Teachers' Page:
We start each week with a Monday Morning Meeting for staff. It's a time for information sharing, celebrating staff and children's achievements, laughter, building and strengthening the kaupapa foundations for our school, and a few tips on teaching, techie skills and even life. This page will be the place teachers can come back to if they want to revisit anything we covered in our Monday Morning Meetings.
It's really a page for teachers, but if you find anything worthwhile here for yourself, great.
Web Pages:
Happy Daze is a website devoted to positive news.
https://www.si.edu/openaccess/
Free Smithsonian Images
If you need to use an image for your art, product, project, or any other reason, check out the Smithsonian's vast collection of Open Access images available under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license.
https://netsafe.org.nz/welcome-to-hectors-world/
Hector’s World is a New Zealand-made animated educational series with a full resource suite for school and home designed to inspire online safety conversations with primary-aged children.
https://recipe-search.typesense
Recipe Search - a searchable database of over two million recipes.
To Ponder:
"Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can't be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest."
— Maya Angelou
Techie Tips:
Generate a voice that sounds exactly like you:
While this feature was mainly developed for people with issues, it can also be used by
anyone who cannot talk but still wants to communicate using their voice.
Also, it is a cool application of AI, kind of like a
deepfake, but for audio.
Dubbed Personal voice, this feature was launched in 17 and lets you create a version of
your voice that sounds exactly like you.
All you have to do is record a bunch of audio while reading some phrases given by your iPhone.
Here’s how you can set up the Personal Voice feature on your iPhone:
Before you get started, you should know that it might take up to 20 minutes to finish the
process and it only works on or later with 17.
1. You will be asked to record around 150 phrases. Make sure you are in a quiet environment and enunciate your words. You can also pause the recording
session at any time and return to the same page to resume it.
2. Once you are done recording, the processing takes place. You will get a notification once the process is complete and your Personal
Voice is ready.
3. You can now start using it by adding it to the collection of voices on the Live Speech
page under Accessibility settings.
4. To use the Live Speech feature with your Personal Voice, make sure Live Speech is
enabled and then triple-tap the side button on your iPhone.
5. You will get a text field where you can type out the phrases that you want to be read
aloud in your own voice, slightly sounding like a robotic voice.
6. You can also add your favourite or most used phrases like ‘Hello’ or ‘Goodnight’ to
the Live Speech settings to quickly use them instead of having to type them out
every time.
That’s it - your iPhone can now talk exactly like you. This is especially useful for people
who are not comfortable talking in English but still want to communicate perfectly with
others in their own voice.
Article:
The Fascinating Reason There Are 60 Seconds In a Minute:
Have you ever wondered why there are 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in an hour?
People often take this for granted because it has been this way for thousands of years.
The ordering of our clocks actually took place nearly 4,000 years ago.
Our clocks work on intervals of sixty because that is how the Sumerians and Babylonians did it. The ancient Babylonians began codifying their astronomical beliefs and findings in the 14th century BCE, or 3400 years ago. We get many of our most basic and common numbers from these calculations and assumptions.
The Sumerians devised a base sixty numbering system called a sexagesimal
system. The sexagesimal system bases everything on the number sixty. We use a base ten number system today, which bases everything on intervals of ten. However, there are numerous benefits of a sexagesimal system that are lost to us today.
The number sixty is the smallest number divisible by the first six counting numbers (1, 2,
3, 4, 5, and 6). Sixty is also divisible by 10, 12, 15, 20, and 30. This makes it extremely convenient for division. The number sixty has eleven easy divisors, making splitting it into simple groups easy.
We divide our clocks similarly, highlighting the versatility of a base sixty numbering system. Because sixty is so easy to use, we can divide our hours into quarters (15 minutes), halves (30 minutes), and even intervals of six (10 minutes.) These common time-keeping chunks are still the ones we use the most today. People say things like “be there in ten minutes” and “half an hour” multiple times daily. And all of those common phrases are harken back to the ancient Sumerians.
By comparison, the base ten number system does not work the same way regarding telling time. For example, if we had hours based on the number ten, it would be difficult
to get simple quarter-hour intervals (since a quarter of 10 is 2.5, making it a messy
proposition.)
The clock is not the only thing that has remnants of the old sexagesimal system. The
Babylonians, in particular, were fastidious inventors and mathematicians. They were the
first to order a year into 360 days (sixty, six times) and the ones who gave us 360 degrees in a circle. All of these numbers are based on their sexagesimal system.
The calendar was eventually revised to be 365.25 days to match the actual days in a year, but it wasn't too far off from their original number.
So, next time you glance at a clock to check the time, think of the Babylonians. They are
the ones that gave us that clock. The ancient sexagesimal system still lingers in many
facets of our lives today, and most people are unaware of its influence. Base ten is a great number system, and it works well for us today (especially if you use the metric
system), but the sexagesimal system had its own benefits as well, which is why it still
remains partially alive today.
