Ramkumar's Log

What happened to studying?

It is a fundamental part of college education: the idea that young people don’t just learn from lectures, but on their own, holed up in the library with books and, perhaps, a trusty yellow highlighter. But new research, conducted by two California economics professors, shows that over the past five decades, the number of hours that the average college student studies each week has been steadily dropping.

Surprise surprise.

In a 2008 survey of more than 160,000 undergraduates enrolled in the University of California system, students were asked to list what interferes most with their academic success. Some blamed family responsibilities, some blamed jobs. The second most common obstacle to success, according to the students, was that they were depressed, stressed, or upset. And then came the number one reason, agreed upon by 33 percent of students, who said they struggled with one particular problem “frequently” or “all the time”: They simply did not know how to sit down and study.

You can’t help but appreciate the honesty here. And it is remarkably true. Lectures flew over my head, and there were very few courses I really loved. ‘Reading assignments’ are generally vague with no clear goal. But at the heart of this, I suppose it’s important to find a reason as to why we do what we do. When the subject material speaks to you, you will sit down and study. The ‘how’ will follow once we get that figured out.

On waiting

bobulate:

James Sturm, a cartoonist on a four-month sabbatical from the Internet, on waiting:

Whether it’s a sports score, a book I want to get my hands on, or tuning into Fresh Air anytime of day, I can no longer search online and find immediate satisfaction. I wait for the morning paper, a trip to the library, or, when I can’t be at my radio at 3 p.m., just do without. I thought this would drive me crazy, but it hasn’t. Anticipation itself is enjoyable and perhaps even mitigates disappointing results. I don’t seem to mind as much when the Mets don’t win (often) or Dave Davies is subbing for Terry Gross and is interviewing an obscure jazz producer.

In the two months since he’s been unplugged:

I have been experiencing more and more moments of synchronicity — coincidental events that seem to be meaningfully related. … I know this type of magical thinking is easily dismissed, but I keep having moments like this. So how do I explain it? Are meaningful connections easier to recognize when the fog of the Internet is lifted? Does it have to do with the difference between searching and waiting? Searching (which is what you do a lot of online) seems like an act of individual will. When things come to you while you’re waiting it feels more like fate. Instant gratification feels unearned. That random song, perfectly attuned to your mood, seems more profound when heard on a car radio than if you had called up the same tune via YouTube.

In a search-dominant culture, we are invisibly impatient. We have expectations that drive a sort of table of contents for stories we may have in mind; narratives in need of finding. But with an absence — in Sturm’s case, the Internet — we supplement stories for tables of contents already in place. Fill in the gaps. Find connections. And waiting can become the part worth waiting for.

[via]

A poignant message, one that’s worth sharing.

Thoughts on iPhone 4 | Kyle Baxter

mnmal:

While Apple’s competitors are building phones, functional but cold, Apple is building something alive. You can see the work that went into every inch of it, the obsession Apple has with coming as close to perfection as they can. This is what I love about them–they never settle, and never accept something as good enough. Nothing is good enough for them, and they work relentlessly in the pursuit of perfection. There is little more admirable than that.

Great points here. What I’ve wanted to say for awhile now. Google felt compelled to take jabs at Apple time and again at Google I/O. Apple never responded (except when they quoted market share figures, but that was still no direct response à-la-Google) simply because they don’t have to. Going down to a feature comparison is a losing proposition. What they do instead is show two people in a video call using sign language and Steve Jobs says “this is why we do what we do”.

In fact, this ties in well with this TED talk that mnmal posted earlier today on the importance of starting from the why. Apple does this, their competitors don’t.

It really is the attention to detail, in everything. To be fair, there are some really good functional phones out there, but as Kyle puts it, these devices are ‘cold’ and fail to excite us. I cannot remember seeing any company mention the hearing impaired when they tout video call features. And why doesn’t anyone else talk about their screen so much? Or spend so much time explaining the phone casing at length? The design is beautiful. Apple obsesses over their products; they want to do the best they can. This speaks to people. It tells them that a phone can be more than the sum of its features.

This is what Steve Jobs said towards the end of the keynote yesterday.

We’re not just a tech company. Apple is more than that. It’s tech and humanity. It’s the hardware and the software working together. It’s not just a great new camera system, it’s the editing too, it’s not just a front-facing camera, it’s that plus 18 months of work on the software side.

There are many more examples to this and I couldn’t agree more.

Facebook and “radical transparency” (a rant)

If Facebook wanted radical transparency, they could communicate to users every single person and entity who can see their content. They could notify then when the content is accessed by a partner. They could show them who all is included in “friends-of-friends” (or at least a number of people). They hide behind lists because people’s abstractions allow them to share more. When people think “friends-of-friends” they don’t think about all of the types of people that their friends might link to; they think of the people that their friends would bring to a dinner party if they were to host it. When they think of everyone, they think of individual people who might have an interest in them, not 3rd party services who want to monetize or redistribute their data. Users have no sense of how their data is being used and Facebook is not radically transparent about what that data is used for. Quite the opposite. Convolution works. It keeps the press out.

By Danah Boyd. Well-written and far too balanced to be called a rant.

Google vs Apple: Google Doesn't Need To Win - O'Reilly Radar

Making money selling mobile ads requires that Google keep the smartphone market open, plural, competitive. As long as there are multiple smartphones in the market, content developers will be driven towards open standards like HTML5. Developers will build richer and richer HTML content for the phones—and Google will thrive in its core business, placing ads on HTML pages. Google doesn’t need to “win”; they just need to “not lose”, to keep the game open, and to drive open technologies to the next level where they can compete successfully.

Interesting perspective on the Google vs Apple war. I keep saying Google is a unique position in most businesses they compete in whether it’s Apple or Microsoft, and this is why. Their bottom line doesn’t come from selling phones or licensing software. Or as Mike puts it, they don’t need to ‘win’, just ‘not lose’.

(via Ruiwen’s shared items on Google Reader)