Fluid Intelligence has Made the Most Gains

So which kinds of intellectual performance have been pushed upward by the better environments of recent decades? Surprisingly, the steepest gains have not been found in the concrete skills that are directly taught in school, such as general knowledge, arithmetic, and vocabulary. They have been found in the abstract, fluid kinds of intelligence, the ones tapped by similarity questions (“What do an hour and a year have in common?”), analogies (“BIRD is to EGG as TREE is to what?”), and ...

 Choral Reading

Choral reading gives students the experience of reading aloud without the stress of reading alone. Based upon the previously described research demonstrating that repeated stimulation of neuronal networks increases their efficiency, it makes sense that the experience of reading aloud together reinforces patterns. When we start the choral reading, I ask students to whisper the words as I read aloud. Th is process continues until students become more confident. As the reading progresses and I ...

 Workspace is Gamespace

It's not surprising that gamespace has become a workplace for hundreds of thousands of "gold famers" who undertake dreary, repetitive labor to produce virtual wealth that's sold to players with more money and less patience than them. The structural differences between in-game play and in-game work are mostly arbitrary, and "real" work is half a game, anyway. Most of the people you see going to work today are LARPing an incredibly boring RPG called "professionalism" that requires them to alter...

 Buckminster Fuller's Advice to a Youth

The things to do are: the things that need doing: that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done. Then you will conceive your own way of doing that which needs to be done—that no one else has told you to do or how to do it. This will bring out the real you that often gets buried inside a character that has acquired a superficial array of behaviors induced or Try making experiments of anything j^ Try making experiments of anything you conceive and are inten...

 Jamie Zawinski on Different Kinds of Programming

There's obviously different kinds of programming. Without people who are not like me none of this would exist. But I've always seen much more in common with writing prose than math. It feels like you're writing a story and you're trying to express a concept to a very dumb person-the computer—who has a limited vocabulary. You've got this concept you want to express and limited tools to express it with. What words do you use and what does your I thing.

 How Medium Constraints Can Enforce Good Design

Construction of a drawing with Sketchpad is itself a model of the design process. The locations of the points and lines of the drawing model the variables of a design, and the geometric constraints applied to the points and lines of the drawing model the design constraints which limit the values of design variables. The ability of Sketchpad to satisfy the geometric constraints applied to the parts of a drawing models the ability of a good designer to satisfy all the design conditions imposed ...