poida Does Technology Make Us Smarter or Dumber? Can a calculator make you smarter? The QAMA calculator can. You use it just like a regular calculator, plugging in the numbers of the problem you want to solve — but QAMA won’t give you the answer until you provide an accurate estimate of what that answer will be. If your estimate is way off, you’ll have to go back to the problem and see where you went wrong. If your estimate is close, QAMA (developed by Ilan Samson, an “inventor-in-residence” at the University of California, San Diego) will serve up the precise solution, and you can compare it to your own guess. Either way, you’ll learn a lot more than if you simply copied the answer that a calculator spit out. Ever since journalist Nicholas Carr posed a provocative question — “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Calculators. (MORE: Does Listening to Music While Working Make You Less Productive?) Auto-complete. Texting. (MORE: Why Kids Should Learn Cursive) Search engines. (MORE: Remember More Without Trying) Email. Websites.
An Oral History Of Apple Design: 1992–2013 Most efforts to explain design at Apple end up reducing a complex 37-year history to bromides about simplicity, quality, and perfection--as if those were ambitions unique to Apple alone. So Fast Company set out to remedy that deficiency through an oral history of Apple's design, a decoding of the signature as told by the people who helped create it. A longer version of the story that includes material not published elsewhere is available in the Byliner original ebook, Design Crazy. "This is our signature," Apple's gauzy television ads proclaim, referring to the familiar words that the company stamps on the undersides of its products: designed by Apple in California. The ads fall in the grand Apple tradition--beginning with the "1984" Super Bowl spot--of seeming to say a great deal while revealing little. The singular Cupertino computer company is one of the most intensely competitive, pathologically secretive organizations in the world. So Fast Company set out to remedy that deficiency.
eSchool News How technology has changed our idea of 'knowledge,' and what this means for schools While technology hasn’t transformed education to this point, it definitely has transformed learning, researcher David Weinberger argues—and this shift has important implications for educators By Dennis Pierce, Editor in Chief, @eSN_Dennis Read more by Dennis Pierce Before the internet existed, humans had a very different concept of what “knowledge” was. Before the internet existed, humans had a very different concept of what “knowledge” was, says researcher David Weinberger. This concept was defined by the physical properties of the dominant medium for sharing information back then—paper—and the limitations it placed on this process. For instance, we’ve tended to think of knowledge as something that was orderly: organized neatly into chapters and books, and sorted on shelves in the library according to a rigorous classification system. Now, “we have a new medium” for distributing knowledge, Weinberger told attendees of the 2013 Building Learning Communities (BLC) conference in Boston.
Mailstrom Helps You Clear Out Thousands of Messages from Your Inbox in About an Hour Install OS X on Your Hackintosh PC, No Hacking Required @pdok: It's not necessarily illegal if you buy a legitimate copy of Mac OS X. It may violate the license agreement (and that's far from a settled question, as is whether the license agreement is even valid to start with), but that doesn't make it illegal. If you just torrent the CD and don't give Apple a dime, then it's illegal as hell. But if you buy a legit license for the program, it's not illegal to download the CD; as the software companies so like to say, they're not selling you software, they're selling you a license to use software, and giving you the software on disc as a convenience. Of course, torrenting it might be a problem because you're also distributing, which is illegal as hell, but that's what Usenet is for. What I'm curious about is, does the EFI emulation cause any problems dual-booting with OS's that rely on good old-fashioned BIOS (i.e.
