Disqus - Latest Comments for drmomentum

Re: BEEP BEEP BEEP

JP Burke — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 08:44:00 -0000

So, the other day I left one of these scanners in my carriage and tried to leave the store. I wish I could say it was on purpose to test this out, but nope. It was by mistake.

It was triggered just as I was trying to maneuver past a woman who had, for some reason just stopped inside of the exit vestibule and was kind of blocking the exit. I was in the middle of saying "excuse me" when the alarm went off. The unit was under some bags.

I fished it out and in big letters on the screen it was asking to be returned to the charging station. So I did, and it immediately stopped screaming.

In your case, you hadn't done anything to cause the thing to scream at you. In my case (and the woman in the story) we'd accidentally taken the unit out of the building (well, almost out of the building.)

Anyhow. Good times?

Re: BEEP BEEP BEEP

JP Burke — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 21:11:35 -0000

At least the people who work there are paid to deal with it. I was just an innocent bystander.

Re: Blue Suede Cat

JP Burke — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 18:35:47 -0000

There was a drink called the Blueberry Bog:

http://www.drmomentum.com/a...

A little sweeter and less alcoholic. And blueberry!

I'm thinking now that the Blue Curaçao should take a back seat to Cointreau, partly on the recommendation of PJ via FB. The drink doesn't really have to be blue.

Re: Securing Data with KeePass

JP Burke — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 17:15:50 -0000

You can manually move the database from place to place. Another option is to keep it on a flash drive and access it there.

Whatever you do, make sure you back it up (obviously) in case the thumb drive gets corrupted.

Re: http://supersonics.tumblr.com/post/29269315255

JP Burke — Sun, 12 Aug 2012 13:02:45 -0000

It's the afternoon, so they should have played "Afternoon Delight."

Re: Diddly squats

JP Burke — Wed, 18 Jul 2012 09:09:48 -0000

Thanks for the info on squats!

While I am barely even a novice at any of this, one important thing to note is that squats have a specific purpose and that certain other moves that incorporate "squatting" don't necessarily play by the same rules.

F'rinstance, a kettlebell swing can involve a deep squat, but that transfers more of the effort to the quads, and that's not necessarily what you want. Same goes for a kettlebell snatch. I refer to: http://www.youtube.com/watc...

He's not talking about squats; he's talking about the snatch. But it's a reminder to match the activity with the intentions. He's not doing a half-squat either, which I find consistent with your squat recommendations. If you're doing a squat, do a squat. The swing shouldn't be half a squat.

BTW, squats with kettlebells (the goblet squat and front squats) have been great for my legs, and I have absolutely felt benefits in running. I use my cross training mostly to benefit running, and squats give me the strength to keep lifting my legs. The easier it is to lift your legs, the less tired it seems to make me, especially on hills.

In any case, great advice like yours is helpful to exercise mindfully. Anything you do automatically can lead you to trouble. A good workout can be felt in the places you're trying to work out! If you're working your abs, you ought to feel it in your abs. But you won't know it if you're not thinking "what is this squat supposed to be doing for me, and am I feeling it? Where do I feel it?" A little info helps you listen to your body better; it helps you interpret what you are (hopefully) feeling and noticing.

I have stopped a move I was doing because it felt either too easy, or was straining the wrong area. I just knew I needed to get some advice on it. Thanks for being a source of good advice.

Re: What is Good Teaching? A Reflection

JP Burke — Mon, 07 May 2012 20:14:49 -0000

Described properly, inquiry should be part of empowerment. It is part of shaping a students view of her agency. Students should be empowered to inquire as a part of their approach to he world, and that can begin in the classroom.

Re: Blurred Lines in Social Hiring Practices

JP Burke — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 16:59:32 -0000

It's none of an employer's business what I do in my private life until it impacts my professional life. The word "until" means being given the benefit of the doubt. The word "doubt" means it will have to remain a mystery to them. It's simple respect for your employees and coworkers.

Don't work for people who don't understand respect.

Re: Sea Change In Knowledge and Education

JP Burke — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 11:43:23 -0000

Notable: they treat teachers as professionals. That article does highlight a number of differences that I believe are related to the success of schools in Finland. I wonder if we are too enamored of the mythical properties of competition here.

