Brad Howarth will be interviewing Tony Wheeler from Lonely Planet.

RSVP here if you want to come along.

The technology is great, the only thing I can say is that it is a little slow. Basically I just wrote a couple of PHP pages to interface with Scribd and a bit of fancy caching to a local database to speed it up. I still have the same opinion of PHP though, its crud and encourages poor coding practices.

The bottom line, the Scribd Platform is fantastic and you would be mad to reinvent the wheel. Just use it!

Since my brother and I are into Ecomodding at the moment I found the post particularly interesting. The 20 June Podcast [mp3] from Science Magazine covers the same topic. Richard Larrick talks about the issue but in terms of how different methods of calculation effect how we perceive the efficiencies of our vehicles.

Here in Australia we generally use Litres per 100 Kilometres which give a nice intuitive feel for how efficient a vehicle is, or as one of my students pointed out, is useful because comparisons become easier. Miles per Gallon gives unintuitive results because it is an inverse relationship for the thing we care about, fuel.

Imagine what a difference improving fuel efficiencies would make to the carbon crisis. Both Seth and Richard demonstrate how easily it could be done, simply changing the way we present information. I think that’s the low hanging fruit.

Check them out here and here.

I’m pleased to find out that educators are finding the software useful in the classroom. Although I get immediate feedback from colleagues, somehow international feedback gives me a real buzz. Thanks!

Go forth and create productive groups for your classroom, business, team, or whatever. Then spread the word by writing a testimonial.

Litmus was designed to be easily installed by teachers onto a school machine and serve a handful of students at any one time. At the moment it is comfortably handling hundreds of international students live on the Internet, even with Chinese characters!

Check out this screenshot.

Litmus was developed in Ruby a long time ago, about a year before Rails was released. Since nothing production ready existed we built our own framework. We used a bunch of technologies: Webrick and Erb for the server, Madeline for sessions, a flat-file persistence layer using YAML, and Redcloth and PDF-Writer for fancy views.

An interesting and unintentional side-effect of the structure is that it load balances out of the box. Just start up a few more Ruby processes and point them at the session and data locations. Unfortunately, the system is IO bound because of a very naive file locking mechanism. The ugly underbelly of not prematurely optimizing.

Once a few things are hardened up and some extra functionality is developed we will do a public release. Until then it will continue to be used for scientific literacy research purposes.

Check out this screenshot.

We will be offering a public release soon but if you are an institution interested in being involved in the study please contact Mitch or myself.

Surprisingly, manually deleting the posts from the database with SQL was less frustrating than I anticipated. It was certainly quicker than extending the CR into full CRUD.

Naturally, any feedback would be appreciated.

* Trial Over: Hope everyone who used the system enjoyed it, thanks for all the great feedback!

1. Prepare a CSV file of student data and import it into Monkey
2. Record the web of relationships among the students
3. Update the group size to the number and size of the classes you need
4. To stream the classes select the “Group Ability” checkbox
5. Click generate and watch the Monkey place each student into their best class

You will now be left with a set optimum classes, students with bad relationships in separate classes and students with good relationships in the same class. If you chose to stream then each class will also contain students clustered around an average mark, but the software would have still done its best to keep those relationships in order.

Good, one less barrier to students achieving their educational outcomes and one less headache for school executives and teachers. There is nothing worse than spending every lesson on behaviour management, lets get those class lists right this time.