Home
Helaine .'s Library tagged → View Popular
Gadgets, And Women Who Love Them -- Courant.com
Ten sites for the unisex home-entertainment consumer:
CNET ( www.cnet.com): For quality and quantity of reviews on all things technological, no site is better. Its "HDTV Basics" is required reading for the novice.
Remote Central ( www.remotecentral.com): Now that you have an HDTV, a high-def cable box, PlayStation 3 and an audio-video receiver, how to best control them all with a single remote? Remote central has the answer.
iLounge ( www.ilounge.com): The former iPod Lounge changed its name, broadened its focus slightly — the iPhone is part of its iWorld — but remains an online iPod landmark.
Projector Central ( www.projectorcentral.com): Want a real home theater, with a real projector that flashes a monstrous picture on a screen? Start here. Also try Projector Reviews ( www.projectoreviews.com).
The Digital Bits ( www.digitalbits.com): If it's on DVD or Blu-ray, it's at Digital Bits: movie-related news, reviews, upcoming features and rumors. Hollywood's best friend.
Blu-rayStats.com: A nerd's guide to Blu-ray. Click on "Blu-ray Statistics" for the real down-and-dirty numbers: aspect ratio, bit rates, run time and box-office gross in a no-frills presentation.
The Computer Audiophile ( www.computeraudiophile.com): Everything you want to know about setting up wireless music distribution in your house is here. Click on "Computer Audiophile Academy."
Monoprice.com: The best place, with the best prices, on the Net for HDMI cables, connectors and everything else for your home-entertainment system.
Mac Rumors (www.macrumors): News, rumors, adulation and complaints, all part of the cult of Steve Jobs. (Be sure to track down the artist's rendition of the forthcoming Apple tablet computer, a jumbo iPod Touch.)
Tech Bargains ( www.techbargains.com): I gave up Woot long ago for this site that aggregates the best tech buys on the web each day. For the non-techies, try PlanetBargains.com.
Student Expectations Seen as Causing Grade Disputes - NYTimes.com
“Many students come in with the conviction that they’ve worked hard and deserve a higher mark,” Professor Grossman said. “Some assert that they have never gotten a grade as low as this before.”
He attributes those complaints to his students’ sense of entitlement.
“I tell my classes that if they just do what they are supposed to do and meet the standard requirements, that they will earn a C,” he said. “That is the default grade. They see the default grade as an A.”
A recent study by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, found that a third of students surveyed said that they expected B’s just for attending lectures, and 40 percent said they deserved a B for completing the required reading.
“I noticed an increased sense of entitlement in my students and wanted to discover what was causing it,” said Ellen Greenberger, the lead author of the study, called “Self-Entitled College Students: Contributions of Personality, Parenting, and Motivational Factors,” which appeared last year in The Journal of Youth and Adolescence.
Professor Greenberger said that the sense of entitlement could be related to increased parental pressure, competition among peers and family members and a heightened sense of achievement anxiety.
Aaron M. Brower, the vice provost for teaching and learning at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, offered another theory.
“I think that it stems from their K-12 experiences,” Professor Brower said. “They have become ultra-efficient in test preparation. And this hyper-efficiency has led them to look for a magic formula to get high scores.”
James Hogge, associate dean of the Peabody School of Education at Vanderbilt University, said: “Students often confuse the level of effort with the quality of work. There is a mentality in students that ‘if I work hard, I deserve a high grade.’ “
In line with Dean Hogge’s observation are Professor Greenberger’s test results. Nearly two-thirds of the students surveyed said that if they explained to a professor that they were trying hard, that should be
Free Audio Books
Free Audio Books
LibriVox, if you don’t know it already, is the king of free audio books. You can use the catalog to search through their library of nearly 1000 works, all part of the public domain. If you’re feeling generous, you can even contribute wiki-style by recording audio of your own.
AudioBooksForFree also has a big catalog to sort through, with an emphasis on classic works, but a decent amount of mystery, sci-fi, and thriller as well. The only catch here is that you’ll have to pay for quality: the lowest quality downloads are free but anything better than 8 Kbps costs $5-8.
If you’re looking specifically for classics, FreeClassicAudioBooks is a nice little resource. Although the library isn’t huge, there are a lot of big names. They also offer the convenience of downloading in an iPod-ready format.