Re: Sea Change In Knowledge and Education

JP Burke — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 09:45:45 -0000

Looking at your number 6, I can't help but think of the times we have had research-based advances in mathematics education that were tanked by parent groups who were afraid of change or disagreed with a changing view of the meaning of public education. Change in the schools is difficult, in part, because it is political change. Will it ever really be driven by the needs of the students? I doubt it. If you look at large STEM initiatives attended by corporations, you hear the needs of the students mentioned but treated in a cursory way; you rarely see the voice of the student at these events.

The one time I did see such a voice, it was revealing, and excellent. A young girl who had received a STEM award in Massachusetts gave an amazing presentation about her experiences in the state's science fairs and other STEM-related educational opportunities. She was going into college for art, she announced, but would always carry her education in science with her. I thought that was a solid win. She was quite inspiring. However, the engineer-manager-executives in the room murmured disapprovingly. She was not going to enter their employee pipeline. To them, that's a failure.
Education is never knowledge for knowledge's sake, in my view. Here (I think) you are using that phrase in a positive way, but many do not look on knowledge without an ROI favorably, and they have a very narrow view of the R. I see this as the influence of a knowledge acquisition model of education, although not entirely. Not everyone views education as opening the brain and inserting knowledge, and many view that as a theoretical impossibility (e.g. radical constructivists and others who deny the ability to directly access an objective reality). Veering away from the sci-fi feats of Neo, consider the possibility of looking at learning (and evidence of education) as an observable change in an individual's participation in some sort of community of practice. It's not entirely at odds with knowledge acquisition, but as a researcher I like the idea of judging someone's learning based on their participation. After all, are we really teaching students to take tests? Is that the situation we expect them to perform in when they are professionals?

Of course not. We are hoping/expecting/relying on a belief that performance on test somehow translated to participation in some other situation.

This, I think, is where some element of gaming comes in, although I'm thinking more of David Williamson Schaffer's epistemic games than of a videogame. (http://epistemicgames.org/eg/) There are people working to create assessments based on an analysis of participation which will perhaps one day challenge the current standardized testing regime.

Twitter in your pocket doesn't excite me much mainly because I don't see access to information as the hurdle in education. I don't think of education in terms of how quickly and easily you can access information, I think of it in terms of participation, and how students can make sense of the world. In other words, a student's ability to interact meaningfully. To interact with meaning is to take information in meaningfully, and express oneself meaningfully. So, to me, students must be engaged in activities of meaning making.

I have been involved in a group investigating what it means to participate meaningfully in a technology-enhanced mathematics classroom, and the most important phrase in there, to me, is "participate meaningfully." When you see two students arguing for their interpretation of a situation, and they are using their understanding of mathematics to make their points, that is activity involving mathematical meaning. If they start drawing graphs on a piece of paper, you can argue that they are using the technology of paper and pencil along with a mathematical representation to enhance their activity. If they drew those graphs on iPads, the technology wouldn't necessarily be an improvement.

A lot of the application of technology to education suffers from a lack of thought about how the technology actually makes a difference (or not) in the meaning-making in the classroom. If I have a phone conference with my adviser, I am using technology in my education, but all it is doing is allowing me to bridge a distance. If we were together in a room we would probably have an even richer conversation. The technology here is just a prosthetic to overcome a physical limitation; it is not creating new kinds of learning or giving me the ability to think about things in new ways.

We need to have a higher bar for judging whether a technology is enhancing education, and it should be tied to meaning-making and to what we have learned from research in education. It upsets me to see laptops handed to kids with the result of people decrying the unfulfilled promise of technology in education. The result of experimenting on kids by handing them tech without regard to what we already know and value in education research is a demoralized and cynical population who will simply harbor suspicion about all technology in education.

Re: http://supersonics.tumblr.com/post/13886990488

JP Burke — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 16:42:20 -0000

I just lost 20 IQ points watching that discussion.

Re: http://supersonics.tumblr.com/post/13886990488

JP Burke — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 16:40:31 -0000

I agree completely with what Stephen Smith says. That Skip guy is stupid. As if we can't (and don't) interpret rules.

Re: http://supersonics.tumblr.com/post/13886990488

JP Burke — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 16:39:29 -0000

Is that "Skip" guy a brain injury victim?

Re: http://rabbitsofmind.com/post/11253402391

JP Burke — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 14:01:22 -0000

I was glad to be far enough away that even if there had been a crash, we would not have been involved. However, we were close enough to say "Holy cow, what is that guy thinking? Oh, man!"

Re: You just shared a link. How long will people pay attention?

