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Mickey Schafer › Comments
What's something life-skill-like that you finally figured out or something you learned about yourself last year?
Penguin It's Cold Outside, "Fatih !", Jimminy Fuller and 4 other people liked this
I took my car through a car wash for the first time ever just before the holidays.
- Catherine Pellegrino
I can help others more than I can ever help myself.
- Julian
I don't have to starch and iron those button-downs *every* time I wear them.
- Admiral Anika
There is a limit to how much I should give -- even if I can give more, that doesn't mean I should.
- Jenica
I learned to ask for help, and I'm learning to accept help when it's offered.
- Imitation lris
I also learned that my local co-op has fabulous soups.
- Imitation lris
I learned to park a car. Mostly. Sort of. SHUT UP.
- D0r0th34
Don't know if beginning to learn Theological Latin and German count... hmm... learned to bake bread... oh, and I learned that I can't afford more school for 10 years.
- Matt Lorfeld
Dorothea, this born and bred midwesterner never learned to parallel park. Just FYI. Some skills are unnecessary.
- Jenica
Parking is one of those things (like taste in music or books) that always feels more high-stakes than it really is. As it turns out, most people don't actually care that much how well I measure up. :-)
- Imitation lris
i *can* live without tv.
- Katie
I'm slowly learning to both say no and delegate. Stop laughing, I said _slowly_!
- Jason Griffey
I am learning how to share. Along with that, I am learning that I can't do everything, especially all at once.
- Julian
This is my brain [broken egg in frying pan]. This is my brain on drugs [tasty omelette]. Any questions?
- s t e v e
(Steve thinks we are zombies!)
- Imitation lris
Learned I don't have to say yes to everything that crosses my path, but I should say yes to the things that scare me.
- jambina
from iPhone
Learned that I need to say yes more often. Especially to things that are scary.
- DJF
Learned that if I say yes, and then regret it it's okay to go back and say "Er, actually, no." Relatedly: that when I'm cringing over my appalling social gaffe, the other person has probably forgotten we even talked. (Still, in future years I hope to learn not to say yes without thinking.)
- Deborah Fitchett
Um. Er. Let me get back to you on this.
- marthalib
That people don't notice most things that I do (even seemingly big things) so don't sweat the explanation in advance.
- Meg v. Meg v. 1.0.0.1
Oh... also - it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission... but it's even better if you just don't have to ask and just do.
- Matt Lorfeld
That you can get off the academic (or any other) treadmill. The treadmill is all in your head.
- Neil Saunders
The main thing I need to work on is willpower. As my wife once said "I'm not the boss of me!"
- s t e v e
Self evaluation suck your inner editor is a total bastard who should be ignored more often
- WarLord
how to bake bread. that bicycling is essential for my well-being. that a certain amount of project planning is a really good idea. (parallel parking? eeeevil.)
- Elaine Nelson
I had to watch my best friend suffer in pain and eventually die on Dec 16th but she was the bravest and strongest person I have ever known she is truly my hero and gives me the courage to face each day.
- VAL D. Zone
I can live without a landline
- JSNFLMNG
I learned how to be an adult when it comes to relationships.
- josh neff, geek at large
I learned to turn off the computer and my phone every once in awhile. Heavenly.
- Archangel ωαřмaiden
Wait, wait. Computers turn off??
- Imitation lris
Iris, no, they don't. really.
- DJF
Oh, whew. I was afraid I'd been kept from knowing some deep dark secret for a minute there.
- Imitation lris
I learned that if I take a deep breath and relax, there isn't much in my life I can't get through.
- Junebug
Psst: Iris, yes, they do. Mine is off at least 13 hours a day. And I mean *really* off, with the powerstrip switched off.
- Walt Crawford
I learned that I don't have to clean my entire house in one day. One chore per day keeps it looking great, and I neither get overwhelmed, nor distracted by the kiddos.
- Jenthemum
That regular exercise does help my mood - and I *did* get to the point that I enjoy it, even look forward to it, no matter how hard those first few weeks at 5 AM were.
- ÉllbeeÇee
"being responsible for" doesn't necessitate "being in control of".
- Marie has inbox zero!
(I'm still thinking, but I'm enjoying what others have to say.)
- B. LB.
If I eat too much and don't exercise enough, my clothes get tight. Who knew?
- Rochelle Rochelle
I can really get a lot done by just doing a little bit everyday.
- Mickey Schafer
I learned that I could lose a whole mess of weight, just by eating less and moving more. Go figure.
- Greg Schwartz
I learned I can get rid of old papers and books without it being the end of the world.
- Abigail
I can hire a teenager to help with loathsome tasks
- marthalib
My writing always sucks less a few weeks a few weeks into the future than it does now. I keep learning this, forgetting and relearning again.
