American Spending

by Dave Pollard

While this post is talking about the impact of oil, I find this quote disturbing:

here's how the average costs of living in North America break down, per $100 in household income:

Expenses heavily dependent on oil: $52

* Food $10
* Transportation $22
* Heating / Air Conditioning $5
* Health Costs $4
* Clothing $5
* Furniture & Home Maintenance $3
* Cosmetics & Household Products $3

Expenses dependent on interest rates: Housing $24

Other expenses: $28

* Taxes $15
* Insurance, Child Care and other service $13

Total expenses per $100 of household income: $104.

Where is the household's spending on child(ren) education?

Mistakes

by Clark Quinn

A few gems from his post:

He who fails fastest, wins.

A company celebrated not when the mistake was made, but when the lesson was learned.

Piet Hein is quotable here: “The road to wisdom? Well it’s simple to express: err and err and err again, but less and less and less.”

I don’t mind small mistakes.

He recited his experience where when a mistake was made, they’d fire someone, and think they’d solved the problem! [My emphasis]

When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.

May I just add one more. If failure is the mother of success, small success is the father.

Manage your road with achievable milestones and celebrate each step on its way.

Learning Activity and Simulator

I have long held the view that simulator (from simple Physics applet, flight simulator to BBC's English history timeline) is not learning activity. I was clicking through the English history timeline and I did not feel like I have learnt anything. :-)

Student forced to view "An Inconvenient Truth" which he did not belive

This Stephen Colbert show tells a horrible story of today's American College Student. Hope this is only an one-off case, else this will really become "China Century"

url: http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/?ml_video=87003

Is it a sound idea?

I was listening to this and started wondering if this girl knows what she is talking about?

Energy (stored electricity in a battery) is NOT the same as voltage!

"Each cell stores 1.2 volts ...."

WRONG!

The sad thing about this podcast is that the interviewer also does not understand!

Climate Change isn't about saving the planet

WHAT! Read on.

Climate Change is about saving OUR LIVES.

So it is much more urgent!

The Himalyan glaciers feed three of the world's major river systems, sustaining 750 million people. If these melt we're not talking about warmer weather - this is a Mass Extinction Event. [my emphasis]

Why Axiomatize Set Theory?

I like mathematics because I like the intellectual challenges it can offer.

Here is a good one:

Russell's paradox concerns the set R={ s | s ∉ s}. Is R∈R? If R∈R, then by the definition of R∉R. But by definition, if R∉R, then R∈R. So R is clearly not a well-defined set.

Answer? Read the rest of the original post.

Learning Chinese R/W way - Lesson 6

Those with keen eyes may have noticed something interesting.

In Lesson Two when we were discussing how to express date, 日 (which means the Sun) is used to express the day. In the last lesson, we have

A sunny day, we say "晴天".
雨 is rain as in 雨天 (rainy day)...

Of course, we should not say "sunny SUN (晴日)" for a sunny day. Rain also does not come from the Sun. So what is the meaning of 天 when it is used alone, you may ask?

天 means sky when it is used by itself. Now that make sense. 天 is also another way of expressing "day".

Chinese is easier than Western language because we do not need to change the verb to different form (e.g. we don't have constructs like go, goes, went, gone) according time, gender nor number. A verb (a single character or a phrase) is the same in all these situation.

Chinese expresses the time (tense) explicitly or implied from context.

Now is 現在, Past is 過去 and future is 未來.

Today is 今天 or 今日.
Yesterday is 昨 or 昨日. Yesteryear is 昨年 or 去年.
Tomorrow is 明天 or 明日. Next year is 明年.

Visualisation of Models

Wolfram Demonstration Project (Maker of Mathematica) has literally thousands of Applets which allows "computational exploration" of complex concepts as expressed by complex mathematical equations.

There are lots of models for Physics (including high school Physics).

You need to download a 80.7M player to see the applets.

Learning Chinese R/W way - Lesson 5

In this lesson, let's learn some descriptions about weather and see how the "radicals" are used in constructing a Chinese character.

We have learnt that to express the day of a month, we can use 日. In fact, 日 means "Sun" and 月 means "Moon". So when you see "Sun", it is a day. When you see one cycle of the change of moon, it is 28 days - close enough to equal that to "month".

Let see some Chinese words with 日 in them:
明 (Sun and Moon together) means "Bright".
A sunny day, we say "晴天"
Morning is 早晨 (which is also the greeting in the morning, equivalent to "Good Morning"). These two words both have 日 at the top.

Now let's move on to another radical.
雨 is rain as in 雨天 (rainy day). When used as a radical, it is always on top.
雪 is snow. 雹 is hail. 霧 is fog.
雷 is thunder, 雷電 is lightning and thunder. (電 is electricity by itself.)


In this lesson, we have learnt these words:
明晴 早晨 雨雪雹霧 雷電
and see how 日and 雨 are used as radicals.

There is another new word which I have not explain what it means 天. Can you guess what it means? Answer in next lesson.

Resources for tackling "school bullying"

When I was in Hong Kong, I met with my old pal Prof Ma Hing Keung. We talked about using role play simulation for "Liberal Studies" in HK. He suggested that RPS can be used to handle school bullying as well. I started a bit of research and found the following.



Black Ants

The YouTube video is a bright scenario whereby encouraging students against bullying. The latter is a dark story telling the tragic consequence of bullying.

Web-enabled Role Plays

John Palka blogs about my presentation at e-Learning Guild 2007 Annual Gathering in Boston and very glad to know that I have made a little difference and he is going to develop a web-based role play.

The steps he is taking are very actionable. Here is a suggestion (specifically related to his step 2) which may help.

I will provide some information about each character, but I’ll leave enough gaps for the youth group to fill in and take ownership of the character.

The level of information to provide is one of the most tricky part of designing an engaging and effective role play (the other are the scenario and kick-start episode). We must provide sufficient information to give players to concretely identify the role (stereotypical may be) and yet leave out sufficient details to encourage embellishment. It is better to err on the side of providing too many instead of too few. When sufficient information are available, you can let the players pick and choose among all the details (and to add/modify if necessary). In this way,the "ownership of the role" feeling is not lost by players and you would have provided a strong foundation for the role play to progress.

Hope to see his final work soon.

Learning Chinese R/W way - Lesson 4

I have said the Chinese is very "lego-like". Let me demonstrate further.

Today new words are: 我你您他她它 們 的

我 is the first person pronoun. To express plural: we say 我們.

Chinese has no distinction between subjective and objective form. So 我 is both "I" and "me".

To express possession, put 的 after the pronoun. So "my" and "mine" are both translated to 我的. "Our" and "ours" are 我們的.

There are two forms of you: a common "you" and a "respectful you". The former is 你 and the latter is 您. For general use, you don't need to distinguish between them. However when you are addressing your "superior" such as father, mother, uncle, it is good to use the second version.

Again the plural form of "you" is 你們. The possessive form are 你的 or 你們的 depending on number.

Third person is denoted by 他她它. 她 is a recent word arising from the political correctness. Previously, we don't distinguish between male and female. [What a bad influence from the W...!] 它 is for animals etc.

Being combinational, once you know today's eight Chinese characters, you can combine to form the following English equivalent:
I me my mine, you you your yours, he him his his, she her her hers, it it its its, we us our ours, they them their theirs.

As soon as you see 們 after a pronoun, you know it is referring to the plural form. As soon as you see 的, you know it is possessive. There is no guessing what has "he" have to do with "him"!

Exercise:
Translate the following into English:
她們的 Theirs - more accurately, this refers to something belong to a group of female human beings.

In this lesson, you have learnt these words:
我 你您 他她它 們 的
and how to combine them in Chinese.

By now, I hope I have convince you that Chinese is easier than English (at least in terms of remembering because of the combination ability of Chinese characters and the simplicity due to the lack of grammatical variations). Next lesson, we shall talk about weather!

Learning Chinese R/W way - Lesson 3

The ability to read Chinese depends on an ability to distinguish between different words. Here are a few words that we have learnt and may confuse you:
十千午年
To confuse you even further, 干 is yet a different word.

To be able to really see the difference, you should understand how Chinese characters are written. Wikipedia has a good article on the eight basic writing principles. Read it now. I will be waiting for you here. Come back after reading it.

千 starts with a "short tapering line thinning toward lower left" (Stroke 7) whereas 干 starts with a "straight horizontal line" (Stroke 2).

Note all the words above do NOT end with "A hook to the left". The last strokes of all of them are just "straight vertical line".

Chinese characters can be written in different "style" or "scripts". Most computer font style is based on either "Clerical" or "Regular" scripts. Now take a look at the example, again from Wikipedia before continuing.

If you have looked carefully, you should have noticed that nearly all strokes start with a slightly larger "head" (in regular script) because when we write them, we pause slightly (or press down the brush slightly) before continuing the stroke. When it is time to turn, we also pause slight (or press down the brush slightly), again creating a slight thicker node. There are two ways to end a stroke: finish the stroke by lifting the brush or by pausing. Please note that some words only differ by how a single stroke was ended.

Please sensitise yourself to these differences. This will be very useful to recognise different Chinese Characters.

In this lesson, we have not learnt any new words. But I hope you have a better understand and ability to find the differences between words that may look similar.

Chinese does not have tense. In the next lesson, we shall learn how Chinese express the time concept we shall talk about pronouns.

PS After I wrote this, I found another useful site which shows how to count pen strokes as well as the order of how to write the character.

Learning Chinese R/W way - Lesson 2

Learning Chinese is easy because it is a very "lego-like" language. Once you know a few characters, you can build on that.

In English, January, February, March, April, ... are all different and hence you need to learn all twelve by heart. In Chinese, 月 means moon - the brightest object we can see at night at the sky. Since Chinese calendar is a "lunar" calender, one month is one cycle of the moon from new moon to full moon and back. By the way, at the beginning of a Chinese month, it is always new moon. Full moon at the middle of the month.

Now back to the month, the same word 月 is used to express western month as well.
January is 一月,
February is 二月,
March is 三月, etc.

Hence by knowing the numbers, you already know how to express the month by knowing one more word, 月.

Two more words to complete your ability to express a full date: 年 (year) and 日(day).

Today, 10th May, 2007 is expressed as 二千零七年五月十日. (Since May is the fifth month in the year) The order is year, month and then day.

What about time? OK, three more characters to learn: 時, 分, 秒. If it is 9:35:42 am, we say 上午九時三十五分四十二秒.

上午 means morning,
中午 means noon, and
下午 means afternoon.

So you may have guess that 午 means middle of the day (noon)! 午時 was the olden way of saying midday.

Look carefully how 上 and 下 are written. The horizontal stroke represent the baseline. So 上 means "above" or "upper". 下 means "below" or "lower". 中 means middle.

Now, I shall also tell you how to express weekdays. No, we don't have to remember another 7 words. We just need to understand that week is western concept. So when it is introduced into China, we need a phrase to mean week: 星期.

Monday is 星期一, Tuesday is 星期二 and so on. Sunday is a bit different. It is not 星期七. It is 星期日.

Exercise:
What does the following mean?
二千零七年五月三十一日星期四 31st May, 2007 Thursday

In this lesson, you have learnt these words:
年月日時分秒上中下午
these phrases: 上午 中午 下午 星期
and how to express date time in Chinese

Next time, we shall look at the characteristics of Chinese character and how to write them. Should be interesting.

Learning Chinese R/W way - Lesson 1

I made the point that Chinese is easy to learn (link) and I am going to back it up by teaching YOU Chinese. So let's experiment to see if this claim can be proven.

My native language is Cantonese and I used traditional Chinese since I started school. However, I have been living in Australia for the last 13 years and hence my Chinese is now rusty. I was not very good at natural Language anyway. But I will give it a try. More experienced Chinese Language teachers are welcome to comment, suggest or criticize.

I will try to post at least once a week (more if I have time) and I hope within one year, you will be able to read National Chinese Newspapers such as those listed in here. I also hope that by then, you will be able to communicate in Chinese too. Note: this is a big claim and this is the first time I teach Chinese. (I was a Physics teacher, not language teacher!) If this experiment fails, so be it. In any case, do not sue me if I cannot deliver!

Before we begin, here is another disclaimer. I believe Chinese is a graphical language (contrast to most Western language which is phonetically based). This distinction makes learning to read and write Chinese MUCH easier than learning to speak and listen to Chinese especially when there are so many different dialects within China. So R/W in my title of this post (course) refers to "READ" and "WRITE".

One more thing before we actually start, you need to be able to write (OK, type). For those using Windows, make sure you go to [Control Panel], open [Regional and Language Options], in the [Languages] tab, add Chinese(Taiwan) and input method ChangJie. Do NOT add the Pingyin input method.

OK, Lesson one, let's start with numbers.

一 (one horizontal stroke) is the number one.
二 (two horizontal strokes) is the number two.
三 (three horizontal strokes) is the number three.

If you have installed ChangJie input method, you can try to input these three Chinese characters. Activate your Chinese Input method (the default is [ctrl] [Shift]). To input 一, type the character M on your keyboard and follow by the [space]. 二 is two M's followed by the [space] and ....

Yes, 三 is 3 M's followed by [space].

Well, number four is NOT 4 M's. It is actually quite different.

Here is the Chinese characters from one to ten.
一二三四五六七八九十
I'll discussion the input method for these characters in a later post. Let's learn how numbers are expressed in Chinese first.

Note the character ten (十) is also a place indicator. In English, numbers are advanced every three places. Hence we have ten, hundred and thousand. After thousand, it is ten thousand.

In Chinese, there are four place holders: 十, 百, 千, 萬. This will require a little switching in thinking. So instead of ten thousand, we have 萬.

Now, exercise for you. Translate the following Chinese numbers back to English. (To cheat, highlight the rest of the post.)

一十二 twelve
四十五 forty five
六千七百八十九 six thousand seven hundred eighty nine
三萬七千八百五十六 thirty seven thousand eight hundred fifty six

So far, I have missed out another important number - zero. It is written like this:零. So 2007 is 二千零七. Note, we don't need to use two 零 because a place holder 千 has been used making it perfectly clear that we mean two thousand and seven.

零 is a bit difficult to write, so some Chinese use the Arabic zero instead. However, if you are using Arabic it should be written like this: 二００七.

Now, you can read numbers in Chinese, keep tuned. Next time, we shall talk about how Chinese express date and time.

In this lesson, you have learnt these words:
零一二三四五六七八九十百千萬
and how numbers are written in Chinese

Golden Ratio, Plant's growth and Stem cell

by Julie J. Rehmeyer

The seeds of a sunflower, the spines of a cactus, and the bracts of a pine cone all grow in whirling spiral patterns. Remarkable for their complexity and beauty, they also show consistent mathematical patterns that scientists have been striving to understand.

Scientists are trying to understand the relationship of this beautiful display of complexity and

in 1868. German botanist Wilhelm Hofmeister was studying the growing tips of plants, which contain cells that haven't yet acquired a particular function in the plant. These unformed cells are called stem cells in plants and, derivatively, in animals as well. The stem cells form tiny bumps called primordia, which then turn into flowers, stems, or other plant structures.

The primordia form in a small region at the tip of a stem. Hofmeister proposed that the precise spot in which they form within that region is the spot that is furthest from older primordia. The primordia then move outward and downward along the stem as the tip continues to grow.

Is this amazing?

Best Scientific Talk ever

via ScienceBlogs

I totally agree with the title suggested by Scienceblogs which I repeat here. Be sure to watch/listen to question time interaction.

Pure genius, particularly the paper upon which the above talk was based!

I wish my own presentation(s) can be 1% as enthusiastically attended as Doug Zongker's.

My presentation Powerpoint

Recently, I have been on the road.

On 5th April, Mary Noggle and I presented at The Eighteenth International Conference on College Teaching and Learning:
Creating engaging experiences for students demands time, resources, and technical expertise. Fablusi, an online role-play simulation platform, offers a solution with immersive learning. This paper details the design process of two role-play simulations, discusses both the pros and cons of the two designs, and highlights important issues for designing engaging role-play simulations. Powerpoint

Today, I presented at the eLearning Guild Annual Gathering:
Engaging Learning Experience Using Role Play Simulations
Engaging learning experience which delivers solid and measurable learning outcomes is the Holy Grail of e-Learning. Today there is increasing focus on the use of games in training and learning.
This session will showcase how learners learn while engaged in role play simulations. It will address ways to create engaging learning experiences by using mapping between game goals and learning objectives.

Participants will see how engaging online multi-player role-play simulations are being used in a wide range of subject areas, from political science, to US Army officer training; from South American diplomat training, to workplace training; from American literature training to second-language learning. You’ll learn the common success factors, and the lessons learned, and see how game goals and underlying simulators together can create engaging learning experience.

In this session, you will learn:

* The relationship between learning objectives and game goals

* The differences between stakeholder viewpoints and roles

* How to motivate learners using a compelling kick-start episode

* Framing the context to ensure learning outcomes in line with learning objectives
The powerpoint is here.

Photography Composition Guides

sxc has a wonderful guide on how to crop and/rotate your photo to be more interesting by using simple golden ratio, etc.

The result of the cropping is dramatic!

Is 17 the "most random" number?

Dave Munger in his Cognitive Daily did an interesting experiment. He asked his readers to pick a number between 1 and 20. The "random" number picked by human is biased towards 17.


Is this culture specific? If you are interested to test it and if you are a blogger in languages other than English, please repeat Dave's experiment and tag your post with human-random-generator. If you can, please also leave a comment here so that other may follow to read your result.

Ten commandments of role play simulation

I am your God because I created the virtual world you are now in.
You shall have no other Moderator before Me.
You shall not make for yourself a moderator.
You shall not make wrongful use of the name of your Mod.
Remember the Rest and keep it every hour. (10 minutes away from the computer every hour!)
Honor your other players. (Responds to other's actions as quickly as you can.)
You shall not kill without Moderator approval.
You shall not hack into the software of the virtual world.
You shall not steal other people's role.
You shall bear false witness when needed.
You shall covet your neighbor's wife when needed.
You shall covet your neighbor's house when needed.

Studying and Learning

What is "study"? What is "learning"? These are questions which have as many answers as the number of people you ask.

From the web, here are a few worth noting:

To apply one's mind to a subject in order to acquire knowledge and skill.
www.geocities.com/clearbirds/study/glosstudy.htm

the act or process of using the mind to gain knowledge.
www.teach-nology.com/worksheets/language_arts/vocab/four/quiz/2/

survey: a detailed critical inspection; applying the mind to learning and understanding a subject (especially by reading); "mastering a second language requires a lot of work"; "no schools offer graduate study in interior design"; a state of deep mental absorption; "she is in a deep study"; analyze: consider in detail and subject to an analysis in order to discover essential features or meaning; "analyze a sonnet by Shakespeare"; "analyze the evidence in a criminal trial"; "analyze your real motives"; learn: be a student of a certain subject; "She is reading for the bar exam"; someone who memorizes quickly and easily (as the lines for a part in a play); "he is a quick study"; learn by reading books; "He is studying geology in his room"; "I have an exam next week; I must hit the books now"
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

From the paper "What do you do when you study?" Education students define study and describe their study strategies by Alex Radloff, Barbara de la Harpe and Irene Styles

What does “study” mean? Dictionary definitions of the verb, “to study” include, take pains to investigate or acquire knowledge of (subject); read (book) attentively The Concise Oxford Dictionary) and, attend to something with intent to understand it and to improve oneself in relation to it (English and English: A comprehensive dictionary of psychological and psychoanalytic terms). In the context of university, we can efine studying as a process involving a range of appropriate cognitive and etacognitive strategies and requiring effort and personal responsibility aimed at achieving ositive learning outcomes.

On Wednesday night, I attended a session given to my daughter at her school. The presenter summarised "studying" as the process when information is flowing IN, as in reading, listening, watching. To contrast, he said "learning" is the process of information flowing OUT as in summarising notes, doing exercises, solving problems. This is a very simple and effective way of explain this to year-10 students, I guess.

When I discussed this with my business partner Roni Linser, he suggested that learning occurs between information IN and information OUT. The doing of exercises and solving problems are demonstrations of the result of the learning. To him, learning is the "reflections" that occurs between the information IN and information OUT stage. "Reflection" is the catch-all word he used to describe a process we understand little. Connectivism may suggest that learning is the building of links among nodes. My catch-all word would be "integration" of the new information into the existing world view we already have.

I would also argue that "learning" occurs both at the information IN as well as OUT stages. Experimentation typically requires creating new problem (information OUT) and observe for the result (information IN). Good experiments are those that produce results which the current theory cannot explain. Gathering such counter examples pushes the limit of the existing knowledge and provide foundation for new theory.

What is "study"? What is "learning"? The quest goes on.

What is a rainbow?

I saw this photo on Flickr, which reminds of the physics of rainbow.


I did a quick search on the web and found this article. Should be a good read for those interested in the topic.

Screen estate and productivity

At my home office, I used 3 screens, the laptop connected to a second screen and a Mac (shown on the left). This is a big boost to my productivity as I can process more information at the same time (my internal bio-memory is small and leaking).

via Gismodo, I now learnt that there is a dual screen laptop. May be this is the beginning of multiple screens...

What the future will be?

Worth watching [6 minutes]

What's Special About This Number?

via BoingBoing

BoingBoing listed the first 11 numbers. Here is the next 10.

11 is the largest known multiplicative persistence.
12 is the smallest abundant number.
13 is the number of Archimedian solids.
14 is the smallest number n with the property that there are no numbers relatively prime to n smaller numbers.
15 is the smallest composite number n with the property that there is only one group of order n.
16 is the only number of the form xy = yx with x and y different integers.
17 is the number of wallpaper groups.
18 is the only number that is twice the sum of its digits.
19 is the maximum number of 4th powers needed to sum to any number.
20 is the number of rooted trees with 6 vertices.

Frankly, I don't a lot of the special properties, e.g.

Abundant Number [http://mathworld.wolfram.com/AbundantNumber.html] is a positive integer n for which
s(n)=sigma(n)-n>n,

where sigma(n) is the divisor function and s(n) is the restricted divisor function. The quantity sigma(n)-2n is sometimes called the abundance. The first few abundant numbers are 12, 18, 20, 24, 30, 36, ... (Sloane's A005101). Abundant numbers are sometimes called excessive numbers.

There are only 21 abundant numbers less than 100, and they are all even. The first odd abundant number is
945==3^3.7.5.


That 945 is abundant can be seen by computing
s(945)==975>945.


Any multiple of a perfect number or an abundant number is also abundant. Every number greater than 20161 can be expressed as a sum of two abundant numbers.

Mathematically oriented people surely will be interested in the whole list (from 0 to 9999) which only a few numbers without some significance.

Everything You Know About Disks Is Wrong

Here is another paper about failure of disk drives - and this one won the best paper award.

StorageMajo has a good summary. Robin Harris's conclusion is

After these two papers neither disk drive or array businesses will ever be the same. Storage is very conservative, so don’t expect overnight change, but these papers will accelerate the consumerization of large-scale storage. High-end drives still have advantages, but those fictive MTBFs aren’t one of them anymore.

Further, these results validate the Google File System’s central redundancy concept: forget RAID, just replicate the data three times. If I’m an IT architect, the idea that I can spend less money and get higher reliability from simple cluster storage file replication should be very attractive. [my emphasis]

Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population

google's engineers are presenting a study of disk drive failure at a conference and the 13-page paper is online. If you don't want to read the whole report, TG Daily has a fairly good summary.

The most interesting observation is:

temperature and high usage alone are not responsible for failures by default. Also, the researcher pointed towards a trend they call "infant mortality phase" - a time frame early in a hard drive's life that shows increased probabilities of failure under certain circumstances.

Why I am excited with VAF's break through? Part 1

In this part, I will describe my understanding of the technology behind the current state of play of Web 2.0.

Mesh up of data - mixing of data sources:

1. Data sources (such as Google Map, Flickr, Criag's List, ...) expose sets of API for user to fetch a customised set of data from the data source.


2. Data is returned typically in XML or JSON format.


3. Mesh-up sites take two or more data stream from different data sources, select useful fragments from the returned data and mix with fragments of data from another source to create unique value-added service.

Note that:

1. the APIs are server-based


2. these APIs are called by server or web browser client (XMLHttpRequest is available both as a server process as well as implemented by most modern browsers.)


3. Mesh-up is mixing CONTENT or data depending on how you like to call it.

The second trend is the injection of additional features on a web-page, typically using Greasemonkey extension using user scripts. I will group customised look and feel into the same category. Basically, if an end-user is not satisfied with a web-page, the web-page is changed using either a user CSS (to replace the original look and feel of the web-page) or an injected Javascript through the GreaseMonkey extension.

I still have not seen mixing of AJAX functionalities (ie the first trend above) with user injection.

This is important to note that in both these trends, the original data source or the web page owner is NOT designed to match and mix with any other data source. It is a third party who mixes the data sources or changed the style/functionality of the webpage.

The experiments I did in the VAF break through shows that data sources can also expose their API as a Javascript object/script and enable a pure web-browser based mesh-up. Data provide context, scripts provide functionality. I hope we can see people starting to provide functionality (in the form of javascripts) to allow users to manipulate data from different sources (such as GreaseMonkey script), and VAF will enable different scripts to work together.

恭喜发财 - Happy Chinese New Year of Pig

[Photo by 1980Nic from Flickr]

Break through in "Virtual Apparatus Framework"

A decade ago, I embarked on designing a framework for creating interoperable component for creating educational webpages. See Virtual Apparatus Framework.

The key for co-operative interoperability is to enable the components to share data and hence can act on what other component is doing. The technology I have chosen 10 years ago is based on the Netscape's LiveConnect. Different vendors have different level of support of this and hence the VAF has been working and breaking continuously.

Today, I jumped on the idea of sharing via DOM. Here are the experiments:
page from http://www.ipa88.com and page from http://www.scormplayer.com. These pages are exactly the same. Please verify using view page source.

The page loads two scripts, one from www.ipa88.com and another from www.scormplayer.com. All scripts from ipa88.com are numbered oddly while those from scormplayer.com are numbered evenly.

Does this method post a security risk? I don't think so because the loading page has explicitly requested the loading of scripts from two domains - i.e. that's by design!

I have tested on windows XP with only Firefox and IE6. Please let me know your testing result on other platform/browser combination.

Creating a 3D effect with image editing software

This is a great tutorial by Andrew546. I am glad that it is illustrated using GIMP too.

[photo from one of the comments, by Kandykornhead]

Blogumentary

from Google Video

BLOGUMENTARY playfully explores the many ways blogs are influencing our media, our politics, and our relationships. Personal political ... all » writing is the foundation of our democracy, but mass media has reduced us to passive consumers instead of active citizens. Blogs return us to our roots and reengage us in democracy. Shot in candid first-person style by director Chuck Olsen. NOTE: This film is presented here for non-profit, educational use only.

Pretty long, about 1 hour and 5 minutes. [May be worth the time to watch it if you have nothing more interesting to do.]

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us

Click play. The next 4 minutes 31 seconds will be definitely a worthwhile and rewarding time for you - to understand what the web will be / should be.



vi many sources

MaestroLive is a Music Game

I have argued that Commerical Off the Shelf Games Will Not Work in Education. This position may need to change in light of the following program. But I am no music teacher, so I don't know how useful it may be.

MaestroLive is a Music Game. From the website:

MaestroLive is a music game that lets anyone play songs by tapping the rhythm of the song on a computer keyboard or on an attached MIDI keyboard. MaestroLive gives you a score for your performance. When you finish playing a song you can save your score to the MaestroLive network and compare it with previous scores of that song or with other player’s scores. Each song has its own set of scores.

# Choose a song from the MaestroLive Song List.
# Pressing any key on your computer keyboard will play the correct next event (an event is a single note or a group of notes).
# The rhythm radar in the center of the MaestroLive window provides you with a visual indication of when to play the next event.
# By pressing the computer keys in the correct rhythm (using the rhythm radar) you will be playing the song.
# You’re performance score updates while you play – when you finish playing the entire song you can save your final score to the MaestroLive network and compare it with the scores of other players of that particular song.
# MaestroLive can also teach you how to play "for real" if you attach a MIDI keyboard to your computer.

But you must download a program first in order to use it. It is free.

Is blogger a jounalist

From WebProNews
In 2004, Apply took the following actions towards Mac fan sites AppleInsider and PowerPage when they reported the technological details about a product codenamed "Asteroid."

Apple sought the identity of the sources who leaked the information by filing suit against the bloggers, and subpoenaed their email records from email service provider Nfox.com. The company claimed that the reports violated California's trade secret laws.

As a result, a Santa Clara County court ordered Apple to pay the legal fees ($700,000) of their opponent this month, a development considered "a large moral victory for bloggers".

WebProNews asks the following questions, which no doubt have been in a lot of bloggers mind for a long time:

Do bloggers qualify as journalists? Can blogs be considered news sites? Does a private company have the right to suspend the protection of journalistic sources guaranteed by the First Amendment?

The situation is still inconclusive. But it seems to be step in the right direction.

2006 Generation Next Study

This recent 45-page report from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press offers a portrait of the so-called “Generation Next”, which applies to those young persons between the ages of 18-25. Based on phone interviews conducted in late 2006 where Pew researchers spoke to approximately 1500 individuals, this report asked participants about their political beliefs, their use of technology as a form of social communication, and their thoughts on immigrants.

I have captured a summary of the statistic on the left.