Who knew that on top of all that print content, ProjectGutenberg also has a huge audio section? They’ve got everything from Aesop to Zola, including a decent number of works in French, German, and other languages.
LearnOutLoud has over 500 educational titles and offers a lot of video as well.
The bright side here is that you can probably get almost any older work in the public domain for free. If what you’re looking for is a bit more modern you’ll either have to shell out a few dollars or try to find a relevant podcast.
Online Literacy Is a Lesser Kind - ChronicleReview.com
Slow reading counterbalances Web skimming
By MARK BAUERLEIN
When Jakob Nielsen, a Web researcher, tested 232 people for how they read pages on screens, a curious disposition emerged. Dubbed by The New York Times "the guru of Web page 'usability,'" Nielsen has gauged user habits and screen experiences for years, charting people's online navigations and aims, using eye-tracking tools to map how vision moves and rests. In this study, he found that people took in hundreds of pages "in a pattern that's very different from what you learned in school." It looks like a capital letter F. At the top, users read all the way across, but as they proceed their descent quickens and horizontal sight contracts, with a slowdown around the middle of the page. Near the bottom, eyes move almost vertically, the lower-right corner of the page largely ignored. It happens quickly, too. "F for fast," Nielsen wrote in a column. "That's how users read your precious content."
The F-pattern isn't the only odd feature of online reading that Nielsen has uncovered in studies conducted through the consulting business Nielsen Norman Group (Donald A. Norman is a cognitive scientist who came from Apple; Nielsen was at Sun Microsystems). A decade ago, he issued an "alert" entitled "How Users Read on the Web." It opened bluntly: "They don't."
In the eye-tracking test, only one in six subjects read Web pages linearly, sentence by sentence. The rest jumped around chasing keywords, bullet points, visuals, and color and typeface variations. In another experiment on how people read e-newsletters, informational e-mail messages, and news feeds, Nielsen exclaimed, "'Reading' is not even the right word." The subjects usually read only the first two words in headlines, and they ignored the introductory sections. They wanted the "nut" and nothing else. A 2003 Nielsen warning asserted that a PDF file strikes users as a "content blob," and they won't read it unless they print it out. A "booklike" page on screen, it seems, turns them off and sends them away. An
I’m So Totally, Digitally Close to You - Clive Thompson - NYTimes.com
-
Students began e-mailing Zuckerberg to say that via News Feed they’d learned things they would never have otherwise discovered through random surfing around Facebook. The bits of trivia that News Feed delivered gave them more things to talk about — Why do you hate Kiefer Sutherland? — when they met friends face to face in class or at a party. Trends spread more quickly. When one student joined a group — proclaiming her love of Coldplay or a desire to volunteer for Greenpeace — all her friends instantly knew, and many would sign up themselves. Users’ worries about their privacy seemed to vanish within days, boiled away by their excitement at being so much more connected to their friends. (Very few people stopped using Facebook, and most people kept on publishing most of their information through News Feed.) Pundits predicted that News Feed would kill Facebook, but the opposite happened. It catalyzed a massive boom in the site’s growth. A few weeks after the News Feed imbroglio, Zuckerberg opened the site to the general public (previously, only students could join), and it grew quickly; today, it has 100 million users.
[WorldCat.org] Search for books, music, videos, articles and more in libraries near you
WorldCat is the world's largest network of library content and services. WorldCat libraries are dedicated to providing access to their resources on the Web, where most people start their search for information.
-
WorldCat connects you to the collections and services of more than 10,000 libraries worldwide
NationMaster - World Statistics, Country Comparisons
Welcome to NationMaster, a massive central data source and a handy way to graphically compare nations. NationMaster is a vast compilation of data from such sources as the CIA World Factbook, UN, and OECD. Using the form above, you can generate maps and graphs on all kinds of statistics with ease.
We want to be the web's one-stop resource for country statistics on everything from soldiers to wall plug voltages.
You can also view profiles of individual countries including their maps and flags, use correlation reports and scatterplots to find relationships between variables, and refer to fully integrated encyclopedia with over one million articles.
California Beaches | Photos and Travel Guide for Beaches in California
-
California
Beaches provide one of the most popular vacations in
the USA. Approximately 54% of the nation’s
population lives within 50 miles of the shoreline,
and more people are moving to coastal areas every
day. That's why this California beach travel guide was
designed to assist more than 85% of travelers in Calif.,
who are local residents.
