Links for 2010-10-30

"There's been talk that blogs are over and Twitter and Facebook are king. I meant to say something about this issue when the end of Bitch Ph.D was announced, since that was an important blog for me and many other people. I think it's only half-right to say that the day of the blog is done.

No matter what alternative venues might come into existence, many blogs were going to have finite lifespans. Even group blogs are not really publications with an identity that stands apart from their authors, into which new authors can come and old ones depart while the blog continues steadily along. Any blog makes sense only at a particular time in its author's (or authors) life. They're hard to maintain. At some point, either the author either moves on to some other kind of writing or publication, gets too busy to maintain it, or simply feels worn out by the exposure and repetition involved in long-form online writing."

"The researchers found that parents' effort is more important for a child's educational attainment than the school's effort, which in turn is more important than the child's own effort.

The study found that the socio-economic background of a family not only affected the child's educational attainment - it also affected the school's effort.

Researcher Professor De Fraja, who is Head of Economics at the University of Leicester, said: "The main channel through which parental socio-economic background affects achievement is via effort.

"Parents from a more advantaged environment exert more effort, and this influences positively the educational attainment of their children.

"By the same token, the parents' background also increases the school's effort, which increases the school achievement. Why schools work harder where parents are from a more privileged background we do not know. It might be because middle class parents are more vocal in demanding that the school works hard.""

"I was lying on my bed trying to think of a more practical method for allowing anonymous users to posts comments to things on the site.

I primarily wanted a method that didn't make them have to decipher horrible random text from a box. With OCR constantly improving, this is inherently a failed system... Its more a case of "when", less "if".

I began to start to think of processes that we can do every day with little effort and a computer would either have to be extensively reprogrammed then taught all the possible combinations of entries. I also wanted something that people could customise to their website -- eg: instead of everyone use letters and numbers.

Kittens are the answer to all this. Sure you can teach a computer what a cat looks like, and it will probably have a fair shot at picking kittens from alligators but what about when you put it up against other similarly cute animals? "