If anybody else is having as hard of a time reading this as I did, try using Glenn Becks voice, maybe with a chalk board in the background or something. Works pretty good....

I agree with you in general. I think it will be a successful product potentially. I just think people are going to find themselves disappointed given all the hype. I just don't think the technology is satisfactory even on the cutting edge. It would be like all (even the best) portable mp3 players sounded like finger nails on chalk boards. Apple came along and made an affordable "finger nails on chalk board sounding portable mp3 player" and we all expected everyone was going to be jumping to buy one rather than simply continuing to listen to their nice home stereo instead.

Just as a first order critique. Do you really think gamers are going to settle for 640x800 screens that subtend even wider visual angles? With 800 pixels over 90 degrees you're talking about a nyquist frequency of 5ish cycles per degree. That ain't exactly a retina display. That's like a tenth the resolution of a retina display on a linear dimension, or one one-hundredth the number of total pixels.

I think this thing will have a highly anticipated launch and peter out as people find themselves preferring to game with their traditional interfaces instead.

I think lucky760 hit the nail on the head there. She's seeing the word in her head and reading it backwards like a sign I used to be able to do simple math in my head the same way by imagining that I had a chalk board in my head. Though admittedly she is doing it really really fast. Props!

>> ^artician:

That's an insane talent. I don't think everyone can do this. I couldn't even fathom how. It's probably just a genetic trait for some people, because I certainly don't think most people analyze the phonetics or spelling of a word as they hear them. I could probably do this for one word after about 30 seconds of thinking hard about it.




>> ^lucky760:

Most impressive.
Note that she's pronouncing the reverse of the spelling of each word, not the sound of each word (example: "batch" as "hick-tab" versus "chab"), which has a much higher degree of difficulty than the latter.
I often find myself reading printed words backwards all the time like on street signs, etc., but I don't have Alyssa's immense talent to imagine a word in my mind's eye and read it reversed in a split second.
Her neck must hurt from carrying around that big brain all the time.

>> ^Payback:

>> ^Nebosuke:
I think he has a vibrating wrist...

When you "pull" _______________/
you get a line.
When you "push" .........................\
it jumps in your hand.
It's technique.


Now can you write that explanation on a chalk board with dotted lines explaining the dotted lines =)

Like GeeSussFreeK said, it's just a matter of holding the chalk at the right angle and it happens automatically. I had a teacher do this back in 8th grade (dating myself, I suppose, since we still had chalk boards) and it was mind blowing at first. Then we all figured out how to do it and were constantly up at the board drawing dotted lines for no reason.

That voice is like fingernails on a chalk board but I can't get this song out of my head, and somehow I don't even mind. Why do I like it? I don't know!

I half suspect that you, my fellow sifters, have more sense than me... don't listen!!!

He's like the black Glenn Beck - chalk board and all.

@Gallowflak, those are questions that many of us on the left ask ourselves every day and I wish like hell I had an answer.

I think the biggest part of it is the media and how it forms peoples opinions from an early age.

I've noticed that Beck and O'Reilly (who are both pretty charismatic) air early in some parts of the country, about the time that kids would get out of school, go home, and turn on the television. I sincerely believe that they aim their discourse at young people, especially Beck.

No, kids aren't prone to sit there and watch the entire show, but as they're channel-surfing, they catch enough of the gist to be influenced, I think. Beck in particular actually uses a chalk board as he's spinning his preposterous lies.

Another thing is that conservatism, as a concept, is very simple and a lot of people are drawn to that because they are unable to deal with complexity. And they are unable to deal with complexity because most of them have been poorly educated.

OK, I originally wrote this as a reply to your comment on "What motivates us", but I go off on a bit of a tangent that probably wouldn't interest the average viewer of the comments section there so I thought I should move it here to your profile.

It is entirely possible that my rambling below won't interest *you* very much either; in that case please accept my thanks for your aforementioned post which piqued my interest, and feel free to ignore me...

Quite a lot of your comment rang true for me. I've been living in Thailand for 3 years, working as a teacher in an ESL program. In Thailand, there is a pretty high demand for native English speakers to work as teachers, but there isn't a great supply, particularly of high-quality people that are actually interested in teaching as a career.

An extremely low percentage of native-speaking English teachers actually have degrees in teaching or English (I myself have a Computer Science degree). The majority are tourists that come here to visit and like the country, so they decide to look for options that would allow them to stay and end up teaching.

A lot of people tend to think that is a recipe for disaster, in terms of quality of teaching, straight out of the box. I basically disagree; I have seen a lot of converted tourist teachers that get personally interested in the work and motivated to do a good job. However, I think that in general the educational system and institutions here do a poor job of recognizing the realities of the talent pool that they have access to and how to manage their teachers to KEEP the people that show that they have teaching skills and motivation.

Autonomy is usually easy to come by. In most educational programs here teachers (many of whom have never actually taught before) are thrown into classrooms without any syllabus, lesson plans, course outcome goals, or even any verbal instructions or ideas. So at least in terms of the course content, I think there is generally too much autonomy.

Work conditions, on the other hand, are extremely variable. As someone from the midwestern US, Thailand is frequently HOT. Sometimes classrooms have air conditioning, but many do not. Some classrooms are good at having ready access to very basic supplies (chalk / board markers / copy machine for worksheets) or other stuff (flashcards / books), and some seem to think that a room containing broken chairs and desks, with no chalkboard or other writing surface should be fine. Administration officials seem genuinely surprised and puzzled when a lack of basic supplies creates motivation issues.

