I just watched the episode 3.1 Nosedive of Black Mirror [Wikipedia]. I was impressed by the philosophical deepness of the TV show so far, but this episode impressed me in particular due to its relevance in our society. Nosedive shows a society which is obsessed with rating. A rating can be incredibly useful, whenever we check Google Maps for a nice place to go out, a movie on Netflix, a hotel, an online service, or product on Amazon, we tend to base our choice on the rating of other people. Every major service nowadays has a way for customers to leave their feedback. Feedback often ...

Some thoughts on this quote mentioned by Jonathan Rosenberg. Don't hire specialists, especially in high tech. Change is the only thing permanent. “I have no special talent just passionate curiosity.” ~ Einstein. I find this statement so funny because it is like a bitch-slap to modern education. Of course the way the world works right now depends on specialists! If you want to go work for the industry, most likely you will have to specialize (at least for now). But if you want to become an entrepreneur, the contrary might be true. In fact, a study found that 40% of ...

Recently I moved my blog away from Medium to be able to customize it. Luckily, Medium allows its users to be the owners of their content, which is why it is possible to export the content in a collection of HTML files and one XML file. The only thing which stays on the medium servers are the images, though, which is not such a big problem normally as they display just fine within the post's themselves. Where the problem starts is when you use a plugin to extract the images, for a gallery or preview for example. On my blog, I ...

These are some of the basics about reading I got from Tai Lopez's material. The Basics

• Have one or several reading rituals every day.
• Be in a comfortable position.
• Make sure to turn off distractions.
• Use a highlighter.

Before starting to read

• Set a goal before starting to read. “Why am I reading this book?”
• Start by the table of contents.
• Read what people say about the author to unlock you authority bias.

Remember

• Do not forget to re-read the best books. Only by repetition will you make the knowledge instinctual.
• Read books about a variety of important topics ...
  
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Jeffrey Karpicke is a cognitive psychologist from Purdue University. His area of research looks at strategies for long-term learning and comprehension. He published several interesting studies [,] in which he questioned college students on how they would study for an exam. After they had read their notes or textbook one time, they had three options to choose how they were likely to prepare.

1. Go back and study all or parts of the material
2. Try to recall the material without restudying after
3. Do something else

Only 18 percent of students would choose to recall information after reading it. 57 percent said ...

Ever since I learned complex concepts, I noticed a trend. Whenever my grasp of the basics was solid, or I could relate the new information to already known concepts, my learning and retention were much better. It always imagined that the brain is a type of data grid where new concepts have to be linked to already present ones in order to be remembered. Perhaps that is not a perfect analogy but it does a good job to get an intuitive understanding of how we learn. This study shows that concepts should be introduced to students in a way that they ...

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I’m one of those individuals who often are uncomfortable and bored in traditional educational settings. I always learned better and had more fun doing it, when reading a book. Except when I got a very enthusiastic teacher, perhaps that’s one reason why I like MOOC’s so much, they tend to be made by teachers who are highly passionate about education. Today I happened to watch some talks about learning and the brain.In this part of the video, Dr. Lara Boyd mentions that due to the difference in our brain structure, our optimal learning settings differ from each other, there is no ...

I’m always getting a kick out of learning something entirely new. Perhaps that’s why I like to read about things outside of my expertise. Conceivably that preference of mine has something to do with the fact that we learn new skills in a logarithmic time curve as I learned in this TEDx talk. The logarithmic curve means that initially, we get better very fast when we learn a new skill, and then our improvement slows down gradually like observed in the graph below. Another side effect of getting better at a task it that we take less and less time in ...

Optimize your learning — advanced learning tips by Jim Kwik“Knowledge is only potential power; it becomes power when we act on it.”I made a short summary of Jim Kwik’s best tips about boosting brainpower and optimize learning.The most important points can be remembered easily by the acronym FAST. Fast stands for:F ForgetA ActiveS StateT TeachNow let’s go into the details about every state.Be present!

• (Forget everything else and just focus on learning) For more details check out: 7 (plus or minus two) short term memory http://www.simplypsychology.org/short-term-memory.html

Be an active learner

• Ask questions! (how am I going to use this, apply this, teach this to others) Put comments etc.

Don’t outsource your brain ...