- marthalib
Martha, how do you manage that? My writing always sucks more in the future.
- laura x
Well, I wait a few weeks, read something and invariably think, "wow, that sucks so much less than I thought."
- marthalib
Also, my friends will help me if I ask. Corollary: I have great friends.
- marthalib
I learned that I can solo-parent J through nearly anything, including several days with no voice whatsoever.
- Catherine Pellegrino
You've heard of Illiteracy. Here's Innumeracy. - http://jasonemiller.posterous.com/youve-h...
Posted via email from The Backstop
- Jason Miller
from Posterous
Culturally, I think that it's acceptable to admit to being "bad at math" b/c it is not considered to be an innate skill (maybe this started with Galileo, who said math was the "other" language God created, but that it had to be learned, preferably by studying nature). Language, on the other hand, is assumed to be a native human talent, extended inappropriately to writing, even though reading/writing must be learned (literacy is not innate).
- Mickey Schafer
What we need, then, is a better sense of what is humanly innate and what is not. I've looked at bunches of different stuff on what might be the innate language capacity in humans, but have never seen anything (or looked, for that matter) for similar material on math capabilities. Do you know of anything like this?
- Mickey Schafer
Mickey, I'm not sure I agree with you about the why we (Americans) think it's OK to say we're bad at math. As far as I know, this is a cultural thing. Does this happen in Japan? In Russia? Maybe it's a socio-economic thing. As for language, humans seem to be hardwired to communicate, but does that include communication by writing? As far as references on innate human ability to do mathematics, check out the Radio Lab podcast on Numbers (I link to it from my commentary on it here: http://bit.ly/7LhbgE).
- Jason Miller
Mickey, Another reference I'd point you to is a book by Keith Devlin, a well known mathematician and author of much popular nonfiction. One of his research areas concerns (or touches on) the question you're raising. The book The Math Gene: How Mathematical Thinking Evolved And Why Numbers Are Like Gossip (at Amazon.com here http://bit.ly/7fkIPh) may explore these ideas more deeply.
- Jason Miller
Truman State University is still rockin' the rankings -- Best Values in Public Colleges 2009-10 - Kiplinger.com http://su.pr/9lUyn6
if value = quality/price, and price is a reflection of how desirable a school is (econ 101), you have to wonder whether this ranking says more about the education you receive at Truman, or about how few people want to live in rural Missouri. (I suppose it's a little of both)
- Chris Miller
New College also comes up frequently as a good deal and living in Sarasota, FL was kind of fun. But since we know that value does not equal quality/price, and desirability varies with the individual, then maybe it is the school after all.
- Mickey Schafer
For the record, I went to Truman, and I'm very happy with the education I received. I know that it still ranks at the top in academics when compared to the state's other public schools, at least in some metrics (ACT scores, etc). And as for desirability varying by individual, well, that's true of any product. The price is still a reflection of how much desirability and abundance a given resource has, though.
- Chris Miller
New College was an interesting place for undergrad, and I always wondered how it hit the "best value" list given an alternative education with a 75% attrition rate (might be better now, but when I was there, I started with a 100 or so others and only graduated with about 20 of them). I always thought the relatively low cost was a compromise b/w a small, selective student body (was 450, now about 750) which should have driven costs up combined with an alternative education that kept costs low.
- Mickey Schafer
Chris, how do you like Baylor? I work with undergrad premeds so try to get a feel for what different med schools are like. Most of my info is pretty soft (UF is research oriented while USF is clinically oriented, etc). We encourage them to go online to find student experiences, but I suspect that doesn't always happen.
- Mickey Schafer
I don't have much info about the med school, but BCM as an institution seems to strike a pretty good balance. I work on the more basic side of the research spectrum, but I have classmates who work in translational labs and are doing their research out of some of the hospitals down the street. If you've got more specific questions, feel free to drop me an email (chrisamiller@gmail.com)
- Chris Miller
Thanks, Chris!
- Mickey Schafer
American Jobs Require A College Degree, but That's Not Enough - http://hatchethead.posterous.com/america...
Posted via email from hatchethead's Science & Math Blog
- Jason Miller
from Posterous
The bulleted list of things Truman STEM would add is great -- exactly the kind of stuff we also tell our students, especially the regarding GPA and experience (Last year, I think it was Johns Hopkins med school that had an average entering class GPA of 3.67 -- so get over the 4.0 already:-)). Will be adding this post to reading recs when it comes time to talk about applying to med/grad school.
- Mickey Schafer
Just got message from UF stating they sorry about how cold the buildings are...but Progress Energy blew a fuse, all available energy for heat is going to the hospital, and they do not expect to get us back online until Friday (which means next Monday or Tuesday).
