http://play.typeracer.com/

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Several people have messaged me telling me that I was sent email, but I swear - I’ve never gotten them.

So if I seem like I’m snubbing you - I’m probably not - technology is just conspiring against me. Or maybe just Google.

Addendum - I wasn’t seeing emails that were BCC’d to me. I think I’ve fixed my gmail filters so that won’t happen again.

• bank statements
• credit card statements
• insurance documents
• mortgage documents
• contracts for work
• articles from magazines i wanted to keep
• piles of receipts for taxes

It piles up fast.

I finally bit the bullet and settled on a document management system.

Enter - the Fujitsu S510m.

I make no bones about saying that most things are poorly thought out and the general suck factor is pretty high, but the S510m is very very far from that.

It’s fucking brilliant.

This little scanner will do 18 pages per minute, double sided, in color - and you push just one button. Out pop PDFs, all OCR’d up thanks to ABBY FineReader and bobs your uncle. Shred or recycle your documents when you’re done.

Wooo!

I went whole hog actually - got myself a copy of DevonThink to act as a document database - well worth it.

What DT gives me now is a way to discover relationships to documents that I might not recognize or have forgotten.

Example - I scanned and stored my Energuide home assessment from a couple years ago, there’s stuff in that report that I know I want to get around to, but we just haven’t had the time.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

That’s DevonThink showing me all the related documents - not perfect - I’m not sure what Concepts, Techniques and Models of Computer programming have to do with home renovation, but that’s not bad at all.

So after just 4 days - I’ve managed to go through and purge a garbage bag and a half of paper. Most of it recycled, some of it shredded and destroyed, but it’s all good.

Truthfully - not all of it was scanned, but having a scanner that makes capturing information so completely effortless got rid of any hesitation I had for going through all my ’stuff’. There’s no way in hell I would have done this with a regular flatbed scanner. The difference between 18 pages per minute (36 if you count both sides) and a plain flat bed scanner is night and day.

The only downside so far has been that it’s forced me to get a real backup solution for home. A real backup solution.

More on that later.

Technorati Tags: gtd

Any sport that’s not objectively measured shouldn’t be in the olympics. It should be clear cut - faster, stronger, higher.

So what about public schools and grading?

I finished reading Alfie Kohn’s “The Homework Myth” a while ago and he makes a strong case that homework’s value is over inflated, sometimes even damaging to a child’s long term learning.

So I started to poke around a bit.

The public school near our house - the one that Rosie would almost certainly be going to had a bullet item: “Target: EQAO scores at/above Board levels (75%)”.

So what the heck are these EQAO tests?

Well here’s an example:

Try your hand at scoring a student response!

Use the rubric below to score this Reading item from the Junior Division Assessment and then check out the rationale for the correct code.

Sample Question and Answer

Do You Need More Sleep?

Have you ever wanted to stay up all night? It’s not really as much fun as you think, and it’s not good for your mind or body.

If you don’t get enough sleep, you can feel grouchy, and your body might become weak, causing you to become sick. There’s something else, too. Not getting enough sleep also makes it harder to remember things. You may not be able to do your best work at school.

Most people find some things, such as reading or working on math, harder to do when they don’t get enough sleep. For every hour of sleep you miss, it takes more time and energy to solve problems.

Sleep is one of those things every animal needs (like air, water, food and exercise). Some animals, such as dolphins, take very short naps throughout the day. However, humans need to sleep for several hours at a time. It takes about 10 hours of sleep (fewer for adults) to help you feel well the next day.

Getting enough sleep is important, because bedtime is when your body rests its tired muscles, builds up energy and gets itself ready for the next day. It’s also when your brain reviews what you’ve learned, which helps it make sense of the things you have seen, heard and thought about during the day.

Do you think more sleep would help you perform better at school? Explain using information from the selection and your own ideas to support your answer.

