Lehrblogger - Latest Comments

Re: Where Do You Go

lehrblogger — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 16:51:49 -0000

Naming projects is always the hardest part, and I got lucky with the No Mercy song :)

Thanks, and yay ITP!

Re: Where Do You Go

Andrew Milmoe — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 00:01:06 -0000

Found this and thought it was really cool,
(especially that you included the YouTube video! I LOLed)

and then realized that it was, of course, an ITP project! Yay ITP! Nice work! -Milmoe '02

Re: Saving the World with Games

lehrblogger — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 01:46:34 -0000

Also somewhat related:
http://twitter.com/#!/jasonpja...
http://twitter.com/#!/lehrblog...
http://twitter.com/#!/lehrblog...

Re: Where Do You Go

Nice — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 10:53:32 -0000

nice

Re: Facebook Killed the Video Star

lehrblogger — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 14:15:46 -0000

"Facebook is the new television, and there are not many more steps until one can get a equally cinematic mélange of personal social content." - Ash Fontana, http://twitter.com/ash_fontana...

Re: Facebook Killed the Video Star

ninakix — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 03:42:12 -0000

hehe, thanks for the write up - much better than I could have done, as I said. (:

Re: Saving the World with Games

lehrblogger — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 08:50:30 -0000

Somewhat related: http://arstechnica.com/science...

Re: An Idea for SizeUp, a Tiling Window Manager

Kchrisg — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 03:02:21 -0000

Try to use Arrange from http://www.trifle.pl

Re: Saving the World with Games

lehrblogger — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 00:40:43 -0000

A glimpse of the future described by Schell: http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/03/shopkick/

Re: Saving the World with Games

lehrblogger — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 00:26:14 -0000

haha, that's awesome. there's also http://www.chorewars.com/ which seems a little more social, and i think the various personal motivations that come from the involvement of other people will play a major role in the design of these systems.

Re: Saving the World with Games

jmrv — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 18:21:01 -0000

still digesting the idea, but thought i'd add more food to the plate:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/...

written today, and suggests (some of) your same conclusions...

Re: Where Do You Go

lehrblogger — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 01:07:45 -0000

Hey Jarno, sorry you're having trouble! I'm not quite sure exactly what's causing your problem - the "delete your data" button should be slightly below and to the right of the YouTube video, next to where it counts up your checkins when it fetches them initially. If you had a screenshot I could try to figure out what error case it is that I'm not handling properly, but in the meantime, just go to http://www.wheredoyougo.net/delete_data/user and then you should see a button to re-authorize with Foursquare. Let me know if that doesn't work!

Also, Robert, I haven't forgotten about that UI change.. I've been busy, sigh :)

Re: This is your brain. / This is your brain on the Internet.

Stever Robbins — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 12:13:37 -0000

As someone who has been using the internet extensively (probably 8+hours/day) since age 11, I am profoundly interested in understanding the effects it has on our ability to think, if only because I want very much to think that I'm the most brilliant person the human race has ever produced. Any evidence to the contrary is quite threatening to my sense of identity. I find this same bias in many of the people who write about the internet. When your profession, your reputation, and your sense of identity are all wrapped up in the Internet, you'll do whatever you can to find the upside and discredit the downside. That's basic social psychology commitment & consistency stuff.

From the inside, I can't tell what effect the internet has had over time. I don't have large data sets. I do, however, have access to large numbers of people who have been teaching college for several decades.

The most common point of view I've heard among college professors is that the internet vastly enriches people's ability to find and use external resources. But, as you point out, disconnected, many people are stupider if they don't have their connection with them at any moment. I guess I can live with that, although it seems like a really dumb long-term strategy to grow up a populace that isn't capable of doing much without a trillion-dollar infrastructure in place and running. One earthquake in the wrong place and we suddenly end up with a populace of dumber-than-before people.

The worrisome part came from a discussion with a college president who is also a professor of mechanical engineering. He said in the last 10 years, they've found that students are arriving at college unable to have intuitions about forces acting on a system. If you give them a problem with all the information, they can crank through it better than ever before. But if they must frame and formulate the problem based on their intuitive understanding of the physical world, they can't do it.

This is worth monitoring. I can't say for sure what value this kind of intuition provides, but my own intuition says that it's important. Einstein made his breakthroughs in physics by doing thought experiments based on his intuitive understanding of the world. A lot of innovation and problem solving is rooted in intuition and nonlinear decision-making. If our increasing reliance on the internet is eroding our ability to think deeply and frame problems (as opposed to solving them once they're framed), that strikes me as dangerous in a world trying to grapple with large, global, systemic problems.