Cabo San Lucas Tourism - Cabo San Lucas Vacation Reviews - Cabo San Lucas Vacations - TripAdvisor
-
Originally a hiding place for English pirates, Cabo San Lucas found fame when John Steinbeck wrote "Log from the Sea of Cortez." Shortly after, Cabo's "Marlin Alley" became a celebrity favorite for big-game fishing. Today, it is one of Mexico's prime resort destinations. Located on the Baja Peninsula, Cabo is still known for fishing, but it's also gaining a reputation for its stunning scenery, near-perfect weather, golfing, water sports, underwater nature preserve, whale watching and nightlife.
The Power-Traveler's Checklist, Part Two: Travel Day
-
You've already found your cheap tickets and followed every other step of our Power Traveler's Pre-Flight Checklist, and now the day is here. You should already have yourself set up for a relatively stress-free trip if you followed part one of our checklist, but now that travel day is upon you, here's our suggested rundown of to-dos to make sure your travel day goes smoothly, you catch your flight on time and you get there in comfort and style.
Mac Specs, Prices, Answers, & More @ EveryMac.com - Established 1996
-
Hello. EveryMac.com is the complete guide to
every Macintosh, iPod, and Mac clone in the world, with technical,
configuration, and pricing details.
Psychology of Intelligence Analysis — Central Intelligence Agency
Table of Contents
* Author's Preface
* Foreword by Douglas MacEachin
* Introduction by Jack Davis
* PART I--OUR MENTAL MACHINERY
* Chapter 1: Thinking About Thinking
* Chapter 2: Perception: Why Can't We See What Is There to Be Seen?
* Chapter 3: Memory: How Do We Remember What We Know?
* PART II--TOOLS FOR THINKING
* Chapter 4: Strategies for Analytical Judgment: Transcending the Limits of Incomplete Information
* Chapter 5: Do You Really Need More Information?
* Chapter 6: Keeping an Open Mind
* Chapter 7: Structuring Analytical Problems
* Chapter 8: Analysis of Competing Hypotheses
* PART III--COGNITIVE BIASES
* Chapter 9: What Are Cognitive Biases?
* Chapter 10: Biases in Evaluation of Evidence
* Chapter 11: Biases in Perception of Cause and Effect
* Chapter 12: Biases in Estimating Probabilities
* Chapter 13: Hindsight Biases in Evaluation of Intelligence Reporting
* PART IV--CONCLUSIONS
* Chapter 14: Improving Intelligence Analysis
Double-Speed 120-Hz Frame Rate Conversion LCD Technology | Kameyama Manufacturing | Kameyama | SHARP
The Expert Mind -- Studies of the mental processes of chess grandmasters have revealed clues to how people become experts in other fields as well - Science & Technology at Scientific American.com:
- He thus put in a nutshell what a century of psychological research has subsequently established: much of the chess master's advantage over the novice derives from the first few seconds of thought. This rapid, knowledge-guided perception, sometimes called - helaine on 2007-01-26
Kevin Kelly -- True Films
-
I present here the best general interest true films I've found. I define true films as documentaries, educational films, instructional how-to's, and what the British call factuals - a non-fiction visual account. The very best of these non-fiction films are as entertaining as the best of Hollywood blockbusters.
In contrast to the fiction that most movies are, true films offer authentic plot twists, real characters, and truth stranger than fiction. They aim to both entertain and to inform - a powerful combo. It is no puzzle that true films are enjoying an expanding audience and rising prestige.
As dogged as I have been in tracking down great true films, I have seen only a fraction of the estimated 40,000 that have been made. So I am ready for more. However I will only list true films and documentaries that are available as VHS tape or DVDs at consumer prices. In other words, films that are easy for most people to see upon request. I won't include films that are only shown in theaters, or available via high=priced rentals, or simply out of print.
If you know of an available amazing true film that I've missed please recommend it to me.
Selected Tags
Related Tags
Sponsored Links
Top Contributors
Groups interested in research
-
web 2.0 research
A collection of resources f...
Items: 31 | Visits: 2493
Created by: Mark Marino
-
Online identity research
Collection of resources for...
Items: 277 | Visits: 2313
Created by: Adam Bohannon
-
Biology
focus on science of living ...
Items: 63 | Visits: 1892
Created by: Sheryl A. McCoy
Diigo is about better ways to research, share and collaborate on information. Learn more »
Join Diigo