I was talking to someone about Calvin and Hobbes today. I have all the books included the hard-bound three volume “Complete” set. A little Googling and I found all of them online.
Some of them with Calvin in school that are educational gems. I’ll dig them up and share.
Recently I have stopped using the plus sign in my Google searches. The reason is simple. The same results are given if the search is done without a plus sign.
If I search for
alvin trusty
there are 55,000 hits. If I search for
+alvin +trusty
there are also 55,000 hits. I imagine the Google database is so big it only makes sense to eliminate links that do not include all terms in the search criteria.
There seem to be some circumstances where the above doesn’t apply. If I search for
alvin trusty education
or
+alvin +trusty +education
I get the same number of hits… about 20,000. If I use use “edtech” instead of “education” in the above two searches, I get 584 hits and 23 hits respectively. Maybe the obligatory plus sign only kicks in if there are a limited number of hits.
Something more is going on. If I do a single word search, I get these numbers
alvin – 17.1 million
trusty – 4.7 million
edtech – 1.9 million
With the old way of thinking, my search including all three terms should give me a total approaching the sum of these three numbers. I am not sure how Google comes up with 584.
I still use quote marks around important strings of words or letters. Those still work as they always have. The plus sign can also be dropped from the quotes as is seems to be a given there too.
I’m helping one of my kids with some Spanish homework. She didn’t know which definition of a word was correct. I have never had Spanish, but I know how to use several translator web sites. My daughter says they are not permitted to use a web site to look up words. They have to use a paper dictionary.
This is crazy. Why should students be forced to use the old-fashioned slow way to look up words in a paper dictionary? It takes ten times as long. I can understand the importance dictionary skills. Students must know how to use a paper-based dictionary properly. I think by tenth grade that skill has been mastered.
We are now talking about learning a foreign language. Time on task should include as little time as possible flipping through pages of a dictionary. Study time should focus on reading comprehension in context and speaking. A web-based translator helps all these things. The free Yahoo Spanish/English dictionary has the definition and an audio file of each word properly spoken.
My daughter says the fear of the teacher is that students will copy whole paragraphs into translators which do not work properly. Just read any warning label printed on a product made in China. A teacher can easily identify a paragraph that has been passed through a Google-like translator. I can identify it and I have not been trained to teach a foreign language.
We have to get our heads out of the old school way of thinking. We are surrounded by technology that can help us complete the tedious tasks associated with subjects like foreign language. If we do not use these technologies to help us, our country will continue to lose ground in the global economy.
Tonight was the kickoff of high school football. We made it through the first half without incident, but the clouds were rolling in during the band show.
The lightning started just as the players were getting ready to come back onto the field. In Ohio this means a mandatory thirty minute wait before the game can continue. Each time there was lightning in the sky, the half-hour clock restarted. At home I would have checked the local radar to see what was coming. I had my cell phone. I decided to call someone that I knew had access to the Internet.
I had to make a couple of calls before I found someone who wasn’t at a football game. The radar showed we were on the south edge of a storm, but a bigger storm (two counties wide) was about fifty minutes behind the one over us. This one was going to be nasty. The weather service said it would include heavy rain and hail.
The referees have a box in the press box. Any time there is a lightning strike within fifteen miles, an alarm goes off. They didn’t have access to anything else. They thought the storm was almost over, so they continued the game. We left.
Within half an hour it hit. I talked on the phone with some people that stayed behind. It was an ugly scene. No one was struck by lightning (thankfully), but there were some injuries on the field stemming from the sudden change in field condition.
If someone in the crowd could have used an iPhone to check a radar map (and show it to the referees), we could have avoided this storm and all the fans and players could have been inside when it hit. I will watch the news tomorrow to see how things ended.
I spent the afternoon working with colleagues on a project involving a learning management system. We are coming off summer break and most of the participants had not logged in for three months. A few of them had forgotten their passwords.
Many got right in because they use the same password for this system as for all systems – university email, yahoo email, calendar, online grade book, student course registration, online banking and that account on the server used to send everyone holiday greeting cards.
With the number of services requiring a password, no one can know how many times a generic password can circle the earth and hit servers that should never be trusted with “secret” information. On a typical day I use accounts at Protopage, Slashdot, Digg, Delicious, Flickr, Google plus all my work related sites. I use a web-based password generator to create strong passwords and Roboform to keep track of all of them.
With all the identity theft going on, using an assortment of strong passwords just seems obvious to me.
