New York Times has an article about the best of online professors. Now that many universities are making their lectures available online for free, sometimes directly and sometimes through services like iTunesU, the next logical step is to separate the wheat from the chaff. Who are the best? Read the article.
Category: Technology
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Boycott Thomson Reuters
I use an excellent program for research, called Zotero. It helps me catalog everything I find about my research subjects into one easily accessed place. One of the best features is that it can pull the bibliographic information off a web page such as Amazon, and put it into a traditional format, such as APA or MLA. This has long been the most time-consuming part of research for me, getting all those niggly little commas, underlines, and dates, names and titles in the correct order and format. It helps tremendously. Highly recommended.
Now, Thomson Reuters, publishers of a similar software, endnote, are suing Zotero because Zotero can read endnote’s formatted files and put them into an open standard. (Reported by Liberal Education and EdTechPost). Trying to close down research by suing a company that can read files your customers make is unconscionable.
If you order Thomson Reuters textbooks, I urge you to switch to another brand.
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Cognizing and offloading Cognitive Load
In linguistincs and psychology we talk about the cognitive load of any task. A task that requires calculation or analysis has a larger cognitive load. A task in a foreign language, or using an unfamiliar tool, like a computer, also increases cognitive load.
David Peskovitz over at BoingBoing has a friend at the Institute of the Future Mathias Crawford found this article about Cognizing entitled Offloading Cognition onto Cognitive Technology by Itiel Dror, and Stevan Harnad talks about
“Cognizing” (e.g., thinking, understanding, and knowing) is a mental state.
And how to offload some of the cognitive load onto technology. In our discussions over at cck08, the Connectivist class by Siemens and Downes, echoed across the web (search your RSS for cck08), where we are talking about the nature of knowledge, and the connectivist idea that it’s most basic element is connections. Connections between neurons, between people, and between organizations and concepts. Check it out.
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Woes on Wall Street, Black Swans
I woke up this morning and opened my browser, and found the Dow down 500 points, to less than 11,000. Lehman Brothers is filing for protection against bankruptcy (Chapter 11, the lesser of the two evils.) Merrill Lynch sold itself to Bank of America for the bargain basement price of $50 billion. AIG needs about $40 billion to stay afloat, and is having a hard time finding it. The soveriegn funds are shying away from US investments. We have have turned a corner here. I put a big chunk of money into Euros just before the summer. Glad I did.
I also received the newsletter The Edge (see below), this time with Nassim Taleb railing agains the Quants. The Quants are the people in the banking industry and in regulation that use statistics (quatifiable methods) to make their decisions. The problem, Taleb says, is that they don’t use the tools correctly, or they use the tools for personal gain at the expense of the institution they are working with. It seems statiticians, true statiticians, are a lot more circumspect when making analyses on data that is less than quantifiable, what Taleb terms the Fourth Quadrant. A good read for scary times.
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Numbers of Words in WSJ
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) has a column devoted to statistics called The Numbers Guy by Carl Bialik, which recently talked about words. Making Every Word Count is an update of statistics about Corpus Linguistics, the study of using large groups of words (Corpus) to analyze language (Linguistics). The science has been really heating up in the last decade, with a some very nice dictionaries based on Corpora.
Computers have spawned a burst of activity in the field. But even computers don’t suffice for the daunting task of word collecting and counting. Brown University’s one-million-word corpus was considered adequate in the 1960s. Today, the 100-million-word British National Corpus is considered small — and dated — because it preceded the Internet era, and other sources of new language.
The problem these days is that verbal speech costs about 5 times what text speech does to collect. And with the larger corpora necessary for finer distinctions of language, the cost becomes prohibitive.