• superfuture
  
  Tags: cities shopping
• Main Page - Uncyclopedia, the content-free encyclopedia
  
  Tags: wikis authority fact miscellany encyclopedia

This is disturbing for lots of reasons.

“A loose confederation of online troublemakers who call themselves Anonymous have declared war on the Church of Scientology by flooding its servers with fake data requests, describing the attacks as punishment for the Church’s alleged abuse of copyright laws and alleged brainwashing of its members.”

• XENUlink
  Checks for broken links
  Tags: web admin

• DesignShare: Beware the Sitting Trap
  Sitting still at school isn’t good for the brain. Makes you wonder what the ideal school chari would be.
  Tags: design schools furniture brains
• abpc » Transforming Learning
  
  Tags: education2.0 constructivism learning
• Brain-based Learning Design Principles
  Designing successful brain-compatible learning environments will require us .. to transform our traditional disciplinary thinking and challenge us to think in much more interdisciplinary ways
  Tags: design research education brainbasedlearning learning brains
• Liverail - Tutorial on developing a Facebook platform application with Ruby On Rails
  Part 1 of a helpful tutorial on making a facebook app
  Tags: api code facebook rails ruby tutorial
• Liverail - Continuing Facebook Applications with Ruby On Rails
  Part 2 of a helpful tutorial on making a facebook app
  Tags: api facebook ruby code tutorial

• Becta excludes Vista, Office - again
  Looks like BECTA are trying to make parents more aware of Open Source equivalents to Microsoft. And it looks like they’re talking sense.
  Tags: schools IT BECTA OpenSource

From The Economist:

“The irony of trying to plan accidents, and orchestrate their frequent occurrence, is not lost on Mr Williams. So he tries mental tricks. One is to ask “what can we take away to create something new?” A decade ago, you could have started with Yahoo! and taken away all the clutter around the search box to get Google. When he took Blogger and took away everything except one 140-character line, he had Twitter. Radical constraints, he believes, can lead to breakthroughs in simplicity and entirely new things. “

• iCalendar spec: 4.8.5.4 Recurrence Rule
  trying to get my head round this
  Tags: ical recurrence code reference

• Human vs. Machine: The Great Challenge of Our Time
  … “bionic software,” the idea that one of the distinguishing characteristics of Web 2.0 is that its applications are a new hybrid of man and machine, driven by algorithmic interpretation of aggregated human activity…
  Tags: social_computing semanticweb oreilly futurejargon
• Schopenhauer’s Extreme Self-Help for Pessimists
  Yup, old Arthur was full of fun.
  Tags: psychology Philosophy Schopenhauer
• The map is not the territory
  “If I felt that someone else was mapping my conversations and the relationships they represented - and wasn’t prepared to have the same done to them, I would soon stop talking.”
  Tags: networks SNA map territory privacy
• EveryBlock
  
  Tags: cities community aggregator
• Possible tool for getting LL a little more accurate
  the latest brain child of the SparkFun dataloggers. The GeoChron is an enclosed, self contained, fully configurable, GPS logger.
  Tags: GPS tools maps

From a recent SciAm article:

Many people assume that superior intelligence or ability is a key to success. But more than three decades of research shows that an overemphasis on intellect or talent—and the implication that such traits are innate and fixed—leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unmotivated to learn.

Teaching people to have a “growth mind-set,” which encourages a focus on effort rather than on intelligence or talent, produces high achievers in school and in life.

Parents and teachers can engender a growth mind-set in children by praising them for their effort or persistence (rather than for their intelligence), by telling success stories that emphasize hard work and love of learning, and by teaching them about the brain as a learning machine.

January 06th 2008 | Comments(1) | Notes on effort, intelligence, IQ, Learning research

On the tube today, on the way to dinner with some friends, I finished a book called The Reavers, by George Macdonald Fraser. A ripping yarn, deeply silly but perfect to curl up with over Christmas.

At dinner, Jane mentioned that she was having to interview people about him. I asked what for, and it turns out she’s doing some work on The Last Word, Radio 4’s obituary program.

GMF died two days ago, and the cold spell feels a lot colder.