic in a doom shall fall upon us if we don't change the way we do things kind of way... (why do we never learn?)
Great article from Wired about rewilding the world.
----------------------------------------------
I am contemplating using the pro version of this software to improve my efficiency. Neato for multi screen users. It's already been quite helpful.
To more expensive hard-core geek hardware… Like when they say pot is a gateway drug, Peek is a gateway device. Used to lure unsuspecting people into the use of mobile devices. First you get this to check your email occasionally, then you upgrade to the harder stuff so you can browse the web, do Google searches, read the news, make phone calls, listen to music, sync and check your calendar, find your way around town, take pictures, text, chat, blog… the list is endless.
Wall Street Journal review here.
Hell… I am actually contemplating getting this for CoB's Mom for Christmas. What do you think? Twenty a month isn't bad, compared to cell phone rates. If you communicate better in the written word rather than the spoken? This is an excellent option. Grapevine says wait until the second generation version comes out in November.
The New York Times' article is titled Nontechies, This One's for You. HA!
Mobile Devices Today mentions that this product is being aimed at a different demographic than your typical uber-gadget-geek.
A review on Wired by the Luddite had this to say (in its first paragraph):
"Sometimes, Freud said, a cigar is just a cigar. In an industry that offers an endless supply of tarted-up gadgetry as phallic substitutes for Freud's cigar, the Peek handheld represents a refreshing, if puzzling, exception to the rule that says, the more crap you can cram into a small device, the better."
Speaking of the Luddite: I love his reference to the Speaker's Corner
Sent to myself with a subject line "More techie goodness" was this article.
-----------------------------------
Campbell's FFA Donations made by clicking on the Red Barn
Starting September 29, you can visit this site and click on the red barn to help support the future of American farming. Each time that you click the red barn, Campbell Soup Company will donate $1* to the National FFA Organization, which is dedicated to developing our future leaders through agricultural education.
---------------------------------
Note to self, upload one of the rat icons to use for this post:
Using this interactive graphic, test your intuitive number sense. After taking the test 25 times to get the "good estimate" they mention, I was correct 92% of the time, much higher than the 75% average of most adults. Cool. If you intend to take the test, realize that it is conducted on Adobe Flash, emphasis on the flash. The test is a series of slides with varying numbers of yellow and blue dots flashed on a screen for 200 milliseconds each — barely as long as an eye blink. You are given less than a second to assess the situation. Capish? Reminds me of a scene from The Fifth Element where Bruce Willis's character peeps around the corner onto the bridge and correctly determines how many of the aliens are and where they are positioned around the room. The related article can be found here, though for the link averse I have it below the cut. One excerpt: "One research team has found that how readily people rally their approximate number sense is linked over time to success in even the most advanced and abstruse mathematics courses…" tests are showing that "your evolutionarily endowed sense of approximation is related to how good you are at formal math." That must be the explanation for my string of A grades in calculus...
Here there was to be a screen capture of the results I refer to above... No dice, it didn't come through.
September 16, 2008
New York Times - Science Section
Gut Instinct’s Surprising Role in Math
By NATALIE ANGIER
You are shopping in a busy supermarket and you’re ready to pay up and go home. You perform a quick visual sweep of the checkout options and immediately start ramming your cart through traffic toward an appealingly unpeopled line halfway across the store. As you wait in line and start reading nutrition labels, you can’t help but calculate that the 529 calories contained in a single slice of your Key lime cheesecake amounts to one-fourth of your recommended daily caloric allowance and will take you 90 minutes on the elliptical to burn off and you’d better just stick the thing behind this stack of Soap Opera Digests and hope a clerk finds it before it melts.
One shopping spree, two distinct number systems in play. Whenever we choose a shorter grocery line over a longer one, or a bustling restaurant over an unpopular one, we rally our approximate number system, an ancient and intuitive sense that we are born with and that we share with many other animals. Rats, pigeons, monkeys, babies — all can tell more from fewer, abundant from stingy. An approximate number sense is essential to brute survival: how else can a bird find the best patch of berries, or two baboons know better than to pick a fight with a gang of six?
When it comes to genuine computation, however, to seeing a self-important number like 529 and panicking when you divide it into 2,200, or realizing that, hey, it’s the square of 23! well, that calls for a very different number system, one that is specific, symbolic and highly abstract. By all evidence, scientists say, the capacity to do mathematics, to manipulate representations of numbers and explore the quantitative texture of our world is a uniquely human and very recent skill. People have been at it only for the last few millennia, it’s not universal to all cultures, and it takes years of education to master. Math-making seems the opposite of automatic, which is why scientists long thought it had nothing to do with our ancient, pre-verbal size-em-up ways.
