http://smritiweb.com/navin Navin Kabra's blog Wed, 03 Feb 2010 10:07:33 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The New York Times has a great article that points out that schools are really focusing too much on things that are not directly related what the goals of primary education should be. Basically, we now understand much more about how the brain develops, and the school methods are not ... http://smritiweb.com/navin/uncategorized/what-should-kids-learn-and-what-can-parents-do Gather around, children, because we are going to talk about the Devanagari alphabet today. We are interested in the consonants, not the vowels. So, here are the consonants: क ख ग घ ङ च छ ज झ ञ ट ठ ड ढ ण त थ द ध न प फ ब भ म य र ल ... http://smritiweb.com/navin/uncategorized/the-meaning-of-the-rows-and-columns-in-devanagari-script I'm really unsure of what the right approach for me is, and would like to hear opinions of people.Last month, I created http://ForPune.com, a website for questions and answers about Pune. It is catching on quite nicely, and has garnered 161 questions in just over a month, and most of ... http://smritiweb.com/navin/uncategorized/is-self-censorship-justified-for-building-a-community These are excerpts from this O'Reilly Radar post by (Jim Stogdill | @jstogdill). He's talking about how the real time internet is addicting, and that's not necessarily a good thing. I swear I'm not a Luddite. I'm not moving to Florida to bitch about the government full time and I'm not in ... http://smritiweb.com/navin/uncategorized/twitter-the-new-drug This post was triggered by this exchange between @netshrink and @sarikaphatak on twitter.@netshrink said: "Why does every woman want me (the doctor) to tell her husband to do things she wants him to do eg. exercise, not drink, come home on time"and @sarikaphatak replied: "@netshrink that's called 'Sonarane kaan tochane' ... http://smritiweb.com/navin/uncategorized/the-he-will-listen-if-you-tell-him-syndrome Communicating effectively is one of the most important skills today. And most people are not particularly good at it.In this post, I am going to give one very simple and effective technique that will significantly improve your talks or documents or presentations or blog posts. Whenever possible, give specific ... http://smritiweb.com/navin/uncategorized/why-your-talksdocumentspresentationsblogs-must-contain-concrete-examples Apparently, we are less creative when trying to solve our own problems. There's this concept of "psychological distance" which partially controls our creativity. And this psychological distance can be created artificially by simply changing the way we thinking about the problem. For example, consider this study where participants were given ... http://smritiweb.com/navin/uncategorized/we-are-more-creative-when-working-on-other-peoples-problems-via-sandygautam Why do we keep checking twitter, almost compulsively? Every refresh that brings a few more items gives us a little high. It's called "seeking", and turns out that rats in the scientists' labs are pretty much the same. In 1954, psychologist James Olds and his team were working in ... http://smritiweb.com/navin/uncategorized/how-our-brain-is-hardwired-to-love-twitter-sms-mail-updates I tweet from 5 different twitter accounts, and to help reduce the confusion and allow people to figure out which ones to follow, here is the "Ultimate Guide to Navin Kabra's Twitter Accounts" (soon to be made into a major motion picture): @ngkabra: This account is used for general interesting ... http://smritiweb.com/navin/uncategorized/which-of-my-various-twitter-accounts-should-you-be-following-warning-self-important-post This article, reports that making school students go through positive psychology exercises helps them get a better impression of school in general, improves their behavior in classroom, and a bunch of other good stuff. For example, one exercise in the positive psychology asked students to list 3 good things that ... http://smritiweb.com/navin/psychology/positive-psychology-exercises-improve-students-outlook-behavior-in-school-tag-research-psychology