Archive for the 'Science' Category
Five years ago, when our son was born, we wanted to keep notes on his first bilingual, later trilingual, language acquisition. One idea was to do audio records, but the amount of data would have proven quickly to be unmanageable as well as life (read: work) getting into the way. In the end, we kept written notes about the first correct utterance of a word in a few dozen cases. Tonight, I came across at a TED talk by Deb Roy: The birth of a word. His presentation as well as the implementation and findings are nothing short of amazing.
Project Implicit® – taken from the introduction:
It is well known that people don’t always ‘speak their minds’, and it is suspected that people don’t always ‘know their minds’. Understanding such divergences is important to scientific psychology.
This web site presents a method that demonstrates the conscious-unconscious divergences much more convincingly than has been possible with previous methods. [...]
Available in 33 languages – try it.
An article at Mashable “In the Future, the Cost of Education will be Zero” doesn’t bode well for institutes for higher education. Universities are a different matter, as higher education used to be free in Germany and still is in countries like Sweden – also top students in any country. In the long run, costs will naturally decrease, but I don’t see language teachers being replaced by videos anytime soon. Also, lower costs don’t mean the price will fall as well – especially in education, a high price tag signals quality. Many of the courses universities offer though could be replaced by open source and keep down overall costs – readings first and foremost. Also, education could be introduced to a broader spectrum of the population, but then again, a certain mindset is neccessary to watch an MIT Video lecture about Classic Mechanics instead of a mundane Big Brother episode at Youtube.
A commenter argues that “automatization can go only so far” – but logical essays i.e. can’t be evaluated by a machine. Nevertheless, PearsonVue is attempting exactly that with the new Pearson Test of English. If it’s technically feasible, I don’t see a problem evaluating other forms of academic production as well, verbal or written.
Still, I’ve had the opportunity to both experience face2face as well as online courses: The biggest advantage is direct intellectual exchange between students working on a case – not doable with today’s tools. Many textbooks are definitely going to be free in the future, it’s just a long way. Education is certainly going to get cheaper – but as long as teachers need to be paid and class rooms needed for social interaction, institutes for higher education are not going to be able to offer completely free courses.
Google Chrome arrived – the second browser war, if it hadn’t already started with the emergence and success of Firefox, has now officially begun. I think Google Chrome is rather a huge social experiment than a browser – what’s more important, your privacy or the (second) best browser?
Reading CNET’s 10 Things we’d like to see in Google Chrome, I already know what I’d like to see in it but won’t ever be part of the software… a decent Adblocker.