The Unreasonable Man

Capsule CRM [del.icio.us]

IanYorston — 2010-02-25T17:27:30-08:00

The easy online CRM for doing business. Simple. Effective. Flexible. Use Capsule to keep track of the people and companies you do business with, communications with them, opportunities in the pipeline, and what needs to be done when.

Rethinking the Classroom - Educating Hunters and Farmers

Ian Yorston — 2010-02-26T00:53:40+00:00

Words and ideas lifted from Seth Godin and Thom Hartmann.

Godin is the author of Tribes, which I can highly recommend.

====

10,000 years ago, civilization forked.

Farming was invented and the way people spent their time was changed forever.

Farming is a very different activity from hunting. Farmers spend time working and planning and worrying. They worry about the weather. They make smart choices about seeds and breeding.

Hunters, on the other hand, spend an awful lot of time just watching and waiting. And waiting and watching. With occasional moments of distraction. And brief periods of frenzied panic.

Some people are better at one activity than another. And then tend to approach life rather differently as a result. Farmers like meetings and plans. Hunters want to try stuff and see what happens.

Farmers want to avoid epic failure. Hunters want a high-stakes mission. Farmers like Facebook. Hunters like Google.

Traditional schooling doesn't really suit Hunters. A child who has innate hunting skills is easily distracted, because noticing small movements in the landscape is exactly what you'd need to do if you were hunting.

Scan and scan and scan and scan and POUNCE.

In school, you'll find that same distracted child can drop everything and focus like a laser - when it matters.

The "farmer", on the other hand, is particularly good at tilling the fields of endless homework problems, each one a bit like the other. Just don't ask him to change gears instantly.

Of course, forcing "hunters" to sit quietly in a school designed to teach farming doesn't make a lot of sense.

Singing rewires damaged brain [del.icio.us]

IanYorston — 2010-02-21T06:00:53-08:00

Research suggest that teaching stroke patients to sing "rewires" their brains and may help them recover their speech. Researchers first used "melodic intonation therapy" when it was discovered that stroke patients unable to speak were still able to sing. Most of the connections between brain areas that control movement & those that control hearing are on the left side of the brain. But it appears there is a corresponding hole on the right side which is not as endowed with these connections, so the left side is used much more in speech; if you damage the left side, the right side has trouble fulfilling that role. But if patients learn to put their words to melodies, the crucial connections form on the right side of their brains. Previous brain imaging studies have shown that this "singing centre" is overdeveloped in the brains of professional singers. The research is being led by Neurology professor Gottfried Schlaug (Harvard Medical & Beth Israel Deaconess Medical).

Skeleton sliders hurtle down test track without moving [del.icio.us]

IanYorston — 2010-02-18T21:13:27-08:00

The US Olympic team have been perfecting their aerodynamics in a new simulator. 1 minute video from NewScientist.

Eye-controlled mobile phone unveiled [del.icio.us]

IanYorston — 2010-02-18T20:57:27-08:00

Special electrodes, attached to a set of earphones, are able to pick up the movement of the eye. Eyes have "electrical potential" - positive at the cornea and negative at the retina - and this electrical potential changes depending on the movement of the eyeball. The system works even when a person's eyes are closed. The earphone electrodes are able to read these changing currents - known as an electrooculogram - and the mobile phone is pre-programmed to translate that information in to a command. So a user can make or receive a call, simply by moving their eyes to the right, then to the left, then back to the right again.

Printing body parts [del.icio.us]

IanYorston — 2010-02-18T14:25:40-08:00

The Economist reports on a new 3D bio-printer, which only costs around $200,00, and can manufacture human tissue & organs. The machine uses stem cells extracted from adult bone marrow and fat as the precursors. These cells can be coaxed into differentiating into many other types of cells by the application of appropriate growth factors. The cells are formed into droplets 100-500 microns in diameter and containing 10,000-30,000 cells each. The droplets retain their shape well and pass easily through the inkjet printing process. A second printing head is used to deposit scaffolding - a sugar-based hydrogel. This does not interfere with the cells or stick to them. Once the printing is complete, the structure is left for a day or two, to allow the droplets to fuse together. For tubular structures, such as blood vessels, the hydrogel is printed in the centre and around the outside of the ring of each cross-section before the cells are added.

