Gamification is a trend in technology right now where people are given micro rewards for accomplishing discrete tasks, such as completing a programming exercise, or completing an online profile, etc. It’s essentially a way to incentivize things that people don’t want to do. And now one idea is to do it for homework. So, giving little badges to…
Archives for April 2012
The Graph All High School English Teachers Should Mount in Their Classrooms
[ The graph’s x-axis shows the GSS WORDSUM score, which is a vocabulary-based intelligence proxy (correlated at .71). The y-axis shows percentage of people with that score. ] Given how little Americans value education today I think it’s a good idea to empirically demonstrate to our youth that intelligence (as proxied by vocabulary) does actually correlate to dollars.…
10 Interesting Data Points on IQ and Demographics
Gene Expression recently put up a brilliant post showing data on the GSS‘s WORDSUM scores correlated to various demographic data points, such as educational attainment, political ideology, religious preferences, etc. From the post: A few years ago I put up a post, WORDSUM & IQ & the correlation, as a “reference” post. Basically if anyone objected to using…
How to Get a Good Cup of Coffee From Starbucks
Wagner’s music is better than it sounds. ~ Edgar Wilson Nye People tend to love Starbucks despite their coffee tasting like it was brewed for three weeks in the center of the sun. Most mask this reality by ordering a coffee beverage instead of coffee, or by disguising the taste with biblical amounts of additives. But anyone who…
The “Existing Causes” Argument Against Free Will
Image from skeptically.org In my ongoing efforts to convince others that free will is an illusion, I have found an argument vector that I’ve not yet encountered: If you believe in cause and effect, i.e. that all outcomes are the result of previous conditions, and you accept that all causes existed before you were born, then it impossible…