#mtbos #EduTooter #edu
https://onedtech.philhillaa.com/p/prospective-online-students-want-async-sync-mix
Phil Hill is amazing and anayltical.
The lede (he also doesn't call it "tl/dr" for the too long, didn't read nonsense)
is that ed tech needs to stop thinking of online learning as synchronous or asynchronous. WE CAN MIX. From the newsletter:
"This conclusion could have been the lede for the survey release. Nearly nine in ten prospective online students would be willing to attend synchronous sessions in an otherwise asynchronous course to improve their ability to learn the material, and most of those would prefer once per week.
I’ll repeat my conclusions from 2021.
I think that the challenge, or opportunity, over the next few years is for schools to figure out how to combine asynchronous methods that preserve anywhere / anytime access with synchronous methods, increasingly with video, that meaningfully increase student engagement. That’s not a new concept, but as William Gibson noted, “The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.” How do we increase the large-scale adoption of the methods that work? That is the key opportunity."
Anybody want to work with me to do that with math?
I think it's probably about time to make a general announcement that after two INTENSE years sciencing in public I'm going into committed rest, recovery, family & focus time for the rest of 2024 .
If it's not something already in motion, I will most definitely be slow if not entirely offline on following up on brand new invites, chats, talk requests, collaboration opps, etc. Please know this is circumstantial & I still welcome them (for '25!)
Excited to be resting and (hopefully) creating.
Today I was prompted (ha ha) by a question Anders Sandberg asked the latest GPT: at what angle should you throw a projectile — subject to uniform gravity, and ignoring air resistance — in order to maximise the length of its trajectory?
[The Chatbot got quite close, but fell over at the end, being too lazy to compute an easy derivative, and then screwing up its numerical solution to a needlessly difficult formulation of the problem.]
It’s well known that to maximise the horizontal distance travelled, you should launch the projectile at 45°. But to maximise the distance along its parabolic path before it hits the ground, the angle turns out to satisfy the beautiful transcendental equation:
s arctanh(s) = 1
where s = sin(θ)
This is solved by:
s ≈ 56.47°
interesting tooling somebody recommended in a chat earlier today: “I spent a couple months building a newsletter generator in the early days of ChatGPT going back and forth in Python. I gave Replit 1 prompt with the same requirements I used with ChatGPT, and it spit out working code in about 15min.” https://replit.com/
This kind of automation (really just the supercharged evolution of autocomplete that has been in IDEs for years) is one area I think LLMs can provide real value in a way that is both familiar (people have been using autocomplete for years) and helps avoid the most common risks that arise when using these things as general knowledge engines.
I cannot even believe this misinformation coming out of the Florida Department of Health. This is just beyond the pale. They are discouraging the use of mRNA COVID vaccines. This is beyond irresponsible. It is malpractice.
https://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/FLDOH/bulletins/3b56786
Conservatives have been championing Telegram as a more ideologically aligned alternative to Signal, and so they are trying to paint Durov's arrest as being politically motivated. To be clear, Telegram is much less secure than Signal (!!)
https://www.404media.co/how-telegrams-founder-pavel-durov-became-a-culture-war-martyr/
Congratulations to our first 2024 EFF Awards Winner, @404mediaco !
As the media landscape in general and tech media in particular keeps shrinking, 404 Media, launched in August 2023, has forged ahead with incisive investigative reports, deep-dive features, blogs, and scoops.
The U.S. gender wage gap has widened for the first time in 20 years.
Men's median earnings rose 3%, compared to 1.5% for women. Details at https://www.axios.com/2024/09/11/gender-wage-gap-rate-earnings
Hi all! I’m overdue for another Bridgy Fed status update. Bottom line up front: we’re now bridging video on Bluesky! Out from Bluesky works now, in will work as soon as they finish their user rollout, hopefully within days.
Also, Bridgy Fed can now ask people to bridge their accounts! This is the infamous “discoverable opt in,” and it’s finally launched. If you want to follow someone, but they’re not bridged, send their handle to Bridgy Fed in a DM or chat message, and it will message them to say you’re asking. (Only once; it won’t send another message if someone else asks.)
