The colloquialism “a picture is worth a thousand words” has reverberated through the decades, yet there is very little basic cognitive research assessing the merit of drawing as a mnemonic strategy. In our recent research, we explored whether drawing to-be-learned information enhanced memory and found it to be a reliable, replicable means of boosting performance. Specifically, we have shown this technique can be applied to enhance learning of individual words and pictures as well as textbook definitions. In delineating the mechanism of action, we have shown that gains are greater from drawing than other known mnemonic techniques, such as semantic elaboration, visualization, writing, and even tracing to-be-remembered information. We propose that drawing improves memory by promoting the integration of elaborative, pictorial, and motor codes, facilitating creation of a context-rich representation. Importantly, the simplicity of this strategy means it can be used by people with cognitive impairments to enhance memory, with preliminary findings suggesting measurable gains in performance in both normally aging individuals and patients with dementia.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721418755385
Bookmarks
Interesting Links/bookmarks for personal use or sharing with others
🔖 Forensic Investigation of a Shawl Linked to the “Jack the Ripper” Murders | Journal of Forensic Sciences
A set of historic murders, known as the “Jack the Ripper murders,” started in London in August 1888. The killer's identity has remained a mystery to date. Here, we describe the investigation of, to our knowledge, the only remaining physical evidence linked to these murders, recovered from one of the victims at the scene of the crime. We applied novel, minimally destructive techniques for sample recovery from forensically relevant stains on the evidence and separated single cells linked to the suspect, followed by phenotypic analysis. The mtDNA profiles of both the victim and the suspect matched the corresponding reference samples, fortifying the link of the evidence to the crime scene. Genomic DNA from single cells recovered from the evidence was amplified, and the phenotypic information acquired matched the only witness statement regarded as reliable. To our knowledge, this is the most advanced study to date regarding this case. https://doi.org/10.1111/1556-4029.14038
🔖 [1903.07456] Self-Organization and Artificial Life | arXiv
Self-organization can be broadly defined as the ability of a system to display ordered spatio-temporal patterns solely as the result of the interactions among the system components. Processes of this kind characterize both living and artificial systems, making self-organization a concept that is at the basis of several disciplines, from physics to biology to engineering. Placed at the frontiers between disciplines, Artificial Life (ALife) has heavily borrowed concepts and tools from the study of self-organization, providing mechanistic interpretations of life-like phenomena as well as useful constructivist approaches to artificial system design. Despite its broad usage within ALife, the concept of self-organization has been often excessively stretched or misinterpreted, calling for a clarification that could help with tracing the borders between what can and cannot be considered self-organization. In this review, we discuss the fundamental aspects of self-organization and list the main usages within three primary ALife domains, namely "soft" (mathematical/computational modeling), "hard" (physical robots), and "wet" (chemical/biological systems) ALife. Finally, we discuss the usefulness of self-organization within ALife studies, point to perspectives for future research, and list open questions.
🔖 Where WordPress Meets Higher Education | WPCampus
Hello WPCampus friends! We’re excited to announce that our Call for Proposals for this year’s conference will be opening soon! We’re looking forward to another year of wonderful ideas, demonstrations, brainstorming, and benchmarking. Session Topics As in past years, we’re looking for a variety of topics on anything that might bring value to our community. …
Sapien is a Web 3.0 social news platform that gives users control of their data, rewards content creators, and fights fake news.
I am a bit concerned that this network heavily features “democracy” on its front page the way it does and includes gab.ai in the page’s meta data. I’m not sure what to expect to find here.
Bookmarking as the result of a mention in an episode of Human Current.
🔖 Identifying White Mediocrity and Know-Your-Place Aggression: A Form of Self-Care | African American Review | Project MUSE
This article offers a primer on identifying what the author calls “know-your-place aggression” as well as the violence of white mediocrity being treated as merit. The author argues that gaining clarity about these hostile tendencies is a form of self-care. Examples include experiences with racism, (hetero)sexism, trans antagonism, ableism, and Islamophobia. Understanding know-your-place aggression and white mediocrity can prevent marginalized communities from wasting energy by worrying about the opinions of people who use objective standards to judge everyone but themselves. The author encourages this form of self-care because she believes it can empower members of marginalized groups to save their energy for what matters most, the quality of their lives and their contributions to research.
10.1353/afa.2018.0045
👓 Schedule | WordCamp Santa Clarita Valley
We’re thrilled to debut the first-annual WordCamp Santa Clarita will be held at the Dr. Dianne G. Van Hook University Center University Center on the campus of College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita, California. Friday, April 5, Beginner’s Day Time Vásquez Rocks Vásquez Rocks were named after...
WebLikes is a simple protocol for adding Likes to pages outside of any silos, on the open web.
🔖 The appeal of newsletters: ownership and intimacy | onemanandhisblog.com
A couple of interesting thoughts from Craig Mod about the underlying reasons behind the shift to newsletters.
🔖 Running a bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL | Piers Cawley
Piers Cawley (bofh.org.uk)Just over a year ago now, I finally opened the bakery I’d been dreaming of for years. It’s been a big change in my life, from spending all my time sat in front of a computer, to spending most of it making actual stuff. And stuff that makes people happy, at that. It’s been a huge change, but I can’t think of a single job change that’s ever made me as happy as this one.
🔖 Schedule | Domains 2019
Domains 2019 is a two-day conference on 2019-06-10 - 2019-06-11 geared toward Indieweb for Education, A Domain of One's Own, and EdTech spaces. Sessions will focus on learning tools, data ownership, IndieWeb, containers and the cloud, privacy and surveillance, accessibility, and art. It will be held at 21c Museum Hotel in Durham, North Carolina, USA
Please visit https://domains.reclaimhosting.com/register/ to register for the conference.
Notice the indie web sessions at this conference geared toward the education crowd.
Filmmaker Dan Reed’s two-part documentary film Leaving Neverland explores the separate but parallel experiences of two young boys, James “Jimmy” Safechuck, at age 10, and Wade Robson, at age 7, who were both befriended by the star. They and their families were invited into his singular and wondrous world, entranced by the singer’s fairy-tale existence as his career reached its peak.
🔖 Virtually Connecting March 18-20 at Digital Pedagogy Lab Toronto!
The Digital Pedagogy Lab – Toronto event is on March 18-20, 2019. We are virtually connecting to you from the Gladstone Hotel in Queen West Village with two (maybe three!) opportunities to connect to this wonderful event from afar. Join us at a distance for a hangout with #DigPed keynotes, track...
🔖 Hemingway Editor
Hemingway App makes your writing bold and clear.
The app highlights lengthy, complex sentences and common errors; if you see a yellow sentence, shorten or split it. If you see a red highlight, your sentence is so dense and complicated that your readers will get lost trying to follow its meandering, splitting logic — try editing this sentence to remove the red.
You can utilize a shorter word in place of a purple one. Mouse over them for hints.
I could see some serious value in this if I could use it as a web app with Micropub support, which would allow it to almost any CMS or platform. It’s a bit reminiscent of Quill, though that doesn’t have the grammar and writing help.
There’s a $20 desktop version that can publish to WordPress and Medium.
Possibly missing for a full editor experience: the ability to add images.
As a sample, I tried putting in some prior writing. Apparently I overuse adverbs. It said I was writing at grade 13 and I should aim for grade 9! (It was something I had already attempted to “dumb down”.)