March 2009
5 posts
#QuiztheBill - Because Congress Needs Help With...
I’ve been spending most of my time lately working on a community resource site for taking and making quizzes, called PlopQuiz.
But like many other Americans, I’ve been distracted by the troubling lack of transparency in the federal legislation process lately — most notably when reps were given only 13 hours to read the 1,000 page stimulus bill, but there are plenty of other...
Introducing GovPix, An Open Source App For...
Sometimes, the simple ideas can be the most useful ones.
With this in mind, I’ve built GovPix, a GPL licensed application that takes simple queries like names and zip codes and renders the image of the Congressional representative who is the closest match.
The source code is at Github. If you already have App Engine installed, there’s no configuration needed to get the app...
A Better Way to Pay Students For Performance
A #HackEdu session hosted by Union Square Ventures was held in New York this morning. It’s been a long time coming, but this event is a good indication that the moment for substantial disruption in the edu space has finally arrived. Edufire’s Jon Bischke said as much last night:
“We stand at a really unique point in history. As I mentioned in my personal blog earlier in the...
Making Music in the Python Shell
Animal Collective - My Girls (mp3)
Justice ft. Uffie - The Party (mp3)
Feist - I Feel It All (mp3)
These are a few songs that I made using the Echo Nest python client, each with less than 20 lines of code. Remixing a song requires just a few lines of high-level API scripting to extract the beat and structure from the song:
def main( toReverse, inputFilename, outputFilename ) :
...
Disrupting Class: Student-Centric Learning
I’m reading Clayton Christensen’s Disrupting Class, and posting a few of my favorite passages.
From Chapter 5: The System for Student-Centric Learning —
In the first phase of disruption of the instructional system, the software will likely be complicated and expensive to build. The reasons for this can be traced to the use of the existing commercial system when marketing...