Tarmo’s blog on education, technology, psychology, and life
Posted in English, Technology on Oct 18th, 2007
I originally discussed the waterfall method in a previous blog post. Pranav just made a comment that I feel needs some further discussion:
I disagree with the following statement: “This is how science (unfortunately) often works – researchers just cite something, because everyone else does so as well, and don’t really read the publications that they [...]
Posted in English, Technology on Jun 13th, 2007
Just listened to the Social Innovations Network on the future of food. Basically what Michael Pollan and John Mackey are predicting is a change from the industrial era to an ecological era. The conciousness of the consumers and the field changing from maximum profits to other values, such as soil health, animal welfare, fair trade, [...]
Posted in English, Technology on Jun 1st, 2007
I installed XiphQT to enable Ogg Vorbis, FLAC and other better than mp3 music formats. I also installed subversion using MacPorts so I can access my work files and other documents on my server. Subversion in combination with the sshfs allows for pretty good file sharing already, but I’ll need to look at nfs sharing [...]
Posted in English, Technology on May 27th, 2007
During the weekend I managed to start using iPhoto and iTunes. Very impressive pieces of software, I must say. No wonder so many people use iTunes. I did import most of my music and photo collections into the applications. There are some aspects where I’d like more control over how they operate, but I guess [...]
Posted in English, Technology on May 25th, 2007
Restoring the contents of my previous laptop’s hard drive was a bit more complicated than I thought. I got a firewire/usb box I could stick the hard drive into, and Mac OS X easily showed the FAT partitions of the drive when I plugged it in using firewire. However, there was no way to make [...]
Posted in English, Technology on May 24th, 2007
I’ve been a happy penguin for years now, but my personal laptop (Asus M3000N) died last thursday. Took it for a checkup, and the motherboard is busted. It’s nearly 3 years old, so no point in getting it fixed. Happily, I was promised a new laptop by my employer, MediaLab of UIAH. MediaLab is full [...]
Posted in English, Psychology, Technology on May 11th, 2007
People following my recent del.icio.us links may have noticed my tendency towards trying to keep this planet of ours in a good condition. In addition to climate change and peak oil, there’s of course the whole of human suffering that is mainly caused by the uneven distribution of wealth. In the last 100 years the [...]
David has published an intriguing draft of a possible book chapter, written in the form of a historical review at a future date, looking at the 2005 – 2010 OpenCourseWars. As one commenter already pointed out, this form of fictive, entertaining writing probably helps to communicate the difficult issues of the Creative Commons NC (Non-Commercial) [...]
Posted in English, Technology on Feb 11th, 2007
You just gotta laugh… I noticed a story about the Westinghouse time capsule in New York from BoingBoing. So they placed a special container in 1939 50 feet into the ground in New York, and it’s supposed to be opened in 5939. The book that details the process is online and is an interesting read.
They [...]
Posted in English, Psychology on Jan 24th, 2007
I attended a nice Siltamat lecture at the Psychology department of the University of Helsinki. Here’s a summary.
Sensory development
Sense of touch starts working at 8 weeks, muscular response to touch at 12 weeks. Pain is felt.
Sense of smell and taste is very accurate. Babies can identify their own mother’s milk even after a 3 month [...]
