Cleverness To-Do List Plugin for WordPress

Cleverness To-Do List is a plugin for WordPress that adds a task list system, including a dashboard widget showing users what tasks they’ve been assigned.

You can configure the plugin to have private to-do lists for each user, to have all users share a to-do list, or to have a master list with individual completion of items. The shared to-do list has a variety of settings available. You can assign to-do items to a specific user (includes a setting to email a new to-do item to the assigned user) and optionally have those items only viewable by that user. You can also assign different permission levels using capabilities. There are also settings to show deadline and progress fields. Category support is included as well as front-end administration.

Review of Lenovo T420

Back in October 2011, I replaced the netbook I’d been using as my primary machine with a Lenovo T420. My problem with computers is that I tend to accumulate too many of them — one of my coworkers was laughing the day I had three laptops and a desktop going simultaneously on various projects.

I was using a netbook for meetings because of its portability and long battery life, a 17″ Gateway laptop for gaming, a Dell laptop for scanning and other secondary projects, and a desktop for video editing (I also have another Dell laptop given to me as part of a freelance project).

Too many f’ing laptops (I blame cloud-based syncing software). What I wanted was a single laptop that would be light enough and have the battery life to tote around everywhere in my backpack and yet be powerful enough to run games like World of Warcraft, Portal 2, etc. at decent frame rates.

I opted for the Lenovo T420, throwing in an i7-2640M Processor, 8gb of RAM (essential if you’re running Windows — 4gb just doesn’t cut it anymore), a 500gb 7200RPM hard drive (I’d have preferred an SSD if it weren’t for issues with doing whole disk encryption on them), a Nvidia Optimus 4200M graphics card, and a 9-cell battery.

With the 9-cell battery, the T420 weighs in at a little over 5 pounds. It is light enough that I have no problem sticking it in my backpack and taking me pretty much wherever I go. The 9-cell battery coupled with Lenovo’s software for managing power means I’ve had only 2-3 times in the past four months where the laptop actually ran out of power for me (on the other hand, I travel very infrequently — a real road warrior might find the battery life in my setup lacking). Obviously the battery life goes down considerably when I’m playing games and the Optimus 4200M kicks in. The battery does also stick out a bit from the body of the laptop, but much less pronounced than on other laptops I’ve used.

Overall the T420 hits the power vs. portability sweet spot for me. I can play games like World of Warcraft or Portal 2 a 1600 x 900 and get very high frame rates. Similarly, the T420 excels at all of the business and personal tasks I throw at it. Certainly I’ve used laptops that were much faster or much lighter, but the T420 is one of the few laptops I’ve owned that I felt I could do pretty much everything I wanted to do on it anywhere I wanted to do it.

One thing I’ve been especially impressed with is the T420′s cooling. I’ve never seen a laptop perform this well and yet stay so cool. If I set up a processor intensive job on my Dell, the damn thing heats up to the point where it would be unhealthy to continue to cradle on my lap. I really have to stress the T420 to notice much of any excessive heat.

The Lenovo keyboard is, of course, awesome. I type about 120wpm and the Lenovo is just a few steps below my Unicomp keyboard (though much quieter than the Unicomp’s switches, which makes my wife happier).

The only thing I wasn’t impressed by was some of Lenovo’s utilities, which I found to often conflict with existing Windows utilities. Also, I’ve seen a lot of longtime Thinkpad fans defend the LED light for the keyboard, but I’d definitely preferred a genuinely backlit keyboard like Dell has on some of their models (though not if it required changes in the keyboard itself).

DLC Quest

DLC Quest is an indie game for the Xbox 360 that does a hilarious job of mocking the rise of downloadable content for games. Ostensibly a 2D platformer, the hook is that almost every feature in DLC Quest has to be purchased by collecting coins and then trading them for DLC packs.

When the game starts, for example, your character can only move to the right. Want to move to the left? Then you need to buy the DLC Movement pack, which also allows jumping (its a bargain!)

Want to leave the room for a minute to grab a snack? Make sure you’ve purchased the Pause Menu pack first.

DLC Quest is available through Xbox Live, so, you guessed it — its only downloadable. Skyrim it’s not, but for only 80 Microsoft points (about $1), it is a clever, fun game that certainly makes its point.

Malleus Maleficarum — The Graphic Novel Version

SLG Publishing has published a graphic novel version of the Malleus Maleficarum — the infamous 15th century witch hunting manual that helped to fuel the European witch craze. A press release by SLG Publishing quotes cartoonist Mike Rosen as explaining,

I don’t think anyone can complain if they get a chance to draw a witch using haunted eggs to turn sailors into donkeys or a possessed cow wearing underwear on its head. This is a dark chapter in history when you think about it, but I wanted to highlight the strangeness and absurdity of it all. I really hoped to make this thick treatise into something entertaining that might inspire people to learn a little more about this insane bit of our past.

Despite the nonsense in between its covers, the Malleus Maleficarum  went through numerous editions in the 15th and 16th centuries thanks to the then-new technological innovation of the printing press.

Quest-Free Skyrim?

Mattie Brice makes the case for eliminating quests altogether in open world role-playing game such as Skyrim,

My response? Abandon quests altogether for future Elder Scrolls games. Skyrim is at a place in its evolution where the series can’t rationalize holding onto several RPG conventions for convention’s sake. There is no reason that we need to go into Skyrim expecting quests to guide us along everywhere because the point of the game is to explore with player-driven volition. I can see a Skyrim that has no quests that are explicitly given to the player but only offers rumors and clues along with different ways of obtaining them. My first time in Riverwood, I was looting the general store on the top floor and happened to overhear some siblings arguing over finding something called the golden claw. Just that knowledge should have empowered me to go find it, but Skyrim relies on the quest-giving model and its explicitly defined objectives, which are all created by developers instead of the player. This is especially problematic when you get the claw back from the bandit who holds it. Your game journal tells you to explore the barrow further. My decision to keep going into the ruins or to get the claw back to the store would be more meaningful if I came to that decision on my own, as hints were already there to do so.

