stimulant

a few, tasty links (August 25th):

• Mind Lab - Home - This looks pretty neat…and there’s an Open House the week after Burning Man.
• living-e AG: MAMP - Mac - Apache - MySQL - PHP - Trivial server deployment.
• PLEAC - Programming Language Examples Alike Cookbook - sourcefridge fodder!
• Wind Turbines to Suck Water from Air | EcoGeek | Water, Air, Comment, Power, Which - Dehumidifying 1600L/day
• Ghetto Development Environment - Instructables - Microcontroller programming, cheap and simple.
• Context Aware Image Re-Sizing - This is amazing.
• Weekend Project: Make a Remote Camera Trigger - Lifehacker - For book copying.
• Build a CNC Router from Scratch (Part 2): Complete Video Tutorial - Instructables - More CNC routing.
• Crop: Andrew’s Crop Circle Language - A language for generating crop circles
• buzhug, a pure-Python database engine - Pythonic > SQLic

a few, tasty links (August 20th - August 24th):

• MAKE: Blog: Intro to Breadboard Electronics - Make: Video Podcast - Breadboarding!
• MAKE: Blog: GPS logger, vibrating motors & PSP touch screen - GPS logger and touch screen are the highlights: the motor’s too expensive.
• Main Page - OpenFM - Homemade FM transmitter, designed to stand up to the elements.
• Documento senza titolo - More PCB etching.
• Geek to Live: Build an internet jukebox with Jinzora - Lifehacker - Streaming music from any computer.
• Teaching - I want to talk to him.
• Theodore Watson - GRL Laser Tag Rotterdam - how to and source code - Enamored.
• &microPONG, The world’s smallest pong game - This would be neat to make SMD.
• MAKE: Blog: Using an ADXL330 accelerometer with an AVR microcontroller - More accelerometers!
• Portfolio - a photoset on Flickr - These are ridiculously pretty.
• Blueprint Grid CSS Generator -
• personal powerPlant - Instructables - This is way better than what L2T has now…
• Cyclean - The pedal powered washing machine - Clever! And clean. Now, modular — 
• MAKE: Blog: Make a USB power/charger from a wall wart -
• DIY laser long-distance listening device - DIY Life - So easy! And amazing!
• Starcross 42 - A whole bunch of neat demos. Take particular note of the lasers + diffraction plates + motors = lightshow
• Paper Critters: Online Paper Toy Creator - Perfect to pair with the laser cutter!
• WhatTheFont : MyFonts - Identify fonts from an image. That’s pretty neat.
• Typetester - Comparing fonts. Easily. With stylings.
• MAKE: Blog: AVR based GPS tracker… - AVR based GPS tracker for mobile devices.
• Punishing Protest - NLG - Scary shit.
• GOOD Magazine | Goodmagazine - Education by Design - The Clackamas monitoring system detailed is pretty neat.
• MAKE: Blog: HOW TO - Make an H-bridge - Switching polarity, fast.
• Diagram showing all programming paradigms and their relationships | Lambda the Ultimate - This is a pretty neat diagram. Things aren’t as different as you’d think.

Some people deny that Wikipedia has a liberal bias:

chickens don’t fly but they have got the wings
no matter how hard they try
they bump into things
they’re all running around
like they’re heads on the ground
they got a wish bone where their backbone should’ve grown
<\blockquote>

Or: “[…] has a wishbone for a backbone.”

a few, tasty links (August 12th - August 19th):

• An Intuitive Explanation of Bayesian Reasoning - More Bayes.
• A Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation - A pretty fantastic introduction to send to people.
• DIY: Power your router with only an Ethernet cable - Lifehacker - Power via ethernet: How much can you draw?
• Phil Dawes? Stuff » Blog Archive » Scheme development environment -
• Wikipedia is only as anonymous as your IP - Man, that’s pretty scary: who’s editing Wikipedia?
• BBC NEWS | UK | England | London | School uniforms made slash-proof - Uhh…
• MAKE: Blog: Ambient Devices now offer access to their datacasting chipset - Ambient devices and data acquisition.
• How to make a chinese finger trap - Instructables -
• MAKE: Blog: Tutorial on the 128x128 Nokia LCD display - Another LCD tutorial.
• MAKE: Blog: Bug labs - hardware, first look - Bug labs, finally!
• Building a (fast) Wikipedia offline reader - That’s pretty neat — making it easy to cache websites and resources offline is something that I’ve been thinking about more and more (particularly in context of the international FabLabs)
• Digital Media and Learning Competition - I’m going to apply!
• MAKE: Blog: Semitone - open dimmer project - Light dimmers!
• InformIT: Ajax Construction Kit: Creating Responsive GUIs with Real-Time Validation > The Challenge: Checking User Input in Real Time - Real-time validation, simply.
• MAKE: Blog: Hydra kit in the MAKE store - A _complete_ game kit.
• MAKE: Blog: Linux based mobile dev kit - A mobile devkit — for stimquip?
• MAKE: Blog: HOW TO - Make a low cost circuit board pre-heat workstation for solder re-work - An easy pre-heat workstation
• Build a Letterpress & Use It to Print Things - Instructables - More thinking about printing.
• Children’s Community School - Come visit! - One for the road.
• macosxhints.com - 10.4: Combine PDFs without using Automator - The join.py file, revealed.
• MAKE: Blog: A Stirling engine in a teacup - Man, this is _amazing_. A paper Stirling engine that you can run with a teacup’s heat.