Yet a host of new studies suggests that the two number systems, the bestial and celestial, may be profoundly related, an insight with potentially broad implications for math education.
One research team has found that how readily people rally their approximate number sense is linked over time to success in even the most advanced and abstruse mathematics courses. Other scientists have shown that preschool children are remarkably good at approximating the impact of adding to or subtracting from large groups of items but are poor at translating the approximate into the specific. Taken together, the new research suggests that math teachers might do well to emphasize the power of the ballpark figure, to focus less on arithmetic precision and more on general reckoning.
“When mathematicians and physicists are left alone in a room, one of the games they’ll play is called a Fermi problem, in which they try to figure out the approximate answer to an arbitrary problem,” said Rebecca Saxe, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is married to a physicist. “They’ll ask, how many piano tuners are there in Chicago, or what contribution to the ocean’s temperature do fish make, and they’ll try to come up with a plausible answer.”
“What this suggests to me,” she added, “is that the people whom we think of as being the most involved in the symbolic part of math intuitively know that they have to practice those other, nonsymbolic, approximating skills.”
This month in the journal Nature, Justin Halberda and Lisa Feigenson of Johns Hopkins University and Michele Mazzocco of the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore described their study of 64 14-year-olds who were tested at length on the discriminating power of their approximate number sense. The teenagers sat at a computer as a series of slides with varying numbers of yellow and blue dots flashed on a screen for 200 milliseconds each — barely as long as an eye blink. After each slide, the students pressed a button indicating whether they thought there had been more yellow dots or blue. (Take a version of the test.)
Given the antiquity and ubiquity of the nonverbal number sense, the researchers were impressed by how widely it varied in acuity. There were kids with fine powers of discrimination, able to distinguish ratios on the order of 9 blue dots for every 10 yellows, Dr. Feigenson said. “Others performed at a level comparable to a 9-month-old,” barely able to tell if five yellows outgunned three blues. Comparing the acuity scores with other test results that Dr. Mazzocco had collected from the students over the past 10 years, the researchers found a robust correlation between dot-spotting prowess at age 14 and strong performance on a raft of standardized math tests from kindergarten onward. “We can’t draw causal arrows one way or another,” Dr. Feigenson said, “but your evolutionarily endowed sense of approximation is related to how good you are at formal math.”
The researchers caution that they have no idea yet how the two number systems interact. Brain imaging studies have traced the approximate number sense to a specific neural structure called the intraparietal sulcus, which also helps assess features like an object’s magnitude and distance. Symbolic math, by contrast, operates along a more widely distributed circuitry, activating many of the prefrontal regions of the brain that we associate with being human. Somewhere, local and global must be hooked up to a party line.
Other open questions include how malleable our inborn number sense may be, whether it can be improved with training, and whether those improvements would pay off in a greater appetite and aptitude for math. If children start training with the flashing dot game at age 4, will they be supernumerate by middle school?
Dr. Halberda, who happens to be Dr. Feigenson’s spouse, relishes the work’s philosophical implications. “What’s interesting and surprising in our results is that the same system we spend years trying to acquire in school, and that we use to send a man to the moon, and that has inspired the likes of Plato, Einstein and Stephen Hawking, has something in common with what a rat is doing when it’s out hunting for food,” he said. “I find that deeply moving.”
Behind every great leap of our computational mind lies the pitter-patter of rats’ feet, the little squeak of rodent kind.
If you do follow the link to the test, let me know what you get as a score!
----------------------------------
This is a great article about how you can get "smoker's mouth" from drinking constantly out of sport's top bottles, camel-backs, and from straws constantly throughout the day for, um, years.
Interesting website that attempts to address the seemingly limitless source of scams out there about electronic gadget bait and switch sites.
A great NPR story... about what? I have no idea now - follow the link and let me know!
The Locust Principle: Described here.
Pirate Week - link inside article to a cool pirate story.
Hybrids & Motorcycle Rally (American made only).
Run Mac OS X on and Eee PC.
Effects of fearmongering? More political conservatives.
Yay! DarkMarket goes dark. I love me my white hat hackers but don't really appreciate the malicious types.
The origination of the emoticon - send to Steve (with a LOL): http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/09/dayintech_0919