JP Burke — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 10:00:47 -0000

To determine whether who shares makes a difference, you'd have to be careful about certain things that might be related to the "who" question. For example, starting rate for clicks might change the shape of the graph, so you would need to compare data among people who have gotten similar starting rates. Otherwise you might just be looking at an effect of initial rate.

The definition of half life used doesn't assume we're looking at an exponential decay, because it uses the peak rate as part of the calculation. But if it is exponential, then "half life" could be free to mean what it does in other exponential decays -- the time over which you will see a halving no matter what part of the data you're looking at.

Re: http://rabbitsofmind.com/post/7404436362

JP Burke — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 07:42:15 -0000

Could be, but I would have expected "Purely Imitation" vanilla in that case.

Re: http://rabbitsofmind.com/post/7404121064

JP Burke — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 23:39:05 -0000

Not everyone does measure curricula by a set of facts. In fact, even the Common Core State Standards which you might say are framework for standardized testing of students contain mathematical practices that are expected outcomes for mathematics education.

There are also people who believe that a grasp of the creation and use of models is something that belongs in curricula, and this is included in NCTM's Principles and Standards. One thing that many mathematics education reformers agree upon is that there are things they want students to be able to do and not just to know.

There are also curricula that value investigation a lot more than facts; TERC's Investigations in Number, Data, and Space is an example.

You ask why "we" are so determined, and the big variable there is who "we" are. We don't all agree! (see the Math Wars) But one factor is that there are people who are quite adamant about math facts and calculation. I think they serve up a recipe for alienating many children from what mathematics has to offer, and those that stress calculation do little that I can see to nurture an investigative spirit, or a desire to know more about mathematics (in specific -- I can't speak for other fields and can only offer some of what I have seen in my own field).

I spent part of last semester wondering myself about why people are not more supportive of allowing students to explore; some people are vehemently and even violently against what you have suggested. I have spoken to curriculum developers that have lived through their wrath.

One practical hurdle is that we do want education to do more than simply instill a desire to learn; we really do need students to know and be able to do many things that they did and could not when they enter. If they do not then we have failed them: we have failed to pass on to them what they deserve to know as inheritors of human knowledge. By another view, we will have also shortchanged the country of a source of advanced, able minds to support the security of our country.

Thus, we need metrics, and standards, and principles, and ways of looking at a progression of knowledge. If you are saying that our country has too rigid an approach to this, I think you would find you are not alone in that. But accountability, measured in a practically scalable way, has the attention of people in power today. That is where this Common Core State Standard is likely to continue taking us.

Re: Napoleon Dynamite controversy is… silly : Blog : Austin : Alamo Drafthouse Cinema

JP Burke — Tue, 31 May 2011 11:20:50 -0000

The word isn't used clinically anymore. At what point can we let this sort of thing go? Do they march every time someone objects to the word "moron" as well? http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...

But your point is important; there is a difference between an individual using a word and a character using a word.

Re: http://rabbitsofmind.com/post/5929632044

JP Burke — Sat, 28 May 2011 16:47:47 -0000

I think this is more about what sports reporting does with the results.

Re: http://rabbitsofmind.com/post/5347636736

JP Burke — Tue, 10 May 2011 10:08:03 -0000

It certainly is.

Re: http://rabbitsofmind.com/post/4676872862

JP Burke — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 11:52:11 -0000

I had cooked up so much meat and veggies for the soup that it wasn't
soupy enough, which is why I supplemented the liquid. The chicken
wings are a good idea. I have also seen packages of chicken parts in
the store that are even cheaper. Now that I know how easy it is, I'll
be keeping an eye out.

Store-bought broth/stock does not compare, of course, but it is cheap
and at hand when needed! It can barely be considered stock. It has no
body to it.

This was my first try, and I can tell that I'll be doing it again in
the near future! Thanks for the handy wings suggestion.

Re: http://rabbitsofmind.com/post/4036549138

JP Burke — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 15:50:52 -0000

The second image is clearly from the digitally remastered version of the episode aven though it is dated 1966. Neither the ship nor the planet looked like that in those days. Except maybe in our imaginations.

Re: http://rabbitsofmind.com/post/4036549138

JP Burke — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 11:01:38 -0000

Did you look at the whole slide show?

Re: http://rabbitsofmind.com/post/3463547277

JP Burke — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 17:33:44 -0000

I agree - all those are preferable to a hobo!

Re: http://rabbitsofmind.com/post/3463547277

JP Burke — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 17:33:41 -0000

I agree - all those are preferable to a hobo!