Please Rob Me. Listing all those empty homes out there. [del.icio.us]

IanYorston — 2010-02-18T05:31:07-08:00

GeoLocation is the next new thing. And it will be fantastic. But like everything technological, it has a down side. The danger is publicly telling people where you are. This is because if the world and his wife know where you are - then they also know where you're definitely not... home. So here we are; on one end we're leaving lights on when we're going on a holiday, and on the other we're telling everybody on the internet we're not home. It gets even worse if you have visiting friends who ever need to check-in at your house. Because they have to enter your address, to tell everyone where they are. Your address. On the internet. The goal of the PleaseRobMe website is to raise some awareness on this issue and have people think about how they use services like Foursquare, Brightkite, Google Buzz etc. Because PleaseRobMe isn't anything very clever. It's just a dressed up Twitter search page. So anyone and everyone can get this information. Including burglars.

Jumpchart. Simple Website Planning and Wireframing [del.icio.us]

IanYorston — 2010-02-15T18:08:50-08:00

From the website: "If you're involved with building websites, you know that content organization and approval can be an overwhelming process. We've all tried flowcharts, and Powerpoint, html mocks... even paper. All of these suffer from crucial flaws: they're not interactive; they carry no momentum into the build phase. Unlike paper mock-ups, and tree shaped diagrams, with a Jumpchart preview, clients just get it. It's not an abstract concept, it works just like the website will. Before you push your first pixel, they can click through and navigate the whole website."

CaptionTube: Captions for YouTube [del.icio.us]

IanYorston — 2010-02-04T15:35:36-08:00

Be seen, heard, and read. With CaptionTube you can create captions for your YouTube videos. It’s easy to use and it’s free.

Not Clever. The Dunning–Kruger Effect. [del.icio.us]

IanYorston — 2010-01-27T16:00:04-08:00

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which "people reach erroneous conclusions & make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it". The unskilled therefore suffer from Illusory Superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than in actuality. By contrast the highly-skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from Illusory Inferiority. This leads to a perverse result where less competent people will rate their own ability higher than more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence because competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. "Thus, the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self; the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others." Or, as Bertrand Russell put it: “The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."

Zotero: Collect, Manage, Cite Research Sources [del.icio.us]

IanYorston — 2010-01-25T20:14:38-08:00

Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work—in the web browser itself.

Hugh Cudlipp Lecture 2010 : Alan Rusbridger : Does Journalism Exist? [del.icio.us]

IanYorston — 2010-01-25T15:34:31-08:00

Alan Rusbridger on excellent form as ever. The Guardian is the only newspaper that really understands the future. --- "The most common question most newspaper editors are now asked is: 'What's the business model?' Of course, we know why people ask. Journalism may be facing a kind of existential threat. Insecurity is the condition of our journalistic age. We are living at a time when "the old models are breaking faster than the new models can be put into place". Thing is, if you think about journalism, not business models, you can become rather excited about the future. If you only think about business models you can scare yourself into total paralysis..."

Neuroscience: Brain structure determines ability at video games [del.icio.us]

IanYorston — 2010-01-25T13:49:49-08:00

If you find video games a struggle, it could be to do with the size of certain parts of your brain, a study suggests. US researchers found they could predict how well an amateur player might perform on a game by measuring the volume of key sections of the brain. Writing in the journal Cerebral Cortex, they suggest their findings could have wider implications for understanding the differences in learning rates. MRI scans showed participants with a larger nucleus accumbens, which is part of the brain's reward centre, outperformed others in the first few hours, perhaps due to the "sense of achievement and the emotional reward" accompanying achievement in the earliest stages of learning, the team speculated. But those players who ultimately performed best on the game in which priorities changed had larger sections deep in the centre of the brain, known as the caudate and putamen.