Normally, this is not a big deal here but we are having incredibly cold weather, with highs in the 40s and lows in the 20s and no heat is kinda not fun right now!
- Mickey Schafer
Zee. to Zee.'s feed, TheNextWeb Forum, The Apple Room, Appetite, RWW: The Future of Tech, building43
Type as you walk on the iPhone with ‘Walk n Type’…Genius. - http://thenextweb.com/applici...
Ted Louie, Peter Dawson, Antoine Bertier and 21 other people liked this
That's what I needed
- ahmet bulent
Genius! It was about time...
- Eric Gagne
Nice app. :)
- AJ Batac
Credit where it's due; Email'n'Walk did this back in the spring, and was greeted somewhat sniffily at the time..http://lifehacker.com/5256519...
- Tim Ostler
I still type looking down though. So I will see the sidewalk and not directly in front of me. I still think its clever though.
- amarquart
There's another app called Walk n' Tweet but it's free.
- Michael Fidler
Thanks for the tip, Michael :)
- Baard @ Pixum
Dragon Speaking Naturally also has a iphone app.
- Mickey Schafer
You'll never have to look up again!
- rowlikeagirl
How We Miscalculated | Print Article | Newsweek.com - http://www.newsweek.com/id...
Cameron Neylon and Neil Saunders liked this
Andy Grove on the Intel floating-point bug. Interesting throughout, including this comment on how insulated most CEOs are: "But most CEOs are in the center of a for-titled palace, and news from the outside has to percolate through layers of people from the periphery where the action is. For example, I was one of the last to understand the implications of the Pentium crisis. It took a barrage of relentless criticism to make me realize that something had changed and that we needed to adapt to the new environment. We could change our ways and embrace the fact that we had become a household name and a consumer giant, or we could keep our old ways and not only miss an opportunity to nurture new customer relationships but also suffer damage to our reputation and well-being."
- Michael Nielsen
Interesting read, but I would have liked to see Grove define what he thinks "the change" is, what his understanding of the "new environment" is -- because I'm not sure that becoming "a household name and a consumer giant" is it. Or, at least, is not all of it. Much of the article exemplified communication, from dealing with consumers to listening to low-hierarchy employees. Definitely...
more...
- Mickey Schafer
Online civility: what does it mean to be "on the same team"? http://scienceblogs.com/bioephe... by @jesspalmer #scibling #scio10
I haven't read the post yet, but for me, that phrase is usually a coded threat of the type "you are not saying what we want to hear".
- Mickey Schafer
Spent 2 1/2 hours at office loading my still-with-fresh-new-car-smell CSS-styled web files and THEY DIDN'T WORK as web pages. As files, yes, but as real links? No. Crap. Now, need to figure out why, preferably by Tuesday morning. Clearly, I should have validated.
What happened when you clicked 'em? Could be in the wrong place (cgi-bin rather than htdocs/...). Or run 'em through http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-val...
- Mark A Jensen
Thanks, Mark. I need to be on campus to do work on things, which likely cannot happen until tomorrow b/c school board decided kids are not to go back to school until tomorrow...I know that teachers need set up time, too, but nothing about public school scheduling seems to recognize that both mothers and fathers work.
- Mickey Schafer
I have a suspicion, but I'm not sure...likely something really easy/obvious from the beginning of the book which was pushed out of my brain while I tried to get a handle on layout. I do okay with non-linear stuff, but often get tripped up by linear order when things get complicated (this was why syntax was easier than phonology:-)). Sigh. There was nothing innovative about what I did, but I was soooo pleased. Aah, the adventure of new stuff!
- Mickey Schafer
I always learn more permanently when actually working on my own project too, even if I wind up with tree-like knowledge with lots of gaps...the frustration of debugging coupled with the rush of endorphins when you fix the bug really cements that particle of arcana in your brain.
- Mark A Jensen
(when the tough can't work, the tough go ice skating! -- at least, that's what the girls and I are gonna do...)
- Mark A Jensen
It's cold enough here to skate, which is bizarre for Florida...but no standing water on which to do so.
- Mickey Schafer
RT @lindseyhoshaw: @NatalieJabbar Want a case study on successful book publishing? See @RobinSloan's project. Build it from the ground up: http://www.kickstarter.com/project...
Mickey Schafer liked this
very cool.
- Mickey Schafer
Found this while searching for a wiki-hosting site -- Glogster: poster yourself! http://edu.glogster.com/
Mark A Jensen and Itachi liked this
"Glogster EDU is your original educational resource for innovative and interactive learning. Glogster EDU was conceived to imaginatively, productively, and collaboratively respond to the dynamic educational landscape and exceed the needs of today’s educators and learners."
