The Geography of Open Source
The paper presents an empirical study of the geography of open source software development that looks at Github, a popular project hosting website. We show that developers are highly clustered and concentrated primarily in North America and Western and Northern Europe, though a substantial minority is present in other regions. Code contributions and attention show a strong local bias. Users in North America account for a larger share of received contributions than of contributions made. They also receive a disproportionate amount of attention.
Posted: October 4th, 2010
at 12:35pm by Koookiecrumbles
Categories: web,development,education,open source
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Speed-Reading Techniques
I was a Bible college student when one of our chapels featured a guest speaker who taught us how to speed-read. At the time I didn't need the skill since most collateral reading assignments in my courses were under 500 pages, but I started practicing just for the fun of it - sort of like a private parlor game. However all that changed when I wound up in graduate school at Princeton Seminary and several Profs. expected me to read several thousand pages of collateral along with the five or six textbooks. That's when I got serious about speed reading. Here is the collection of what I practiced then, and picked up since. The first thing I had to do was toss away the reading myths I had held so long.
Posted: October 1st, 2010
at 3:33pm by Koookiecrumbles
Categories: weaponry,diy,education
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Pulse of the Tweeters
If you really want to know the most influential people tweeting on the hot topics of the day, go to pulseofthetweeters.com. The website went online in May and has been tracking the top trending topics from Twitter in real time ever since. AThe website was created in the laboratory of Alok Choudhary, John G. Searle Professor and chair of electrical engineering and computer science at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science. It grew out of the thesis project of Ph.D. candidate Ramanathan Narayanan. A"The question we're really asking is: whose opinions are most interesting and influential on any given topic?" Narayanan said.
Posted: October 1st, 2010
at 3:27pm by Koookiecrumbles
Categories: education,#twitterisfothebirds
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Solar Cells Thinner than Wavelengths of Light
Ultra-thin solar cells can absorb sunlight more efficiently than the thicker, more expensive-to-make silicon cells used today, because light behaves differently at scales around a nanometer (a billionth of a meter), say Stanford engineers. They calculate that by properly configuring the thicknesses of several thin layers of films, an organic polymer thin film could absorb as much as 10 times more energy from sunlight than was thought possible.
How Universities Work
Fellow graduate students sometimes express shock at how little many undergraduates know about the structure and purpose of universities. It's not astonishing to me: I didn't understand the basic facts of academic life or the hierarchies and incentives universities present to faculty and students when I walked into Clark University at age 18. I learned most of what's expressed here through osmosis, implication, inference, discussion with professors, and random reading over seven years. Although most of it seems obvious now, as a freshman I was like a medieval peasant who conceived of the earth as the center of the universe; Copernicus' heliocentric[1] revolution hadn't reached me, and the much more accurate view of the universe discovered by later thinkers wasn't even a glimmer to me. Consequently, I'm writing this document to explain, as clearly and concisely as I can, how universities work and how you, a freshman or sophomore, can thrive in them.
The biggest difference between a university and a high school is that universities are designed to create new knowledge, while high schools are designed to disseminate existing knowledge. That means universities give you far greater autonomy and in turn expect far more from you in terms of intellectual curiosity, personal interest, and maturity.
Posted: September 28th, 2010
at 3:50pm by Koookiecrumbles
Categories: education
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Get Schooled : Gizmodo University
OK, we’re calling it: Computers are more than a passing fad. We’re so convinced of this, that we’ve teamed up with Sparkle Labs to teach you about electricity and electronics prototyping with series of interactive video classes.
Every Saturday at noon, from October 23rd to November 13th, we’ll post a video lesson that teaches you the basics of what goes on inside a computer chip. From breadboard basics to sophisticated circuits, you’ll gain a greater understanding of how your machines work. And the certified geniuses over at Sparkle Labs will hang around for a while in the comments to answer any questions you might have.
To take part in all the activities you’ll see on the videos, you should probably pick up Sparkle’s Discover Electronics Kit. We’ve convinced them to drop the price to $40 for Giz readers. You’re welcome. And we’ll see you in class!
Posted: September 27th, 2010
at 3:46pm by Koookiecrumbles
Categories: computers,design,diy,education
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100 Best First Lines from Novels
1. Call me Ishmael. aHerman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. aJane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)
3. A screaming comes across the sky. aThomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)
4. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. aGabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967; trans. Gregory Rabassa)
5. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. aVladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)
6. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. aLeo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877; trans. Constance Garnett)
7. riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. aJames Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939)
8. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. aGeorge Orwell, 1984 (1949)
9. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. aCharles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
10. I am an invisible man. aRalph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952
Posted: September 27th, 2010
at 3:31pm by Koookiecrumbles
Categories: education
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Revalorizing the Trades
For the 10th-anniversary issue of The Chronicle Review, they asked scholars and illustrators to answer this question: What will be the defining idea of the coming decade, and why? Camille Paglia writes…
Having taught in art schools for most of my four decades in the classroom, I am used to having students who work with their handsaceramicists, weavers, woodworkers, metal smiths, jazz drummers. There is a calm, centered, Zen-like engagement with the physical world in their lives. In contrast, I see glib, cynical, neurotic elite-school graduates roiling everywhere in journalism and the media. They have been ill-served by their trendy, word-centered educations.
Jobs, jobs, jobs: We need a sweeping revalorization of the trades. The pressuring of middle-class young people into officebound, paper-pushing jobs is cruelly shortsighted. Concrete manual skills, once gained through the master-apprentice alliance in guilds, build a secure identity. Our present educational system defers credentialing and maturity for too long. When middle-class graduates in their mid-20s are just stepping on the bottom rung of the professional career ladder, many of their working-class peers are already self-supporting and married with young children.
The elite schools, predicated on molding students into mirror images of their professors, seem divorced from any rational consideration of human happiness. In a period of global economic turmoil, with manufacturing jobs migrating overseas and service-sector jobs diminishing in availability and prestige, educators whose salaries are paid by hopeful parents have an obligation to think in practical terms about the destinies of their charges. That may mean a radical stripping down of course offerings, with all teachers responsible for a core curriculum. But every four-year college or university should forge a reciprocal relationship with regional trade schools.
Posted: September 12th, 2010
at 1:21pm by Koookiecrumbles
Categories: development,education
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Pour des Dents d’un Blanc Eclatant et Saines
by Jeroen Diepenmaat
Part of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University’s groundbreaking exhibition that explores the culture of vinyl records through 50 years of contemporary art.
The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl features work by 41 artists from around the world, from the 1960s to the present, who use vinyl records as subject or medium. The exhibition includes sound work, sculpture, installation, drawing, painting, photography, video and performance.
The Record includes rising stars in the contemporary art world (William Cordova, Robin Rhode, Dario Robleto), outsider artists (Mingering Mike), well-established artists (Jasper Johns, Ed Ruscha, Carrie Mae Weems) and artists whose work will be shown in a U.S. museum for the first time (Kevin Ei-ichi deForest, Jeroen Diepenmaat, Taiyo Kimura, Lyota Yagi).
Posted: September 9th, 2010
at 7:53am by Koookiecrumbles
Categories: music,art,contemporary,events,education
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