Thinking Allowed

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showing posts for 'really'

I’ve Researched Time for 15 Years—Here’s How My Perception of It Has Changed

Why does time slow down in near-death situations? Does time really pass more quickly as you get older? How do our brains process time?
Source: singularityhub.com

Was Brexit About Tax Avoidance?

Several years ago I published an article “Is Brexit Really About Tax Avoidance?”, and it’s probably about time to revisit the topic, in the past tense, especially since the Anti Tax Avoidance Directive has now been implemented, and we have the EU/UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement to consider....
Source: politax.com

Remembering the people

blog post image Please suggest some technology that might help ... but remind me who you are first. What do you use to keep track of everyone that you work with, live near, party with, study with, or just share time with? Mere humans can only maintain about 150 close relationships (Dunbar's number) so just wondering...
Source: wikipedia.org

Mountain gorillas: The ripple effect of conservation

Justin Rowlatt finds out what gorilla conservation can teach us about protecting other species. 'The secret of this success? Dr Gladys Kalema Zikusoka was the Uganda Wildlife Authority's first vet in 1995, then she set up the charity Conservation Through Public Health. Perhaps surprisingly, she says,...
Source: bbc.com

IT tools and gadgets

I really enjoy finding tools that just do the job and don't try to profit from you or your data. Here are some of the ones that I find useful. Send a large file or lots of files Transfer files up to 6GB in size. No registration required. No ads. Links expire. FileTransfer.io ... https://filetransfer.io/...

Clubhouse And Education

"New App Has Exciting Potential For Today’s Educators | Emerging Education Technologies" I've used Clubhouse for a couple of months and it certainly provides the opportunity for communities to come together and invite expert speakers. It is refreshing in that it doesn't have screen time and you can...
Source: emergingedtech.com

World's wealthiest (and 'business as usual') 'at heart of climate problem'

"These [polluter elite] are people who fly most, drive the biggest cars most and live in the biggest homes which they can easily afford to heat, so they tend not to worry if they’re well insulated or not. … They’re also the sort of people who could really afford good insulation and solar panels...
Source: bbc.com

Databunker secure storage

Really like this approach putting privacy tools all in one place. Warrants some experimentation. "Databunker gives strong, serious, real personal-data protection for customer records without expensive custom coding and with full customer visibility."
Source: databunker.org

Using GPT-2 to generate Tweets

blog post image Last summer I blogged about using a Deep Neural Network to generate tweets but only used 3200 of my tweets. Since then I've used Twitter's archive mechanism to retrieve ALL my tweets (just over 30,000) to train a network. Not any old network - the GPT-2 model from OpenAI. This 'finetuning' of an existing...

Rashomon approach to medical education.

"The Rashomon approach was named after the 1950 film, Rashomon. In this film, a single event, a homicide is described from the different perspectives of the characters. In the Rashomon approach, teachers, like film directors, need to fully understand the big pictures so that they can engage characters = students...
Source: biomedcentral.com

UK rollout data on AstraZeneca shot should guide other countries: vaccine chief

Natural experiments can be a really useful source of data. "Data from Britain's vaccine rollout on the effectiveness of the AstraZeneca/Oxford University COVID-19 shot in older people should help other countries reassess their use of it, the head of the university's vaccine research group said on Tuesday."
Source: reuters.com

Why Are COVID-19 Case Numbers Dropping?

"We don’t know. That part is easy. Also easy is that case numbers really are falling — it’s not just reduced testing — and it’s happening pretty much everywhere. Urban areas and rural. Red states and blue. Places with broad vaccine rollouts and those with hardly any. North and South America,...
Source: jwatch.org

Using the right tools for the job

Since this blog has been up I've fiddled with some text analysis stuff by analysing the text and making recommendations for similar blog entries. Did it all in PHP and MySQL just to understand how the algorithms work. Eventually it started to take about 5 hours to: tokenise and stemming the textcalculate...

Australian news app beats Facebook in App Store

"Take that Facebook. A homegrown app from Australia Broadcasting Company (ABC) topped iOS download charts in Australia, outpacing Facebook. That's important for one big reason: Facebook just banned news from appearing on Australian newsfeeds in response to a law that would require the social giant...
Source: mashable.com

Word of the day: deprecated

Geek talk. The tech behind this blog which takes any link that I find interesting and, instead of curating it for LinkedIn / Twitter / Facebook, curates it here on something I have control over broke. I accidentally upgraded the server to PHP8 and an old function in PHP each() no longer worked. Took...

Oppose the educational technology algorithims and technosolutions?

Essay by Audrey Watters on schools and the technology industry ... basically f**k the algorithm. "Robot Teachers, Racist Algorithms, and Disaster Pedagogy: I have volunteered to be a guest speaker in classes this Fall. It's really the least I can do to help teachers and students through another tough...
Source: hackeducation.com

In search of the secret handshakes of ID

"Many of my sponsoring stakeholders - that is, the people with the power to buy instructional design services - wouldn’t have known a learning solution if it bit them on the toe. Frankly, they really didn’t care about learning. They really didn’t want me to tell them...
Source: wixstatic.com

Media predictions for 2020 from BBC's Amol Rajan

Amol Rajan's 9 media predictions for 2020: Could we see streamageddon, eco-browsing, the break-up of Amazon and a new owner for ITV? "The data shows we really are living through the most extraordinarily peaceful, prosperous, wealthy, healthy, safe period in human history. There is strong evidence to...
Source: bbc.com

Video for learning

Video for learning is great at some things, not so great at others. Great summary of recent evidence from Donald Clark. What can we learn from Netflix? (Use technology appropriately not just the buzzwords) Episodic vs. Semantic memory (Remembering the right things from video isn't as easy as you think)...
Source: blogspot.com

“In essence Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) is a simple idea: people have limited capacity for processing information; by

“In essence Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) is a simple idea: people have limited capacity for processing information; by designing learning experiences and materials in a way that respects those limitations, we can improve the process. “Though there is nothing fundamentally wrong with this idea,...
Source: aconventional.com