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Category Archives: thoughts

The Information Diet by Clay Johnson

Monday, July 2, 2012

In many more ways than one, this book can be described as “food for thought.” Clay Johnson aims to do for information what Michael Pollan did for food. The parallels the book draws between the food and information industries are surprisingly persuasive. Like our food, the most easily and cheaply accessible information that we consume [...]

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Thought’s on MITx’s pilot course — 6.002x Circuits and Electronics

Monday, June 11, 2012

I took this course to refresh some of my EE basics which, having moved from EE to CS, I had long forgotten. I’d also been dabbling with various online courses being offered by Stanford (Machine Learning and Databases) but although the content and teaching were excellent, I realized that unless I was really serious about [...]

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On vacation — pun intended

Saturday, December 24, 2011

Vacations — how we love them! It’s not just the water which comes in shades that give the colour blue not just a personality, but a soul; it’s not the sand that’s so fine that you’re tempted swim in it; nor does the salty tang of the insistent ocean breeze really explain it. What really [...]

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On teaching as learning

Monday, April 18, 2011

He wore a cowboy hat and he said, “write software that could cook me bacon.” That was one of the responses I got this morning, when I asked a class of 30-odd students what they’d like to do after learning programming. It was an introductory Python programming class, and we mostly covered the basics, like [...]

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Mathematician envy

Sunday, March 2, 2008

The scene is a hands-on workshop for developing presentation skills. Sixteen teaching assistants have come prepared with a ten minute teaching session on a topic of their choice. A biologist describes the human genome project. A chemist delights us with the tale of dimerizing a ketone molecule. An Lab TA attempts to convey the intricacies [...]

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