- Mickey Schafer
@readinator uses this in her english classes quite a bit
- Mark A Jensen
Someone might find this useful -- Ripplerap: the collaborative conferencing tool -- http://www.ripplerap.com/
"RippleRap is a free, open source, customisable note sharing tool! It's based on the popular open source TiddlyWiki product and is designed so it can be configured to meet your specific needs. "
- Mickey Schafer
I wish I could unlearn the muscle memory causing me to put two spaces after a period. Typography of days gone by.
Mickey Schafer and Michael R. Bernstein liked this
I struggle with this one, too. And still correct it on student papers:-(.
- Mickey Schafer
Homo ex machina : Book Review - History of Darpa - 'The Department of Mad Scientists,' by Michael Belfiore - Review - NYTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2009...
Mickey Schafer liked this
The interview with Belfiore on NPR's Science Friday yesterday was fun, too.
- Mickey Schafer
LiveScribe and Teaching - http://jasonemiller.posterous.com/livescr...
Mickey Schafer liked this
Posted via email from The Backstop
- Jason Miller
from Posterous
left comment at site!
- Mickey Schafer
Thanks, Mickey. I replied!
- Jason Miller
Steven - (A response to your comment on this post.) How do you select which question to answer (and post) via PenCast? Are you able to recycle solutions between courses and semesters/years?
- Jason Miller
My lazy American students - <http://www.boston.com/bostong...>
Rob Haas, Kevin Borders and Alex Scrivener liked this
"IT WAS the kind of student conference I hate. “I’ll do better,’’ my student told me, leaning forward in his chair. “I know I’ve gotten behind this semester, but I’m going to turn things around. Would it be OK if I finished all my uncompleted work by Monday?’’ I sat silent for a moment. “Yes. But it’s important that you catch up completely this weekend, so that you’re not just perpetually behind.’’ A few weeks later, I would conduct a nearly identical conversation with two other students. And, again, there would be no tangible result: No make-up papers. No change in effort. No improvement in time management. By the time students are in college, habits can be tough to change. If you’re used to playing video games like “Modern Warfare’’ or “Halo’’ all night, how do you fit in four hours of homework? Or rest up for class?"
- Itachi
Both the original and its follow-up are interesting, though not unexpected. Another source of American undergrads' work ethic has to do with a larger American cultural ideal: we believe strongly in the underdog. That is, Americans, unlike their more realistic international counterparts, really do believe they can catch up on a semester's work in a weekend b/c culturally, they've been...
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- Mickey Schafer
Of course, I guess you have to remember that the overseas students tend to be in the top-tier of students from those nations to come to a foreign western country to study, and they have to perform well to receive funding and visas.
- Itachi
Yep! Also, I often find academics (myself included, but I'm trying!) grossly over-estimate the degree to which their students wish to follow in their footsteps...an undergrad who's there b/c it was a better idea than a job right out of high school is not likely looking to become a PhD candidate. There really needs to be a shift in the education perspective that takes into account the...
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- Mickey Schafer
Michael Nielson posted a YouTube video you might find interesting, "Confessions of a Converted Lecturer" -- http://friendfeed.com/michael... or here: http://www.youtube.com/watch...
- Mickey Schafer
Thanks for the links, Mickey.
- Itachi
Just saw this in an ad for the UF Digital Learning Institute: the STEAM Learning network -- http://www.steamlearningnetwork.com/
Jason Miller liked this
"Several years ago, an under-resourced elementary school on the east side of Gainesville rose from an F to an A in standardized assessment scores, making the largest learning gains in the entire state of Florida. They did it by incorporating the Arts into their 5th grade Math class. And they’re not finished yet…"
- Mickey Schafer
ArXiv to begin asking for voluntary donations: http://arxiv.org/help/support/
Rafael Sidi, suelibrarian, Claudia Koltzenburg and 5 other people liked this
"Cornell University Library is beginning an effort to expand funding sources for arXiv to ensure its stability and continued development. We intend to establish a collaborative business model that will engage the institutions that benefit most from arXiv — academic institutions, research centers and government labs — by asking them for voluntary contributions. We are working with library and research center directors at the institutions that are the heaviest users of arXiv to refine our plan and to enlist support. We expect to release the plan, with a call for broader engagement and contribution, in early 2010."
- Hilary
Doesn't really help the "Green OA is a financially sustainable practice" meme much :(
- Wobbler
I wonder if to some extent this is a matter of having to demonstrate profitability rather than sustainability. In most things academic, it isn't enough to show you're breaking even, regardless of what the service might be.
