Perhaps a bit pedantic, but would be more accurate to say that Base64 encodes binary data into a subset of ASCII characters, since ASCII has 128 code points - 95 printable characters and 33 control characters - whereas Base64 uses 64 - 65 if we include the padding - of those.
In general you want to reduce the amount of things you have to retrieve from memory in one go, and attempting to retrieve a 20 person list is just going to give you problems.
The cloze solution is certainly better than the full list (and does follow the minimum information principle because you just have to retrieve a single name) but the problem is that it doesn't give you any handles. If you have 19 names and Flaubert is hidden, how would you know it's Flaubert that's missing? Long-term you're bound to fail those cards.
But I would also question the premise of the card. Do you expect to have to come up with the 20 names each time you want to talk about 19th century French literature? As in, each time the context is "19th century French literature" is the appropriate knowledge to retrieve "* list of 20 authors *"?
Instead a better approach might be to flip it around and ask yourself, "In which century did Flaubert write Madame Bovary?" or something along those lines. You can both reconstruct the list from that and if you're writing about Flaubert the knowledge that he wrote during the 19th century will come more fluidly to you.
Agreed. In particular, how do you order these? And how does it fit within spaced repetition paradigm?.. I've been struggling with reading classics. I wonder if it would help.
This is still in the experimental phase, and I want to wait on a full writeup until it’s had sufficient time to prove itself and get the kinks worked out. I’m happy to ramble on about it here for a bit, though.
This idea was actually born to combat review starvation: I haven’t been very active at adding new cards lately, and there was a risk that my daily review count would hit 0 for long enough that I’d stop checking regularly— I needed a source for lots of interesting but low-priority cards to keep the pump primed.
The original paper on cloze deletion [1] uses them as a readability measure: Readers are given an unfamiliar text with blanks and are asked to guess the omitted words; the percentage correct is then a measure of the text’s quality rather than the reader’s knowledge.
Instead of a knowledge quiz, which is how clozes are usually treated in the SRS world, this is an automated reading comprehension test— Just the thing for capturing the intangible benefits of reading literature. In theory, as you become more familiar with the book’s style and subject matter, you should be able to pass the first review of an unseen passage most of the time.
I settled on 25 lines of text per card with one omitted word about 2/3 through the passage. Successive cards contain some duplicated lines (5) to provide a sense of continuity between the cards, which are presented in a disjoint manner.
I import each book into its own deck set to show 1 new card per day (in the order added)- I want whatever mental connections are necessary to understand the next passage to end up in long-term rather than short-term memory. The reviews give me an opportunity to spot details that seemed unimportant on a first reading but that foreshadow something that happens later.
Beyond that, it’s driven by Anki’s normal scheduling algorithm; these are subdecks of my general-review deck, so Anki will autumatically mix the new cards and reviews with any other reviews I have due.
Most of the books I’ve imported are 300-400 cards, so it’ll take about a year to work through each of them. I wouldn’t be surprised if I end up doubling the number of books I’m reading at once, which would bring the average to around 1/month.
Semi-automated: I have a hacky Python script that will break up the main text and pick the cloze words, but the other metadata on my cards has to be entered manually (Title, Author, Chapter)
I did the first one manually. In addition to being a lot of work, there were major spoiler hazards— If I wasn’t already familiar with the general shape of the plot, the process would have revealed secrets too early.
Sure, but it's pretty rough; the cards are normal Anki cloze cards with a couple of extra fields.
The script will ask you for a text file to process and the pop up a Tkinter window with a single button. Each time you press the button, it copies the next card's body text to the clipboard, ready to be pasted into Anki's Add window.
The text file needs to be already split into reasonable-length lines, like the ones you get from gutenberg.org
The vacation idea needs to be in the core application.
A simple toggle: "pause Anki". Here are my requirements:
- in the paused state, the review UI is entirely disabled. You cannot review anything.
- when you toggle out of the paused state, Anki calculates the number of days since the pause, and delays all cards in all decks by that many days.
- pausing and resuming on the same day has no effect since the days delta is zero; the UI just becomes enabled.
- For the purposes of the delta calculation, a day is the study day (e.g. 7 a.m to 7 a.m), not the midnight-to-midnight calendar day. If you pause at 11:45 p.m. and resume at 1:15 a.m., that's a no-op since that's the same study day.
- since resuming is potentially a time-consuming operation that destructively manipulates the database, unpausing comes with some yes/cancel prompt, except in the no-op case.
My number one recommendation is to not get overly excited about it. One of the first things that happen when you start using Anki and realize the superpower that it is being in charge of your memory is that you want to include EVERYTHING in it.
You start creating cards with obscure bash one-liners, little-used git commands, or Javascript functions you read about in a random article. You add all of it to Anki. After all, you might use them in the future right? And it doesn't cost you anything to create a card with them so why not.
What happens is that because you don't have a clear picture of why those cards are valuable to you - you just added them because they might be useful, one of these days - you will have trouble retaining their knowledge, meaning that you will keep failing to successfully review those cards.
And because of the way spaced repetition algorithms work, those cards will be constantly appearing in your reviews, and you will keep failing them. And they will keep appearing. And so on and so forth until you lose all motivation to use Anki because it's becoming a frustrating experience to do your reviews.