One thing that always strikes me as strange about discussions like this about accreditation or credit is that all of these contortions are a natural byproduct of not having students do anything important: they end up without having anything of substance to show for their work. Instead, since classes (more broadly, schools) operate on this idea of students as bins that get filled up with varying amounts of knowledge and skills, the focus is on the student themselves and trying to tease out the integrity and extent of that knowledge. I’ve never seen more persuasive or comprehensive assessment than an in-depth project that someone has completed. For all the EECS students I know, the only ones whose skills impress me are the ones who build things.

What’s particularly strange about the discussion about credit and accreditation is that

It must be remembered that one of the reasons for the establishment of accreditation by geographical regions was precisely to provide assurance to accepting institutions that the credits earned at the “sending” institution were in fact “earned and comparable.” Within regions virtually all institutions offering academic coursework were known and a network of college officials worked together to make practical and usually fair transfer decisions.

which doesn’t question at all the model under which tihs assessment is happening. It doesn’t question what’s “earned and comparable.” Even some discussions of assessment that suggest project-based or portfolio-based methods often propose that skills and knowledge should be taught traditionally, then for the purposes of assessment, students should be given a project or set of assignments to create a portfolio.

When this happened to me in high school, the experience was a ridiculous one. The teachers resented the extra work and lost class time. The students resented the lost time, the tedium, the absurdly vague and wishy-washy language of the “standards” which our “portfolios” were intended to meet. In the end, everyone acknowledged the need to bullshit our way through the work, and so we did.

One of the reasons that [ac]credit[ation] and assessment are such difficult topics is that as long as the content of a student’s learning exists without a context, investigating the efficacy of their education is unavoidably going to confound their mastery of the school system and their mastery of the material. The exciting thing about real contexts and applications of knowledge is that they are valuable manifestations of learning that exist independently of school. Something you build or write or prove or make that calls on the skills and knowledge you’ve acquired is the truest representation of the learning process because it recreates exactly the object of the learning process. Tests are not the object of the learning process. Supposedly, their comprehensiveness makes up for their failure to provide context. But a comprehensive lie is worse than a partial truth. Seymour Papert once commented

Working with Michael [a “troubled” student who was constantly at odds, failing, in the public school system] has increased for me the troubling awareness that failure in school can be the expression of valuable intellectual and personal qualities.

How can we, in good conscience, implement a system that disenfranchises people by failing to provide for the exercise of their skills and capacity in a fair context, and in turn say that that disenfranchisement is to rectify precisely the dearth of skill and capacity we misperceive because of the system we’ve rigged?

I’m back, again.

A quick note: as I read papers, books, whatever, I’ll be updating my Google Notebooks, from which I’ll probably be drawing a good number of my posts. I’ll also start adding and documenting the various notes and ideas I write throughout the day, and as I start projects, I’ll document them online. Eventually, I’ll be able to do this with my own software. But until then, Google Notebook is serviceable.

Anyway, feel free to peruse, inquire, comment as I link to them. I’m still finishing up the notebook for Instead of Education, but it’s viewable here. As it comes up, project documentation will be available here, and an archive all my marginalia will be available here.

Enjoy.

a few, tasty links (August 11th):

