A tablet specifically for schools

Everything for school squeezed into a 10" tablet. Will they buy it? Prices start at $299 with a $99/ year subscription. Read about it in Amplify Tablet Custom-Made for Schools

EHR in NYC

Though the Big Apple has had a bad time with storms and power outages, last month, it got to report some good news. At the “NYC Celebrates Improved Health Through Technology” event on February 7th, New York City’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced positive results for the adoption of electronic health records. Read more about it in 

Big Data for a Healthy Big Apple

Misplacing a valued client

Citibank was nice enough FedEx me an illustration of a misplaced modifier. The letter begins: "As a valued client, we recently mailed a letter to you regarding an incredible opportunity to receive relief on your mortgage payment through Home Affordable Refinance Program. " As far as grammar is concerned, we only need to focus on the first five words. The way the sentence is set up the first four words are a description that should be followed by what they modify, but instead, they are followed by the pronoun "we," that is the entity that makes up Citibank, which is not its own valued client. 

To make the sentence work grammatically, Citibank could have opened with something like thins, "Because we value you as a client, we want to let you know about an incredible opportunity," or something along those lines.

For more on misplaced modifiers, see http://www.infoplease.com/cig/grammar-style/misplaced-modifiers-lost-found.html and my favorite grammar site, Purdue OWL,

Your guide, not you're guide

In honor of National Grammar Day, which is celebrated on March 4th,  here's a quick guide to pronouns and apostrophes. While people tend to get confused and add in unnecessary apostrophes at times, when it comes to pronouns, all you have to think about is this: contractions do have apostrophes, whereas possessive forms do not.

The apostrophes in contractions take the place of the letters that get knocked off when two words are combined into one, thus "I am" becomes "I'm," and "it is" becomes "it's." In contrast, possessive pronouns inherently convey possession without any apostrophe. Just like we write "his" and not "hi's" or "his'" for belonging to him,  we write "its" (with no apostrophe) for belonging to it.

Here's the list of pronouns in contraction and possessive form:

                                         Contraction                          Possessive Pronoun

                                             I'm                                             my

                                            you're                                         your
                                            he's                                             his
                                            she's                                            her
                                            it's                                               its
                                            we're                                           our
                                           they're                                          their

From the list above, people tend to confuse the ones that sound alike: it's/its and they're/their. Interesting enough, I don't really see "you're" mistaken for "your," even though both words sound exactly the same, The thing to remember is that just as you would not write "you're" or the nonexistent "you'r"  for the word that mean belonging to you, you cannot write "it's" for the word that means belonging to it, no matter how common the error.

The same holds true for "their," which is not only confused with the contraction "they're" but even with the third homonym for the grouping, "there."

Note: for the rules of apostrophe usage for plural forms, see http://www.dailywritingtips.com/when-to-form-a-plural-with-an-apostrophe/

Trailing the Tiger Trade

You can learn how stealth cameras work in the tiger exhibit at the Bronx Zoo. In at least one case, the picture recorded by the stealth cam   sealed the conviction for tiger poachers in Thailand last year.  Just like fingerprints, the patterns of tiger stripes are individually distinctive.  Consequently, the poacher’s picture proved that they did break the law. Thanks to the laws and enforcement that EIA works for, one was sentenced to four years and another to five, the longest such sentence yet for this sort of crime.  Read more about the efforts to save big cats with big data in

Trailing the Tiger Trade With Big Data

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Writer's homework

When I read articles by people who didn't bother to investigate the subject properly, I really wonder, why are they getting paid for this? I just read a Guardian piece on the advantages and drawbacks of  massive open online course AKA MOOCs.  Iit includes an assertion that the courses only can be given for subjects that involve multiple choice tests: 

Moocs are limited to subjects that can be assessed with multiple choice exams, marked automatically.Written any essays in your degree? Your professor's critique of them can't be replicated by a mooc – yet.

First of all, MOOCs like Coursera have come up with a way around that, as I explained in a blog posted last year:

Another innovative aspect to Coursera is the way it assesses student work in courses that are not limited to technology or mathematics.

As founder Ng observes, "Multiple choice doesn't really work for a poetry class." Also, with thousands enrolled in a single class, instructors would find it impossible to personalize responses to student work.

Coursera's solution to that problem is the introduction of "a system for peer grading, in which students will be trained to evaluate each other's work based on a grading rubric provided by the professor." This is not all that different from peer reviews encouraged in writers' groups, which some teachers employ in their own classroom, though the Coursera system is designed to ascertain that the students comprehend the instructor's standards before being allowed to grade another's work.

 Second of all, there are already some systems to automate grading for written work as I explained here:

For example, Pearson’s Write to Learn is designed to offer instant feedback and personalized direction on student writing. The software can be accessed at computers in the school or through an Internet connection remotely. Teachers using the software are happy to have much of the grunt work associated with guiding students through revision and editing lifted from their shoulders.  The automated critique also reduces personal confrontations. As one teacher featured in a Write to Learn case study says, there's no "evil professor" who delights in finding fault in student work.

Educational Testing Service's e-rater is another automated assessment tool. It can score 16,000 essays in 20 seconds, a breathtaking rate of productivity when compared to the one to two minutes per essay typically allotted to human scorers.

Students responded positively when the New Jersey Institute of Technology introduced e-raters. An assistant professor there, Andrew Klobucar, observes that whereas students see drafting and revising multiple times as "corrective, even punitive," when assigned by evil professors, they do not have the same negative view when doing it for an e-rater.

I do wish writers would do their own homework when offering an opinion on the current state of educational technology.

New site

I set up a new site at http://writewaypro.net

The Big Bow-Wow & a Bit of Ivory

Sir Walter Scott contrasted his style of writing with that of Jane Austen: "The big Bow-Wow strain I can do myself like any now going; but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me". While he characterized his work as large, Jane Austen called her own small, a "little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush."

The two are married together, so to speak, by Mathew Jockers, who declares them the literary equivalent of Homo erectus, or, if you prefer, Adam and Eve,"

Read more about the humanities going Google, as one article put it in my Big Data Republic blog, The Big Bow-Wow & a Bit of Ivory