Free eBook: 154 Brilliant iPhone (and iPad) Tips. Too Cool Not to Share. Did you know you can add your own keyboard shortcuts on the iPad or iPhone? How about some faster ways to reject suggested auto-corrections as you type, or write contractions, or a single-tap method to magnify and select text? This free eBook from Michele Ballard is jammed full of handy, cool techniques like these. I recently downloaded this book from the iBooks Store and was so impressed by the first few tips alone that I knew I had to share it here. Most of these tips will work on the iPad too. Here’s a few more tips to whet your appetite for this fabulous freebie: Format text in e-mails: You can bold, underline, or italicize text in emails by highlighting a section of text and then clicking the right arrow in the menu that pops up, where you will then see a “B I U” option.Mark an email as Unread: This can help you remember to go back to an email and follow up on it later. About Kelly Walsh Print This Post
Are ROMs Really Necessary on a Nexus Phone? I rooted my Galaxy Nexus last night, and got a lot of people asking me this very question. I'm curious about you other Nexus users: Do you use a custom ROM? Why or why not? I'm already pretty stoked on some of the other features CyanogenMod has to offer. I always ran custom ROMs on my HTC devices because I didn't use the stock launcher anyway (LauncherPro pre-ICS, Nova thereafter) and the HTC ROMs were sometimes missing features I really liked. Now that I've got a Nexus (4 and 7), though, and Jelly Bean is where it is, I don't have much of an incentive. I will say this, though, since you're using a rooted Nexus: you should look into franco.Kernel for your GNex if you haven't already. I have looked into Franco kernel, actually. I had a Nexus S 4G (which sadly died a month ago), I rooted it from day one and ran custom ROMs on it. I got a Nexus 4 within 2 weeks of its release. Beyond root, I don't really need anything extra is what I'm trying to say. Hm, my reply seems to have vanished.
Top apps to outfit a new iPad or iPad mini You know the scenario: a friend or family member got an iPad or iPad mini as a gift this week. Now they want to know what to do with the pretty slab of aluminum and glass. The App Store can be an overwhelming place, with programs that can transform the iPad into a word processor, a MIDI instrument, or a 3D gaming machine. We chose a few popular categories that cover some of the most common usage scenarios, then listed the top app in each that we would recommend to a friend. Image editor The iPad's screen is great for editing images, and photo buffs have no dearth of options for editing images while on the go. Snapseed also has a nice touch-centric interface, with most effects adjusted by sliding left or right. Another good option is Apple's own iPhoto ($4.99), which has a unique editing interface that also plays well with the iPad's touch input. Text editor Text editors are also a hot category for the iPad. Cloud storage News Messaging Music Games Weather E-reading Just a start
Must-have apps for your new Android tablet Know someone who emerged from this holiday season with a new tablet in hand—and they now want your advice on what to do with it? An Android device is only as good as the apps you install, so we've drawn up a listed of some top Android apps for tablet newbies. The apps we've chosen below are not necessarily new or edgy, but we've field-tested them all and find them solid choices for a wide variety of users wanting to get started with some basic tablet tasks. (See our iPad version as well.) Snapseed (free) The Google Play store is not overflowing with powerful image editing applications—there are many more apps that will let you pop clip-art cats or Eiffel Towers into your pictures in lieu of doing a simple crop. Snapseed allows you to pull in photos to edit from cloud services like Box or Dropbox, which can be handy if you tablet is stuck with only a front-facing single-megapixel camera. DroidEdit (free) DroidEdit is by far the most flexible of the text editors we tried. Google Drive (free)
The new tech battleground: Tearing down walls, building bridges This article is part of Next, The Globe's five-day series examining the people, places, things and ideas that will shape 2013. Call it a TV guide on steroids. The NextGuide is an iPad application that helps users find out exactly what shows are on at any given time, in any given place. The app, developed by San Francisco-based start-up Dijit Media and released this fall, acts as a personalized program guide, following its users’ watching habits and suggesting new content based on those habits. “People always say ‘I have 500 channels and there’s nothing to watch,’” said Jeremy Toeman, chief executive officer of Dijit Media. At the core of the NextGuide is a simple but powerful concept. “What we’re doing adds value to everybody in the food chain,” Mr. But quietly, a host of start-ups are creating a niche industry by developing what can best be described as bridge-builders: apps that let users escape the confines of the walled garden.