I know you went another direction but I wanted you to see this new DANISH phone concept.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/01/flip-phone-yanko/
Monday, January 31, 2011
Flip Phone - For Kevin
I know you went another direction but I wanted you to see this new DANISH phone concept.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/01/flip-phone-yanko/
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Saturday, January 29, 2011
carpooling effort are failing, in spite of traffic and cost of driving along to work
Published: January 28, 2011
Car-Pooling Declines as Driving Becomes Cheaper
The share of workers who car-pool to work has dropped by half since 1980, largely because the cost of owning a car became more affordable and workplaces spread out into suburbs.
rape in congo is even worse than feared
Congolese soldiers raped 67 women: UN probe
Jan 25, 2011 2:56 PM | By Sapa-AFPCongolese soldiers raped 67 women in two separate incidents in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo in early January, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said Tuesday.
Photograph by: ROBERTO SCHMIDT
Credit: AFP
"Two separate investigations by MONUSCO and UNJHRO on villages in North Kivu and South Kivu have shed light on the extent of violations committed by FARDC soldiers over the New Year period," said Rupert Colville, spokesman for the UN High Commissioner.
MONUSCO is the UN mission in DR Congo, while the UNJHRO is the UN joint Human Rights Office.
"In Fizi in South Kivu, at least 35 women were raped and 32 people wounded by soldiers of the 43rd FARDC sector on the night of January 1, the UNJHRO is able to confirm," he said.
In another incident in North Kivu, DR Congo army soldiers "reportedly perpetrated at least 32 rapes, including two pregnant women and one 16-year-old girl," added Colville.
Rape is frequently reported in eastern Congo and blamed on a range of armed movements, including the country's regular army.
Colville said that 11 soldiers accused of the South Kivu rapes have been detained, with trials expected to begin shortly.
"The High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay calls on the DRC authorities to ensure that the crimes are investigated and alleged perpetrators are brought to justice as soon as possible," said the commissioner's office in a statement.
OTHER ARTICLES IN 'AFRICA'
- Mandela's health scares
- UN chief worried about AU rift over Ivory Coast
- Haiti will release election results on Wednesday
- Mubarak defiant
- Mubarak orders curfew to quell riots
- 31,000 Ivory Coast refugees in Liberia
- Protests in Egypt resume after prayers
- Egypt plays hardball with handball website
- Wave of violence kills 200 in Central Nigeria
- Rwandan rebel says innocent of Congo crimes
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
An analysis of what is funny, and how to measure the funniness of different people
A Taxonomy of Supreme Court Humor
By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: January 24, 2011
WASHINGTON
Doug Mills/The New York Times
The court in October. Justice Antonin Scalia, second from left in front, may be the class clown.
How funny is the Supreme Court?
The answer, naturally, requires exacting empirical research and a deep understanding of grad-school humor theory.
Ryan A. Malphurs, a litigation consultant with a doctorate in communications, has done the necessary work, analyzing every laugh in the Supreme Court term that started in 2006. His study has just been published in The Communication Law Review.
Drawing on Kant, Schopenhauer and Freud, Mr. Malphurs identified three primary theories of laughter (superiority, incongruity and relief). “Laughter enables justices and lawyers to negotiate the institutional, social and intellectual barriers that impede human communication,” he wrote, seriously.
Mr. Malphurs defended his straight-man approach in a footnote. “For some reason, studies on laughter or humor prompt readers to expect authors to adopt a humorous tone or style,” he wrote.
But the seminal study in this area, from 2005, was indeed lighthearted. It counted up how often comments from given justices were followed by the notation “(laughter)” in the official transcript, and it calculated that Justice Antonin Scalia was by that measure the funniest member of the court, followed by Justice Stephen G. Breyer.
Justice Clarence Thomas beat out Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg for the title of least funny justice, but only by a little and aided by the fact that he never asks questions.
The older study’s author, Jay D. Wexler, a law professor at Boston University, was frank about its methodological shortcomings.
The “(laughter)” notation, he wrote, does not “distinguish between the genuine laughter brought about by truly funny or clever humor and the anxious kind of laughter that arises when one feels nervous or uncomfortable or just plain scared for the nation’s future.”
Mr. Malphurs said his goal was to remedy these flaws, noting that the Wexler study “lacked the methodological rigor and insight normally attributable to social scientific studies.”
Asked about the Malphurs study, Professor Wexler said, “I’m not sure what to think about it, but I’m pretty sure it makes me want to die.”
The new study has had respectful coverage in The Washington Post and on National Public Radio.
Still, it was not entirely clear what Mr. Malphurs added to the field aside from some big words.
Justice Scalia again turns out to be the funniest justice, and he is again followed by Justice Breyer. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who joined the court in 2005, after the Wexler study was completed, was “squarely in third place,” Mr. Malphurs found. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who came onboard in 2006, gave Justice Ginsburg stiff competition for the role of least funny justice who talks.
Mr. Malphurs’s main contribution was a taxonomy of the subjects of the justices’ jokes. He found that they made fun of themselves about as often as they mocked the lawyers before them and a little more often than they teased the other justices.
The study, though new, is dated. Two more justices have since joined the court, and at least one of them, Justice Elena Kagan, showed pretty good humor potential during her confirmation hearings last summer.
Indeed, Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, addressed the matter head on.
“There was a recent study I read,” he said at the hearings, probably referring to Professor Wexler’s groundbreaking investigation. “Justice Scalia gets the most laughs.”
Ms. Kagan proposed a reason. “He is a funny man,” she said.
“If you get there,” Mr. Schumer responded, “and I believe you will, you’re going to give him a run for his money.”
Not so far. A not very careful review of the transcripts of the arguments this term places Justice Kagan near the bottom of the rankings, joining Justices Ginsburg, Thomas, Alito and Sonia Sotomayor. Justice Kagan has been handicapped by a large number of recusals, though, and her showing may improve as she is able to participate in more cases.
Justices Scalia and Breyer still dominate the rankings, though Chief Justice Roberts was responsible for a respectable number of laughs. The three of them account for about 80 percent of justice-generated laughter at the court.
Chief Justice Roberts has a light, witty touch, while the laughter that follows a long hypothetical question from Justice Breyer can feel like an expression of relief. Justice Scalia, by contrast, will repeat jokes mercilessly, raising questions about whether he has artificially increased his laugh count.
The rare laughs generated by Justice Ginsburg are not easy to classify. In October, she tried to clarify a lawyer’s point about how longtime employees should be treated.
“Are you then saying that these people have to be grandfathered?” she asked. She corrected herself, now using gender-neutral language: “Or grandparented?”
There was laughter, but it was not clear whether Justice Ginsburg had meant her clarification as a joke.
On the other hand, there was surely an intended sting in the best line of the term so far, from the generally dour Justice Alito. In an argument over a law barring the sale of violent video games to minors, Justice Scalia asked what the drafters of the First Amendment thought about government restrictions on depictions of violence.
“I think what Justice Scalia wants to know,” Justice Alito said, “is what James Madison thought about video games.”
“(Laughter.)”
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Steven's presentation on Prototype Testing for first class of Spring Semester
On Monday, January 24, I will be discussing how product designers carry out prototype testing as part of the iterative design process. Here's my presentation.
Fascinating discussion of experimental design
To Really Learn, Quit Studying and Take a Test
By PAM BELLUCK
Published: January 20, 2011
Taking a test is not just a passive mechanism for assessing how much people know, according to new research. It actually helps people learn, and it works better than a number of other studying techniques.
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The research, published online Thursday in the journal Science, found that students who read a passage, then took a test asking them to recall what they had read, retained about 50 percent more of the information a week later than students who used two other methods.
One of those methods — repeatedly studying the material — is familiar to legions of students who cram before exams. The other — having students draw detailed diagrams documenting what they are learning — is prized by many teachers because it forces students to make connections among facts.
These other methods not only are popular, the researchers reported; they also seem to give students the illusion that they know material better than they do.
In the experiments, the students were asked to predict how much they would remember a week after using one of the methods to learn the material. Those who took the test after reading the passage predicted they would remember less than the other students predicted — but the results were just the opposite.
“I think that learning is all about retrieving, all about reconstructing our knowledge,” said the lead author, Jeffrey Karpicke, an assistant professor of psychology at Purdue University. “I think that we’re tapping into something fundamental about how the mind works when we talk about retrieval.”
Several cognitive scientists and education experts said the results were striking.
The students who took the recall tests may “recognize some gaps in their knowledge,” said Marcia Linn, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley, “and they might revisit the ideas in the back of their mind or the front of their mind.”
When they are later asked what they have learned, she went on, they can more easily “retrieve it and organize the knowledge that they have in a way that makes sense to them.”
The researchers engaged 200 college students in two experiments, assigning them to read several paragraphs about a scientific subject — how the digestive system works, for example, or the different types of vertebrate muscle tissue.
In the first experiment, the students were divided into four groups. One did nothing more than read the text for five minutes. Another studied the passage in four consecutive five-minute sessions.
A third group engaged in “concept mapping,” in which, with the passage in front of them, they arranged information from the passage into a kind of diagram, writing details and ideas in hand-drawn bubbles and linking the bubbles in an organized way.
The final group took a “retrieval practice” test. Without the passage in front of them, they wrote what they remembered in a free-form essay for 10 minutes. Then they reread the passage and took another retrieval practice test.
A week later all four groups were given a short-answer test that assessed their ability to recall facts and draw logical conclusions based on the facts.
The second experiment focused only on concept mapping and retrieval practice testing, with each student doing an exercise using each method. In this initial phase, researchers reported, students who made diagrams while consulting the passage included more detail than students asked to recall what they had just read in an essay.
But when they were evaluated a week later, the students in the testing group did much better than the concept mappers. They even did better when they were evaluated not with a short-answer test but with a test requiring them to draw a concept map from memory.
Why retrieval testing helps is still unknown. Perhaps it is because by remembering information we are organizing it and creating cues and connections that our brains later recognize.
“When you’re retrieving something out of a computer’s memory, you don’t change anything — it’s simple playback,” said Robert Bjork, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved with the study.
But “when we use our memories by retrieving things, we change our access” to that information, Dr. Bjork said. “What we recall becomes more recallable in the future. In a sense you are practicing what you are going to need to do later.”
It may also be that the struggle involved in recalling something helps reinforce it in our brains.
Maybe that is also why students who took retrieval practice tests were less confident about how they would perform a week later.
“The struggle helps you learn, but it makes you feel like you’re not learning,” said Nate Kornell, a psychologist at Williams College. “You feel like: ‘I don’t know it that well. This is hard and I’m having trouble coming up with this information.’ ”
By contrast, he said, when rereading texts and possibly even drawing diagrams, “you say: ‘Oh, this is easier. I read this already.’ ”
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