yjsoon

By Andreas Englund.

“Angry chihuahua mood”! This is the Dan Lyons we used to read and love.

Lovely:

Click through for the full set, and links to his other GoT illustrations.

Kinda like Pinterest, but with less publicity, more designers, and a nifty auto-backup feature that can pull from Instagram, Delicious, Pinboard and Twitter. I’d previously been using Realmac’s LittleSnapper to capture websites for inspiration, but I like this a lot better, and now my stuff is here.

Great article by Cory Doctorow, explaining what’s coming up after SOPA and why.

I find myself physically unable to stop watching this terribly amusing video:

Siew Kum Hong makes an impassioned commentary on higher education progression in Singapore:

According to the Heritage Foundation, Singapore has the second freest economy in the world (after Hong Kong). But there is one aspect of Singapore that has always felt to me like a command economy: the way the Government tries to calibrate supply and demand in higher education.

[…]

This is the sort of misguided social engineering that leaves a bad taste in many Singaporeans’ mouths. It stems from a fundamentally-misconceived view of higher education as being a means to the end of creating people to fill the jobs out there.

(This is over a recent statement by Minister of State for Education Lawrence Wong, who when asked if there would be more places for ITE students available in the polytechnics, noted that there would not be enough ITE graduates if everyone made it to poly.)

A good read. As much as I feel for my ex-colleagues who have to defend such positions (and yes, I used to be a small part of this “calibration process”, so I would have had to do the same), I hope views like this take deep enough root in the public consciousness for our political leaders to notice, and to strongly consider decoupling higher education progression from “manpower planning”. (See this parliamentary reply for a taste of what goes into planning higher education places.)

High school introduces iPads for everyone, parents get annoyed, tell media gems such as the following:

Mr Lim said he was told at the briefing that in school, cyber wellness was the teachers’ responsibility.

But at home, it would be the parents’.

He asked: “Why is the school giving me additional things to do?”

Great, now I have an additional thing to do: hunt this parent down and slap him on the head.

Google runs a series of Experimental Search trials which any user can join — “new features aimed at improving the search experience”. A short while ago, they had one called “keyboard navigation”, which allowed users to navigate results using the keys J (down), K (up), and O (open). I loved this to bits, and used it all the time… until it went away, replaced by an enhanced “accessibility” feature which makes search results look hideous:

So I went and tried DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine for a while. It looks great, is highly customisable, and has my beloved keyboard shortcuts… but I can’t quite get behind it because: (a) it’s a bit slow, especially compared to Google, (b) there isn’t native Safari support for it (I have to go through a GlimmerBlocker script), and (c) I just can’t shake the feeling that Google’s search results might be better, so I end up switching to another browser and checking on Google, just in case. This, naturally, was a recipe for madness, so I started looking into how to get back my beloved keyboard shortcuts in Google.

Thankfully, I wasn’t alone in my tribulations: the Google Experimental Search forum had quite a few others sharing my pain of having to use their mice while searching. One thread led me to this post on a blog called “Not Quite Zero”, where the author found Google’s original JavaScript for keyboard shortcuts, and re-injected it into the webpage using a user script, hence re-enabling the plugin. Yesss!

If you’re on Firefox or Chrome, the script linked in that post is all you need, but I did edit it to fix a couple of things for myself:

• Re-aligned the search arrow to get it in line with the searched item; and
• Packaged it as a Safari extension.

Here are my new versions. Once again, all credit goes to the original author; all I did were some minor styling fixes and packaging. MIT/X licensed.

• Script for Chrome or Firefox: the latter requires the Greasemonkey plugin installed before clicking on the link; tested on Chrome 18 and Firefox 10 on Mac.
• Safari extension: tested on 5.1.3 on Mac.

Important: For these to work, you do need to disable Google Instant, first at Google’s search preferences and, if you’re using Chrome, in its browser preferences. Otherwise, Instant’s search bar will grab focus when the page loads.

Note that Google’s original extension JavaScript is still hosted on their servers, so if they remove it, these extensions will do nothing! Let me know if that happens, and I’ll fix it ASAP. (As I was finishing this post, the author replied to say he put up his extensions on Github — might want to take a look there instead, if you’re interested in the original JS version. I’ll probably fork it with the styling changes.)

An overview of the new iTunes U Course Manager works. This was news to me (emphasis mine):

The overall course design provides a nice bit of organization for a class, but you’re not going to run everything from within iTunes U. In particular, there’s no feedback from students, so you’re not going to use this for tests or grading. This is a one-way broadcast of information.

I’m not sure why, but I’d previously gotten the impression from Apple’s iTunes U page that it would support student submissions and progress tracking (e.g. seeing what the latest video each student has watched). It seems this isn’t the case at all, and it makes sense if Apple expects most courses to be publicly available (and hence not graded by the instructor), rather than targetted at individual classes.

I’m left more than a little disappointed by this realisation; consider my excitement over iTunes U greatly tempered now. With student tracking functionality, iTunes U could have been a great way for teachers everywhere to conduct their own “flipped classrooms” — it’d be like using Khan Academy’s coaching tools for instructors, but allowing teachers to consolidate their own videos and materials. I suppose the good news, though, is that innovation in this space is only just beginning, and there’s a lot more that will be done. (Anyone who takes this chance to say that “the education industry is ripe for disruption”, though, will be smacked on the head with a ruler.)