Pen v Keyboard v Newton v Graffiti v Treo v iPhone [del.icio.us]

IanYorston — 2010-01-24T15:24:34-08:00

Phil Gyford tested a small collection of PDA and smartphone gadgets to see which of their methods of input was quickest. He tested six input method: Apple Newton handwriting recognition (1997); Palm Vx Graffiti (1999); Palm Treo 650’s hardware QWERTY keyboard (2004); Apple iPhone 3G’s software QWERTY keyboard (2009); old-fashioned Pen & Paper; a full-size QWERTY keyboard. He copied out 200 plus words. And he did it twice for each input. The results were surprising. Palm Graffiti was surprisingly slow. Handwriting was surprisingly slow. The iPhone soft keyboard was surprisingly fast.

UK Education watchdog highlight gaps in Citizenship teaching [del.icio.us]

IanYorston — 2010-01-24T14:48:38-08:00

Some schools in England are struggling to cover citizenship properly, according to inspectors.
A report by Ofsted says that in some secondary schools, pupils have "important gaps" in their knowledge. Inspectors say lessons have improved since they were made compulsory seven years ago but their report, based on 91 schools, reveals that only just over half schools were at least "good" on the subject, and only one was rated "outstanding". More than 10% of schools were judged to be "inadequate" in this area. Often citizenship shared a timetable slot with Personal, Social, Health and Economic (PSHE) education, but the time allowed was "too little to do justice to either subject".

Pub Quizes...

Ian Yorston — 2009-12-01T22:39:57+00:00

... are really difficult without Google.

Nudge. Nudge. Wink. Wink. Make the World a Better Place.

Ian Yorston — 2009-11-03T22:19:58+00:00

Two thoughts:

1. nudge: A book that offers advice on how to improve decisions about health, wealth and happiness.

2. thefuntheory.com: A site dedicated to the thought that something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better. Be it for yourself, for the environment, or for something entirely different, the only thing that matters is that it’s change for the better.

Migration is not a crime

Ian Yorston — 2009-10-29T04:02:14+00:00

Migration is not a crime

Originally uploaded by Steve Roe.

Nice piece of counter-think. Photographed in Oxford.

Canberra, Australia - ASBA 2009

Ian Yorston — 2009-10-09T18:26:38+01:00

I've been speaking at the ASBA 2009 Conference in Canberra. Great fun and a great audience. I've promised to write up some of our discussions once I get home - and once I'm over the jet-lag. In the meantime, many thanks and check back soon. Everyone is back in action in July 2011, in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Total Eclipse of the Heart. As a Flowchart.

Ian Yorston — 2009-08-18T20:59:56+01:00

Loved this. Total Eclipse of the Heart.

Found on Tumblr : Koufukuron

Homeopathic A&E

Ian Yorston — 2009-07-03T16:03:01+01:00

XKCD - On Extrapolation

Ian Yorston — 2009-07-03T15:30:44+01:00

Updating Old-Fashioned Technology

Ian Yorston — 2009-04-30T18:41:48+01:00

Just occasionally I find myself needing to revert to old technology. Like writing letters. Or sending faxes.

Which is difficult if you are averse to paper.

Step forward two cool services that make my life a little easier.

1. L-Mail. This lets me write letters by e-mail (or via a web interface) which are then printed, stuck in an envelope and posted by hand. Neat. I can even choose from which country they are posted. Which is fun. I can pretend to be in India and send birthday cards to my children.

2. PopFax. This lets me send (and receive) faxes from my computer. Either scanned files (photos, handwritten notes, etc) or standard desktop files (.pdf, .doc, etc).

Both services are web-based, cheap and efficient.

How much ? NHS spends money like water on ICT

Ian Yorston — 2009-04-13T00:15:42+01:00

According to the Guardian "BT Group will next month become the third major contractor in as many years to take a multimillion pound writedown on its work with the government's crisis-stricken GDP12.7bn overhaul of the NHS computer system."

This is the most astonishing amount of money.

The NHS is pretty much the biggest employer in Europe. There are something like 1,330,000 employed by the wider NHS - of whom some 133,000 are Doctors.

Yet despite that vast workforce we could (takes deep breath) give every-single-one of those employees TWO top-of-the range laptops (one for work and one for home) AND an iPhone each - and still have some change left over from GDP2.7bn.

