Poptropica is a fun virtual world for kids that can be easily navigated. Inside Poptropica you can play games, solve puzzles, go on quests, and visit different places in the world. I could totally see my children getting hooked on this. I have only tinkered it with it briefly, and saw some learning games, but it still seems a little low on the learning side. However, it might be effective at teaching problem solving skills. If anyone has experience with this program, let me know what your review of it is!
How likely are you to get divorced?
I thought this little online calculator was a good example of taking a ton of sociological data on the backend to make a very usable product for regular joes like us who don’t want to hear all the regression statistics, but simply want to know the answer to an important question. In this case the question is: How likely are you to get divorced in the next five years?
However, it also raises—very poignantly—another problem with research on human beings: The fact that statistics don’t seem very meaningful when applied to an individual. For example, I don’t feel like the 15% chance this calculator gave me is low enough—I feel our marriage is too strong for that high of a divorce probability. Someone else in marital trouble might feel their percentage should be much, much higher. So the statistics tell good general trends for people of my age and gender, but are still not very meaningful when applied to someone personally.
But of course you already knew that about research! 🙂
GodTube
First TeacherTube, and now there’s a Christian spinoff of Youtube called GodTube. I love little inspirational videos, songs, comics, and art, so this looks appealing. As a starter, here’s an inspiring video of two dancers who work amazingly well together—despite missing two limbs.
When science becomes magic
Wow, Intel’s got me excited. Justin Rattner, Intel’s chief technology officer, gave a keynote yesterday and discussed some big, BIG ideas. One involves programmable matter, with the idea being that you could have something the size of a USB stick and at the touch of a button, have it convert to a phone, or PDA.
Wow.
ZDNet.com, in their article about the keynote, also discuss the potential for wirelessly transmitting energy, so cords become extinct and laptops can charge up from entering an energy field transmitted like WIFI is transmitted now.
Double wow.
Perhaps my favorite quote of the article is this one from Arthur C. Clarke, which sums this all up nicely: “Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic.”
Reviewing Microsoft Expression Media
On Black Friday, 2007, I took advantage of a truly Super Sweet (suite) deal. It was great–I bought Microsoft Office 2004 for a Mac for about $30, and can upgrade for $10 to the new Office 2008. The dilemma presented to me is this: Do I choose to get Office 2008 student edition with 3 licenses, or the Special Media Edition, which is one license but includes Microsoft Expression Media. I really only need one license, as my wife can use Office 2004. But what if in the future I want to upgrade her version to 2008? What if the time comes that she can’t open documents (like .docx files) from collaborators? So 3 licenses is not terribly important, but would be nice.
But I don’t want to NOT get Microsoft Expression Media if it’s useful. I had never heard of it before, but I have learned it is a digital asset management tool to help catalogue the digital media on my hard drive. I still didn’t know what that meant in practice, so I downloaded the trial version and tested it for about 30 minutes. After that brief time, here is my take on it:
It is basically iPhoto/iTunes on steroids. I like the idea and the system, although it badly needs some Mac interface lovin’. It’s pretty ugly and looks like a Microsoft product usually does: like a spreadsheet. So the UI experience is not pleasant to look at, and I had to search for how to use some of the options. But it was fairly easy to use.
I do like the concept, though, and that may have sold me on it despite its terrible UI. It catalogues all of the images, music, pdfs, video, and anything else you have on your hard drive. You select the folders, and it imports it into its database where you can search and browse to find things.
Up to this point, it’s no better really than Spotlight. But what I like is that within this one program I could tag, star (rate), rename, and manipulate the media. That’s not a big thing, and maybe there is a little shareware app out there that lets me quickly tag things in my folders? If there is, can anyone tell me about it? Otherwise, I might get Expression Media just for this one functionality. Here’s why: I tend to download comics, talks, and images that I think pertain to different topics I am interested in, so I can use them in my teaching. But if I have something titled "school.gif" in my K12 folder, I may not be able to find it if I’m teaching on elearning in higher education, for example (because I’d look in my K12 folder). With Expression Media, I can tag images so when I search under different names, I can find things, which is good because most media pertains to more than one category.
Can anyone think of another app that does that? If so, let me know in the comments. Otherwise, I might get Expression Media for that reason alone.
Anyone else tried Expression Media? What’s your take/opinion on it? Please let me know!
Tags: Microsoft Expression Media, office 2008, macintosh, software, microsoft, digital asset management
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Know a good blog editor?
I love the concept of Flock–a browser based on Firefox that is built from the groundup to support Web 2.0 social networking. It has automatic connections to a person’s blogs, flickr account, and so on. It also has a cool web snippets sidebar and a blog editor to post automatically to your blog.
But in the last six months or so since I last used Flock, the blog editor is actually worse. It no longer does a very good job of indenting and showing the external links for quotations as evidenced by my last post which looks like a mess. This is too bad because this was the coolest feature of the old Flock.
So my question to anyone reading this is what blog editor do you use (offline or online). I want something where I can easily copy over things I read online, including pictures/audio, and then quickly and painlessly write up a post to publish in one click to my blog. It needs to be easy–or I just won’t do it in the rush of everyday!
Let me know any suggestions!
Blogged with Flock
Great package of mac software
I’m going to drop this note to give some publicity to a great package of macintosh applications being bundled and sold right now through TheMacPak. It’s a productivity/business bundle, and I’m very excited about it, especially SoHo Notes, which is the best PIM/note/idea manager out there that I have tried. They are also including Assignment Manager, which looks like a sweet way to keep track of the different writing projects I have going on, as well as iBiz, which will be helpful for billing and managing different contract/consulting jobs. Also included is 1Passwd, which I’ve heard lots of good stuff about, a financial tracking app, and an typing assistant app.
Pretty sweet list of apps for only $70!