Another major contributor to classroom conditions is the presence, absence, and/or quality of teaching assistance. Schools say that there will be a Thai speaking co-teacher or teaching assistant in the classroom at all times to help maintain order and translate words or concepts as needed. In practice that is often not the case, which can be disastrous for people that are just thrown in without any experience or techniques to maintain discipline. If you lose control of discipline in a hot classroom full of 40+ gradeschool kids that don't speak English, and don't have anyone there to back you up or bail you out, motivation is going to plummet. Rapidly.

Anyway, sorry for the really LONG ranting response, but I'm interested in how that would compare to your findings in your thesis. Particularly if there is some country or system that tends to "get it right" more often than others.

And just as a final note, I too thought of Google when watching the clip. When the narrator said he was going to provide an example of a company that gave employees time to work on self-directed projects, I was almost sure he was going to say Google.

Thanks for the interesting comment!
>> ^SDGundamX:

For my Master's final project, I presented on teacher motivation for teachers of English as a Second or Other Language. In my research, one of the things I looked at was salary. Studies that had been done on teacher motivation and salary found the same thing this study found--that you need a minimum salary in order to get people to stay at the job, but better than average salary didn't correlate to better motivation. There were a host of other factors that did correlate, however, including the big one mentioned here--autonomy.
But autonomy wasn't the only factor. As poolcleaner pointed out work conditions are also a significant factor in motivation. If you're forced to teach your classes in the janitor's closet with no air circulation and only a dim lightbulb for illumination no amount of autonomy or salary is going to make you a motivated teacher. Likewise, if your boss doesn't listen to anything you say or you have no input in the curriculum at all, you see a big drop-off in motivation as well.
Still, autonomy is a pretty key component to motivating people. I think autonomy in the workplace works if it is coupled with accountability. If you look at companies like Google, which give their employees a couple hours a day to work on whatever they want, you quickly see that the model works because Google also monitors what the people are working on and gets to keep (and ultimately sell) whatever the final product is. I think it is safe to say that this model is working well for them.
Also, having been to the Google Mountain View campus lots of times, I can tell you that they've definitely got the work environment thing covered: free lunches at dozens of restaurant-style cafeterias; on-site massages and doctor; laundry services; a gym; free shuttle from the major mass transit stops in the area.... It's unbelievable. You can read more about the benefits here.

>> ^braindonut:
I think I'd have been far more convinced if she had done the whole thing with a chalk board.


You mean, like, finger nails on the chalk board?

I think I'd have been far more convinced if she had done the whole thing with a chalk board.

>> ^archwaykitten:
Stereo songs can easily be converted into mono songs, either through software or by using special headphones made for hearing impaired people. The only reason to buy the mono box would be because you're the type of audio geek who likes to hear slightly different recordings of the same songs. And that's cool.

Sure you can convert anything, the problem is you're missing the intermixing that was done at the studio to bring out the tones and pitch. The best studio mixers of the day aren't around. It's much like the difference from listening to something played on transistor based or tube based electronics. Tubes will give you a much warmer sound.


The guy is an idiot and annoying. No point denying that. But I've got this stuff on vinyl, and cassette. Compared to the CD release, or even MP3 formats they're not close. Tones and pitches are off, hi's are too hi' lows are shallow or have no depth. They'll pan too early. Mids taste flat.

I'm not anywhere close to an audio geek, tones that sound off drive me up the wall. That's my problem, much like nails across a chalk board.

Mate, i think you've completely misread my post.

I'm saying that political correctness (ie. the need to enforce "black history month", the need to force people to say "chalk board" instead of "black board") is, i would say in most cases, counter-active to racial equality. And that's what morgan freeman is saying.

Racial equality is when no one even thinks about the need for black history month. To draw one's own connotations of racism from any use of the word "black" and ban it as a result is counter productive.

What i suggest IS treating others with respect. I hope i'm clearer now, i'm sure we're talking about the same thing.

I'm sure we agree on this matter and this is a misunderstanding, otherwise i don't understand your viewpoint at all!

In reply to this comment by dystopianfuturetoday:
>> ^dannym3141:
I've always said this for years, as long as we have political correctness - ie. the need to enforce necessary AND UNNECESSARY changes to how we communicate - racism will never be gone. You draw attention to racism and i would say encourage racism by kicking up a fuss when someone demands that we use "chalkboard" for "blackboard".
This world has enough problems with racism without searching for it around every corner. Something that a lot of activists fail to realise.


I knew these words were going to be forced into some kind of conservative political ideological mold.

Morgan Freeman isn't suggesting we ignore racism. After all, MLK, Malcolm X and Rosa Parks' 'fuss kicking' brought equal rights under the law to everyone. Freeeman is merely saying that black history should be included as a year-round part of American history, and not relegated to the shortest month of the year.

Also, I don't get people who have such a huge problem with treating others with respect. Is the social pressure to say Asian instead of oriental really that oppressive to you?

>> ^MarineGunrock:
I have a friend, who in high school took a (unused) tampon from his classmate, dipped it in a bottle of red Gatorade, swung it around like a lasso and threw it at the chalk board, where it stuck like a magnet. Needless to say, the teacher was none too impressed. He was sent to the principal's office.
Well worth it, I say.

You don't have friends.

I have a friend, who in high school took a (unused) tampon from his classmate, dipped it in a bottle of red Gatorade, swung it around like a lasso and threw it at the chalk board, where it stuck like a magnet. Needless to say, the teacher was none too impressed. He was sent to the principal's office.

Well worth it, I say.