I've noticed a few people say they've just gone out and found an angel instead of working freelancing/etc. during development. Out of curiosity - how do people go about this? Do you meet people through your existing contacts? Do you search on the internet? Do angels generally need to be people in the same country?
> A lot of us are high level developers, architects, consultants, and so on.
Which in the eyes of most people other than those you have listed, makes us geeks. If we're talking about leadership, it isn't so much how we see ourselves that matters, but how others see us.
I've been using Colemak for a couple years now - but instead of learning it with my laptop's keyboard, I learnt it with a new Kinesis Advantage Pro. I now find that if I'm using a standard keyboard, I can type qwerty without much more difficulty before, but if I'm using the Kinesis, I have no trouble touch typing Colemak. My guess is that the massive difference in the actual keyboards stops my brain from getting confused.
I love the idea - I've been looking for ways to try and "immerse" people in a new language without actually travelling for a while now.
I do have two worries about it, though. The first is that they seem to be using translations which aren't particularly accurate, which means its possible that if it works, you'll still end up sounding like a beginner.
The other worry is that the language you are learning is still embedded in your native language. I'm pretty sure this will not help with learning the grammar of words, and when you are constantly switching between your language and another language, it won't be very conducive to memorisation of the new language (from my own experience learning Japanese).
Its still a really neat idea though, and I wish the best to the creators.
> Japan has extremely low crime as well, and is probably the least Americanized of all First World nations today. Clearly, it is physically possible for the State to eradicate crime.
It is possible that the fact that Japan is the least Americanized of First World countries is the reason behind it's low crime rates. I wonder if it is their culture, not their government, which keeps the crime low.
There's actually an open source app which functions similarly to super-memo, but uses an older spaced repetition algorithm and doesn't quite have the same feature set. Its called Anki (http://www.ankisrs.net), and its been a godsend for both myself and many friends who learn Japanese.
The thing I found interesting in this article is that switching contexts actually increases the amount you can learn. From what I understand, this would mean studying grammar, character reading/production and vocabulary at the same time would be beneficial. I never quite understood why this was the case before, even though people have told me it is so.
This poses an interesting question for those of us building apps - would you get more signups to your app eventually if you didn't make people sign up just to view the content? Its theoretically possible that requiring people to authorize your app just to view content will annoy enough people that you'll end up getting lower signups. And of course, the reason for requiring or not requiring authorization is in most cases to get signups.