The most important thing about using Anki is to keep using it. That's how you get the benefits of it, so be more selective about what you add to Anki instead of profligately adding cards that you gain nothing from.
This was exactly my experience when I tried to use it for software engineering. This is after having used it incredibly successfully to learn Japanese a decade prior and being very experienced with it.
I’m having some success remembering C++ with Anki because the language itself has such massive complexity and syntax. I am inputting Scott Meyers books into it right now. Its still really hard to write good prompts with enough context- akin to writing an interview type quiz. So far I think the main benefit is in understanding complicated template code I wouldn’t have a reason to write myself. I don’t expect to be able to use these features just recognize them though.
"In that period of unprecedented (and largely unregulated) growth, much of the US population became quickly enslaved by a few members of an elite group, later called the robber barons (Rockefeller, Frick, JP Morgan, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Mellon et al.)"
You ought to rethink what you define as "enslavement". As far as I am aware, neither Rockefeller, nor JP Morgan, nor Carnegie "enslaved" the US population when they helped transform the by then agrarian nation into the industrial and economic powerhouse it later became. They didn't use force, as far as I am aware, in their dealings and the wealth of their achievements certainly wasn't created at the expense of those who didn't.
During the Gilded Age there were hundreds of strikes a large minority of which ended with the murder of the organizers and arrest of the leadership, an incomplete list thanks to wikipedia:
Did the robber barons kidnap people from Africa, ship them across the sea in chains and force them to work by whipping them if they didn't? No.
Still, have you ever heard the song "Sixteen Tons?"[1] You might recognize the lines "another day older and deeper in debt" and "I owe my soul to the company store." It's about the life of a coal miner in Kentucky. Those lines refer to a system where the company paid its workers in vouchers that they could use to buy food and clothing from the company store. Prices at the company store were higher than the workers could afford on the wages they received, but since they didn't get cash they didn't have the option to buy elsewhere. So they'd buy on credit and gradually build up a debt to the company that they had no way to pay off.
Is that slavery? Perhaps not technically, since the workers weren't owned by the company and couldn't be sold. But they didn't have many choices, either. They were basically stuck doing a fixed amount of work each day in exchange for food and lodging. Sounds an awful lot like slavery in practice.
Having to work to each day for food and lodging is like slavery in practice? That a preposterous notion.
Whether you live in a desert island, a small village with no water or electricty, or New York, you will still have to face the practical demands of your survival, of which food and lodging are the primary - in the sense that they are the most immediate,- but not your only, concerns. Whether by hunting and killing your own food, or buy buying it from the supermarket, the facts are the same: you have to work for your survival, it is not guaranteed by nature. And for myself,if I may, I take having to work so I can buy my favorite food and drink at the supermarket every day over having to savagely hunt and kill the food I eat.
There is a moral right to own that which you have produced, and it is definetely not an legal artifact but an expression of the concept of individual rights.
Furthermore, it isn't copyright that is preventing people from accessing the content, but the fact that these corporations have not evolved their business model to the way consumers consume content these days.
There may be several reasons as to why that has not happened (they may still be making enough money with their old business model and are risk-averse to try new things) but claiming that the creators of something do not have the moral right to own their creations is an absurdity.
"There is a moral right to own that which you have produced."
Sure. You produce a tool, it's your very own tool. You produce a painting, it's your very own painting. You produce a pie, it's your very own pie.
Ralph sees your Very Own Tool and decides that'd be handy. Ralph knows taking your Very Own Tool would deprive you of your property and decides he won't do that. Not to mention it's a physical item and the law has something to saw about theft of physical items. So Ralph, being the upstanding citizen he is, makes another tool just like yours - his Very Own Tool. Ralph's also a bit of an extrovert and tells everyone about this great new tool and other people want one. So Ralph sets about making more of the tool you designed to sell to other people.
Do you have the right to be upset at Ralph for making money off your idea without compensation to you?
Controlling copying of your creations is what copyright is about. It says that with respect to certain works, you as the creator own the right to make copies ... or to license other people (or companies) to make copies.
P.S. Now don't get me wrong - I understand that a tool design is probably best protected by patents. Maybe this "tool" is a sculpture that's also useful to accomplish a task. My argument is about "intellectual property" in general.
There isn't a moral consensus of what 'owning' entails. You seem to suggest that owning an item means that nobody in the world can make a copy of it without your permission. I don't agree with that.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, and given the amount of high-profile backclash against Windows 8's policies I might, but the 'problem' seems to be that in order to use the Windows 8 tiles you have to sell your program through Windows Store, right?
In what way is it any different than selling an app through the Apple Store? If you want to add the extra functionality, you have to sell it through the Windows store, but no one is forcing you to use it in order for you costumers to use your program (lets face it, your games probably dont need the tiles) and if you do so choose to use their store, it isn't forcing you to remain exclusive to that store, you can sell it anywhere you want.
I don't know if this is the core issue in the article, but this is my take:
I think the real issue is Microsoft's horribly Apple-esque policy on Windows 8 RT: you can only install software from the app store.
The core worry is that this is going to transcend ARM in future releases. Given the unified branding--both products are called "Windows 8"--I think this is a very real worry.
Even if it doesn't transcend onto x86 and desktop Windows 8, it's still every bit as bad Apple's policy and should not be condoned even only on RT.
