316 karma · joined September 1, 2009
Since I assume "Humble Bundle Inc" is processing the transactions, I added it to the "Humble Tip" portion of my order.
1) The comment I replied to above is pretty accurate, especially for younger children. The parents and environment the child is in are the largest influence on their academic success. If the culture of the area is not about education and success in learning, you've got a long uphill battle.
Honestly, you could pump all the money in the world into the worst high school in the country and it won't make a lick of difference if the students don't want to learn. Upping the school's finances won't change the outcomes on the level people are looking for. To get those kinds of results you need to change the culture and community around education. However, if a school/community is simply lacking resources, then it could make a huge difference.
2) Sending your child to Pre-K DOES better prepare them for Kindergarten and school in general. How much a difference one could truly make over another is not something I've ever actually asked my wife. Dinner conversation for tonight :-). I would also love to see the paper araneae had read and run that by her as well.
Education wise Pre-K will help your child with basics - colors, shapes, letters and numbers. However, the biggest thing Pre-K will do is help your child learn to socialize and interact with people their own age in a classroom setting. This doesn't sound like much, but it is actually a big deal.
3) Something not often thought about is WHEN to send your child to Kindergarten. Many schools have policies like "If your child will be 5 years old by December 31st", which may give you a choice. It is NOT always best to send your child to Kindergarten as soon as they are eligible to attend. If your child is ready, by all means send them. But if they're truly not ready, sending them is really not going to help them.
Some fit/finish things:
1) The Main Menu lets you scroll, but doesn't do the "iOS bounce" when you get to the top or bottom. If you're not sure of the effect I am talking about, you already use it on the "Discuss" screen.
2) When you tap "Finish" and get the "Are you really finished" dialog, the "No, not yet!" button is black on a black background. Perhaps you can go with a red button with white text, or something else that conveys "Cancel" and stands out against the background.
3) When you are on the "Manage" screen, the "on/off" buttons would be better as "Yes/No" buttons. "Urgent Surgey ON" isn't as nice as "Urgent Surgery YES".
4) The app is totally silent, which isn't bad but it feels kind of "eerie" to me. Maybe some background music of some kind, and key click sounds as you toggle things and change screens? Perhaps a little jingle at the end that changes based on how well you did? Like a "patient flat line" sound if you do badly, or a "da dah trumpet" if you ace it?
It's the most benign thing you could do, breaks the ice a little, and it actually demonstrates that you've paid close attention to what they're doing.
All that said, I personally wouldn't do anything.
A few other things I have noticed:
- The app doesn't tell me how many pictures there are and/or which picture I am on. That would help in knowing how far into the pictures you are, and give me a way to easily find a picture again.
- The app always starts at that first picture. It would be nice if it restarted where I left it. If I wanted to show a particular picture to someone, I've got to start the app and then swipe my way through.
- If you start swiping very quickly to try to motor through the pictures, it looks like the phone can't keep up and you end up with a black background for a bit.
- The "Random" has some kind of a bug that I've only been able to produce once where, when pressing it rapidly, I got the spinner to come up and never go away.
- "Random" generally results in the spinner getting shown, and then the screen simply displaying the new image. However, if the image is an image to the immediate left or right of the current image it does a swipe style animation to display it. It should probably be consistent and just pop the image on screen.
- A way to get to the beginning or the end might also be useful. Perhaps a double tap on the screen can alternate bouncing you between the first and last picture. You could use the double tap to bounce between the first and last picture for now, and in the future change use it to display a tiled "Camera Roll" style view.
A couple bits on the interface.
When the app starts I begin at the "Yves Saint Laurent" underwear with the fish on it. If you swipe from right to left, it advances to the next picture. If you swipe from left to right, it "bounces" indicating no previous picture.
Pressing the right button at the bottom of the screen produces the same image as swiping right to left. But pressing the left button loads the last image in the gallery, which can't be done by swiping.
It would be cool if swiping and button pushing worked the same. Putting the images in a "loop" would make it easier to get to an image that appears at either end.
Also, it seems as if the only way to view the images in the app is to swipe/push through them. It would be nice to have a screen that tiles the images like Apple's Camera Roll. Then I could just zoom in on the ones I found interesting.
Just my $.02
As other posters have pointed out, innovation really did not stop in 1992. Pinball 2000 was actually a success, but Williams decided to pull the plug despite that. The Pinball 2000 platform was quite revolutionary - from how the player played the game, to how the game was designed, maintained, and even upgraded.
I don't think free play really had anything but an ancillary role in the decline of the hobby. It was likely the rise of video games, and specifically home consoles, that really hurt pinball. People played video games at home, and then played newer/better games in the arcade. Due to the cost a pinball machine in the home is a rarity to this day, and so the exposure it received was never the same. Kids learned Mario and Nintendo, they didn't learn the silver ball and flippers.
Along the lines of the article, the most "interesting" idea I heard in pinball circles was that clear coating playfields was a harbinger of doom. Williams started doing this and called it "Diamond Plate". It was designed to reduce the need for mylar to protect the playfield.
The premise is that the idea worked TOO well. Playfields on the machines could look like new forever. A machine's lifetime was extended, the impetus to replace the machine was lowered, and sales suffered.
It was 12 weeks with the neck brace on, and 14 weeks before I could walk unassisted with a cane. Full healing and recovery took even longer then that.
The first thing you need to realize is that you don't have to hack your body - based on your tech details the doctors have already done that for you. Welcome to the bionic club! The practice of medicine in general is akin to hacking - it either helps the body do something better, or coaxes it into doing something it wouldn't otherwise do.
Your diet should be as normal and healthy as it can be. You don't need to do anything special. If something was out of whack that you needed, it would probably be detected by now. I was low on potassium and sodium after my emergency surgery and they wouldn't let me leave until it was corrected. FYI - IV potassium burns :).
Your physical therapist can assist you with exercise. In general they'll want you to do a variety of things in the office and give you some exercises for daily homework. Do them! Your therapist should be able to put together some appropriate exercises if you want to go beyond the basics.
The most important thing for you right now is to be extremely comfortable with your doctors and physical therapist. You need to be able to tell them everything and anything without fear or embarrassment. Sometimes the best test a doctor can do is to ask what you are feeling, and pushing through the pain in PT doesn't make you a hero. Communicate, communicate, communicate.
Be careful with painkillers. They are important, but they can be addictive. It might not be a bad idea to have someone keep an eye on the bottle and make sure you stay within the prescribed limits.
I'm not sure what devices you could use to watch yourself heal, but you can probably get your X-Rays and other test images on CD when they are taken. I've even got a bunch of physical X-Ray, CT and MRI films.
To help heal my leg, which broke in a spot at great risk for nonunion, they put me on an ultrasound bone healer. Nifty little gadget - I still have it!
http://www.engadget.com/2006/07/25/portable-bone-healing-sys...