We send a couple other DMs now too, a welcome when you bridge your account, and an FYI when you reply to someone but they won’t see it because you’re not bridged .
It’s been a busy couple months. I was all set to post this weeks ago, after I put the finishing touches on DMs, but then Brazil happened. 3M new users and 10-20x usage increase in just a few days!
Amazingly, even though Bluesky team hosts all the difficult-to-scale parts themselves, not in the cloud, they’d still planned for this kind of surprise and handled it ok. Bridgy Fed though, not so much. It stayed up and serving, but Bluesky => fediverse got slower and slower. Tough timing, too, I was busy with other things and couldn’t find much time to work on it, so after a week it was almost 3 days (!) behind.
Fortunately, I finally managed to speed it up – props to Ilya‘s libipld library, among other things! – and after it worked through the backlog, we were back in business.
Anyway. Since last time: video, DMs, usage spike, and other features and bug fixes too:
Improved Pleroma and Flipboard compatibility.
Improved style of web => Bluesky bridged posts, also now try harder to include an image.
Drastically improved monitoring and alerting.
Stricter authorization for AP Undo
s.
…and lots more bug fixes.
As usual, feel free to ping me with feedback, questions, and bug reports. You can follow the now label on GitHub to see what I’m currently focusing on. See you on the bridge!
After spending some time familiarising myself with pywavelets, I have found that an R library (WaveletComp) is probably more convenient. It has confidence intervals (pywavelets, not at the moment of writing), and the cone of influence seems to be automatic.
pywavelets is a generic tool for wavelets, while WaveComp is more focused on statistics for time series. I tend to go directly to Python, and I think I need to change my default when thinking in software to do somewhat advanced statistics.
Another PSA that Google uses its fonts to track traffic to other people's websites. Google has no business knowing who visits other people's websites. If you want to use Google hosted 'free' fonts in your site, let your visitors know, or learn to host them locally on your server.
For instance:
https://webdesign.tutsplus.com/how-to-self-host-google-fonts--cms-34775t
To use Big Tech is to feed it. There are other ways.
"Before former President Donald Trump could appear in Tucson a second time, his campaign had to make a deposit of $145,222.70 upfront.
The required deposit came about because Trump failed to pay an $81,837 bill from a campaign event he held at the Tucson Convention Center in 2016."
Scientists used #NASAWebb to observe our Extreme Outer Galaxy, a region bursting at the seams with activity.
Find:
young stars
jets of material
background galaxies
foreground stars
Learn more about the fringes of our Milky Way: bit.ly/3Xl0F2N
HISTORY OF PHYSICS
Michael Faraday and the first attempt of a Unified Theory.
On March 19, 1849, Faraday's diary records:
'Gravity. Surely this force must be capable of an experimental relation to Electricity, Magnetism and the other forces, so as to bind it up with them in reciprocal action and equivalent effect. Consider for a moment how to set about touching this matter by facts and trial'.
1/
I'm working with someone who uses github copilot and a lot of my feedback boils down to "that's something that people used to do in #python but it's obsolete now" because *of course* that's the sort of feedback I'd give. Of the code that github stole, most of it is always going old because, like, more things happened in the past than in the present. So now we live in a very weird present-future where allegedly-cutting-edge "AI" is telling us to do Python 2.7 idioms like class ClassName(object)
I'd love ideas for how to intentionally "break" my terminal so that one of these 4 things happen:
1. backspace doesn’t work, it prints ^H instead
2. terminal won't echo my characters when you type them
3. the line not breaking, and the terminal pasting new characters over old ones
4. overflowing the line, and when I backspace, the line is poorly redrawn
ideally I'd love steps that are:
a) specific
b) close to something that might "realistically” happen while using the terminal normally
Theoretical physicist by training (PhD in quantum open systems/quantum information), University lecturer for a bit, and currently paying the bills as an engineer working in optical communication (implementation) and quantum communication (concepts), though still pursuing a little science on the side. I'm interested in physics and math, of course, but I enjoy learning about really any area of science, philosophy, and many other academic areas as well. My biggest other interest is hiking and generally being out in nature.