Tuesday, June 14, 2011

can't recall where you left your brain?

I can't vouch for the results reported about yet another brain research experiment. I'm sure this one has some faults too, but it does seem to have made some good observations about our success in trying to recall words. The report was here at Science Daily.

Basically, I think it says that you have better recall ability when the theta waves in the brain are high.

To me, this relates to SRS, because I have questioned the effectiveness of Space Repetition. Let's say you're using an SRS to try not to forget the Kanji. If you do your SRS review while the theta waves in your brain are low, your results will not be as good as if you had used the system during high theta wave activity. This will affect the SRS's ability to determine the next optimal time to show you the ones you are failing. So, say you have a bad day and get a lot of them wrong. Now there will be a day in the future where your need-to-review words will be higher.

Thursday, June 09, 2011

the US president speaks Chinese

Did you know? The president of the United States speaks Chinese? And so do his secret service agents. I don't know if it is a secret or not, but you can watch it on YouTube. I've embedded the video in this post below so you can watch it if you're interested in seeing the president speak Chinese. The scene is set in the Oval Office and there is only one bodyguard and the president. It's less than a minute long. If I add more people, they'll all be speaking Chinese! I had fun creating this video and doing the voices. When you record your voice, you can tweak the pitch so you can easily sound different for different characters.