- Mickey Schafer
Although in the case of OA services, "breaking even" sounds like a sufficient enough objective IMO. Making profit might eventually stifle collaboration, increase competitiveness and decrease the overall efficiency and effectiveness of scholarly communication. It doesn't help that "sustainability" is probably a weaker incentive than "profitability", though. And that financial sustainability is still a question mark.
- Wobbler
I would be SUPER EXTRA interested in the Cornell-library-internal politics behind this one. If I had to venture a guess, with library budgets getting hit bad everywhere, somebody gave arXiv the $400K fisheye. Easy to do, since OA is *still* seen as a non-core library activity. There's also SCOAP to compare it to: "libraries are chipping in for THAT, why not THIS?"
- D0r0th34
What chafes my scrote is that $400K is pocket change relative to gummint spending on physics research in total, plus the fact that without arXiv physics will have to go back to the "beg a publisher and wait six months" model of information transfer, likely reducing ROI on that research funding by considerably more than $400K -- and yet, here we are with arXiv needing "donations". The stupid, it burns.
- Bill Hooker
lol, Bill, I have several bad jokes about powder, but they don't seem appropriate given the reality here.
- Mickey Schafer
Confessions of a Converted Lecturer: Eric Mazur - http://www.youtube.com/watch...
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Carl Boettiger, Itachi, Meryn Stol and 8 other people liked this
Eric Mazur: "I thought I was a good teacher until I discovered my students were just memorizing information rather than learning to understand the material. Who was to blame? The students? The material? I will explain how I came to the agonizing conclusion that the culprit was neither of these. It was my teaching that caused students to fail! I will show how I have adjusted my approach to teaching and how it has improved my students' performance significantly."
- Michael Nielsen
I got to hear Mazur talk about this at the New Faculty Workshop (for new physics profs) last year. It was very powerful. Perhaps the most useful thing I learned was that there are data (with error bars and reproducible) that can demonstrate how much more effective instruction can be, compared with traditional lecture. For example, figure 1 here (the "hake plot" that Mazur shows): http://physics.umd.edu/perg...
- Steve Koch
A sort of generalization that I came away from the workshop with: you can improve conceptual learning by doing almost anything that is different from traditional lecture and more interactive. For me and I think a lot of people, this was intuitive, but it's great to have data to look at. I also learned that I should do pre-tests in my courses if I really want to know if students are learning. But so far I've failed at doing that. Hoping to do it for Junior Lab next Fall.
- Steve Koch
Steve, pre-tests are becoming a real interest of mine, too, but I haven't figured out how to set one up yet for what I do. I was thinking along the lines of a series of tasks that I'd expect to be faster and more accurate by the end of a semester. I haven't listened to the talk yet, but it's on the calendar (I consider myself on vacation for 1 more day!), so I don't know what Mazur...
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- Mickey Schafer
I can report that a new assignment I developed last semester where students worked in groups to create CMEs (based on Medscape's freely available modules) worked very well even though I wasn't the one teaching them (umm. that didn't sound right -- it isn't whether I was doing the teaching, but that it was a first for developing a new, complex assignment that I didn't monitor/teach the...
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- Mickey Schafer
No more FF today. Am starting my CSS tutorial (self taught) -- this is much more fun than I was expecting! But I should've started a month ago.
you'll wonder how you did anything without it --
- Mark A Jensen
My plan is 1 chapter a day for 15 days; 2 on days like today when I have more time. Kind of steep learning curve, but I've had so much fun today that I feel like ignoring my children, dogs, cats, and husband for a go at the next chapter. But the hard part hasn't really begun yet -- and that is the design for the pages I want to change. That will have to start Dec. 17.
- Mickey Schafer
For me, diving in to my own project with a new technology always teaches me a lot. Maybe because it feels like it's for something, rather than an exercise. [Java's my next technoberg!]
- Mark A Jensen
Ended up chowing down on 2 chapters a day, with tutorials, for 8 days. Then, took about 48 hours of obsessive musing (seriously -- all I thought about, dreamed about, woke up thinking about) while trying to figure out how the individual book chapters create a whole. I did manage to get a working template for my classes (simple, clean, using floats but very little in the way of snazzy...
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- Mickey Schafer
you go, msscha
- Mark A Jensen
@msscha: sorry to pollute this thread, but thought you would like this: Strategy - Faculty - The Case of the Vanishing Full-Time Professor - NYTimes.com http://bit.ly/6QGtGl
- Mark A Jensen
wow, this is exactly my experience. I have a bit more security as a lecturer, but no long-term contracts and the real possibility that if our center is ever viewed as less "efficient" than we currently are, then the departments which use our services would hire adjuncts to fill in. I also have noted to a non-listening crowd that the lecturers in our department mostly hold PhD, do...
