As a user, I've found self promotion via comments way more helpful and relevant than their terrible ads...
As both a user and an advertiser I agree. The communities I visit, if not the whole site, are faithfully anti-ad. But if I answer some questions occasionally somebody will get curious about my profile and check stuff out.
Do you happen to know how Garmin compares to Fitbit in terms of performance analysis? Fitbit made some changes that I'm unhappy with and they refuse to offer us a way out. I'm thinking of talking to Santa Clause about this.
I'm not even sure it has to be registered. In at least one court case I know of (a local landlord case) the court assumed that a mailed letter was delivered properly.
I exercise quite a bit, and have struggled with my weight when I exercise. It's kind of a paradox: I could lose weight or exercise, but not both.
Recently I accepted a $500 challenge to get down to a certain weight by a certain date, so I started taking the calorie in- calorie out bit seriously. I won the challenge of losing 30+ pounds and in so doing became very suspicious of the low-carb mentality I had adopted 25 years ago or so when the problem really surfaced.
To get through cardio I need carbs, and suspect that I would increase my overall calorie intake to get them as I was keeping my carb percentage low. Stop the exercise and I could take the weight off.
So I'm definitely back to the opinion that calorie balance is the real key (short of some metabolic disease). I'm 61 years old.
This sounds like an interesting book. When I looked at the learning style research I found that most "debunking" reviews pointed to a couple of meta-studies by, for example, Pascher, that found no evidence of learning styles. As I looked deeper I saw that most studies were very limited, and mostly compared visual to verbal memory recall efficacy.
There were a few that tried reading comprehension, etc, but often at an age of student where memory is not that different from comprehension in testing for it.
The other thing that I found was that nobody was testing for learning styles. They determined "Learning Styles" by giving questionnaire about preferences. It seems to me you need to at least develop a possible test for learning styles before you see if there are differences in learning. I may prefer to look at pictures, but I may actually learn more from text.
But I do side with Bjork in that teachers focusing on learning styles at this point is a distraction from things we know that help education. I just think more research needs to be done before we dismiss it.
I don't believe the learning style antagonists would disagree with this. They argue that variations do exist, but they are due to prior knowledge background, talent and IQ (or g or whatever).
I certainly see some truth in their argument. If you and I were each to read a text of something that, say, you are familiar with and I am not, then you would probably score higher in the "verbal" learning category and I would have to draw pictures to understand the text. But a big part of the difference is that I would have to learn a lot more than you in order to parse the text- you have a better background. This is easily seen in reading research papers for example, with a novice vs an expert.
My argument is that we simply haven't studied it enough to know if there are fundamental differences in the way people learn.
There's also an idea that some people like to jump in and try things and others like to think about them first. The learning style antagonist camp would say (if I understand them correctly) that these differences are due to a difference in talent, experience with the subject, or IQ.