Excerpt from:

Inside Firefox – The Inside Track on Firefox Development
Every few months a new worm makes the rounds, Sobig, Sober (the 77KB worm which ultimately destroyed my email account) and others. These worms usually travel using Microsoft Outlook as the hook onto people’s systems. Creating an email with an attachment that appears inocuous and beckons the user to open it but which is really a malicious piece of executable code, these emails scan addressbooks and propagate rapidly. Sophisticated worms like Sober even contain their own SMTP engine.

People get infected with these worms because they are a) do not understand internet security (probably an impossible problem to solve) and b) their email client software makes it too easy to execute such attachments.

Excerpt from:

Creating Passionate Users: Most classroom learning sucks
The most depressing result of Skyler’s transition to public school was when she came home one day a few weeks into her 7th grade, and said, “In real school, they don’t seem to like it when you question the teacher…” She was horrified to be labeled somewhat of a troublemaker, because she’d been treated for so many years as a thinking person, encouraged to challenge and question and not assume it was her fault if she didn’t understand something. Suddenly dropped into the US public school system, she quickly learned that it’s a very different world. She knew more about learning theory and the brain than most of her school’s administration, and her tolerance for poor/weak educational experiences was pretty low.

She did have some fabulous teachers throughout the rest of her public school days, but wouldn’t you know it–they were always the teachers getting into trouble with the school administration or even parent’s groups. In a later post I’ll tell you a shocking story about one of her teachers who made the national news, twice, for encouraging students to think–and act– for themselves. He was nearly fired during a witch hunt that both local and national media seized on (although most later offered apologies when it became obvious what was really going on).

Filmmakers know that the feeling the audience leaves with has a huge impact on the movie’s success. It’s what the audience remembers, and determines how (and whether) they talk about the movie to others. When filmmakers do audience testing, they’re trying to get the ending right, and that’s why usually the best music of the movie is saved for the ending credits.

It’s the psychological princple known as primacy-recency, and it matters to advertisers, writers, entertainers, and teachers.

When it comes to retention and recall, the middle sucks.

People tend to remember beginning and endings better than middles.

So the solution is simple: have more beginnings and endings in your message.

A 90-minute lecture with no breaks means that most of the material is presented somewhere in the vast cognitive wasteland of the middle.

A series of 15-minute mini-lectures punctuated by exercises for deeper processing of the new content, means a lot more beginnings and endings, so more opportunities for better learning, especially better recall and retention.

The more granular the message “chu

…excerpt from: headrush.typepad.com…