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- Mickey Schafer
sure-- my wife is a high school english teacher in a small, expensive private school, and in this realm there are very similar issues; she also posts frequently on web 2.0 teaching stuff (in the "english space"). Check out @readinator on twitter--
- Mark A Jensen
"The Case of the Vanishing Full-time Professor" -- http://www.nytimes.com/2010...
sent to me by Mark A Jensen (http://friendfeed.com/markaje...) -- interesting article, and adds to the academia teaching mix both gained and lost opportunities for students to encounter great teaching. "Lost" in the sense of fewer full-time profs with rich careers for students to learn from -- "gained" in the sense of great teachers with real-world/outside-academia experience who can provide a very different perspective on what is useful to learn.
- Mickey Schafer
Need suggestions of book gifts for kids - ages all over the place, 2 to 10. one's into fishing, one's into drawing, one doesnt know yet..
RAPatton, edythe, pets and 4 other people liked this
one's too young to care (16 months) and the last one mostly into star wars....
- Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)
(yes, that's 5!)
- Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)
and actually there's 3 more... i'll go animal themes for those
- Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)
so far, twitter wins the helpful answer contest
- Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)
there are a metric tonne of star wars books, tales from mos eisley cantina was a good one
- Mike Chelen
I always go with Roald Dahl. You can't go wrong. I also love the Neverending Story which I think I read around that age. If they like books already perhaps also something from the classics, I loved Jules Verne when I was young (come to think of it, that explains quite a lot)
- sofiagk
In the genre of drawing books, The ones by Ed Emberley were huge favorites of mine when I was a kid. The best was Make a World. Besides teaching how to follow step-by-step instructions, it gave me a whole new way of looking at complicated things, and taught me to break them down into the simplest parts. This is a skill that carries way past drawing, into just about any task one would ever need to complete. http://www.amazon.com/gp...
- April Russo (app103)
Sofia - these are all great ideas, I'm with you on all of these :D April: I'd never head of these, thanks for the tip!
- Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)
Hmm... 2 to 10. Ours is 4 and loves Paddington books which are probably not a very good suggestion for UK kids. :-) We also read a lot of books by Sven Nordqvist from "Pettson and Findus" and "Mama Muu" series. These are great but I don't know if quality translations to English are available.
- Andrey Ivanov
Tove Jansson's Moomin books are good. We staged a theatrical play based on them on one birthday party and kids loved it. But again these are all good when translated to Russian. Not sure about English versions.
- Andrey Ivanov
And Astrid Lindgren of course.
- Andrey Ivanov
we had recently switched our little girl to English-only daycare, and they had delivered some reading list based on ages, made by UK shop which helps them with UK-adjusted kids books. If you ping me tomorrow, I can try to find few titles...
- A.T.
if i may, for the one into fishing i guess he would love something about bushcraft, so maybe a book from Ray Mears or Mors Kochanski. - http://www.amazon.com/Essenti... and http://www.amazon.com/Bushcra...
- ovigia
recent faves of my kids (6, 9) are anything in the "diary of a wimpy kid" series and the "bad kitty" series. The latter's author (Nick Bruel) has a bunch of hilarious books, most with great reviews: http://www.amazon.com/Nick-Br...
- Mickey Schafer
ok, one of books from Winnie the Witch series, presumably targeted at 4-5 age. Unfortunately we left catalog at daycare when wife brought order form :-/
- A.T.
Joelle, you can't go wrong with a Robert Munsch story (especially for younger kids) - there's one involving fishing: A Promise is a Promise http://www.amazon.co.uk/Promise...
- Micah Wittman
I'm set for next year too now :) @aivanov Moomin was I think started in english (oddly enough) so translations are good. And Astrid Lindgren, of course, what a good idea, not sure the parents will thank me after the kids read Pippi Longstocking...
- Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)
For the little fisher: http://www.boingboing.net/2008...
- Isola Virtuale
@silpol A.T. Winnie looks great, when my niece is a tad older I will definitely bring them! @msscha Mickey: thanks for the Bad Kittie and Wimpy references, the first will definitively work well for one of them I think, and the Wimpy Kid brought me to "Stink and the Great Guinea Pig Express" which fits another one of them I think :) @isola those popups are crazy, that genre's certainly come a long way since i was a kid
- Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)
one more question to all you parents: what makes sense when they are small, our niece is 16mo old and I know they have everything and then some. Wanted to stick to books but does it make sense to get a book for the really small or should i get a book slightly older that she can follow? Any books that worked really well from really young but had lasting value? @micah Would books...
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- Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)
for 16 monther it might make sense to buy "toy book" - they are made from different materials (with different tangible effects and feelings), have some primitive figures inside and mostly to develop finger pads (known as tactile pads, and responsible for mental development)
- A.T.
