The old
concept of getting your
brain subscribed to has a reincarnation into the
lifestream idea : add a page to your blog listing all
your timed actions on the web. I stumbled upon it via the
Lifestream – ala wordpress post containing a link to the original Streaming my life away
article by Jeremy Keith. After far
too much time I managed to install Chris Davis’
Lifestream wordpress plugin. Here are some comments that may make it easier to install a
lifestream page yourself. To begin, don’t download the plugin at the
top of the page, but rather scroll down to comment 886-59 by Gunnar
Hafdal and download via the link given there (or use this direct link).
This version at least contains a readme file (even after reading through
all the php-code of the other version I didn’t have a clue as how to use
it, in the readme file I finally learned that you had to create a new
page and use Lifestream as a page-template…). Next, I could’t
get it working until line 78 of stream.php was
commented out (the Copenhagen-time line). Also don’t use the
Dashboard-Manage-Lifestream page in the hope to change your
RSS-subsriptions, but rather hard-code them in the
life.php file. Bear in mind that not all RSS-data will
work with Lifestream. I’ve tried out all of the social bookmark sites of
which the logo is given at the bottom of a post, and found that only six
of them work without doing extra work : co.mments, digg,
ma.gnolia, furl, netvouz and de.lirio.us (the last one modulo the fact
that it doesnt give the accurate time). At the moment I’ve added just
co.mments, digg, magnolia and netvouz to my lifestream but I may add
other streams later. Of course one can solve problems with the other
RSS-feeds by scraping them and writing new feeds which Lifestream (or
rarther the underlying magpieRSS bundled with wordpress) can handle. I
assume this is the idea behind the other Lifestream plugin by Elliot Black (I havent
tried this one out). The last thing to do is then to change the
stream.php file so that it produces a page with more or
less the same look and feel of the rest of the blog. Apart from a few
things which I still have to remedy, I’m happy with my
Lifestream. Now it is time to have a serious go at some of these
social-bookmarking sites…
Author: lievenlb
As if I
didnt yet have enough doubts about whether to continue this blog or not,
one of the few people who (imo) did a truly magnificent job decided to
stop her blogging activities right after celebrating her first
blog-anniversary. Christine C. Dantas
maintained Christine’s
Background Independence, a blog dedicated to quantum gravity, and
motivated her decision to stop as follows :
Hello all.
Here are the facts,
before too much speculation runs wild…
Yes, the blog
is “dead”. The main reason is that I do not have the right
temperament to be in the middle of so much polemics. Yes, I had fun with
the blog and got a lot from it. But lately, although I wanted to make it
seem that everything was all right in its first year anniversary, things
were not that good, at least, not to me.
First, a major
Brazilian journal posted (for the first time here in Brazil) a large
article (with front page) about the current polemics in string theory.
Some weeks earlier, a journalist (the author of the article) contacted
me asking me to help him on the jargon and to correct possible mistakes
and misunderstandings. The article is a review on Smolin’s new
book and also contains an interview with him. I have made some
corrections (as well as another Brazilian physicist working with strings
did, as I came to learn afterwards). The published article, however,
includes a part that was not in the original draft sent for me to
review. It indicates that there are hot discussions over blogs and cites
(including the corresponding links) the blogs of a physics Harvard
professor (you know well who) and my blog, and makes it appear we are
both fighting each other over the web uneducatelly.
Second,
Bert Schroer wrote a paper specially for the the blog anniversary.
Although I felt that some parts were too harsh and unfortunate, I still
believed that it would be interesting to make it available, since there
was also a scientific content that could be of value. In fact, I was
interested to read the constructive comments of readers in these
specific scientific parts. However, after posting it over at my blog, I
soon realized it was too polemic and was already causing a strong
reaction, specially from people I have high consideration, like Bee, and
she was right on what she wrote. Although it was clear that
Schroer’s post was not mine and that I did not necessarily agree
with his points of view, I felt embarrassed and sad. (You see, I do not
have the right temperament for “living in the
blogosphere”…)
These recent past occurences,
plus several other during the past year of its existence, and other
internal pressures, made me realize I was not willing to go on with the
blog, although I understand that it was useful and interesting not only
for me but also for some of you out there.
I’ve made
a (partial) copy of the blog and deleted it from the server. I do not
wish the whole content to be available anymore, so I left no major
traces. I just left Oriti’s contribution because I wanted to do so
and felt it was a right thing to do.
All things come to an
end, so now it seemed to be a good time.
I am a quiet
person, and wish to go back to my quiet life, to my quiet readings and
studies.
Thank you, I’ll continue visiting PF, I
enjoy greatly this place.
