Disqus - Latest Comments for jamtoday

Re: Hacking Education

jamtoday — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 20:51:17 -0000

"I'd like to do to standardized testing what napster did to the music biz"

The music landscape today was inconceivable even ten years ago. I think it's safe to say that our educational model in ten years today appears to be inconceivable - to most people.

But let's not mistake education for music. The music revolution involved replacing scarcity with abundance, in the case of both distribution and production.

For testing, the distribution is already covered. It's not too difficult to imagine taking multiple choice tests on an iPhone, for instance.

But the means of production has been the bottleneck. Tests are still made today like they were fifty years ago. If you were to simply keep producing test material by requiring experts to manually research topics and write questions, you'd quickly run into a problem with a capital G.

Unlike music, which doesn't lose value as it is copied, test material does lose value as it is copied. After all, who wouldn't be tempted just to try Googling answer keys? If the tests aren't reliable, they don't have value.

Fred, what we need now is a way to produce assessment material much more quickly and easily than ever before. A factory that can just plop quizzes out, one after another....

Re: Ignorance Is Bliss, and It May Soon Be Vice President Too

jamtoday — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 19:51:00 -0000

When Palin says “I’m not going to solely blame all of man’s activities on changes in climate” I hear something else, entirely.

Historians and anthropologists have learned that climate change indeed is to blame for most of man's activities - migration patterns, development of agriculture, down to fine details of culture.

Perhaps she is making an astute commentary about how the interplay of free will and environmental determination.

Re: My Talk At the Freebase Developer Meeting

jamtoday — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 23:46:07 -0000

"nice pony."

talking about your mama?

oooh snap

Re: Hmm. The Future of Product Placement

jamtoday — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 07:12:53 -0000

just reblogged: http://jamtoday.beehold.us/post/49673337/re-blo...

Re: Hmm. The Future of Product Placement

jamtoday — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 07:07:18 -0000

I think when product placement is called out, it ruins it. Isn't it
supposed to be covert?

I think theres much more likely to be an informal system.

Imagine on facebook, my name is Markie Mark, and I have 3,000 friends
and 10,000 fans because I have nice abs.

Maybe I'll agree to get free stuff, from high-end brands, in exchange
for that to be broadcast to my network. This way, we don't have the
poor intermediary of pictures and video. Of course, if I'm getting
free underwear from Calvin Klein, that's probably what I'll wear.

Re: Hmm. The Future of Product Placement

jamtoday — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 06:35:11 -0000

Well, I'm interested in services that scale really well. Without some
kind of image recognition, then you're just putting a new interface on
top of old behavior, product placement.

That in itself could be successful, but hardly revolutionary.

Re: Hmm. The Future of Product Placement

jamtoday — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 06:22:33 -0000

Not nearly as automated as serving ads.

In particular, image recognition technology isn't good enough yet to recognize products in video, or even pictures.

Re: Django and News Organizations

jamtoday — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 17:05:12 -0000

Point taken. I think my language in that post was a little bit strong.

I think the issue that I have is that politicians, by their very
nature, always try to say things that are technically truthful, but
are inaccurate in spirit. Especially in the midst of Palin-mania or
whatever they're calling it, it's frustrating to see some of the Truth
o Meter results. Although the very fact that I'm checking it pretty
often says something....

Re: The Asus works (Scripting News)

jamtoday — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 22:10:45 -0000

Second that.

Tiny memory footprint. It makes Photoshop look morbidly obese by comparison.

Re: HowTo: Welcome to the idea of BearhugCamp!

jamtoday — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 00:46:10 -0000

sweet! count me in!

Re: An experiment: Who's really out there and how do you measure influence?

jamtoday — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 20:34:07 -0000

I'd guess that like me, the people overloaded with social messages are
always more wary of blatant attempts to game the system. I spot spam very
quickly, and I'm guessing my "demographic" is similarly quick about
filtering noise.

If you were going to draw a map of your follower cloud, I'm sure people like
me would be a big part of it.

We might not repost, but at least we'll snarkily respond. ;-)

Re: An experiment: Who's really out there and how do you measure influence?

jamtoday — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 20:11:34 -0000

Seems to me like a spammy self-promotion tactic, like a Calacanis move.

Maybe its an NYC thing?

Re: Assessment for Understanding

jamtoday — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 04:32:50 -0000

That was a great article.

Although I'm not working in the education space right now, I'm also very interested in the epic fail of assessment.

