The best of both the online and bricks-and-mortar worlds

With the all-important holiday shopping season around the corner, retailers are doing whatever it takes to win customers in the United Kingdom. eBay is betting on a combination of online ordering and in-person pick-up with a six-month trial of “click and collect,” where the online auction house provides delivery to Argos stores for a number of its sellers.

The partnership gives customers the best of both the online and bricks-and-mortar worlds. Read more in 

eBay Bets on In-Person Pick-Up Partnership

the MoMA goes mobile

Handheld devices put a wealth of information at your fingertips, and now museums are using them to enhance visitors’ experiences and enable people to relive their experiences afterwards. One thing to remember: that flow of data is a two-way street. 

This past summer, when I visited the Museum of Modern Art in New York, instead of audio guides outfitted with buttons that I had come to expect upon entry, I was given a sleek iPod to use. Like the audio guides, it provided access to recorded information about particular works of art on display, but it also provided a lot more options

Read more about the MoMA's mobile innovation here

The writing test

I'm one of the scorers for the SAT essays. That factual accuracy is not required can get annoying, particularly when you get essays that say Einstein invented the lightbulb or that Shakespeare was a novelist. Then there are the literary analyses that give me the sensation of nails on a chalkboard because they do so miss the point.
 However, as the essays cannot be predicated on any prior knowledge of a subject, the rule is that the score cannot suffer for student ignorance. What the test is about is not making stuff up so much  Matthew J.X. Malady  asserts  in We Are Teaching High School Students to Write Terribly, but in being able to formulate a position with backup on the fly. 

Here's an extract:

 “In fact, trying to be true will hold you back.” So, for instance, in relaying personal experiences, students who take time attempting to recall an appropriately relatable circumstance from their lives are at a disadvantage, he says. “The best advice is, don’t try to spend time remembering an event,” Perelman adds, “Just make one up. And I’ve heard about students making up all sorts of events, including deaths of parents who really didn’t die.”

Now, you have to remember that students are only be scored for the effectiveness of their writing. The question of truth here is irrelevant. No one is supposed to win extra points out of sympathy for their situation here. The stuff of make believe is not just a component in creative writing but can work for expository writing when offering hypothetical examples for illustration. 

The real problem is not making stuff up and deviating from facts but canning essays. As the questions are fairly general, some SAT prep places advise students to jut plan an essay ahead of time and then just connect it to the question in the introductions. No matter what the prompt is, these students come in prepared to write about Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks, or The Great Gatsby, or the American Revolution.  In truth, they can get away with it a lot of the time, but every once in a while, there is a prompt that really doesn't fit the canned essay. On those occasions, no matter how well stated and developed the essay is unto itself, its score will suffer for not being on target.

Another assertion I find not to be true in my extensive scoring experience is this:

 Most students choose to write what is referred to as “the standard five-paragraph essay”: introductory and concluding paragraphs bookending three paragraphs of support in between. Each essay is later independently graded by two readers in a manner that harkens to the famous I Love Lucy scene wherein Lucy and Ethel attempt to wrap chocolate candies traveling on an unrelenting conveyer belt.

Scorers are specifically warned not to award or deduct points for students who opt for the 5 paragraph essay. As a point of fact, most essays I see, particularly the ones that score a 5 or 6 tend to incorporate fewer than 5 paragraphs, though the essays typically do cover both pages. Also the idea of two scorers is one that colleges also use when scoring writing assessment tests, as I remember from my days as an instructor. It's meant as a check on standards -- in case one scorer will tend to be too harsh or too lenient. They two reader system  is nothing like the chaotic image that Malady attempts to evoke with her television reference.  Is it possible that the writer here has fallen in the the fault he attributes to the SAT essay exam? He has opted for expressing what he feels will resonate with readers rather than for digging up the actual facts.

Now, I'm not saying that the SAT essay is a perfect way to assess student writing. Certainly, some students can do a much better job if only they were given more than 25 minutes. However, it is not the be-all-and-end-all of writing standards. Certainly, from what I see in high schools teachers continue to assert their own writing standards (and many of them still push the 5 paragraph essay) rather than train their students to write for the SAT exam.

Google and MOOC.org

Google sees the partnership as a way to support educational innovation. "Our industry is in early stages of MOOCs, and lots of experimentation is still needed to find the best way to meet the educational needs of the world. An open ecosystem with multiple players encourages rapid experimentation and innovation, and we applaud the work going on in this space today," Dan Clancy, director of research at Google wrote.

Throw enough spaghetti at the wall and eventually some should stick. That’s the approach here. If we build a system to accommodate large numbers, eventually someone will stumble on what actually works. It’s the pursuit of innovation through trial-and-error on a large scale.

Read more in Google Infrastructure Adds to MOOC Momentum

Why you may feed the trolls

Just had a thought: does anyone offer trolls for hire? As having antagonistic comments on posts increases total comment numbers because the hate attracts defense comments from people who otherwise might not have commented. And, of course, keeping the debate going keeps things going. 

