Teaching Mom Internet – Part 1

Last fall when my mother visited the US, I gave her an old laptop. Now I get questions such as this one I received last night, after I sent her some videos on YouTube:

“Why are the videos stopping in between and then getting started on their own? First two and the last one didn’t stop, but the other two stopped.”

Here’s my not so perfect answer to her question:

The videos start and stop during playback because of two reasons:
1. Speed of your connection to the internet, this may limit how much information you can receive from YouTube within a given time
2. The ability of your computer to process the information sent by YouTube and convert it to Video

Some sites help avoid this from happening by making you wait when you first click play so that there’s enough time for the site to send the information through to your computer and also giving your computer to the ability to process this information. This is called buffering. In your case, YouTube didnt do this well to ensure that there were no interruptions when you played the video.

Got a better explanation for my mom? Is there a Common Craft type of video I can send her to explain this better?

How to read a book

Lately I have been feeling a bit challenged in…yes…finishing books I start reading. This problem is particularly acute when it comes to works of non-fiction or works of fiction that don’t have a lot of pictures.

While browsing for what ironically (and disappointingly) turned out to be a curated reading list of non-fiction books, I found this gem: A paper by Paul N. Edwards at School of Information in University of Michigan called How to Read a Book.  A little snippet from the 9 page article:

“So unless you’re stuck in prison with nothing else to do, NEVER read a non‐fiction book or article from beginning to end. Instead, when you’re reading for information, you should ALWAYS jump ahead, skip around, and use every available strategy to discover, then to understand, and finally to remember what the writer has to say. This is how you’ll get the most out of a book in the smallest amount of time.”

I am going to read this article and see if I can change my behavior and read more non-fiction books.

I am keeping my fingers crossed.

reBlog: Dan Roam: Healthcare on the back of a (4) napkin(s)

Dan Roam has an excellent presentation on SlideShare about the questions around Healthcare reform in the U.S. The post on his blog that lead to the presentation on slideshare is here.