Philip Pullman, for the older one(s) Orson Scott Card's (Ender game), for drawing Edward Gorey comes to mind :)
- Michael Bravo
michael @mbravo thanks for the tips, philip pullman has some great YA but I am afraid that part of the family is too religious for me to dare it. Never heard of Edward Gorey, will look him up
- Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)
Question about CC declaration and reader-experience -- I originally placed the CC declaration in footer, but realized reader would have to scroll to see it...
Mike Chelen, Cameron Neylon, Itachi and OpenSci Info liked this
Is it better to have it part of side nav bar, then? Is there an etiquette for this? Thanks for help!
- Mickey Schafer
Well, WordPress templates normally put it in the footer--so as a reader (and editor who frequently reuses posts with CC permissions), I'm used to looking there first. But that's just me.
- Walt Crawford
Thanks, Walt! My current compromise is to have it both ways -- the CC image is part of 3 images stacked in the left side bar in a section headed "Attribution Info" (includes univ, academic unit, then CC) -- the sentence declaration is in the footer.
- Mickey Schafer
Okay, another question -- does the CC declaration on the web page cover everything -- text, html, CSS -- or does each component have to be covered separately? My guess is that someone might want to use the text or web page wholesale...can't imagine that the CSS would be that big of a deal, but I'm curious...
- Mickey Schafer
think it is taken to mean original content, to which the author would hold the copyright. most websites and blogs use platforms like wordpress whose code is released under its own license, while a selected license would apply to user-generated material
- Mike Chelen
IANAL but if someone took any part of your site and used it reasonably under the terms of the licence I think you'd struggle to make any claim against them unless you were very clear and very explicit about where it didn't apply. I try to make mine as prominent as possible to people can find it easily.
- Cameron Neylon
What Cam said -- I put my CCZero with my pic, email, RSS and "about" links at the top (right), which is where I'm used to looking for that kind of info on a blog. I also try to make sure all of that is visible without scrolling when the page first loads.
- Bill Hooker
Invited to be a PLoS ONE Academic Editor; stoked!
Jason Winget, Anna Croft, Cameron Neylon and 13 other people liked this
Welcome aboard!
- Adam Ratner
Congrats!
- Mickey Schafer
Thanks! I'm reading through some of the guidelines for editors and learning a lot. One good thing is that I learned that post-publication comments by the academic editor of the paper is encouraged. I wasn't sure of this, because for the papers I've read on PLoS, I don't think I've ever seen this.
- Steve Koch
Ask TLS: is non-access to published literature a problem for those who have reviewed manuscripts? It never occurred to me until I had to review something, wanted to check a few references, and found them behind a pay-wall...
Tom Morris, Daniel Mietchen, Khader Shameer and 3 other people liked this
Is there a precedent for the journal reviewing a manuscript paying for reviewers to access subscription-only articles at other journals, or, heaven forbid, for reviewers to pay for access themselves? Or is it that reviewers check references so rarely that it just isn't an issue? When they do happen to come across one they don't have access to, do they just go "meh" and move on?
- Shirley Wu
Also, I suspect that since many reviewers are well-ensconced in the cozy surroundings of their institutional subscriptions, this occurs much much much less often for them than it would for a reviewer like me, who is not in academia...
- Shirley Wu
Despite my academia-level access, I frequently find myself unable to read references I want while reviewing. If they are essential to my understanding or my argument, I post to the RW room; if that fails I note in my review that I think [cite] is important but I was unable to access it. I suspect that most reviewers go with "meh" though...
- Bill Hooker
Thanks, Bill, those are good alternatives to going "meh" ;).
- Shirley Wu
from twhirl
JMB give 30 day access to a large range of literature to their referees via a temporary account on Scopus.
- Iddo Friedberg
from Android
Kudos to JMB -- I'm surprised, because that is tacit acknowledgement that there's an access problem, which is something that most publishers deny.
- Bill Hooker
Reviewing for cross disciplinary journals can require access to many different journals. As Bill H notes, academia access is no guarantee of access.
- Bill Anderson
from twhirl
Though it involves paying $$ -- Deep Dyve is what I've been recommending to health providers not associated with academic institutions. At $19.99/mo for unlimited access, it's not a bad price, though the site's received some negative reviews for its search engine. I haven't given it a try, though, so don't know how specific one needs to be to get to a precise article. This testing is on the list for the new year!
- Mickey Schafer
Just for fun, I ran "autism prosody" at Deep Dyve, and although the citation count was absurdly high, the first dozen or so articles are the same ones that come up in gopubmed or novoseek. A few articles were freely available.
- Mickey Schafer
I recently ran into this in a serious way reviewing facility proposals for a well known synchrotron. Some stuff out of my field and I really just wanted to check whether what was being proposed was novel. But I had no way to do that because I couldn't access the relevant literature.
- Cameron Neylon
Putting in author's name in the advanced filter worked to pull up a single article. It appears that it has to be last name, first name/initial, though there are no immediate instructions for that. In any case, may work for fast retrieval of an individual item for the purposes of checking sources (as opposed to downloading them). Don't know if they have a library or folder system which would be particularly useful for organizations.
- Mickey Schafer
Deep Dyve does have a bookmarking function -- didn't see that until I went to the sign up page. I realize this is not ideal OA by any means, but again, for non-academic practitioners, having a "rental" service is a good solution with significant cost savings compared to individual subscriptions to something like MD Consult.
- Mickey Schafer
see also: http://omicsomics.blogspot.com/2009... - pq: "I've been frustrated on more than one occasion whilst reviewing a paper that I couldn't access their supplementary data, and have certainly encountered this as a reader as well. I've sometimes meekly protested as a reviewer; in the future I resolve to consider this automatic grounds for "needs major revision"." via: http://friendfeed.com/mndoci...
- Bill Hooker
Paper access for a reviewer is indeed a problem! I have to admit, I often just go 'meh' and do a second-rate job, simply to save time. Which is just one of many reasons why for me the status quo of scientific publishing is the worst part of my job.
- Björn Brembs
from iPhone
Meh myself. By the time I put the paperwork in for interlibrary loan, it is activated, payment from my grant is approved, and the rest of the madness the deadline for the review would be way past gone.
- Kubke
Nice, I didn't notice the discussion here had expanded until Bill reshared. @Iddo, does JMB automatically provide instructions for the temporary Scopus account or do they wait for the reviewer to come to them with the problem? Still although there are workarounds like this, a lot of these solutions probably don't work too well with the modus operandi of most scientists... namely,...
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- Shirley Wu
America needs more Scientists and Mathematicians? But are we STEM-folks hurting our cause? - http://jasonemiller.posterous.com/america...
Mickey Schafer liked this
Posted via email from The Backstop
- Jason Miller
from Posterous
The comments on the Discovery article make for interesting reading as well.
- Mickey Schafer
just a few things to do today ;)
Mickey Schafer liked this
At least, the shopping is done??
- Mickey Schafer
Curious as to how you all in this room as educators would recommend selling a webapp product on the freemium model to schools and school districts. I think that you need to keep in mind the vast majority of schools are not very dynamic and aren't very flexible when it comes to changing from their current model, whatever it is.
Anna Croft and Alex Scrivener liked this
There are a few different routes you could go. First, approach individual educators and ask them to try it out; I've recommended several freemium services to my kids' teachers...the primary limitation is that school systems often severely limit the sites teachers can do to in class. Still teachers are free to use whatever they want at home, and this means using free material to...
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- Mickey Schafer
This is not an easy thing, Itachi -- schools are really, truly flooded with deals, promotions, product pitches every day. Personally, if it's findable on the web by parents and teachers, and the free service is really worth it, I think that's a good place to start. The real school administrators here will likely have better advice.
- Mickey Schafer
Thank you very much for your input Mickey, I didn't think about the high volume of pitches that schools receive and the levels in the hierarchy change is implemented from. Will definitely keep this in perspective.
- Itachi
A Must Read: RT @revkin Why I'm leaving staff of The New York Times and what I'm doing next: http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009...
Neil Saunders and Mickey Schafer liked this
wow -- makes me want to run off and camp on his front lawn.
- Mickey Schafer
Too Late: Obama Organizers Finally Rail Against Obama on Health Care | Politics | AlterNet - http://www.alternet.org/blogs...
Mickey Schafer, Michael R. Bernstein, Amir and Morton Fox liked this
"As Congress stumbles toward some parody of health care reform, and the White House sends its talking heads out to parrot that this is the delivery of Obama's promises, those who once provided the grassroots manpower for the President's presidential campaign have finally started to voice their mass dissatisfaction. On Thursday morning, Andy Stern, the head of the nation's largest labor group, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), sent out an internal e-mail to all of its employees titled "Where do we go from here?" The e-mail, forwarded to me by an SEIU organizer, detailed the massive union's internal "Town Hall-style telephone call" recently that confirmed what has already been so clear on the micro level -- progressives are pissed, en masse."
- Steven Perez
from Bookmarklet
He may not be the almighty savior that many of us were hoping he would be. But, he is leaps and bounds above the alternatives.
- Mathew™ one of a kind
agreed, Mathew.
- Mickey Schafer
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