Timely Snow

Would You Take the Bird in the Hand, or a 75% Chance at the Two in the Bush? – New York Times
Professor Frederick discovered striking systematic patterns in how people answer questions about risk and patience, including those above. This short problem-solving test, he found, predicts a lot:

1) A bat and a ball cost $1.10 [...]

MathandText

For some reason, I found this very funny. The weblog itself also seems very interesting, written by a school mathematics textbook developer.

In a few weeks I’m supposed to give a talk about the use of wikis and weblogs in teaching and research. Which would be easier if I knew more about them. This tool will certainly be used in what I do, though, so I’m storing the link here:

Jon Udell: Visualizing change
This is wildly cool stuff. [...]

blyberg.netCreatingavirtualcardcatalog
I’m not sure yet what this is good for, but our local library (Ann Arbor District Library) now allows you to create your own virtual card catalog. You have to set up an account there, but you don’t need to be an actual AADL card holder.

Ink Gestures for Word now in public beta – The Tablet PCs Weblog
Loren Heiny has been hard at work on Ink Gestures for some time now.
James and I have talked about it in passing on our podcast and I’ve been trying out an early beta release for the past
couple of weeks. Loren has now gotten [...]

[Actually, this is the building next door to my grandfather’s house…which kind of alters what follows…] It’s probably never going to be good news when your relatives send you an article about your grandfather’s house entitled “City demolishes another eyesore.”

Lightweight eye tracker – hack a day – www.hackaday.com _

Here’s an article on how to build your own, semi-portable eye-tracker.

I’m listening to a very interesting talk by Bob Bain, a historian of education who followed up a long career as a high school history teacher by starting a second career as an education professor. I won’t try to summarize the talk, except briefly, but take some notes on the thoughts it stimulates in [...]

Durkheim – Social Facts

“A social fact is any way of acting, whether fixed or not, capable of exerting over the individual an external constraint”

From this, which has this nice explanation of why this is interesting:

The cohesion necessary for coordinated group effort can be only be explained by reference to “social facts”, those things that are [...]

Chinese educational yearbook—a good source of official information and statistics.

Link courtesy of Pinyin News.