Wrote about it recently on my blog recently, although not with nearly as much depth: http://jamtoday.beehold.us/post/37396861/solvin...

Re: Jam Today? - Indiana Jones and the Curse of the Weekend Project

jamtoday — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 12:08:04 -0000

Great feedback. I'll try to get all of those into the next release.

The hardest problem to solve may be with the blank items. I'm not getting
errors, but I suspect it has to do with the fact that I'm running all the
MJT queries at once, which results in a greater failure rate.

Running MQL from python would give me more flexibility, but urllib isn't
working in the production environments right now.

Re: Who owns your comments? (Scripting News)

jamtoday — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 08:50:19 -0000

obviously Daniel Ha owns all of our comments.

Comment Portability, anyone? Anyone? Hello???

Re: Jam Today?

jamtoday — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 22:33:04 -0000

Hey Mike, thanks for letting me know. I changed the credit on the main
page, and it now links to your site.

Re: Google App Engine and the Google python gdata API Client Library - getting AuthSub session tokens to work

jamtoday — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 00:04:51 -0000

## so I wouldn't have to create yet another custom parsing/processing module in python ##

i feel your pain, and I'm glad it wasn't mine.

Re: Derrida: "What Comes Before The Question?"

jamtoday — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 06:48:39 -0000

first

Re: Jam Today? - The Lag Problem

jamtoday — Tue, 27 May 2008 18:00:04 -0000

By the way, while i do tend to be biased toward YC companies, I think
that Tipjoy has a ton of potential for a donation system. They're
giving API access to the first 200 people who mention techcrunch
(cheesy but effective)

http://tipjoy.com/platform/api/

On Tue, May 27, 2008 at 12:55 PM, Jams Alexander Levy

Re: Jam Today? - The Lag Problem

jamtoday — Tue, 27 May 2008 17:56:04 -0000

Fund a beat? Well, if I'm going to have a more long-time relationship
with a reporter, I'm going to want to see my ROI. It would be sweet if
I could see some analytics to determine how large the audience is for
the beat, what kinds of people it reaches, etc.

Re: On Challis

jamtoday — Sun, 25 May 2008 21:52:32 -0000

the sarah: Mozzarella cheese, Ragu sauce, and a squeeze of jalapeño

Re: Fund a Beat - American News Project

jamtoday — Sun, 25 May 2008 00:56:38 -0000

I hear that Facebook is coming out with a full-featured micropayment API in June.

But then again, screw that, right?

Re: Jam Today? - Heck, I'll Fund That! Can Crowdfunded Journalism Work?

jamtoday — Sat, 17 May 2008 04:22:03 -0000

@digidave:

Here's some thoughts from my mom:

"I'm not sure that I understood all of the 'crowdfunded' concept but it
definitely is intriguing. The part I don't quite get is this: if I'm
interested in a story and am willing to put my money where my mouth is which
seems to be the first step how do others a) know that I'm putting up money
(I assume that's where Spot.Us comes in to play?) and b) how do others know
enough about the story I want to break to want to put up their money? That
is, do I have to "spill the beans" before anyone has done the investigating?
If so, that's a problem because the story that I think/assume is there
may not be, after someone has done some investigating or may turn out to be
different than my assumptions. Also, if I'm afraid to "spill the beans"
publicly (think: whistleblower), how does that happen anyway?"

Re: Jam Today? - Painting Eric's Fence: The Evolution of Business Models

jamtoday — Sat, 10 May 2008 09:48:06 -0000

There was a meme in the last couple weeks about how in crisis times, people are resorting to "Facebook and Twitter" instead of traditional media sources. I don't know about that, but I think you do have a good point. What's continuing to stop television, for example, from progressing, is that CNN can't instantly create and deprecate new channels. This brings me to things that smart people like Mark Cuban have said, that television is going to be sticking around for a while. I've never seen how even a good idea like Current.TV can work on a medium like broadcast. If SMS is considered deep interaction, we've still got a long way to go.

Re: Jam Today?

jamtoday — Wed, 07 May 2008 08:09:38 -0000

Daniel, it means a lot to me that you're personally fielding this.

On this page, if you click on that pie chart above, it will take you directly to the link, whereas on the main page shadowbox activates. The problem is that the <div style="display:none;"> for shadowbox isn't loading on individual posts with disqus enabled, although I'm not getting any errors.

This isn't a high priority problem, but if you have any ideas of how I might fix this, let me know and i'll investigate.