You mention, "...My thought processes have developed in a world in which I am always connected...I experience them as sources to be synthesized into the broader thought to which I am devoting my energy." The problem is that, with all due respect, you're not qualified to judge. You have only your own thought processes and results by which to judge, and being steeped in the internet, your idea of what is possible and what is intelligence is at best benchmarked by your own experience. It could be that the synthesizing abilities of non-internet-raised people are so beyond yours or mine that we simply can't relate or evaluate it. (This is a variant on the idea that people who aren't good at something often believe they're good at it, since they aren't good enough to know the difference http://articles.sfgate.com/2000-01-18/news/1763... )

I have a fair amount of data that suggests I'm a good synthesizer and a good thinker. But I can't conclude that I woudn't be even better had I not been so internet obsessed over my life.

In short, while I find your question ("do we think better with the internet") extremely relevant, I don't know that it invalidates the importance of the internet-screws-us-when-disconnected phenomenon. If there's hard science that shows that multitasking and distractions physically impede the brain's ability to function and the causal relationship has been established (which as I understand it is Carr's claim), I would pay attention to that. As flawed as much of science may be, it's quite clear—scientifically proven, in fact—that intuition and subjective self-reports are considerably more flawed when you're trying to uncover large-scale causal patterns.

Re: Where Do You Go

peSHIr — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 09:11:37 -0000

Mmm, it keeps getting stuck showing me the "uh-oh! It looks like something's wrong with your OAuth link between WDYG and Foursquare, so we can't update your map [...]" message. Trouble is, there is no ' "delete your data" button above' to be seen and it is not obvious how to re-authenticate with Foursquare at all. Never saw this working. Could you help me?

Re: Where Do You Go

Robert Kosten — Mon, 03 May 2010 01:12:44 -0000

Well that's a rather more important deadline :-D

Re: Where Do You Go

lehrblogger — Sun, 02 May 2010 13:06:12 -0000

Hey Robert, thanks for your comment! You're right that the images were originally included in the map, and I'm glad you were able to get it working. I'll improve the messaging on the site soon, but won't be able to get to it until after my thesis is due... on Friday :)

Re: Where Do You Go

Robert Kosten — Sun, 02 May 2010 10:01:39 -0000

Did you change the behavior of the hotlinkable image? Originally it included the map, right? The change was probably necessary for legal reasons, but I'd put a nice big notice on the page about it, took me some time to realize what had happened ;-) Now I use the map as background, but for quite a few days I thought wheredoyougo was simply broken...

Re: 4-in-4 Day 3 Project 3: M[]leskine

Frequentlee — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 21:32:34 -0000

I'm just childish, but the picture of the thousands of discarded tissues made me giggle. Right, back on topic - I think it's a pretty BA idea, I remember we met up at CPK and I can't remember if we discussed it or not but I feel like I didn't even bother to ask and just assumed the notebook had been sold that way to you. I didn't know the backstory until now and it's a pretty solid idea. I may email you suggestions haha. 40% of the profits, man....40%....

Re: Where Do You Go

lehrblogger — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 22:41:58 -0000

Sorry you're having trouble! Sometimes it gets stuck and I haven't been able to fix the bug yet. Try clicking the "delete your data" button or go to http://www.wheredoyougo.net/de... when you're logged in to Google, and then re-authenticate with Foursquare.

Re: Where Do You Go

kingrat — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 22:34:19 -0000

Pretty cool, but on my data set the app craps out at 310 check ins.

Re: Little Computers – Meetapp, a Meetup.com iPhone app

lehrblogger — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 12:06:31 -0000

There's one that just made it to the app store a few days ago, for only $2, but I haven't tried it out yet.

Re: Little Computers – Meetapp, a Meetup.com iPhone app

Brandon — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 18:36:34 -0000

I'd love for this to happen :) I'm a fan of meetup but hate not having an app!

Re: My Life in the Cloud – A Four-Computer Syncing Scheme

lehrblogger — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 22:02:33 -0000

"doh launched Adium at work today before Dropbox finished syncing, messed up logs, restored folder from Time Machine at home, problem solved!" - http://twitter.com/lehrblogger...

Re: My Life in the Cloud – A Four-Computer Syncing Scheme

lehrblogger — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 19:58:05 -0000

I was running out of disk space on my netbook, so I moved all of my 'conflicted copies' from my Dropbox folder to another non-Dropbox folder using a variation of the instructions I found at http://robwilkerson.org/2008/1...

It didn't quite make sense to completely delete the files (at least yet) since I have plenty of space on my MBP, but this should free up nearly 600MB on my netbook. The following should do the trick in Terminal, but make sure you understand what it's doing before you try it so that nothing breaks:

find . -type f -name "* conflicted *" -exec mv {} [FULL PATH TO TARGET FOLDER] \;

Re: An Idea for SizeUp, a Tiling Window Manager

lehrblogger — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 19:04:59 -0000

I just realized that setting the margins feature in SizeUp is great for making dedicated space for my Adium buddy list and random files downloaded to Desktop. This is muuch easier than constantly showing/hiding list depending what else was in that corner.