bluusteel

I kept expecting the author to recommend this book, but then he never did...

It seems like blog posts on simple statistical methods like this one land on the front page of HNews a lot more than one would expect.

I think this is called varied practice and that the idea has been around for awhile. The book Make It Stick[1] discusses a study that had 8 year olds toss beanbags at a target. For one group, the distance to the target was varied. For another, the distance to the target was fixed. At a later time, both groups were tested and the group that practiced with a variable distance performed better than the fixed distance group.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674729013

Really nice writeup! I wish more graduate students would blog about their research in this way. Could be a great way to educate the public and convey the importance of government research funding.

I wonder how big the reflection coefficient is for the air/ice interface. It seems like it would be huge. So maybe ground based techniques offer better coupling at the cost of not being able to survey as much area?

I wonder if they plan to tackle other educational settings in the future (e.g. schools, self-studying individuals, etc). Am also curious to know if the card design happens automatically or maybe the customer selects from different card types depending on content. The space of tech products that help improve learning seems more sparse than it should be.

I don't think I realized how important default colors/styles are for visualization software until using seaborn. Quickly producing sensible plots in terms of aesthetics should not require 10+ lines of extra code. Fortunately, it looks like the matplotlib folks are looking to change default colors/styles with 2.0 [1].

[1]http://matplotlib.org/style_changes.html

I thought closed form expressions existed for linear regression. Why is gradient descent needed?

Reminds me of the "talking" drums used in West Africa[1]. Low frequency sound can travel distances measured in miles.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talking_drum

Sounds like a good project for a graduate level computational electromagnetics course. The method used in this app is FDTD, which is pretty easy to understand and implement compared to other methods for solving Maxwell's equations numerically[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_electromagnetics

"Desirable difficulties" were originally suggested by Robert Bjork, a psychology professor at UCLA. For a short overview, see his website: http://bjorklab.psych.ucla.edu/research.html#idd