Month: February 2017

The OECD, a club of mostly rich nations, recently published a survey on adult skills, which captures information on proficiency in literacy, numeracy and computer skills.

Almost a quarter (24.3%) of the people in the study don’t know how to use one. Ten per cent had never used a computer, so took a paper-based test.

Almost another 10% (9.6%) refused to take the computer test at all, preferring to take the paper-based assessment. That’s despite saying they had used a computer before.

Almost 5% (4.7%) of adults failed the basic test, which included using a mouse or scrolling through a web page. (Source)

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A matrix helps you to organise your notes in a format that is easy to translate directly into your chapter draft. The idea is to identify themes you want to write about first so that you can read with more purpose and distill from the articles only what you need. You may find you think up more themes as you read and write. The table below is fictional, just to help you get the idea. (Source)

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Labels metricophilia as

“the unjustified faith in numerical quantities as having particularly special status as ‘evidence’ (Smith 2011)” (Source)

The quote is drawn from Simpson (2017) which includes related quotes such as

"It suggests teachers and policy makers are prone to ‘metricophilia’: the ‘expectation that quantitative data – virtually on their own – will give us the answers on which to base policy in education’ (Smith 2011, 633).

References

Smith, R. 2011. “Beneath the Skin: Statistics, Trust, and Status.” Educational Theory 61 (6): 633–645.

Blame is the enemy of safety. Focus should be on understanding how the system behavior as a whole contributed to the loss and not on who or what to blame for it source: @worrydream tweet citing Engineering a Safe World: Systems thinking applied to safety

image

And a bit more

When trying to understand operator contributions to accidents, just as with overcoming hindsight bias, it is more helpful in learning how to prevent future accidents to focus --not-- on what the operators did "wrong" but on why it made sense for them to behave that way under those conditions

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Makes 12-18 (depending in the size of your scone cutter) 1 egg 4 tablespoons of oil (she uses vegetable oil) 2 cups of milk (or 1½ cups milk and half a cup of sour cream or thickened cream) 4 cups of self raising flour 1 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon sugar

Beat the egg, oil and milk until combined. Sift the flour, sugar and salt into a bowl. Add the egg mixture to the flour. Knead until just combined and then turn the dough out onto a floured surface. Pat into a flat shape of the thickness you'd like your scones. Hyatt prefers ¾ inch. Cut with a floured scone cutter and then place on a greased tray. Cook at 220 degrees for 12 to 15 minutes. (Source)

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Looks at de-centralisation largely from a technical perspective but has some interesting potential implications beyond.

When people talk about software decentralization, there are actually three separate axes of centralization/decentralization that they may be talking about. While in some cases it is difficult to see how you can have one without the other, in general they are quite independent of each other. The axes are as follows:

Architectural (de)centralization — how many physical computers is a system made up of? How many of those computers can it tolerate breaking down at any single time?
Political (de)centralization — how many individuals or organizations ultimately control the computers that the system is made up of?
Logical (de)centralization— does the interface and data structures that the system presents and maintains look more like a single monolithic object, or an amorphous swarm? One simple heuristic is: if you cut the system in half, including both providers and users, will both halves continue to fully operate as independent units? [<small>(Source)</small>](https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/the-meaning-of-decentralization-a0c92b76a274#.veh84p4j9)

see: BAD in particular Distribution

We needed students in science and math. So we “created STEM.”

Then folks decided that art needed a place in design thinking so we made “STEAM.”

Then another smart someone decided that all of this work required texts we read so we created “STREAM.”

Soon a soothsayer will decide STREAM requires civic engagement and citizenship and decide we need Social Studies leading to “STREAMSS”

We used to call this “School”

STEM isn’t a class or subject. It is a way of being, thinking, and doing.

Iterative design in the process of knowledge creation.

The only STEM crisis is our addiction to alphabet soup (Source)