You can always change this.

Gasoline.
You buy it.

It is not that long time since I was admiring one Finnish music video. Today I found that there are more diamonds in the archives. Enjoy!

I thought this makes a good tribute to the famous extreme ironing.

There is a growing body of research indicating that the consumption of wild blueberries has positive effects on health. For example, an antioxidant called anthocyanin seems to be responsible for improved night vision and may also ease eye-fatigue.

Here is what I think the researchers have omitted to investigate: it is not merely the consumption of the berries, but (and perhaps mostly) it is the picking up AND cleaning the blueberries that demand the vision’s increase sensitivity 1) to green-blue differences during picking and 2) to nearly imperceptible trash that needs to be hand-cleaned before the berries are further processed.

It is not very surprising that people who pick and clean blueberries also do consume them afterwards. Thus, the omnibus effect of blueberries need to be further studied to figure out what are the partial contributions of each of picking, cleaning, and consumption.

If the hypothesis that it is indeed the picking and cleaning of the berries that mostly affect vision is true, then one might easily extend the research on other species of berries, or on any other natural products whose consumption requires one to first employ advanced vision skills.

“..statues of Matti Tedre will be put up all over Finland … when farmers find out how much the statues scare the birds away”. This has been predicted by Matti and Justus a year ago for the year Two Thousand.

How about 2007, what is coming down the road? Perhaps not as hilarious as those we heard from Justus and Matti, I am presenting here some predictions, with a varying degree of speculation, hunch, and seriousness.

– There will be at least two new PhD graduates, however, no more than five.
– SciFest@Joensuu will attract more than 10000 visitors, out of which half will in future enroll to the CS dept@Joensuu. Other half will become science and technology ignorants forever.
– Members of the research group finally start to use delicious, as suggested by Andrés. Andrés, however, start to convince them to use digg.
– Roman will need only another 35 good advices from Justus. Per month.
– By the end of 2007, a half of edtech users are on a Mac. Another half uses Linux. And the remaining half does not return from Mexico, why to bother with computers anyway.
– Jeliot 3 is used as the main support tool in the introductory cs courses worldwide, and students write their alternative-end theses in Woven Stories.
– Grant proposals are written in Woven Stories, too.
– EdTech builds a satellite hub on the Moon. The reason, as lately discovered, is that the proposal is not proofread by the court-language-editor.
– After a long fast, at least three new edu-tech games are developed. One for seniors, one for kids, and one for Jussi to stop him from the constant complaining.
– Mikko becomes a minister of education of African Union, outcomes of which are yet to be observed.
– All members of edtech join the North-Carelian Africa society.
– The edtech joint paper “Ultimate confusion: an empirical evaluation of a novel game-like strategy for teaching programming in technology enhanced remote village classrooms in developing countries” becomes the single most cited edtech publication ever.
– To counter-attack, Justus publishes a paper “I always knew the strategy works and my students love it.”, in ICALT 2007.
– Kid’s club brand merchandise finally yields first results, as a night club of the same name opens in the city center.

The discussion below is open for your insights about 2007 & edtech.

According to recent findings, “Having a common enemy brings out the best in men“. Well, I’m quite sceptical about the results, it just seems so counter-intuitive for me! I call for a direct replication of the study! Let’s build some new conrnerstones!

Dear fellows, our competitor is the university from the neighbouring city, I will hold the fund and you and other volunteers can contribute any amount between 0-5 euros.