The design of textbooks in common use at all levels from elementary school through high school are appallingly bad. I’ve come to this conclusion after several years of carefully looking at my sons’ books as they went through public middle and high school. What follows is a critique of very common design “features” in these books in reference to visual information design principles. Since I’m not a subject expert in the content of the disciplines presented, I’ll just refer to the visual design, typography and information design principles in general.

One of the most striking features of the GOP front-runner is his special fondness for conspiracy theories. From the (non-existent) connection between vaccines and autism to the “real culprits” behind 9/11, he shows the typical clustered endorsement of multiple conspiracy theories.

The question about whether this a form of pandering or a genuinely held set of perspectives is interesting, though barely relevant. In the former case, the abandonment of reason to achieve a political goal is an egregious fault. In the latter case, it sheds considerable light on crucial decision-making capacities. Endorsement of conspiracy theories requires a set of cognitive biases that fundamentally hobble evidence-based decision making.

An ingenious study using the massive Weibo network revealed insights into the spread of certain emotions through social networks. Weibo is a social network platform not unlike Twitter. It is also hugely popular in China with millions of users making it an ideal platform for understanding how emotional states between socially-connected users correlate with each other.

But the highest correlation by far was among angry users. Rui and co say anger strongly influences the neighbourhood in which it appears, spreading on average by about 3 hops or degrees. “Anger has a surprisingly higher correlation than other emotions,” they say.

Speaking of Anki, here’s a Swiss Army knife of database utilities that provides searching, moving and renaming functions from the command line.

On GitHub.

You can do things like this to rename and collect tags:

$ anki_tool mv_tags '(dinosaur|mammal)' animal

Looks cool.

[N.B. 2016-03-26 Nathan Ifill pointed out that it is possible to use Anki’s built-in conditional replacement feature to do what I’m illustrating. I’ll have to work on another example!]

Anki is a widely-used flashcard application. If you’re learning a foreign language and you’re not using Anki, you should be.

If you are using Anki and are picky about the appearance of the cards, you should know that JavaScript can be used in the card template. This opens up a number of possibilities for dynamic cards. I’m just touching on the technique here.

Learning the vocabulary of a non-native language is a daunting task. The Russian vocabulary encompasses an estimated 200,000 words. Facing the task of learning this massive vocabulary for a foreign speaker is a Herculean task.^[Fortunately, many words are rare or obsolete and my experience with other languages is that you can make yourself understood with far less than the complete vocabulary.] The average adult English speaker is said to use about 20,000 words. Presumably Russian speakers can get by with about number too. Nonetheless, it remains an enormous task, one that can’t be conquered solely by brute force.

Memorization has a bad reputation in education today, but it underpins the abilities of all sorts of high-performing people. I often refer to this article from 1999 about how to better organize information for memorization.

My favorite pieces of advice:

• Do not learn (memorize) if you do not understand.
• Stick to the minimum information principle.
• Use imagery
• Avoid sets and enumerations
• Use mnemonic techniques.

I’m reluctant about using Facebook. Recently I returned after a 5 year sabbatical. It seems about the same as it was when I left. But I had never really used Facebook groups before. So when a friend launched a group around a topic of interest to me, I joined enthusiastically. While watching the numbers grow quickly in the first few days, I realized what a difficult platform it is for having any kind of meaningful discussion.

How to identify Russian letters in a string? The short answer is: [А-Яа-яЁё] but depending on your regex flavor, [\p{Cyrillic}] might work. What in the word does this regex mean? It’s just like [A-Za-z] with a twist. The Ёё at the end adds support for ё (“yo”) which is in the Latin group of characters.

See this question on Stack Overflow.