I'm trying to read a kid's version of The Odyssey in Greek and to be able to understand my partner's mum, and these are the features that I wanted.
Also, I wanted to experiment with "what would an app like this look like if we could trust AI to be very cheap/fast/correct?".
- So, for example, it's a fully generative dictionary & search, e.g. the dictionary entries/metadata/example sentences don't exist until the first person searches for them!
- You can upload any kind of content (image, audio, text), and it'll automatically transcribe, translate, annotate, etc.
The evidence suggests that brainstorming doesn't work so well - the loudest and earliest views tend to dominate.
Instead, the recommendation seems to be to allow people to generate ideas in silence first. This is my approach, which has worked very effectively in groups of up to a dozen remotely for a variety of questions:
Building on Hofstadter's models of analogy-making to build pattern recognition algorithms that work in a more human-like way. At least, that's my hope!
My background is in computational neuroscience, but I'm doing this on my own, mostly for fun. If it sounds interesting, I'd love some company! greg at gregdetre dot co dot uk
I've been using 1Password for a few years now. I'm not qualified to comment on the security aspects of it - I'm trusting them and Apple to take care of that.
But I can comment on the superb quality of the user-facing aspects - it's a pleasure to use, has great iPhone and Dropbox support, and I really like the way they communicate as a company.
I'd be totally fascinated to hear about this if you ever find it! I'm greg at memrise dot com.
There's lots of evidence to show that mnemonics boost recollection by a factor or three or so across a wide range of domains, abilities and time ranges. See e.g. http://www.unforgettablelanguages.com/studies.html
Re the intermediate mnemonic device, here's the way I picture things. The mnemonic provides training wheels for your brain, helping you get the answer right a few times. Then, after enough correct responses, mediated by this (hippocampal) mnemonic representation, you rely less and less on the training wheels, and your cortex has had a chance to form a longer-lasting and more direct semantic link.
Disclosure: I'm one of the co-founders of Memrise, so it's not too surprising that I think there's merit in this approach :) Drop me a line or reply here, and I can try and follow up in more detail. Maybe I should write a blog post...
Broadly, our scheduling algorithms are based on the same ideas of spaced repetition that inspired Anki, SuperMemo and lots of others, though the devil is often in the details.
However, neither Anki nor SuperMemo enrich and speed up your learning with mems (crowd-sourced mnemonics), which provide a huge and well-documented boost to your learning rate and retention.
Perhaps most of all though, we've worked really hard to make Memrise a really happy learning experience. It's harder to put numbers on that, but hopefully you can feel it when you try it!
We added the garden narrative in Spring 2011. The goal was to wrap our internal model of the state of your memories in a visual metaphor to make it clearer and more vivid for you as a learner.
We've improved the underlying algorithms a lot since then. Do let us know if you still find the garden confusing.
In our experience, we've found that creating your own mnemonic is usually the best way to really deeply encode a new memory.
But a great mem from someone else works almost as well. And it's a lot easier to breeze along, giggling at other people's imagery, occasionally coming up with something new of your own.
We've tried 2 or 3 existing Javascript error tracking systems in the past. None of them helped much.
Performance is not the feature I care about.
On the other hand, I would be delighted to pay to get more actionable information about our errors. It's so so hard to determine exactly where in the code, and under what circumstances, errors in the browser happen.
We're seed-funded, just out of TechStars Boston, and we have thousands of happy users, clamouring to hear about progress on an iPhone app.
If you like the idea of a deeply creative, technically demanding role in a company that aims to make all learning fast, fun, mobile and effective, please send an email with CV or questions to jobs at memrise.com.
Join us in our mission to give the world a better memory.
Some forms of short-term storage are volatile, like RAM. They store by coaxing the neural activation into a stable attractor - as long as all the neurons keep firing in sequence, the memory stays alive. This is fast to create, since it doesn't require any hardware writes (changes in synaptic weights).
In contrast, long-term storage involves permanent changes in the synaptic weights between neurons, which survive any fluctuations in activation, and can then subtly influence computation ever after.
And for medium-term storage (from minutes to months, say), you have the hippocampus, which has a big hash table of pointers to long-term structures.
If you're interested in pursuing this, I'd start here (Ken was my former PhD advisor, but I still think this is a rich but comprehensible introduction):
- As you're reading, AI helps you with words it thinks you might not know
- Highlights etymologies & mnemonics
- Shows you words in their natural habitat, e.g. listen to example sentences
https://www.hellozenno.com/
I'm trying to read a kid's version of The Odyssey in Greek and to be able to understand my partner's mum, and these are the features that I wanted.
Also, I wanted to experiment with "what would an app like this look like if we could trust AI to be very cheap/fast/correct?".
- So, for example, it's a fully generative dictionary & search, e.g. the dictionary entries/metadata/example sentences don't exist until the first person searches for them!
- You can upload any kind of content (image, audio, text), and it'll automatically transcribe, translate, annotate, etc.