EQAO Grade 3

Generic Rubric

Code	Description
10	response does not refer to ideas and information from the reading selection response indicates a significant misunderstanding of the reading selection; ideas and information from the reading selection are inaccurate
10	response does not refer to ideas and information from the reading selection response indicates a significant misunderstanding of the reading selection; ideas and information from the reading selection are inaccurate
20	response addresses only part of the question response is developed with limited support; ideas and information from the reading selection are minimal, vague and/or irrelevant
30	response addresses the complete question response is developed with some accurate, specific and relevant ideas and information from the reading selection; some ideas and information are inaccurate, vague and/or irrelevant
40	response addresses the complete question response is developed with accurate, specific and relevant ideas and information from the reading selection

Actual Score: 30

Rationale: Response indicates an understanding of the effect of having more sleep using some accurate and relevant support (e.g., …grouchy) but does not clearly show the connections (e.g., …better grades).

I guessed a score of 30, mostly because I can’t see the difference between 30 and 40, and I assumed that the kid wasn’t getting perfect. It’s not clear that the response is missing “specific and relevant ideas from the reading selection” because it may be obvious to the student that better grades come from “it takes more time and energy to solve problems”. After all - there’s no other reason to say that the grades were better.

But that’s nitpicking - my main point is really this - testing is hard - whether that’s testing software or kids. If the best we can do is obtain subjectively accurate test scores - we’re not doing anyone a favor. Good students may not score well for no reason. Poor students may score well for no particular reason. Students who fall in the middle learn that it’s a crap shoot how well they’re going to do once they exert a nominal amount of effort. Is that good enough for you?

Never mind that everyone’s favorite economist Steven Levitt has shown that when there are distinct payoffs for higher scores on standardized tests - you can bet that you’ll find teachers and administrators cheating to get those higher scores.

Conclusion? Nothing extraordinary here - just more of the same. Be skeptical. Always be skeptical.

I hardly use the thing anymore and I was starting to resent my friends for spamming me through it.

If you need to contact me - use my email. Or phone me. Or visit me in meatspace.

In other news - vipy apparently has a bug.

My last post wasn’t very clear - or actually - it was barely a post at all.

vipy is an extension to vim so that you can run your nosetests from within vim. It’ll try to find your test methods or functions if possible, or will fall back to just running your test module.

If you happen to have nose-growl/py-growl installed or nose-django installed, it’ll handle those properly too. So you get pretty notifications via Growl on OSX and you get nice Django integration.

Yay.

If you’re using the nose-django plugin, that particular nose plugin will try to hunt down your settings.py module at the current working directory, and if it’s not there - it’ll try to hunt it down by traversing up the directory path. Probably not secure, but hey - if you’ve got a better idea that doesn’t involve more configuration - I’m all ears.

Bugs:

I’ve inherited the test class naming convention from py.test in vipy so it won’t detect test classes unless they start with “Test”. This causes grief for drproject which uses plain jane class names like “TicketModelTestCase”.

I’ll have to fix that bug - thanks to Jeff Balogh for finding that bug.

Keys you’ll use:

vipy has only 2 key bindings:

<LocalLeader>tt (TestThis)
TestThis will test the current test method or function

<LocalLeader>tm (TestModule)

Run tests in the whole file.

For people who haven’t used LocalLeader in vim yet, this generally means hitting : “\tt” or “\tm” to run the tests. 3 keystrokes.

If you want, you can remap LocalLeader in vim by sticking this into your .vimrc to remap to “comma” which is what I do.

let maplocalleader = “,”

..and no - I won’t translate the title for you.

$ easy_install “vipy[django,growl]”

Will install vipy with django and growl extras.

Whee.

I have my doubts about the accuracy of this graph - that’s the only reason Erlang is even on that list.  Food for thought anyway.

vim+python+nosetests to automagically detect what function or method you’re in and then run nosetests against that piece of code.

Yes - if you’re running Emacs, this is oh-so-boring, but well - if you’re using emacs - your wrists probably hurt really badly a lot of the time too.

I’m still tweaking things a bit, but the video shows me running module level test functions as well as unittest.TestCase-like test methods.

I’ll be posting code up shortly after I get it into a state where it’s not completely embarrassing to me.

One non-obvious thing (to me anyway) is that the postgresql contrib files are located in:

/opt/local/share/postgresql82/contrib

So to enable the adminpack, you need to do:

$ cd /opt/local/share/postgresql82/contrib
$ psql82 -U postgres < adminpack.sql