Representing Eatrth's History in terms of a 24 Hour Clock:
It shows the first occurrence of each major Earth history event as if the history of our Earth all took place within a 24-hour period.
Sketchplanations
Hara Hachi Bu is a saying from Okinawa in southern Japan that advises people to stop eating when they're 80% full. Okinawa is famous for its longevity.
I learned it from Michael Pollan's excellent book Food Rules many years ago. He shares traditions, including the Ayurvedic in India, the Chinese, and the prophet Muhammad, that all counsel stopping eating earlier than your stomach might be telling you. That, and the German expression, "You need to tie off the sack before it gets completely full."
Hara Hachi Bu also appears in Dan Buettner's Netflix documentary Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones. Blue Zones are areas in the world with the longest lifespans. Dan Buettner identifies eating to no more than 80% full as one potential factor in Okinawans' long lives.
The more literal translation of hara hachi bu is stomach eight parts (out of ten).
Some other methods to eat less without sacrificing enjoyment include:
- Eat slowly so that changes in hunger signals from your stomach have a chance to reach your brain.
- Avoid distractions such as the TV while eating (when eating dinner, just eat dinner)
- Use smaller plates
- Have a good selection of convenient (stacking) Tupperware for storing leftovers.
The Village Venus effect describes the experience of someone living in an isolated village and knowing the most beautiful person there. Because the person is the most attractive person they've ever seen, it's easy to think that no one could be more so. Yet, beyond the village is a whole world of people, many of whom could be more beautiful.
The Village Venus effect can remind us that we often think within context and constraints without realising or considering what may be outside them. In that way, it can nudge us to think bigger or look outside our sphere of familiarity.
The Village Venus effect is related to the challenge of local optimisation—not realising there may be a higher level elsewhere—and the Dunning-Kruger effect, where it's hard to evaluate your level before you know how good "the best" can be. It's also an example of something Daniel Kahneman called What You See Is All There Is—WYSIATI.
If you're hiring and you interview five candidates, should you hire the best of those you've seen, or could there be a set of candidates in a different pool who would all be a better fit than those you've spoken with?
How many builders should you meet with before you're confident you have one who'll do an excellent job for your project?
How often do we unintentionally limit our choices by only looking at the immediate options presented to us?
The Village Venus is a term from lateral thinking originator Edward De Bono.
For a funnier take on the Village Venus watch Flight of the Conchords, The Most Beautiful Girl in the Room.
Mini Article
Zooming in on our brains on Zoom
A new study finds that neural signalling during online exchanges is substantially
suppressed compared to activity in face-to-face conversations.
When Yale neuroscientist Joy Hirsch used sophisticated imaging tools to track in real-time
the brain activity of two people engaged in conversation, she discovered an intricate
choreography of neural activity in areas of the brain that govern social interactions. When
she performed similar experiments with two people talking on Zoom, the ubiquitous video
conferencing platform, she observed a much different neurological landscape.
Researchers found that neural signalling during online exchanges was substantially suppressed compared to activity observed in those having face-to-face conversations.
The findings were published Oct. 25 in the journal Imaging Neuroscience.
“In this study, we find that the social systems of the human brain are more active during
real live in-person encounters than on Zoom,” said Hirsch, the Elizabeth Mears and
House Jameson is a professor of psychiatry, a professor of comparative medicine and neuroscience, and a senior author of the study.
“Zoom appears to be an impoverished social communication system relative to in-person conditions.”
Social interactions are the cornerstone of all human societies, and our brains are finely
tuned to process dynamic facial cues (a primary source of social information) during real
in-person encounters, researchers say. While most previous research using imaging tools
to track brain activity during these interactions has involved single individuals; Hirsch’s lab
developed a unique suite of neuroimaging technologies that allows them to study in real
time, interactions between two people in natural settings.
For the new study, Hirsch’s team recorded the neural system responses in individuals
engaged in live, two-person interactions, and those involved in two-person
conversations on Zoom, the popular video conferencing platform now used by millions
of Americans daily.
They found that the strength of neural signalling was dramatically reduced on Zoom
relative to “in-person” conversations. Increased activity among those participating in face-to-face conversations was associated with increased gaze time and increased pupil
diameters, suggesting increased arousal in the two brains. Researchers said increased EEG activity during in-person interactions was characteristic of enhanced face processing ability.
In addition, the researchers found more coordinated neural activity between the brains of
individuals conversing in person, which suggests an increase in reciprocal exchanges of
social cues between the interacting partners.
“Overall, the dynamic and natural social interactions that occur spontaneously during in-
person interactions appear to be less apparent or absent during Zoom encounters,”
Hirsch said. “This is a really robust effect.”
These findings illustrate how important live, face-to-face interactions are to our natural
social behaviours, Hirsch said.
“Online representations of faces, at least with current technology, do not have the same
‘privileged access’ to social neural circuitry in the brain that is typical of the real thing,”
she said.
Other co-authors, all from Yale, are Nan Zhao, Xian Zhang, J. Adam Noah, and Mark
Tiede.
Cool App:
