Cool Teaching/Learning Program

Wired recently had an article about a program/technique called SuperMemo (WikiPedia) which uses a pretty sophisticated algorithm to quiz you on information based on a memory reinforcement technique. Basically, you create (or download) a set of "flash cards" for a topic. The program then presents the questions to you, you answer (to yourself - it doesn't interpret your responses or anything) and then you grade each card on a scale of 0-5, where 0 means that you had no idea of the answer, 1 means you remember the subject, but couldn't remember the answer, 2 means you got it right, but it took way too long to recall, 3 means you answered it with some difficultly, 4 means you're pretty sure you've memorized it for now, and 5 means that it's so ingrained in your mind that you're positive you'll remember it for a long time. It goes through each card in the "deck" until you've graded them all with at least a '2', then you're done for the day. The next day (or so) when you run the program, it picks the cards you've graded the lowest and presents them to you. The ones you've graded higher don't always show up, so you may not see a '3' for a couple of days, a '4' might not show up for a week, and a '5' may be up to a month or more. The intervals and technique are based on several psychological studies that chart how long facts hang around in your short term memory and how many times you have to recall them in order to put them in long term memory (the spacing effect and the forgetting curve). It also plays on the psychological finding that being quizzed or tested is the most effective way to study - blind recall and grading/correction has been shown to be much better than re-reading texts, studying notes, or re-copying notes.

It sounded really cool, but SuperMemo is evidently a bit of a mess. The good versions cost money, the web site is pretty ugly, the program has a lot of features for creating content, but it's cryptic and not very user-friendly, etc. That being said, there are some really great resources there on how to write the most effective kind of study questions and I really need to download one of the trial versions and give it a real try..

Since the earlier versions of SuperMemo were free and the algorithms were documented, there is an Open Source version of the same type of tool called Mnemosyne which is much more basic, but free and easier to play around with. The first thing I did was create a deck to teach myself the resistor color code, which I've never really memorized effectively beyond remembering "Bad Boys Rape Our Young Girls But Violet Gives Willingly" and counting on my fingers or looking at a printed chart. After a week or so, I've just about mastered it except for the really odd (and infrequently used) portions, like extremely high tolerances and fractional multipliers.

I wish I'd known about it earlier in the year when I could have got my kids to give it a try. It is particularly good for foreign language vocabulary and for continual reinforcement of things you learn over a whole year. Because of the interval learning, it's not great for stuffing in a bunch of facts to cram for a final. For example, in a history, foreign language, or science class, if you put in your facts and vocabulary at the beginning of each chapter, you can study them up to the test and then keep them in the deck so that you are constantly practicing them up to the final or mid-term. It would have been great for chemistry (memorizing ions and compounds, periodic tables, etc.). Of course, it's not so great for math since it can't "generate" problems.

I'm trying to think of something to memorize next with it to give it a better workout. Any suggestions?

Morgan's Movie Quiz

My daughter, Morgan, created her version of the favorite movie quote quiz.

Same rules as the last quiz...

1. I figure life's a gift and I don't intend on wasting it. You don't know what hand you're gonna get dealt next. You learn to take life as it comes at you... to make each day count.

2. You know it's funny what a young man recollects? 'Cause I don't remember bein' born. I don't recall what I got for my first Christmas and I don't know when I went on my first outdoor picnic. But I do remember the first time I heard the sweetest voice in the wide world.

3."All we are is dust in the wind," dude.

4.She's gone. She gave me a pen. I gave her my heart, she gave me a pen.

5. As you know, the concept of the suction pump is centuries old. Really that's all this is except that instead of sucking water, I'm sucking life. I've just sucked one year of your life away.

6. We're in the middle of a revolution Jude. And what are you doing? Doodles and cartoons?

7.Iris, in the movies we have leading ladies and we have the best friend. You, I can tell, are a leading lady, but for some reason you are behaving like the best friend.

8. Elliot? You're gonna name the kid Elliot? No, you can't name the kid Elliot. Elliot is a fat kid with glasses who eats paste. You're not gonna name the kid Elliot. You gotta give him a real name. Give him a name. Like Nick

9.You seek a great fortune, you three who are now in chains. You will find a fortune, though it will not be the one you seek. But first... first you must travel a long and difficult road, a road fraught with peril. Mm-hmm. You shall see thangs, wonderful to tell. You shall see a... a cow... on the roof of a cotton house, ha. And, oh, so many startlements. I cannot tell you how long this road shall be, but fear not the obstacles in your path, for fate has vouchsafed your reward. Though the road may wind, yea, your hearts grow weary, still shall ye follow them, even unto your salvation.

10.And if in some distant place in the future we see each other in our new lives, I'll smile at you with joy and remember how we spent the summer beneath the trees, learning from each other and growing in love. The best love is the kind that awakens the soul and makes us reach for more, that plants a fire in our hearts and brings peace to our minds, and that's what you've given me. That's what I hope to give to you forever.

11. Once upon a time, there was a beautiful young girl whose stepmother always made her stay home with the baby. And the baby was a spoiled child, and wanted everything to himself, and the young girl was practically a slave.

12. Here's the deal I'm the best there is. Plain and simple. I wake up in the morning and I piss excellence.

13. Wow, you're fast. I'm glad I caught up to you. I waited 5 hours for you. Why is your coat so big? So, good news - I saw a dog today. Have you seen a dog? You probably have. How was school? Was it fun? Did you get a lot of homework? Huh? Do you have any friends? Do you have a best friend? Does he have a big coat, too?...

14. We met it seems, such a short time ago. You looked at me, needing me so. Yet from your sadness, our happiness grew. Then I found out, I needed you, too. I remember how we used to play. I recall those rainy days, the fires glowed, that kept us warm. And now I find, we're both alone. Goodbye may seem forever, farewell is like the end. But in my heart's a memory, and there you'll always be.

15. I'm sorry, sir. I could never answer to a whistle. Whistles are for dogs and cats and other animals, but not for children and definitely not for me. It would be too... humiliating.

The Quote Game

After playing on Jodi and Ren's blogs, I decided to give this a try myself.

Here are the rules if you want to create a quiz yourself:

Pick fifteen of your favorite movies.

• Go to IMDB and find a quote from each movie.
• Post them on your blog for everyone to guess.
• Fill in the film title once it’s guessed.

This part is for the contestant/blog reader:

• No Googling or using IMDB search functions.
• Leave your answer(s) in the comments.

NOTE: I'm going out of town in a few days, so if you don't answer quick, you won't get any feedback for a week or so most likely...

NOTE 2: My counting skills are off. Once I pasted them in there, I found I had sixteen. Sue me.

1. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping. [not El Mariachi - although I do like that movie] [Bladerunner - Jeff]
   
   
2. The leading banker in Amsterdam is now the pastry chef in our kitchen.
   
   
3. I have some rope up here, but I do not think you would accept my help, since I am only waiting around to kill you. [The Princess Bride - Rick]
   
   
4. There's the television. It's all right there - all right there. Look, listen, kneel, pray. Commercials! We're not productive anymore. We don't make things anymore. It's all automated. What are we *for* then? We're consumers, Jim. Yeah. Okay, okay. Buy a lot of stuff, you're a good citizen. But if you don't buy a lot of stuff, if you don't, what are you then, I ask you? What? Mentally *ill*. Fact, Jim, fact - if you don't buy things - toilet paper, new cars, computerized yo-yos, electrically-operated sexual devices, stereo systems with brain-implanted headphones, screwdrivers with miniature built-in radar devices, voice-activated computers...
   
   
5. Say, Jim! Whoo! That's a bad outfit! Whoo! [Superman - Jeff]
   
   
6. You are a sad, strange little man, and you have my pity. Farewell. [Toy Story - Jodi]
   
   
7. Yeah, they're dead. They're all messed up.
   
   
8. Forget the fat lady. You're Obsessed with fat lady. Just get us out of here! [Independence Day - Mark]
   
   
9. Another one of them new worlds. No beer, no women, no pool parlors, nothin'. Nothin' to do but throw rocks at tin cans, and we gotta bring our own tin cans. [Not Plan 9 From Outer Space] [Forbidden Planet - Rick]
   
   
10. Bad karma, dear! [Valley Girl - Jeff]
    
    
11. It's not the years, honey, it's the mileage. [Raiders of the Lost Ark - Rick]
    
    
12. That's a human ear all right.
    
    
13. Little brown eel comes out of the cave... Swims into the hole... Comes out of the hole... Goes back into the cave again... [Jaws - Mark]
    
    
14. Oh, it's probably some kind of hunting lodge for rich weirdos.
    
    
15. The central message of Buddhism is not "every man for himself".
    
    
16. Spontaneity has its time and place. [The Sure Thing - Jeff]
    

John McCain: Is he a Cylon?

I think I said this before, but now that he got the nomination and I've been hearing and seeing him more often, it continues to bother me...

He looks and talks just like Colonel Tigh on Battlestar Galactica.

It doesn't help when he's seen with his wife, since Tigh's wife was a younger blond as well (at least McCain hasn't poisoned her because she was a traitor).

Every time I see him, I wonder where his eyepatch is.

The voice is even closer, so radio doesn't help.

Worst of all, I keep thinking, "We can't trust him. He's secretly a Cylon!"

I even saw him in person and thought the same thing.

Yes, I'm a bit loopy. BG season 4 (the final season) looks like it's going to be awesome and now we've finally got Sci-Fi on HD, so I'm really looking forward to it...

After I posted this the first time, I found this image from another blogger who thought the same thing:

W&W Electronics Closing Sale Starts Next Week

I wrote about W&W Electronics here in Huntsville a while back in this blog post. As I rushed in yesterday right at closing time to pick up some connectors for the cool new Arduino Motor Shield kit I was putting together, the clerk said that the clearance sale starts next Monday, March 3rd.

Everything in the story will be 50% off (at least to start) and their goal is to empty out the story within a month or two.

Time to put together my shopping list...

Start a Band!

This is too cool not to share. On the re: Becca blog that a friend of ours writes, I learned about a cool game to randomly generate a band name, album name, and album cover.

Go to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first article on the page will be your band name.

Then
http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four words of the last quote on the page will be the name of your album.

And lastly
http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/?
The third picture is your album cover.

Another friend of hers liked the game as well but didn't like having to go into a photo editing package to create the cover, so he wrote a web application to do it automatically:

The Random Band/Album Generator

It gets the results and lets you crop and position the picture and text, change fonts, change font colors, or re-fetch any of the three elements. You can then preview it and download the "album cover."

I think it's interesting that our brains are so programmed to scan album covers and try to make sense out of enigmatic band names and album titles that most of these don't even seem out of the ordinary. In fact, I find myself wondering what the music would be like...

Here is my favorite result so far:



By the way, I hereby lay claim to the band name "Zealots of Piety" - I'm surprised it isn't a real band.

A Couple of Reviews

Cloverfield

We saw Cloverfield this weekend. The audience wasn't the best and we were treated to repeated farting noises as the movie started, a laser pointer light show repeated occasionally through the film, and several people yelling "That sucked!" and "What a waste of money!" at the end of the film. Sad and annoying as that was, we still loved the movie (and none of us got motion sick).

I can't believe people griped that you didn't see the monster enough. In fact, I would have been just as happy without the longer, clearer shots of it toward the end. A sufficiently developed imagination can create a scarier creature than any CGI shop and fear of the unknown and unseen (in fiction at least) is scarier than fear of the known and seen. In fact, the most tense scenes of the movie, to me, were the scenes where you knew the monster was near, but for whatever reason the camera wasn't pointed at it (either Hud was running or he was concentrating on what he was doing, like crossing the roof). The sound effects and sound editing were amazing in those scenes as well.

As for not explaining what the monster was or where it came from, which seemed to annoy many members of the audience, that worked well for me. I'm a sucker for monster movies, particularly giant, city-destroying monster movies, but they never get past my sense of disbelief. Either you have to accept that they are supernatural in origin, or that radiation mutated iguanas can grow to Godzilla size, or that giant apes are prowling around uncharted islands somewhere. No matter how good, or at least fun, the monsters are, you never "buy" the explanation for them. I'm not saying that I believe the Cloverfield monster is possible, but you are not given an explanation to disbelieve, so the mystery is, in this case, more interesting than any possible explanation.

Even with the crappy audience, I'm glad I saw it in a theater. I expect that since the audience reaction was so polarized, the hype that made it #1 at the box office will drop off quickly as negative word of mouth spreads. Some of my friends said they weren't terribly interested in seeing it based on the trailers and I told them it was exactly what you should expect from the trailers, but better than I expected.

The Soldier Son Trilogy, by Robin Hobb

I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy, but I don't consider myself a big fan of fantasy fiction because so much of it is dreadful. It takes some pretty strong recommendations and reviews from people I trust before I will start a fantasy book, much less a trilogy or series of books. Two authors that I do respect, Orson Scott Card and George R. R. Martin, both highly recommended books by Robin Hobb. Frankly, without their recommendations, I would have put them back on the shelf after reading the back covers. There is nothing in their descriptions that would lead you to believe that they were anything more than your standard sword-and-sorcery, rags to riches, mythic quest rehashes. In fact, even the names of her characters are off-putting. In the first series of her books, The Farseer Trilogy, the main character is the illegitimate son of a prince of the Farseer family and a common naming convention in their kingdom is to name children based on desirable character traits and illegitimate children have the name or prefix Fitz attached to the name of the father (if known), so the protagonist's name is FitzChivalry Farseer. Eek.

The second trilogy, the Liveship Traders, seemed even more stupid. Yes, it's about sentient sailing ships and the covers of all three look like bodice-ripping romance novels mixed with Dungeons and Dragons tie-ins. They were even better than the first series.

Once you get past the names and the marketing, you will find that Robin Hobb is an amazingly good writer. Her books are unpredictable (to the extreme), unique (she isn't just rehashing common fantasy themes), emotional, and, above all, meaningful. They aren't just escapism, but are ways of setting up complex moral, ethical, social, political, and even environmental dilemmas in a setting that is different enough from the "real world" to make you think of them in objective ways, but realistic enough to make you emotionally connected to them.

One other warning: another characteristic of her books is to completely and utterly torture her main characters, leading them through increasingly bleak circumstances, bad decisions, life altering tricks of fate, misunderstandings, separation from loved ones, treason, and more to the point where you are positive that their lives are ruined and there is no way the books can resolve anything in any happy or satisfying way. Then she resolves everything in a happy (or at least bittersweetly happy) and immensely satisfying way. As entertaining and well written as they are, they aren't always a "fun" read. Two and half books into any of the trilogies and you will be wallowing in despair and misery along with the characters.

Sorry for the digression, but I wanted to cover the background before recommending her latest trilogy of books which I just finished. The Soldier Son Trilogy consists of Shaman's Crossing, Forest Mage, and Renegade's Magic. I was even surer when I saw Shaman's Crossing that I would not like this series. It is set in a frontier society where a vaguely British colonial society is expanding across the plains and deserts into the mountains and confronting native tribal societies - obviously America's westward expansion and treatment of Native Americans with the names changed. To make it worse, the magical beliefs of the native tribes are real: they do have magical powers. The book's main character is Nevarre Burrelle, the son of a moderately wealthy landowner who in the first book is trained as a boy by a "civilized" native then is sent off to a military academy to become a soldier. Of course, since these are Robin Hobb books, his life is soon turned upside down as becomes alternately a pawn of the native magic, a victim of plague, an enemy of the native tribes, obscenely fat, a traitor to his own people, an outcast of his family, cursed by a god, a criminal, a shaman, and potentially a tree.

I was expecting the books to be about how evil white men destroyed the peaceful native tribal societies and despoiled nature. Instead, the books were incredibly well balanced and were about conflicts between differing cultures and the good and evil that all people can do when they are trying to do what they believe is right, or just trying to get by. Once again, by the middle of the third book, I both hated and felt deeply for Nevarre and was convinced that there was no way the book could resolve itself in even a slightly satisfying way. I was wrong. I e-mailed a friend of mine who is also a big Hobb fan when I finished it and said, "Holy crap. She did it again."

The Farseer Trilogy

• Assassin's Apprentice
• Royal Assassin
• Assassin's Quest

The Liveship Traders Trilogy

• Ship of Magic
• Mad Ship
• Ship of Destiny

The Tawny Man Trilogy

• Fool's Errand
• Golden Fool
• Fool's Fate

The Soldier Boy Trilogy

• Shaman's Crossing
• Forest Mage
• Renegade's Magic