Game On!

Here is a nice article in Nature (Game on, 20 July 2017) summarizing some of the available games that teach scientific concepts.

• XTRONAUT let's you explore space.
• Go Extinct! is a simple card game about, well, extinctions.
• Keep Cool let's you 'gamble' with climate change. There is also a multi-player online version Keep Cool mobil (sadly only in German at this time).

MindMode

MindMode looks like a great idea/mind/concept-mapping tool. Unfortunately, it only runs on Mac and iOS (and costs $$$).

Campus Technology 2017

Here's their annual survey: 2017 Teaching With Technology Survey. Now, these surveys are a bit biased from the start and so its is important to parse the results keeping that in mind. Still, a few things are interesting:

• Faculty and students agree: ed-tech is good for teaching and learning (Page 29). This result is not surprising given the biased source.
• Students do not have/use tablets (Page 29).
• Faculty feel confident in their ed-tech abilities (Page 34). Again, not a surprise result given the biased source.
• Top-10 Technologies that will be dead and gone within 10 years (Page 36), for example clickers, non-interactive projectors, traditional LMS, and computer labs.
• Top-10 Technologies that will become important over the next 10 years (Page 37), for example VR/AR, 3D everything, next-get LMS (?), and the Internet of Things.

Population.io

Population.io is an interactive data viz by the World Data Lab: just enter your birthday, country of birth, and sex at birth to see how you fit (statistically) into everybody on the planet.

The ArcGIS Book

Esri released a new version (I think) The ArcGIS Book in-time for the annual Esri UC in San Diego. It contains 10 chapters organized around 10 'big ideas' related to spatial science (aka. Geography!).

Mapping Cities with AI

Here are three interesting examples of using Google Street View and crowdsourcing to train AI algorithms to 'map' conditions in cities.

• Seen on Maps Mania: Project Sidewalk is a classic example of crowdsourcing, now used for training machine learning algorithms. Cool and also somewhat scary.
• Place Pulse has been around for a while and aims to quantitatively recognize which areas of a city are perceived as wealthy, modern, safe, lively, active, unique, central, adaptable or family friendly.
• StreetChange takes a similar approach, albeit focused to detecting urban change from Street View photos taken several years part. 

Histograms

Histograms are easy...in-theory. But things can easily get a lot more complex and all that is nicely illustrated and discussed in What's so hard about histograms?