Mark Shead's articles

Mark Shead

Take a Nap for Memory

Studies suggest that your memories are solidified while you sleep. Your brain does a lot of work during your rest--almost like it is busy filing and making sense of everything you've discovered while you were awake. When you've learned a new concept or information that you want to retain, consider taking a nap or reviewing it right before going to bed. This will give your brain the best chance to assimilate the new information. … [Read more...] about Take a Nap for Memory

Benefits of Expensive Oil

By Mark Shead 4 Comments

Most people are concerned about the high cost of gasoline. The countries that produce oil are, of course, thrilled. In the Middle East, people are paying millions of dollars on car license tags with unique numbers. Evidently, having a Rolls Royce isn't enough to make you stand out over there. Saeed Khouri paid $14 million dollars to be able to put a license tag containing "1" on his car. People living in the US and other countries that are primarily consumers and not producers of oil are less fond of the current pricing trend. However, in an effort to always discover the silver lining, we are going to look at some of the potential benefits of expensive oil. Technological … [Read more...] about Benefits of Expensive Oil

Pre-Charged Batteries

By Mark Shead 6 Comments

Duracell sent me a few of their new pre-charged batteries to try out. The idea is that people don't purchase rechargable batteries because they need to use them right away. In the past you couldn't pre-charge Ni-Cad rechargeable batteries because they would lose their charge while sitting on the shelf. The new pre-charged batteries seem to overcome this problem which also means you can charge up the batteries and not use it for awhile without losing power. I'm still testing them out to write up a better review of their performance. Duracell seems light on stats for the batteries with most of their efforts going into marketing based on humor, however the product seems good and will … [Read more...] about Pre-Charged Batteries

Language and Learning

By Mark Shead 1 Comment

For my freshman English class in college, I wrote a paper looking at the correlation between language and thought. My premise was that certain thought capabilities would be impossible without having a language in order to express those thoughts. There has been some recent research looking at how language can help with learning. The experiment was designed to see if people could learn information more quickly if there was a word associated with it. They were shown a series of "aliens". These were clay sculptures some had roughly shaped heads and others had smoother heads. The subjects of the experiments were told to tell if each alien was friendly or not. The smooth head aliens … [Read more...] about Language and Learning

The Benefits of Failure

By Mark Shead 8 Comments

My wife and I were doing some research into how education is handled in various countries when we ran across some interesting statistics. Basically researchers took middle school age children from a bunch of different countries and tested them in mathematics. The US children did very poorly compared to the rest of the developed world. However, the researchers went a step further and asked the children to rate themselves in mathematics. The US children consistently ranked themselves higher than the children in the countries who were actually more skilled in math. So while the US wasn't the best in actual mathematics, they are the best in teaching students how to feel like they are good … [Read more...] about The Benefits of Failure

Mobile Me Email Down for a week.

By Mark Shead 8 Comments

My .mac (now Mobile Me) email has be non functional since last Friday. I can't believe a company with the resources of Apple can't get an email server fixed in 4 to 6 hours much less a whole week. Walt Mosberg says the other services aren't very reliable either. I had been told that they were storing all incoming emails in a queue, but when I asked them if they could print out my emails and fax them to me (I know that is insane, but they weren't offering me anything useful and being down for a whole week is even more crazy than faxing emails) I found out that their servers are simply rejecting incoming connections so after four days they will be returned as undeliverable. At this point, … [Read more...] about Mobile Me Email Down for a week.