Best
wishes, Christine
In fact, the whole
thread at PF is pretty interesting reading, as is the parallel
comment section at Not Even
Wrong. Trying to maintain a non-anonymous blog makes you
much more vulnerable than you want. It is always easy to criticize (and
even laugh at) people who express their opinion, thoughts and trivia.
Keeping your mouth shut and your ideas to yourself is generally
considered a much better career move. So, why should one
continue with a science blog? Perhaps the ultimate reason is contained
in Christine’s follow-up comment
I have
created the blog and I have destroyed it. It was just a blog. It was
useful, nice, interesting? Good, I am happy I did something
useful in this life! Now it’s gone, like many things in
life I suppose…
All the
best, Christine
That’s what it all
should be about, trying to make a positive contribution somehow, even
when you sometimes feel like being the court jester, entertaining the
voyeuristic (and gossipy) masses at maths and physics departments all
around the world…
Sociologists are a constant source of enlightenment as CNN keeps reminding
Kids who are turned
off by math often say they don’t enjoy it, they aren’t good
at it and they see little point in it. Who knew that could be a formula
for success?
The nations with the best scores have the
least happy, least confident math students, says a study by the
Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy.
Countries reporting higher levels of enjoyment and confidence
among math students don’t do as well in the subject, the study
suggests.
The eighth-grade results reflected a common
pattern: The 10 nations whose students enjoyed math the most all scored
below average. The bottom 10 nations on the enjoyment scale all
excelled.
As this study is based on the 2003 Trends in International
Mathematics and Science Studies and as “we” scored best
of all western countries
this
probably explains all the unhappy faces in my first-year class on group
theory. However, they seemed quite happy the first few weeks.
Fortunately, this is proof, at least according to the mountain of wisdom, that I’m on the right track
If too many students are too happy in the math
classes, be sure that it is simply because not much is expected from
them. It can’t be otherwise. If teaching of mathematics is
efficient, it is almost guaranteed that a large group or a majority must
dislike the math classes. Mathematics is hard and if it is not hard, it
is not mathematics.
Right on! But then, why is
it that people willing to study maths enter university in a happy mood?
Oh, I get it, yes, it must be because in secondary school not much was
expected of them! Ouf! my entire world is consistent once again.
But then, hey wait, the next big thing that’s inevitably going to
happen is that in 2007 “we” will be tumbling down this world
ranking! And, believe it or not, that is precisely what
all my colleagues are eagerly awaiting to happen. Most of us are willing
to bet our annual income on it. Belgium was among the first countries to
embrace in the sixties-early seventies what was then called
“modern mathematics’ (you know: Venn-diagrams, sets,
topology, categories (mind you, just categories not the n-stuff ) etc.) Whole
generations of promising Belgian math students were able in the late
70ties, 80ties and early 90ties to do what they did mainly because of
this (in spite of graduating from ‘just’ a Belgian
university, only some of which make it barely in the times top 100 ). But
then, in the ’90ties politicians decided that mathematics had to
be sexed-up, only the kind of mathematics that one might recognize in
everyday life was allowed to be taught. For once, I have to
agree with motl.
Also, the attempts to connect mathematics with
the daily life are nothing else than a form of lowering of the
standards. They are a method to make mathematics more attractive for
those who like to talk even if they don’t know what they’re
talking about. They are a method to include mathematics between the
social and subjective sciences. They give a wiggle room to transform
happiness, confidence, common sense, and a charming personality into
good grades.
Indeed, the major problem we are
facing today in first year classes is that most students have no formal
training at all! An example : last week I did a test after three weeks
of working with groups. One of the more silly questions was to ask them
for precise definitions of very basic concepts (groups, subgroups,
cyclic groups, cosets, order of an element) : just 5 out of 44 were able
to do this! Most of them haven’t heard of sets at all. It seems
that some time ago it was decided that sets no longer had a place in
secondary school, so just some of them had at least a few lessons on
sets in primary school (you know the kind (probably you won’t but
anyway) : put all the green large triangles in the correct place in the
Venn diagram and that sort of things). Now, it seems that politicians
have decided that there is no longer a place for sets in primary schools
either! (And if we complain about this drastic lowering of
math-standards in schools, we are thrown back at us this excellent 2003
international result, so the only hope left for us is that we will fall
down dramatically in the 2007 test.) Mind you, they still give
you an excellent math-education in Belgian primary and secondary schools
provided you want to end up as an applied mathematician or (even worse)
a statistician. But I think that we, pure mathematicians, should
seriously consider recruiting students straight from Kindergarten!