Leaving some GDP10bn to spend on connecting them all up...

Let's look at that one more time. Two laptops and iPhone for every single NHS employee, and still have GDP10 Billion left over.

For pity's sake, who runs these contracts?

Because we sure know who's paying for it all.

Magistricide isn't nice

Ian Yorston — 2009-02-10T00:03:47+00:00

Connected Students

Ian Yorston — 2009-02-08T21:37:27+00:00

Found on TwitPic, via Twitter, from one of my students.

Ouch: Virtual Learning Environments are Expensive and Ineffective

Ian Yorston — 2009-01-13T01:56:13+00:00

Wow. According to the BBC, Ofsted have produced a hard-hitting assessment on the costs (high) and benefits (err, very few apparently) of the VLEs that we are all supposed to be purchasing.

Some of the quotes:

The use of online materials to help students with their lessons has been "slow to take off".
In many schools and colleges VLEs are still on a "cottage industry" scale.
The benefits to learners are so far "not yet obvious".
"Despite expectations", dating back some 3 or 4 years, the arrival of these online support services for learners are "still in the early stages of development".

Here at Radley, we bypassed a formal VLE and went for a simple school-wide wiki - using CourseForum software. Much simpler. Surprisingly powerful. And it works.

BBC Education

A trip to Canberra in October 2009

Ian Yorston — 2008-12-06T20:41:28+00:00

I'm taking a trip to Canberra between October 4th and October 11th 2009.

Australian School Business Administrators Conference 2009

Dilbert: Life, The Universe and Doctors

Ian Yorston — 2008-11-30T11:47:28+00:00

I'm married to a Doctor - so this struck a particular chord.

From my iPhone

Ian Yorston — 2008-11-22T20:48:10+00:00

I now have a shiny new 3G iPhone - on the O2 PAYG contract. It really is a very impressive handheld computer. And it runs fully fledged apps for many purposes. Including an excellent blogging tool. But the real strength of the iPhone is the excellent browser, coupled with its excellent connectivity (both WiFi and 3G).

A peek at the future: Google Flu Trends

Ian Yorston — 2008-11-12T01:09:27+00:00

This sort of thing is seriously smart. And a real indication of where Google can go by using the "Wisdom of the Crowds" as evidenced by activity passing through its own search engines.
Google Flu Trends.

Google have found that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity. Google Flu Trends can use aggregated Google search data to estimate flu activity in US states up to two weeks faster than traditional systems.

This work is overseen by Google.org - the multi-billion dollar charitable arm that Google have established. They aim to use the power of information and technology to address the global challenges of our age: climate change, poverty and emerging disease. In collaboration with experienced partners working in each of these fields, Google plan to invest resources and tap the strengths of their employees and global operations to advance five major initiatives:

45 Years

Ian Yorston — 2008-11-05T22:20:03+00:00

American Rhetoric: Martin Luther King, Jr. - I Have a Dream

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Martin Luther King, delivered 28 August 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington D.C..

Barack Obama

Ian Yorston — 2008-11-05T02:42:06+00:00

It's 02:45 in the UK - and I'm about to head for bed, confident that Barack Obama will be a junior Senator for only a few hours more.

The world could yet become a much better place.

Wikipedia: "Barack Obama is the junior United States Senator from Illinois and presidential nominee of the Democratic Party in the 2008 United States presidential election."

Google Maps: Zoom In

Ian Yorston — 2008-10-23T22:27:50+01:00

from XKCD - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.

Sarah Palin Debate Flow Chart

Ian Yorston — 2008-10-22T23:02:52+01:00

from www.adennak.com.

The Return of the Unreasonable Man

Ian Yorston — 2008-09-15T20:49:01+01:00

Time to start blogging again.

You get an ology, you're a scientist

Ian Yorston — 2008-06-13T09:06:49+01:00

Lots of students are doing public exams at the moment.

One of them (thanks James) sent me this:

From Randall Munroe's hugely entertaining xkcd - a site which not only offers "romance, sarcasm, maths and language", but also makes very clever use of img tags if you mouseover his cartoons.

All of which led me back to this tv ad from the late 1980s

The ad, created by agency J Walter Thompson, is priceless and was the watercooler moment of its time - making "you got an ology" a veritable catch phrase.

The ad also has a wonderful outro:

"It's the teachers who are wrong. You know, they can't mark. A lot of them can't see..."

Ready for the Small Screen

Ian Yorston — 2008-06-02T23:19:48+01:00

I've bought an Eee PC from Asus. It runs Linux. It runs all the Office applications. It runs the Firefox browser. And it runs my e-mail client of choice.

Cool.

And just 200 GBP.

Independent Schools Conference

Ian Yorston — 2008-06-02T22:45:20+01:00

I'm chairing a session tomorrow at the Independent Schools Annual Conference. We're looking at the threats and opportunities presented by Social Networks within a schools' context - so primarily YouTube, MySpace, Bebo and Facebook.

It should be a good session: we have Dr Zoe Hilton and Emily Knee, both from the NSPCC - who are experts in child-protection issues.

And then we have Antony Mayfield from iCrossing, who is a specialist in the interactions of People and Brands through the medium of Social Networks.

I'm guessing we'll be faced by a bunch of Heads who think that Social Networks are just a threat, pure and simple - but I'm hoping that I'll be wrong...

Save the Internet

Ian Yorston — 2008-04-27T22:21:53+01:00

Important (and informative) movie. Click through and watch...

See also: Save the Internet

Even more Unreasonable

Ian Yorston — 2008-04-25T16:13:35+01:00

Are you reading this website on its "home" page at www.UnreasonableMan.net or are you getting some sort of a feed into your own information channel?

Did you get here by chance or did you try typing the word "unreasonable" into Google?

Are you reading the comments on the right hand side of the page ("del.icio.us ideas") or just the main entries down the middle of the page?

If you're reading this in some sort of feed reader then do you have the latest feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheUnreasonableMan or are you reading something quite different (and perhaps older)?

I'm trying to push everything through the one channel...

The Future of ICT

Ian Yorston — 2008-04-23T23:47:47+01:00

It's becoming ever more obvious that the future of ICT lies with Web Based Applications. Facebook, Google, Amazon, Flickr, Twitter, etc If you want to keep an eye on the future then you could do a lot worse than to have a look at this list of the best web-based apps of 2008. It is worth noting that Google appears in just about every category (bear in mind that Picassa, Blogger and YouTube are all Google products - and iLike is essentially a Google product). Also note that Amazon do a lot more than just sell books, music and DVDs; they're rapidly becoming a major force in the ICT world.

BlogIt - Blogging from Facebook

Ian Yorston — 2008-04-19T18:27:25+01:00

There's now a blogging application within Facebook - written by those nice people at Typepad, who host this weblog of mine. It's got pretty neat functionality - and supports various blogging accounts (WordPress, Typepad, Blogger) as well as supporting Twitter and Facebook status posts.

You can get it here

Why iTunes matters, and how it happened.

Ian Yorston — 2008-03-09T21:26:19+00:00

Once upon a time there was a really neat program for the Apple Mac. It played your music. It shuffled songs and albums. And it was called SoundJam.

Apple bought it - re-badged it - and iTunes was born. The rest, as they say, is History.

Or, more to the point, the rest is the Future of Computing for the next 10 years or so.

Because Apple have leveraged iTunes into the interface of choice for every form of content that you might want. Music, Film, TV, PodCasts, Lectures. You name it (er, "Books?" I hear you cry), and Apple have figured how to put it on your iPod. And as the iPod (and now the iPhone) has become the smart device of choice, so iTunes has become the interface that everyone uses.

For content.

And as everyone knows (and Sony learned) content is king.

But actually, that's changing. Because now the iPhone is actually a computer - it runs Apple's OS X operating system and is well on the way to functioning as a fully fledged laptop/tablet. And that means that, well, iTunes is growing into something more.

It's now the conduit for all the functionality you wanted.

Apple have had the TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) triumvirate covered for a while. But now they have a hotline to every Form and Function you might possibly want.

Neat.