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Tags: reference, text, history, bbs, geek, archives on 2008-09-19 and saved by15 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm

SuperMemo; learning software that reminds and tests you at intervals so that you understand what you are forgetting, and can remind or relearn at the correct time to retain it.

Tags: article, articles, awesome, blog, brain, business, computing, cool, download, downloads, essay, fun, geek, hack, health, howto, intelligence, knowledge, language, languages, learning, life, lifehacker, lifehacks, memory, people, philosophy, reading, review, social, spanish, study on 2008-07-22 and saved by41 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Precisely those things that seem to signal we're learning well — easy performance on drills, fluency during a lesson, even the subjective feeling that we know something — are misleading when it comes to predicting whether we will remember it in the future.
Wozniak has also invented a way to apply his learning system to his intake of unstructured information from books and articles, winnowing written material down to the type of discrete chunks that can be memorized, and then scheduling them for efficient learning. He selects a short section of what he's reading and copies it into the SuperMemo application, which predicts when he'll want to read it again so it sticks in his mind. He cuts and pastes completely unread material into the system, assigning it a priority. SuperMemo shuffles all his potential knowledge into a queue and presents it to him on a study screen when the time is right. Wozniak can look at a graph of what he's got lined up to learn and adjust the priority rankings if his goals change.
These techniques are designed to overcome steep learning curves through automated steps, like stairs on a hill. He calls it incremental reading, and it has come to dominate his intellectual life. Wozniak no longer wastes time worrying that he hasn't gotten to some article he wants to read; once it's loaded into the system, he trusts his algorithm to apportion it to his consciousness at the appropriate time.
We associate intelligence with pure talent, and academic learning with educational experiences dating far back in life. To master a difficult language, to become expert in a technical field, to make a scientific contribution in a new area — these seem like rare things. And so they are, but perhaps not for the reason we assume.
Even the basic demand for regularity can be daunting. If you skip a few days, the spacing effect, with its steady march of sealing knowledge in memory, begins to lose its force. Progress limps. When it comes to increasing intelligence, our brain is up to the task and our technology is up to the task. The problem lies in our temperament.

The "Hello World" Program, in 366 Programming Languages!

Hello World" is the traditional first program you write when learning a new language, first appearing in K&R's "The C Programming Language" book in 1978. Since then it has been implemented in almost every programming language on the planet. This collection has it in 366 coding languages (even LOLCode!) and 58 human ones! Is your favourite here?

Tags: programming, language, helloworld, reference, humor, fun, code, geek on 2008-05-04 and saved by29 people -All Annotations (0) -About