I left Skyrim feeling that this was it. There’s nowhere else to progress given the trajectory the series has found for itself. It’s the same ol’ fantasy with the same ol’ combat, the same “epic” story that I have seen before. A stronger focus on helping the player tell their stories through the method that The Elder Scrolls has established would shed the necessity that binds the series in its RPG conventions. As recent RPG developers have found, the usual ways that the genre tells stories isn’t working anymore, and there’s little progress in designing something players haven’t seen before. The narrative is in the play. Let me play.

Interesting. I’m not sure we’ll ever seen a quest-free Elder Scrolls, but Skyrim does get a bit annoying in its quest-a-holic format. My son was about 20 hours into Skyrim on the XBox when he looked up and said “Dad, how do I abandon a quest?” Well, at least on the console versions, you can’t. Accept a quest, and you’re stuck with it forever. That design decision is extremely annoying.

The other problem with Skyrim quests, IMO, is the lack of parallel quest structures. For example, I enjoyed the entire line of Thieves Guild quests. What I would have liked even more, however, would have been the option to go undercover and bring the Thieves Guild to justice. I could just ignore the Thieves Guild altogether, or perhaps go in and slaughter the whole bunch, but neither of those options parallels the existing Thieves Guild quests.

Is the ‘Hot Hands’ Hypothesis Incorrect?

The BBC recently summarized yet another researcher’s look at the so-called “Hot Hands” hypothesis in basketball. The “Hot Hands” hypothesis claims that a player who successfully makes a shot in basketball is likely to be successful the next time he or she makes another shot attempt.

The prevailing wisdom is that this isn’t the case. In the research summarized by the BBC, for example, researchers looked at three point attempts by NBA players. Rather than having “Hot Hands”, what the study found was players who made a successful three point shot were more likely to miss rather than make their next three point attempt.

They discovered that players who scored a three-pointer and then attempted another were more likely to miss the follow-up shot. However, players who missed a previous three-pointer were more likely to score with their next attempt.
“[Basketball players] assume that even one shot is indicative of future performance, while not taking into account that the situation in which they previously scored is likely to be different than the current one,” said Dr Loewenstein.
He said this showed that despite years of experience, professional basketball players let the outcomes of their most recent actions affect their behaviour in ways that can negatively impact their performance.

One of the obvious issues in basketball is that the defensive team can change how it handles a player who has just made a three-point shot. A team that lets a player step up and make a relatively uncontested three-point shot initially might react by not allowing the next attempt by the same player to go uncontested.

One area in basketball where “Hot Hands” can be studied without worrying about the changing circumstances is in free throws. Gur Yaari and Shmuel Eisenmann recently published their research looking at whether there was a “Hot Hands” effect with free throws in the NBA, and found that such an effect does, in fact, appear to exist, but for different reasons than fans and players believe,

Strong evidence for the existence of a “hot hand” phenomenon in free shots of NBA players were found. More precisely, several statistically nontrivial features of the data were found and can be summed into one concept: heterogeneity. The heterogeneous behavior was found both in “space” (across players) and time (along one season). In particular it has been shown that

  • If one looks at the aggregated data he/she is likely to observe patterns that do not necessarily exist at the individual level.
  • The probability of success increases with the order of throw attempt in a sequence (NS).
  • Even if one looks at each individual sequence separately, “hot hand” patterns are still visible (CP): probability of success following a success is higher than the probability of success following a failure.
  • These patterns could have resulted from “better and worse” periods and not necessarily from positive/negative feedback loops.

So the “hot hands” phenomenon does appear to be real, but could be better summarized as a “hot night” or “hot half”. Sometimes good NBA players are really good, and sometimes not very good at all. As Yaari and Eisenmann note near the end of their article,

In retrospect, it seems like a very long journey to walk through just in order to notice that human subjects have good periods and bad periods and that the time sequence results can not be produced from a binomial independent repeated trials with a constant probability of success.

Fire Nancy Grace

Nancy Grace should have been fired a long time ago. Of course if they fired everyone worth of such distinction at CNN, who would be left to put on camera?

Chez Pazienza: An Open Letter to CNN Regarding Nancy Grace (Huffington Post):

Is that simple and unambiguous enough for you to get through your heads the gravity of the situation that the world’s most irresponsible cable news presence has put your network in? Is it finally sinking in just how reckless, unhinged and flat-out dangerous Grace is — and what an embarrassment she is to the CNN brand I have to assume you value — now that she’s used your airwaves to make the ludicrously inflammatory claim that Whitney Houston may have been murdered, without a shred of actual proof? Did you cringe when one of your level-headed anchors, Don Lemon, was forced to follow up her ridiculous, histrionic accusation with a disclaimer distancing CNN from the opportunistic ravings of one of its own? Are you maybe, now, after all this time, beginning to realize the level of shame that Grace has heaped at your doorstep for the past seven years — seven years in which you’ve inexplicably given her free rein to bullhorn whatever wild theories or self-serving but ultimately defamatory blather have popped into her overactive mind?

You can’t let this continue. Enough is enough.

I’ll say it again: You have got to fire Nancy Grace — and you have got to do it now.