08 JAN 2018 by ideonexus
Focus on Producing Information, Not Consuming
The production of information is critical to a healthy information diet. It's the thing that makes it so that your information consumption has purpose. I cannot think of more important advice to give anyone: start your day with a producer mindset, not a consumer mindset. If you begin your day checking the news, checking your email, and checking your notifications, you've launched yourself into a day of grazing a mindless consumption.
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But there's something else that being a producer do...10 MAR 2017 by ideonexus
Changing Focus from Teacher to Learning in Education
Most theories of teaching and learning take a particular stance on the role of the teacher and the relative importance of the teaching act, in contrast to the role of the learner and the learning act. This fundamental division splits the world of educational theory into two clear schools of thought. In the first—more ancient—school, it is the authority of the teacher that takes pride of place. The teacher is seen as a master or wise one who possesses knowledge and who, through the act of ...12 JAN 2015 by ideonexus
The Evolution of the Eye
To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every..."Absurd," Darwin admits, but entirely possible.
30 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
The Tapping Game
The tapping game is when I tap one time, you tap two times, and when I tap two times, you tap one time. Children play this game sixteen times, mixing up the times that children are asked to tap once when the experimenter taps twice, and tap twice when the experimenter taps once. In other words, the rules of the game keep changing, and the children need to apply their focus and attention to follow what’s going on. Blair says: What happens with four-year-olds is, in general, they’ll hang in...A game for children to learn focus.
24 MAR 2013 by ideonexus
Enthusiasm Improves Productivity
When we are engaged in what we are
doing, all sorts of things happen. We
persist longer at difficult problems—and
become more likely to solve them. We
experience something that psychologist
Tory Higgins refers to as flow, a presence
of mind that not only allows us to extract
more from whatever it is we are doing but
also makes us feel better and happier: we
derive actual, measurable hedonic value
from the strength of our active
involvement in and attention to an activity,
even if the activi...And it creates a cycle of enthusiasm as our accomplishments increase our positive outlook on the task, increasing our focus.
09 MAY 2012 by ideonexus
Burning a Diamond
To day we made the grand experiment of burning the diamond and certainly the phenomena presented were extremely beautiful and interesting... The Duke's burning glass was the instrument used to apply heat to the diamond. It consists of two double convex lenses ... The instrument was placed in an upper room of the museum and having arranged it at the window the diamond was placed in the focus and anxiously watched. The heat was thus continued for 3/4 of an hour (it being necessary to cool the g...Folksonomies: chemistry
Folksonomies: chemistry
Faraday describes and experiment with Davy where they set a diamond on fire.
23 MAR 2012 by ideonexus
Darwin Believes Part of his Brain has Atrophied
My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain that alone on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organised or better constituted than mine would not, I suppose, have thus suffered, and if I had to live my life over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for...The part concerned with taste and the humanities, due to his focus on fact and hypothesis.
25 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
Focus on Common Things
And first, for those things which seem common. Let men bear in mind that hitherto they have been accustomed to do no more than refer and adapt the causes of things which rarely happen to such as happen frequently, while of those which happen frequently they never ask the cause, but take them as they are for granted. And therefore they do not investigate the causes of weight, of the rotation of heavenly bodies, of heat, cold, light, hardness, softness, rarity, density, liquidity, solidity, ani...We overlook the common in scientific inquiry, but it is in the common occurrences that the laws of nature are to be found.