The URL,which was first put up very long form was changed on my article. Here's the new one: http://ww2.cfo.com/it-value/2013/09/is-digital-currency-catching-on/http://

I took this picture at the Bitcoin Conference

on/ … #bitcoin #Ripple #CFO

The face of analytics is yours

Do personalized offers make you smile? Or do you value privacy over customized shopping experiences? Read about the facial recognition technology at work to sell you more stuff in

Putting a Face on Retail Analytics

A wealth of educational materials available free

With September here, students and teachers are back in school.  Instead of just repeating the same lesson plans they used in previous years, teachers have a new way to convey the material to their students through a free service called Gooru. Drawing on the power of big data to enhance learning,  Gooru offers teacher and student a curated and sharable playlist of educational materials.

Read more in 

Back to School With Big Data

  

Bitcoin: the stereotype, reality, and possibilities

Bitcoin wants to emerge from its somewhat shady reputation as a currency for folks with something to hide and become a useful tool for legitimate business. Some say it can even do more -- like alleviate poverty and disease in Third World countries. Read more in 

Bitcoin: A Stereotype & a Possibility

Sometimes memes get to me

I try really hard not to be a Grammar Nazi online. Even when I cringe at obvious errors, I restrain myself from pointing them out, though I sometimes do contact the writer if s/he will have the ability to fix it.

Many errors appear in memes. The one that made me feel impelled to address a grammar problem is this one:

You can say "How a dog looks after doing something bad." Or you can say,  "What a dog looks like after doing something bad." However, you have to toss either the"how" or the "like." As they both serve the same function in this sentence,  the two together are redundant. It's rather like this sentence, "The reason I didn't get my homework done was because my computer crashed." That should be, "I didn't get my homework done because my computer crashed."

3D printing in the cloud: it's not just fun and games

One of the delights of writing for The Enterprise Cloud Site is learning about things that sound unlikely but really do exist, like the Society for Printable Geography. The printable does not refer to traditional maps but to 3D printing, which renders geographical data into iPhone cases, pendants, earrings, and puzzles.

All this is made possible by Sculpteo, a company that combines 3D printing with a cloud engine. Howevr, 3D printing is not just for hobbyists and collectors. It has many applications in robotics, architecture, scientific research, and education.  Read more in 3D Printing, Cloud Engine Revolutionize Manufacturing

Dictionary updates

The Oxford English Dictionary wants to show itself to be keeping up with trends and trendy words, some of which  you may wish you never heard of. Its blog has post Buzzworthy words added to Oxford Dictionaries Online – squee! has been paraphrased by a number of other online news sources already. But odds are good that this is the only one not to include a picture of Miley Cyrus demonstrating a move in the not Disney approved dance known as twerk (one of the additions).

Those who are interested in the digital currency movement may be happy to see that bitcoin makes it in (in the lower case form).  And in a nod to something that's been practically beaten to death in tech circles, BYOD is there. It's intersting to see how many of these are underlined by Blogger's spell check, about half I'd say, including the title's own "squee" and "selfie," another word we may wish we didn't have to have.
Here's the full list of Oxford's updates.

apols

A/W

babymoon

balayage

bitcoin

blondie

buzzworthy

BYOD

cake pop

chandelier earring

click and collect

dappy

derp

digital detox

double denim

emoji

fauxhawk

FIL

flatform

FOMO

food baby

geek chic

girl crush

grats

guac

hackerspace

Internet of things

jorts

LDR

me time

MOOC

omnishambles

pear cider

phablet

pixie cut

selfie

space tourism

squee

srsly

street food

TL;DR

twerk

unlike 

A kind of nutrition label for apps

Your mobile apps know a lot about you: what you buy, how you pay for it, what you browse, and where you are when you do it. To get some idea of just how much data is collected about you and who else gets to see it, click on Target’s privacy policy http://m.target.com/spot/terms/privacy-policy#InformationUsed. While that information on data collection is available, most customers probably never bother to check it.  The question is if a voluntary code of conduct for apps that summarize the information upfront will provide better consumer privacy protection.  The NTIA believes it can, but as it is something companies are not required to opt into, its critics regard it as a diversion from more effective legislation.

Rather like the nutrition facts label on food packages, the short notice on apps is intended to which reveal at a glance how much of what you don’t want in your diet is in it. Also like the packaged food industry, the voluntary code frees companies from a mandatory label that might rate its data collection policies according to a government standard.

Read more in Voluntary Privacy Policy Proposed for Mobile Apps

There's a parallel to the nutrition labels printed on packaged food. If there were a legal mandate, then all apps could have a point rating to reflect how privacy-friendly (or not) they are. But without that, it's up to companies to be self-regulating, as it were, and voluntarily decide to briefly show some of its data collection facts.

This week's Advertising Age includes http://adage.com/article/news/big-food-preps-50m-push-facts-front-labeling/243475/. The food manufacturer want to avoid having a legal mandate, so they are spending $50 million to promote what they call ad "Facts Up Front." The idea is that putting that nutrional summation on the front of the package will satisfy those who are critical of the way they have represented sugary cereals and such as sound nutritional choices without having to accept an offical label that is not within their own control like the grade system recommended by the Institute of Medicine. With such a label, the foods that contain more fat, sodium, or sugar than the benchmarks set for them would get no stars at all.