authenticgeek

Why Do Some People Learn Faster

2012-02-23T13:32:00Z

An oldie but goodie about Failure-Learning loops.

The critical part of this article (and why it feels more concrete than other social science based discussions on learning) is the identification of error-related negativity (ERN) and error positivity (Pe) activity in the brain. Researchers can actually tell if you’re making mistakes and simply giving up or making an effort to learn from your mistake.

My favorite part from the article:

After the children finished the test, the researchers told the students their score, and provided them with a single line of praise. Half of the kids were praised for their intelligence. “You must be smart at this,” the researcher said. The other students were praised for their effort: “You must have worked really hard.”

After this, the kids were offered a second test with the choice of harder or easier questions:

When kids were praised for their effort, nearly 90 percent chose the harder set of puzzles. However, when kids were praised for their intelligence, most of them went for the easier test.

So not only can we tell if someone isn’t making mistakes positively, we can influence their learning so that they make better choices and learn from their mistakes in the future!

It fits nicely with my own personal theory: there are no smart people or dumb people, there are people who choose to do smart things and people who choose to do dumb things.

(x-posted to authenticgeek and finestructure)
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Brave 'The Prize' Trailer

2012-02-23T12:48:00Z

Pixar continues to amaze. I love the whole arrow firing animation. The attention to detail is really why I love Pixar films so much, there's always something new to find.

And the characters are fantastic. You can feel where the rest of the story is going just by how the characters walk and behave.
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How Bots Seized Control of My Pricing Strategy

2012-02-21T23:19:00Z

An interesting tale of Amazon pricing and used books that may or may not exist.

However, the more interesting fact is that there are Amazon bots that sell Markov Chain-generated books (titled about turing tests) for dumb prices. Do they make money? Someone must buy them and get confused about what it all means. Moneyquote:

"… a computer program, pretending to be human, hawking a book about computers pretending to be human, while other computer programs pretend to have used copies of it."

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This is How I Blog

2012-02-20T23:30:00Z

Pinboard is my blog platform. Or at least it was for most of 2011. I let my science blog Fine Structure wane at the start of last year when I stopped having time to research and write long posts about science topics. It was incredibly enlightening to dig deep into a complex topic it but it’s not easy.

I still wanted to keep the blog alive even if I was just posting some short links and summaries because I was still reading a plethora of science blogs. I found that wrapping up complex topics in a few sentences is a great way to solidify my understanding of whatever I was reading as well.

Eventually I started Pinboarding links I wanted to write about in an attempt to pick up the habit but I resisted pasting my Pinboard descriptions in the Movable Type interface out of laziness (or intimidation).

There’s nothing like a technical challenge to motivate though so I glued together something from existing plugins to grab pinboard links with certain tags and generate posts on Fine Structure. Yes, I put in a bunch of effort upfront in an attempt to reduce the amount of effort I needed to post daily. It sounds contrary.

But the result was great. I felt liberated by the tiny non-wysiwyg text box of Pinboard and the lazy publishing model. I would write a few sentences about a link, add a tag and save it. Sometime in the next 30 minutes it would be posted to Fine Structure and it would float by on twitter.

I was pretty happy with that amount of effort for Fine Structure so I didn’t think more about it.

A little later I started writing some posts on topics that weren’t science related so I resurrected a personal blog (here! that’s this!). I still felt sick of web writing interfaces so I wrote a little static site generator in python. It took a bunch of text files and made a blog. Easy enough, right?

I still wasn’t happy though. I fussed with Octopress a bit which I felt was a great flexible tool to publish a blog - a (much much) more polished version of the thing I had written previously.

The thing was… I still had to generate my blog on one computer. Even if I had synced my templates and posts and octopres on every computer I own, I still had to do some work between writing and being done. It was still a pain.

I spoke to Alex about it over chat one day. I recall saying “what I really want is cloud Octopress, but who has the time to build such a thing?”

