all posts tagged “blog”
I've always hated math. Since about the 6th grade, I've always felt behind and deemed myself "not a math person." As I get older, I'm realizing that part of my problem was how I was taught math. It always seemed like memorization and rules without context. I never had teachers that helped me develop a passion for math or see the the magic in solving problems. I wrote about this experience here.
Recently I learned about a series of thirteen blog posts that are meant for people like me. Steven Strogatz is an award winning mathematician from Cornell who has taken it upon himself to explain the magic of math on the New York Times Opinionator blog. Here's how it describes the genesis of the idea:
I have a friend who gets a tremendous kick out of science, even though he’s an artist. Whenever we get together all he wants to do is chat about the latest thing in evolution or quantum mechanics. But when it comes to math, he feels at sea, and it saddens him. The strange symbols keep him out. He says he doesn’t even know how to pronounce them.
In fact, his alienation runs a lot deeper. He’s not sure what mathematicians do all day, or what they mean when they say a proof is elegant. Sometimes we joke that I just should sit him down and teach him everything, starting with 1 + 1 = 2 and going as far as we can.
Crazy as it sounds, over the next several weeks I’m going to try to do something close to that. I’ll be writing about the elements of mathematics, from pre-school to grad school, for anyone out there who’d like to have a second chance at the subject — but this time from an adult perspective. It’s not intended to be remedial. The goal is to give you a better feeling for what math is all about and why it’s so enthralling to those who get it.
I've read the first few installations (he's posted 4 of 13 so far) and I'm impressed. It's not in plain English, per se, but he does a great job of using visuals and metaphor to explain math in a way that is new to me. Each post takes about ten minutes to read. All the current posts are here, and I encourage you to start at the beginning.
Thanks to Jay at Juxtaprose for letting me know about the series.
For a while now I've been fascinated by the idea of creating a single place (other than Facebook) that brings together all the things I do on the Web. That is why I created the zeitgeist page here on Common Craft - to have that single place to bring it together. At the same time, I've had a blog at leelefever.com that has become a pain to keep updated - I needed a replacement.
Recently I discovered Tumblr, which is a super-simple and lightweight way to have a blog with a minimum of effort.
Here's the deal. I blog here, I put photos on Flickr, I put videos on You Tube and updates Twitter, the list goes on. Anyway, Tumblr takes the RSS feeds from these sources and turns them into blog posts. This was a perfect replacement for my old blog - it is always updated.
Further, Tumblr makes it super-simple for me to add a new photo, video, quote, blog post, or whatever, via a handy-dandy bookmarklet. It's fast.
The Tumblr posts don't allow comments and there are only a handful of features, but they appear to be the right ones.
So, I've redirected leelefever.com to leelefever.tumblr.com - which will provide a constant flow of Lee-related bloggified fun from this point forward.
As the US presidential election heats up, I've been more and more interested in how the candidates are shaping up, particularly on the web. One of my daily newsletters, Tech President (blog), has recently become something I look forward to each day. It's by the Personal Democracy Forum and focuses on, you guessed it, how technology is changing politics (or not).
It's fascinating to see how things are playing out. For instance, think it's so interesting that the Democrats jumped into the YouTube debates and a number of the Republican candidates won't take it seriously. There is something about this that reminds me of the experienced executive that is too busy to worry about the company's web site.
Anyway, if you're interested in the upcoming elections and a thorough take on how the web is shaping politics, Tech President is good start.
2 Friends, Tag Drafting and Web 2.0 Personalization
Posted by: leelefever on April 7, 2007- 5:00pm
Categories: blog, friends, Social Design, socialbookmarking
I've been inspired and impressed by a couple of my local Seattle friends who have, over the last year, become some of my favorite online community-focused bloggers.
I first met Ryan Turner working on a big project with a large aero-space company formerly based in the Seattle area . At the time, Ryan impressed me with his mad workplace ethnographic skillz. Since then, he's gone on to work at the web design consultancy Zaaz and refocused his efforts on helping Zaaz clients wrap their minds around online communities and Web 2.0. Lucky for us, he talks about these experience on his blog - Web Social Architecture - The Mad Science of Online Communities. (at least that's the title this week. Ryan knows what I mean.)
A post of Ryan's that caught my eye lately was: The Basics of Web 2.0 Personalization. These are the cliff's notes (and cool visuals) of a talk he did recently as Zaaz.
Sean O'Driscoll is another favorite that I've come to know recently through project work. Sean's one of the few people at Microsoft that actually has "community" in his title. He's the General Manager of Support Communities and MVP. Along with his real-world experience and love for BBQing, Sean's passion for community show's through on his new-ish blog: Community Group Therapy.
Like me, Sean is always looking for easier ways to describe the trends and technologies that are shaping Web 2.0. I particularly like the racing-inspired term "tag drafting" to describe using your friends as filters for information coming from sites like Del.icio.us.
I'm looking forward to hearing more from both Ryan and Sean - keep it up, please.
I’m just starting a new project that should be really interesting. I’m working with Bill Reid’s group at Microsoft, which does IT Solutions. Like so many other teams at the company, they are interested in using blogs as a way to support and connect more personally with customers.
When we first started talking about the project, it was about using blogs as a feedback loop, where the blogs would facilitate customer feedback that could be used to improve products, in this case, IT solutions. What we found was that this was putting the cart before the horse. This was about the time I wrote the Wiki This post.
Now, we’re focusing the project on the blogging first- understanding best practices for building readership, listening to the blog world, writing for a blog, etc. Overall, we hope to increase the blog literacy of the IT solutions group so that the team can identify the ways in which a blog may help them achieve their goals individually and as a group.
I'm also excited to be working loosely with Lilia Efimova (Mathemagenic), who is doing an internship at MicrosoftResearch studying how they are using blogs. Like her, I hope to blog what I can.
Just a quick link and quote from an article about Sun's blogs. More of the same, but you gotta love that quote.
Sun's Simon Phipps, whose job title is chief technology evangelist, says that researchers and developers can swap more ideas, build better software, and meet customers' needs faster if they are active in online communities, where blogs play the dual role of soap- and suggestion-box. "In a world where you must speak with an authentic voice," says Phipps, "the obvious way is to let the people you most trust�?your employee's speak directly to the -people you most want to appeal to your customers." According to Phipps and Schwartz, not only do Sun's blogs show customers that the company is paying attention to their concerns, but they have also become a major channel for communicating with programmers outside the company who write crucial third-party applications that run on Sun's hardware and operating systems.
Via: Christopher Carfi
Recent Post Topics
Subscribe with RSS