The Blackthorn at the Kilpatrick muir id a little behind others I’ve seen recently from the road.
We did see out first tortoiseshell butterfly and quite a few bees today. A couple of larks singing on the muir too.
Purple Mountain Saxifrage, first time I’ve seen this, flowering just above 2000ft in the shelter of a bolder. Hardy wee flower.
speedwell in the evening sunlight, fells like spring.
evidence-led innovation
Ollie Brae’s tweet, leads to Game Over for Maths A-level — Conrad Wolfram
The combination of ChatGPT with its Wolfram plug-in just scored 96% in a UK Maths A-level paper, the exam taken at the end of school, as a crucial metric for university entrance. (That compares to 43% for ChatGPT alone).
Wrong conclusion: ban it. Right conclusion: change what humans are learning so they step up a level, and don’t compete with what AIs do well.
Wolfram goes on to explain that an overhaul of the math curriculum is long overdue, and quotes himself from 3 years ago:
Today’s ecosystem of education doesn’t easily support such subject change. From assessments tied to today’s subjects, to too short a time horizon, to evidence-led innovation rather than innovation-led evidence, there’s everything to prevent core subject change and seemingly nothing to promote it. Except, eventually, after much disarray, cold, hard failure.
My hi-light. Seeing “evidence-led innovation” as part of the problem was interesting.
Listened: 246 – Building your own social network with the Friends plugin
So you love Facebook and you hate Facebook, you love Twitter and you hate Twitter. You love… You get the idea! If you’re anything like me you have at times questioned how much time you’ve spent trawling through social media. You may even be worried about how much data they’ve been gathering about you, or perhaps thinking about whether or not we’re even able to escape from it all. On the podcast today we’ve got Alex Kirk, and he certainly has been thinking about all of this. So much so in fact that he’s built a social network plugin for WordPress. Listen to the podcast to find out all about it…
Really interesting podcast discussing the Friends WordPress plugin with its author Alex Kirk. A lot of interesting features, including a built in RSS reader and a WordPress to WordPress social network.
I had a couple of thoughts, I wonder if this would work on a WordPress multi-site like Glow Blogs?
I also wondered if importing all these posts you were reading would bloat your own blog? This was answered in the podcast, you can set the number of posts kept or the length of time to keep them.
Alex did mention the IndieWeb, so I am wondering if there is much integration, with webmentions or bookmarking for example.
Obviously to use the social part you need friends using the plugin, but I think I’ll install it somewhere to see how it works as an RSS reader when i have a mo.
Good Call Flickr: the original announcement threw me, I’d no idea how to implement a user agent in my amateur use of the Flickr API or if I’d need to. As a tinker I’ve really enjoyed using the Flickr API over the years. The fact it has never changed has been great for me.
Read: April in Spain by John Banville ★★★★☆ 📚
Slowly building up a few different threads that come together quickly. A lot of fun from the characters as opposed to the plot.
Enjoyed listening to the latest episode of Really Specific Stories: Gaby Santiago. @gaby chatting to @martinfeld.
This is becoming on of my favourite podcasts. I think I prefer listening to people talk about listening to tech podcast than actually listening to tech podcasts.
We are putting together a Google Earth Web sound map for UK National Parks. We are a group of researchers, passionate about listening and about how we, as human beings, relate to the sounds around us in our daily lives.
Another interesting audio project. Reminds me of the UK SoundMap from a few years ago. The map itself seems to be lost:( I blogged about that UK Sound Map and joined in with a few boos.
I loved the way the UK Sound Map project allowed anyone to join in by recording an Audioboo and tagging it.
The National Parks Sound Map is a bit more manual, you upload a sound and fill in a form. I just added one to see how it works.
First blackthorn flowering along the Balmore road.