edtechdev

I don't see why he would regret it. Ubuntu and Android aren't really competitors (at least not yet). The phone version of Ubuntu is built on top of Android. They're both open source. Maybe eventually they'll be "open source" competitors like KDE vs. Gnome or something like that, but Ubuntu is a long way off from that (I'm not knocking them - I pre-ordered an Ubuntu phone even though I like and have no problems with Android).

If I were him, I would regret that Ubuntu is still slow to get a real, permanent toehold in the PC/laptop/tablet market - where vendors consistently and regularly include an option to have Ubuntu installed instead of Windows. I would regret that there is no Ubuntu tablet out there at all. You can't really use Ubuntu on any of the new Windows tablets (I've tried installing it on several). I've been using Ubuntu as my primary OS for over 6 years now, and what I want is a hybrid/convertible tablet that runs Ubuntu, and isn't as slow or limited or buggy as it would be if I installed Ubuntu on an android tablet. I'm not blaming Ubuntu for these problems - Microsoft and the hardware manufacturers chose to use Clovertrail and UEFI and all this other nonsense.

This is useful for educational purposes, too - wirelessly streaming from a chrome browser or chromebook to a projector (via hdmi to vga adapter).

(An alternative if you have a laptop connected to the projector is to run AirServer to act as a virtual Apple TV, and then either airplay from your ipad or run AirParrot from a windows tablet. Of course Chromecast will be the first solution to work from android tablets, too, since Miracast solutions still seem to be non-existent or not so great.)

6 years ago there was an initiative at Harvard to focus on teaching and not just research, but I don't know what came of it: http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2007/02/task-force-pro... http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/10/education/10harvard.html?_...

But yes, the general state of things at virtually all universities (except community colleges) is that teaching is very much secondary to research, and as a result, as the book Academically Adrift summarizes, is that a big proportion of students learn very little in college: "45 percent of students 'did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning' during the first two years of college. 36 percent of students 'did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning' over four years of college." http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/01/18/study_finds_la...

An example of a university that does pay a lot of attention to teaching is Valencia College (community college). They have required professional development classes both for and by the faculty: http://valenciacollege.edu/faculty/development/ and they won an award for their efforts: http://chronicle.com/article/Valencia-College-Wins-First/130...

I went digging for any example of a course that made a dent in student retention, and I found two courses, one on learning & motivation strateges, and another on math for engineers: http://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2013/07/17/two-courses-that-m... And coincidentally both required hundreds of thousands of dollars in grant money to develop - the latter one 5 million dollars in NSF funds.

Well, there's actual research on it. Most of our intuitions about teaching and learning are wrong.

Google computer science education or check out SIGCSE

Great idea. Imagine seeing this on HackerNews posts, or reddit, etc., even popular posts that got plenty of upvotes and had substantial discussions going on:

"As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. If you feel that this question can be improved and possibly reopened, visit the help center for guidance. If this question can be reworded to fit the rules in the help center, please edit the question."

Yeah there's a lot of interesting stuff being developed around pouchdb, I've been slowly checking it out the past couple of months:

Some beginning tutorials/intros to pouchdb: http://pouchdb.com/getting-started.html http://briantoth.github.io/Tutorial/2013/03/19/pouchdb-intro... http://mattgwwalker.wordpress.com/2013/04/08/pouchdb-2/

Todo Tutorial using AngularJS and PouchDb http://twilson63.github.io/ngTodoPouch/

Building Offline Applications With AngularJS and PouchDB http://mircozeiss.com/building-offline-applications-with-ang...

Other Apps Using PouchDB https://github.com/daleharvey/pouchdb/wiki/Who-or-What-Is-Us...

including this offline conference app https://github.com/axemclion/conference

PouchVision - inspect and interact w/pouch instances http://brudolph.pouchvision.jit.su/

Puton - bookmarklet for inspecting/editing pouch dbs http://puton.jit.su/

PeerPouch (PouchDB-over-WebRTC) - in development at one point https://github.com/natevw/pouchdb

Like someone else mentioned, they are essentially cheat sheets. Very useful if you already know some other programming language.

I especially like pages that map the features of one programming language to another (that I already know). The recent AlloyUI post was an example comparing it to jQuery and YUI: http://alloyui.com/rosetta-stone/

And also see Rosetta Code http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_Code

There are professionals and researchers out there whose job is dedicated to this issue of improving math education (and the same with physics education, computer science education, etc.). You can find great ideas and sample lessons and great educational software.

Math is taught out of context, or completely decontextualized - that's why people hate it, and that's why it's hard to motivate people to learn it. Math knowledge is both situated and embodied. Look at mathematics education research for ideas on how to teach math more effectively.

For example Jo Boaler's work. She is teaching a MOOC on this topic of how people learn math next month: https://class.stanford.edu/courses/Education/EDUC115N/How_to... http://joboaler.com/

NCTM - National Council of Teachers of Mathematics http://www.nctm.org/

RUME - Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education http://sigmaa.maa.org/rume/Site/News.html

As someone else mentioned, the app DragonBox helps with understanding algebra: http://dragonboxapp.com/

The Adventures of Jasper Woodbury taught math in context, in the form of complex challenges: http://viking.coe.uh.edu/~ichen/ebook/et-it/ai.htm

The numbers for women in programming/tech are even worse than the article states when you look at minority women:

"The numbers for minority women are even more dismal. Hispanic women represent 1% of the high-tech workforce, and African-American women don't fare much better, at 3%. The better the jobs, the lower the proportions are of women and non-Asian minorities. Despite the diversity of the population of the region, Silicon Valley, which boasts the highest salaries among tech regions, fares much worse than the national numbers."

http://www.fastcolabs.com/3010423/the-geek-boy-irony-behind-...

I get ear blockage just about every spring. Allergy medicine helps in my case. Also, maybe try to keep the inside of the ear dry. I had an ear blockage last month, and it went away after a few days taking allergy medicine, but then just the other day water ran down my ear during a shower and it's clogged up again.

Also, like others mentioned - go to a doctor - in particular an ear, nose, throat specialist. 2 years ago I went and they cleared everything out.

There's also Derby, CanJS, Spine, Dart, Dojo, etc. and now Facebook's React library.

TodoMVC seems to have them all covered (except the latest one from Facebook): https://github.com/tastejs/todomvc http://todomvc.com/

"the Search charm will provide global search results powered by Bing"

This is similar to what Ubuntu users complained about when they included Amazon results in any searches.

Hopefully there will be an option to disable it and/or switch to another search provider.

Hard to detect plagiarism when the original article is behind a paywall of another publisher

Here's hoping open, post-publication review catches on:

http://futureofscipub.wordpress.com/open-post-publication-pe... http://www.frontiersin.org/Computational_Neuroscience/10.338... http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2013/03/22/brian-deers-...

There is Xubuntu or Linux Mint (or of course tons of other Debian-based distros)

If you want to stick with Ubuntu and just remove unity, here are instructions for replacing it with Linux Mint's desktop interface (Cinnamon) and file manager (Nemo): http://askubuntu.com/questions/292394/how-to-completely-remo...

If you are using Ubuntu, here is how to install the Nemo file manager, which is from Linux Mint and based off of Gnome 3.4 before things were removed: http://www.webupd8.org/2012/12/how-to-install-nemo-file-mana...

I've been using standard Ubuntu as my sole OS for over 6 years now. I'm most likely switching to Linux Mint or Xubuntu when I get a chance.

there is also churnalism, a chrome extension that checks if a story is just a press release or plagiarized - this story checks out

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/churnalism/igpjomm...

If they allowed a title-only layout, it would be closer to google reader, and you could skim hundreds of posts very quickly.

Yeah there is research on this, too - it's usually called "learning by teaching," although there are other names, too, like the "protege effect": http://ideas.time.com/2011/11/30/the-protege-effect/

But generally, the idea is to help students learn, instead of just yourself. So, instead of lecturing, give them opportunities to explain the material to others, do study groups, etc. Even explaining material to yourself helps you understand it better (this is called the self-explanation effect, by Michelene Chi and others). So, you can embed prompts after questions that ask students to reflect and explain what they learned, or have students blog or keep a journal about their work (or contribute to stackoverflow, yahoo answers, or similar support forums).

Anyway, read How People Learn, a free book: http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=9853

Here are videos showing the 7 exercises, along with some tips for avoiding potential damage (don't slide down after the wall sit, for example, push up, so you don't damage your knees):

http://lifehacker.com/these-12-videos-show-the-proper-form-f...

These studies measured reaction times. There's only a negative .31 correlation between reaction time and intelligence test scores. Just chewing gum lowers your reaction times. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_time#Mental_chronometr...

Actual intelligence scores have risen each decade: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

Also, the "We" in these studies is no longer just a narrow range of middle to upper class white males. If you look at sub-groups, most likely everybody is rising even when the overall average might be declining.

This is what happened with SAT scores since the 60s: "SAT scores don’t decline because students get dumber; they go down because more students take them." http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/blog/average_...

So the question is, have reaction times gotten slower because of more people being tested, or other factors? I'd imagine in decades past, participating in a psych experiment was a more "special" occasion warranting heightened attention and performance than it is today.

I'm not the author of this, and I'm still trying to wrap my head around how it works, but one potential use for it in the future might be essentially a browser-based application platform. Visitors could run, edit, create, and host their own web applications. But it's still very early in development - there isn't a security model yet, other than sandboxing user-generated scripts using Web Workers. There are some sample apps like an RSS reader and so forth here: http://grimwire.github.io/grimwire/#_apps There was also an article on Mozilla about it a couple months ago: Building User-Extensible Webapps with Local https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/03/building-user-extensible-w...

PageForest is another site that lets people create their own javascript applications, hosted on appengine: http://www.pageforest.com/ And other sites that let visitors create and host their own apps or games include http://pixieengine.com/ http://www.playmycode.com/ and http://scratch.mit.edu/

There's some more info about Grimwire here: http://grimwire.github.io/grimwire/

You didn't even bother to read the article, it says "family member or intimate acquaintance." If you're intimate with "drug dealers killing each other" then I stand corrected.

"you're talking about the number of households that admit to owning a gun, not the real number"

Looks like you either didn't read the short sentence I posted, or didn't think about it before responding, because that doesn't say anything against the evidence that there is lower gun ownership today than there was 20 years ago, only that the actual percentage back then AND now is likely higher than surveys suggest, but there is still a strong trend downward in gun ownership.

And for this "so called research", I'm talking about the NIH and CDC research into gun violence that was cut off under pressure by the NRA in 1996: http://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2013/02/gun-violence.as...

Research for example that showed that owning a gun increases the likelihood of harm done to or by a family member or acquaintance.

Well back in 1993, almost 49% of households had a gun. Today the number is 32%. That alone is a 35% drop in gun ownership.

There are so many other factors that could play a role here. And none of them negate the need for common sense gun regulations and re-funding research on both gun and non-gun violence.

See jStat for one javascript statistical library that is similar to what is offered in R and Matlab: http://www.jstat.org/

And Formula.js has javascript versions of all the Excel functions: http://stoic.com/formula/

You can read books on a screen, too - they are called ebooks

From https://github.com/JacksonGariety/Yugen/blob/master/routes.j...

  res.redirect(crypto.randomBytes(3).toString('hex'))

You probably already know this, but you'd probably want to replace that with a unique id generator, like perhaps MongoID or a timestamp or something.

If one of these hundred alternative languages that compiles to JavaScript takes off ( https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/wiki/List-of-lang... ) AND has features that would benefit from a better underlying "assembly" language (like Dart from Google, Typescript from Microsoft, or asm.js from Mozilla), then I would say Javascript's days are either numbered, or it will finally adopt static typing, as was proposed a decade ago for JavaScript 2.0 or ES4 or whatever: http://www-archive.mozilla.org/js/language/js20-2000-07/libr... http://www.webreference.com/programming/javascript/rg38/2.ht... http://www.ecmascript.org/es4/spec/overview.pdf