• Richard Felder: Resources in Science and Engineering Education -
• Tomorrow’s Professor Listserv -
• Optics Express - A gedankenexperiment solving the traveling salesman problem in quadratic time. - That’s amazing clever. A gedankenexperiment solving the traveling salesman problem in quadratic time.
• OLPC News: An XO Oscilloscope to Measure Children’s OLPC Learning - Hey!
• blik Wall Decals - Removeable Decals, Stickers & Graphics. Designs by Undoboy, Keith Haring, Zeptonn, I am 8-bit, Eames. - More blik. Still expensive.
• the Threadless shop @ blik - Fresh Produce - Surface graphics. Made expensive.
• Newswise Business News and Social and Behavioral Sciences News | Wealth Gap Is Increasing - No shit, again.
• Instructables Charlieplexing 7 segment displays - Charlieplexing. Redux.
• MAKE: Blog: HOW TO - Sprinkler control with embedded linux - Or, watering control.
• Zonbu: Green doesn’t have to make you Blue! -
• Instructables A simple mechanical resonance demonstrator - I’ve wanted to play around with resonance for a long, long time.
• MAKE: Blog: Ardustat - low cost Arduino based galvanostat/potentiostat - More low-cost equipment.
• The downside of diversity - The Boston Globe - Apparently, there’s a [significant] one.
• MAKE: Blog: Build your own rain barrels - Rain barrels!
• MAKE: Blog: Fire-powered, bean-tin battery charger - Easy, DIY Peltier-Seeback effect.
• Scene Completion Using Millions of Photographs - Man, this is pretty amazing[ly convincing]
• Open Building (TreeHugger) - I guess that is a pretty good point about buildings: they aren’t built to be modular and repairable and maintainable.
• DailyTech - Blogger Finds Y2K Bug in NASA Climate Data - How could anyone refuse openness in science?
• (Alexandre Borovik) Mathematics under arrest « What?s new - Oh god.
• OLPC News: Participation Design of OLPC XO-2: With And For People - I’m tired of critics.
• Newswise Social and Behavioral Sciences News | Year-round Schools Don’t Boost Learning - No shit.
• Auto-save JSF forms with Ajax: Part 1 - A guide on autosaving forms with AJAX.
• RegexPal: JavaScript Regular Expression Tester - Pretty. Simple. Useful.
• MAKE: Blog: Condenser mic in a tin can - Dead simple tin can condenser microphone.
• MAKE: Blog: Playing with RF Modules - Awesome Electronics Workshop PDFcast - And more and more RF. This time, a PDF.
• MAKE: Blog: Playing with RF Modules - Awesome Electronics Workshop Podcast - And more RF.
• Dual Music Player That Plays Your MP3 Collection - Awfully clever CD/mp3 player design.
• MAKE: Blog: Instructional videos from TAP plastics - Plastic making baking. From TAP.
• MAKE: Blog: Adding a remote antenna to Parallax’s RFID reader - More RFID to play around with.
• Mathematics under the Microscope: Gold Sand in a Stream - This sounds like a pretty amazing place…[via Terence Tao]

a few, tasty links (August 3rd - August 10th):

• What makes a libertarian? - I want to contact this guy. The libertarianism connection seems bogus and unfounded, but I’d be interested in the details of the story.
• DIY Plasma Gun - Hack a Day - Plasma. And shooting.
• ISIS © - I want to make one of these fold-flat chairs.
• Newswise Medical News | Breast Implants Linked to Higher Long-Term Suicide Risk - The degree to which this appears to be true is pretty fantastically weird.
• Craftzine.com blog: DIY Shrinky Dinks - Shrinklets! Easily! Cheaply!
• MAKE: Blog: PopSci 5 min videos - How 2.0 videos, online now!
• Who Needs a Shopping Bag With a Mottainai Furoshiki? (TreeHugger) - I’ve wanted one of these for a long time.
• Craftzine.com blog: CRAFT: 02 - Kombucha Tea - A recipe — 
• Newswise Education News | Test Scores Slow Under No Child Left Behind Reforms - Why hasn’t this been reported on? NCLB isn’t working.
• Bayblab: The Science of Cooking - An easy way to play around with chemistry, and kids.
• Mechabolic: The Ultimate Trash-to-Fuel Land Speed Racer Slug (TreeHugger) - I can’t wait to see this at Burning Man.
• vvvv: a multipurpose toolkit : vvvv : a multipurpose toolkit - Real-time video synthesis with a GUI for programming.
• /// Dory Ex Machina /// » Article » Concrete Crickets - Aural graffiti.
• Record Player Made from Paper (TreeHugger) - This is amazing.
• Digital Reality, Inc. Custom Products as Unique as you! - Commercializing digital fabrication and combining it with customer resale.
• Lab Rat: main page - An amazingly comprehensive page full of vintage gaming electronics projects.

Taxing cigarettes is a pretty repugnant policy. The government acknowledges that cigarettes are addictive and unhealthy and then turns around and makes a profit off that? And forces that policy to do double duty as a punitive measure in the interest of public health?

The government taxes the sale of an addictive and unhealthy substance because it is addictive and unhealthy.

Cui bono? Whether or not it’s intentional malfeasance, taking advantage of an addicted [read: captive] group and alleging that punitive measures are benevolent is atrocious.