As it turns out, I did.

The answer was rooted in Dropbox. I wanted to write stuff and put it on Dropbox from anywhere - what device doesn’t have a Dropbox client? - and then just have a computer somewhere else do the octopressing for me. Don’t make me configure a post, just let me write, save and publish.

I’d been using Go on a few small projects and I was really getting into the groove of prototyping things quickly. I figured it’d be a good exercise so I started writing a Dropbox API wrapper. Once that was done, a few more lines had me generating a site from files in my Dropbox.

As it stands, go-publisher looks at files in Dropbox every 20 minutes or so and generates a site if something has changed. Posts are easy to write, just Markdown and some YAML front matter (ala Jekyll), most of which is generated for you. Minimally, you can just write until you’re done and add ---published: true--- to the top of your post. Everything else is just done.

Back to Pinboard. I loved my Fine Structure posting method so much that I wanted to retain it in this new thing I was building so I wrote a quick addition that makes documents in Dropbox from Pinboard posts (modularity!). This is still my favorite way to keep on top of my blog on a daily basis.

There are a few other projects that I didn’t know about at the time, including Calepin and scriptogr.am which Anil tipped me off to. They feel very similar in goals, probably great if you want a simple blog and don’t care to run it yourself. I didn’t honestly expect to be the only one with this idea. In fact, it feels nice to have my needs reflected by others.

So it exists on github now. It’s actively used (by me) and I update it whenever I run into something that makes blogging not fun (or, y’know, bugs). It needs a name as well. Something clever. If this is the sort of thing that interests you, you should fork it. Learning Go is fairly enjoyable as well but that’s another blog post.

I wrote a few core foundations for my motivation in the readme:

• you already write long form with your favorite tools
• you already have streams of short form stuff
• you don’t want to be constrained to a single computer/device
• you don’t want to babysit a publishing platform

Make these tools get out of my way so I can Just Fucking Write. Let’s make it a trend.

Maker Faire Bay Area 2012 Tickets

2012-02-20T18:48:00Z

Maker Faire Bay Area tickets are on sale for 2012! This year the faire covers May 19th and 20th at the same spot, the San Mateo Event Center.

The 9th of February also marked the opening of the call for Makers for those of you inclined to show your creations at this event. You only have until March 20th to submit your application, so get started!
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Ice Cream Sandwich Preview on Galaxy Tab 10.1 Google I/O Edition

2012-02-18T09:46:00Z

There are a couple guides for installing CyanogenMod9 preview (Ice Cream Sandwich) on retail versions of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 but a couple quirks prevented me from readily installing it on my Google I/O limited edition from I/O 2011. I’ll run down the details for Mac and Windows.

Google I/O tabs don’t have the standard Recovery/Download firmware that you get when you hold POWER+DOWN on boot. Instead they have fastboot/Download. Traditional instructions tell you to use the Odin downloader to install ClockworkMod to the recovery partition, but we just use fastboot to boot to a ClockworkMod image whenever we need it. It’s less steps and less chance to fuck something up.

If you’ve installed the android tools you already have the fastboot command line tool, otherwise you need to download a standalone version (OSX: this one, Windows: there’s a fastboot download in this post, easily searchable if either of those no longer exist). There used to be an official standalone from HTC but now people just pass around links to standalone versions. Sometimes it’s called ‘fastboot-mac’ for the mac, you can rename it before use if you want.

A brief interlude for Windows users, and stop me if you’ve heard this before: you need drivers. Not stock ones. Better ones. Download this thing called PDANet which is normally used for sharing your mobile internet connection through USB to your computer. We don’t use it for this purpose. During install it’ll ask you about reinstalling drivers, say YES and choose Samsung.

Back on both platforms. Booting into ClockworkMod is pretty easy now. Put your Tab into fastboot mode by holding POWER+DOWN on startup and selecting the left option (DOWN to change, UP to select, fastboot is the USB icon). It’ll say some things about fastboot being ready. Connect the USB cable to your computer.

Windows users: PDANet will bring up a window recognizing your mobile device - CLICK THIS WINDOW. It’ll attempt to connect to your device and fail. That’s OK.

Mac users: just kick back and look cool.

You should be able to use your command line tool now: fastboot devices should return a list of devices connected to your machine (hopefully just one - your Tab). If not, you did something wrong. Bummer.

This is the latest version of ClockworkMod for the Tab. Download the “Fastboot/Nvflash” version and unzip the single img file somewhere convenient.

Presuming your device is still connected and in fastboot mode, just run fastboot boot /path/to/recovery-cwm_5.0.2.7-sam-tab-10.1.img (the ClockworkMod image is called something like that) and your Tab will reboot into cwm recovery mode. You must do this every time you want to get into ClockworkMod. Luckily you don’t have to do it more than once or twice.

That was the hard part. Now you can follow such instructions as “How to Root your Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1” which is a requirement of such tutorials as “How to Install the CyanogenMod 9 ICS Preview Rom on the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1”. Don’t bother with the instructions for Odin or flashing your recovery partition - just boot into CWM using the fastboot method when instructions require it.

We haven’t actually changed anything on the Tab using these instructions. Both the Root and the CM9 instructions will have you drop zip files onto the flash memory of the device itself which requires you to be booted regularly but none of the fastboot commands I discuss here prevent that. Good luck!

Remix Some Interactive Fiction

2012-02-15T19:29:00Z

I like it when people take old things and move them into the future in such a way that it compliments both the classic feel and the new technology. Such is the case with Playfic.

First thing: Waxy.org has an intern. Andy Baio hired his nephew to do some work and the two of them ended up with a way to play interactive fiction on the internet. That's not too original, but they added ways to remix the stories or easily create something new from scratch. Plus Twitter's Bootstrap, so of course it looks great. It really compliments interactive fiction and the technology just gets out of the way.
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Ender's Game Full Cast and Crew

2012-02-15T08:20:00Z

The cast list is out for 2013s -biggest disappointment- best movie, the film interpretation of Ender’s Game. And get this: Harrison Ford as Graff.

Otherwise mostly unknowns since it features a bunch of kids. That kid from Hugo as Ender is spot on, otherwise no one is really as I pictured them. Or I simply never had a very good idea of what anyone looked like.

Also, the headshots that kids do for acting are fucking creepy. source

The 2012 Update for Dwarf Fortress

2012-02-14T16:41:00Z

Insanity. This game always amazes me with its depth and complexity. The hardness of smelted ore is actually based on real stress/strain physics:

When Toady redesigned the combat system in DF2010 (the successor to 40d), he changed it from a heuristic system (with values he decided on) to a system based on the properties of Yield, Fracture and Elasticity. He did this in an attempt to simulate proper Stress/Strain equations. However, because Iron has poorer properties in comparison to Bronze, the result was the Iron Weapons/Armor are inferior to Bronze Weapons/Armor in DF2010

It’s difficult to say if the confusing interface makes this game better (use your imagination, like text based games!) or if it only serves to limit the audience. At the very least, I can imagine a Sim Dwarf City doing very well on the app store.
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In Time

2012-02-13T11:39:00Z

In Time turned out to be a movie that relied far too heavily on making time puns. As for the plot, there are about a million ways one can make an interesting scifi storyline with immortality and time-as-currency but the writer/director managed to keep everything pretty shallow.

Speaking of, writing and directing a film seems like a Lucas-esque control freak move. You’re the best writer you could convince to do your movie? Unlikely. And the best director? These odds are not getting better. Don’t even get me started on people who write/direct/star.

I’m a fan of Matt Bomer on White Collar so I was disappointed by his lack of screen time. He may have been the only character in the entire film with clear motivations, though that may have been simply a side effect of being a chracter who dies early.

In conclusion, do not watch.