Consider just how effectively this octopus camouflages itself.
Tag: video
Multi-modal IRP’s
If I present information to you orally, you’ll probably only remember about 10% 72 hours after exposure, but if I add a picture, recall soars to 65%.
–Alex Lundry (2009): Chart Wars: The Political Power of Data Visualization
How you present visual information is important. And my students are discovering this as they work up their Independent Research Projects (IRP’s) this week.
In the spring they are fairly free to pick their topic and style of IRP. Some choose research projects, others term papers, and a few do things that strike their fancy, like writing fiction or programming games.
In the end, they submit a written report and give a presentation.
For research projects, I have one student who did a great job of coming up with a hypothesis and testing it. He even compiled a nice table of his data for his results section, but was reluctant to go through the effort of making a graph. After all, he claimed, anyone reading his report (or watching his PowerPoint presentation) could just look at the table and read the data off there themselves.
My response was that people absorb the data much more effectively when it’s presented graphically. Fortunately, Alex Lundry has a nice little presentation that reinforces this point. It also gives a few tips about what to look out for in graphics, because they can be used to mislead.
The key quote (via The Dish) is this:
Vision is our most dominant sense. It takes up 50% of our brain’s resources. And despite the visual nature of text, pictures are actually a superior and more efficient delivery mechanism for information. In neurology, this is called the ‘pictorial superiority effect’ […] If I present information to you orally, you’ll probably only remember about 10% 72 hours after exposure, but if I add a picture, recall soars to 65%. So we are hard-wired to find visualization more compelling than a spreadsheet, a speech of a memo.
–Alex Lundry (2009): Chart Wars: The Political Power of Data Visualization
Here’s Lundry’s five minute presentation.
Caminito del Rey
Impressive video of someone walking across the Caminito del Rey in Spain. The narrow walkway links two sides of an almost vertical slot canyon. It has fallen into disrepair, however, and parts of it are missing. In some places the concrete walkway is entirely gone and all that’s left is a rusty metal beam that traverses the absent span. Quite impressive.
The Challenge of Assessing Good Language
Middle school is where you learn the conventions of language: comma placement; who versus whom; and things like that. But language, and even its conventions, are ever evolving. Stephen Fry makes the case that we should be a little less pedantic.
Courage
Watch the full episode. See more FRONTLINE.
With the different outcomes of the protests in Tunisia and Egypt compared to Libya and Syria (and Bahrain), it’s important to recognize the courage of the protesters out there on the streets. It’s not really courage if there is nothing to risk. These men and women are risking everything.
Just like the lonely man who stood in front of a line of tanks during the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. No one knows what happened to him.
About midday, as a column of tanks slowly moves along Chang’an Boulevard toward Tiananmen Square, an unarmed young man carrying shopping bags suddenly steps out in front of the tanks. Instead of running over him, the first tank tries to go around, but the young man steps in front of it again. They repeat this maneuver several more times before the tank stops and turns off its motor. The young man climbs on top of the tank and speaks to the driver before jumping back down again. Soon, the young man is whisked to the side of the road by an unidentified group of people and disappears into the crowd.
To this day, who he was and what became of him remains a mystery.
— FRONTLINE, 2006: The Tank Man: The Memory of Tiananmen June 4-5, 1989.
What does it take to show such courage? We’ve talked about how your situation in life, like poverty, can affect the ethical choices you make. We’ve also seen how different social and demographic conditions can force countries toward revolutions.
So it’s worth taking a moment to think about the protesters. And about ourselves. What do we value so much that it would overcome our fear to risk our lives?
Panyee F.C.: Soccer on the Lake
This cute, little, true story of how a bunch of kids (they look like adolescents) living on rafts in a lake built their own soccer field (on rafts), and eventually created the Panyee Football Club, is actually an advertisement for the Thai Military Bank (TMB), but it’s quite inspirational nonetheless. The setting and videography are also superb.
Peat Pellets
We just planted seeds using peat pellets. The students are always impressed by just how much they expand when you add water, so one student decided to record it on video. Since they recently acquired a new iPhone app that reverses the video, they posted the video played backwards.
Tsunami
The tsunami spawned by the recent earthquake off Japan did most of the damage we know about so far. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Center for Tsunami Research uses computer models to forecast, and provide warnings about, incoming tsunami waves. They have an amazing simulation showing the propagation of the recent tsunami across the Pacific Ocean (the YouTube version is here).
They’ve also posted an amazing graphic showing the wave heights in the Pacific Ocean.
Of course, these are the results of computer simulations. As scientists, the people at NOAA who put together these plots are always trying to improve. Science involves a continuous series of refinements to better understand the world we live in, so the NOAA scientists compare their models to what really happen so they can learn something and do better in the future. Perhaps the best way to do this for the tsunami is by comparing the predictions of their models to the actual water height measured by tidal gages:
You’ll notice that NOAA did not do a perfect job. They did get the amplitude (height) of the waves mostly right, but their timing was a little off. Since it’s about 6000 km from the earthquake epicenter to Honolulu, being off by a few minutes is no mean feat. Yet I’ll bet they’re still working on making it better, particularly since some of the other comparisons were not quite as good.
Finally, if you were wondering, attempting to surf a tsunami is not a good idea. For one thing, there is no nice face to surf on:
… a tsunami wave approaching land is more like a wall of whitewater. …. Since the wave is 100 miles long and the tail end of the wave is still traveling at 500 mph, the shore end of the wave becomes extremely thick, and is forced to run far inland, over streets and trees and houses. …. And remember, the water isn’t clean, but filled with everything dredged up from the sea floor and the land the wave runs over–garbage, parking meters, pieces of buildings, dead animals.
— Natural Hazards Hawaii, University of Hawaii at Hilo: Why you can’t surf a tsunami
UPDATE: Terrifying video of the tsunami: