Welcome
Attached: Welcome# Welcome to Writing Kit!
Thank you for purchasing Writing Kit. This document is a quick introduction to the app: why it exists and what it offers. This is also a Markdown-formatted document; therefore, it's a good idea to tap the eye-shaped Preview button on the toolbar to read it in a beautifully-rendered interface. ## Why Writing Kit exists I've been trying lots of different writing apps on iPad, and none of them truly satisfies my need. A good writing app isn't just about offering me a screenful of text â" it needs to support finding and adding reference material to my document. Dave Caolo of 52tiger nailed it: > My problem is that I canât easily refer to reference material while Iâm writing. > Hopping back and forth between the post and my collected material is just too annoying. I usually have a few Safari tabs open as well as a note or two, plus my paper notebook. Mobile Safari ends up re-loading pages and swiping between notes causes me to lose my thought. Writing Kit is built to solve this kind of issue. ## What Writing Kit offers First and foremost, Writing Kit brings you *an amazingly good text editor* with numerous key features: * **Font choices** - Writing Kit comes with 13 popular fonts: American Typewriter, Anonymous Pro, Baskerville, Droid Sans Mono Slashed, Georgia, Helvetica, Helvetica Neue, Hoefler Text, Inconsolata, Times New Roman, Trebuchet MS, Courier, and Marker Felt* **TextExpander support** â" Honestly, which writing app doesn't have this feature these days?
* **Markdown syntax support** â" Writing Kit is developed by a Markdown user, for Markdown users
* **Formatting toolbar** â" Sensible shortcuts to format your text however you want
* **Document outline** â" Writing Kit *understands* your document. It automatically analyzes the content and displays an outline to help you quickly jump between different sections in your document
* **Navigation options** (iPad version) â" Quickly move your cursor or select any text for editing just by tapping on the left or right margin of the text with one or two fingers. Use one finger to move back and forth character by character, two fingers to do so word by word
* **Preview and Exporting tool** â" Preview your Markdown-formatted document as HTML file and export it to different services (Evernote, Tumblr, Posterous, etc). Use your own CSS stylesheet to customize the way your preview document looks
* **CloudApp support** â" Upload images from your library to CloudApp, or transfer images from any web pages to your CloudApp account to use in your document
* **iTunes File Sharing support** â" Use iTunes to transfer your documents between your iPad and computer
* **Dropbox sync** â" Sync your documents with Dropbox and work with them anywhere
* **Auto-save** â" Your document is automatically saved every 10 keystrokes so that you never have to worry about data loss Second, Writing Kit bundles with *research tools* to help you find reference material while writing: * **Terminology app integration** â" Look up and/or replace words as you write your document
* **Quick Research** â" Use the power of the up-and-coming DuckDuckGo search engine to find more information about any search terms
* **Built-in web browser** â" Do your Google-fu right from with Writing Kit and get everything you need for your document Tap-and-hold any content on the page and simply choose Insert into Editor; Writing Kit will offer you to insert it into your document as either a link, an image or a quote. No more awkard copying and pasting between apps. Those using my [Cyberspace web browser](http://cyberspaceapp.com "Check it out!") will find themselves right at home: The built-in web browser brings you all the features that set Cyberspace apart from other competitors: * Access to **1300+ site-specific search engines** (Google, Bing, Wikipedia, Flickr, etc)
* **Distraction-free browsing** with ad blocking and Text-only mode
* Deep integration with **Instapaper**
* Local bookmarks with **tagging and extensive bookmarklet support**
* Access to online bookmarks saved on **Delicious, Pinboard, and Zootool**
* **Reading queue** built for long articles This is just the beginning. Hope you enjoy Writing Kit as much as I do!
Sean
Sean KearneyTriablogue: The Prisoner
There is no healing in this world. Only sedation. That’s the best the world can offer. We escape into drink and drugs and recreation, but we can never escape ourselves.
Silk-Silicon Implants Could Connect to Your Brain, Enable LED Tattoos
Researchers have developed a new type of super-thin silicon transistor, which can be embedded on a dissolvable silk-based film (pictured). Brian Litt, associate professor of neurology and bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania, told Technology Review, "Current medical devices are very limited by the fact that the active electronics have to be 'canned,' or isolated from the body, and are on rigid silicon." These new silicon-silk implants are much easier to place within a body: the silk sheet "melts away," and the transistors are small enough that they don't irritate tissues.
via switched.com
How Sleep Deprivation Fries Your Brain
Todd Maddox, a psychology professor at the Institute for Neuroscience at the University of Texas in Austin, tries to understand what exactly is going wrong in the impaired brain, whether it is impaired by lack of sleep, normal aging or as a result of diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. "The brain regions that are impaired when you are sleep-deprived are the same ones that are impaired with aging," he says.
via forbes.com
Top Ten Psychology Videos
Top Ten Psychology Videos
Sandra Kiume - July 14, 2008
Cognitive to clinical to social, the many applications of psychology reveal profound thoughts, human frailties and strengths. These are some of the best results, framed in video players.
via psychcentral.com
Augmented Cognition Technical Group
The AUGMENTED COGNITION Technical Group is concerned with fostering the development and application of real-time physiological and neurophysiological sensing technologies that can ascertain a human's cognitive state while interacting with computing-based systems; data classification and integration architectures that enable closed-loop system applications; mitigation (adaptive) strategies that enable efficient and effective system adaptation based on a user's dynamically changing cognitive state; individually tailored training systems; and roadmaps for future directions concerning augmented cognition science and technology and guidelines of use for the technology and the user information that may be garnered from it. https://www.hfes.org/Web/
Howard Rheingold on Computational Democracy
With a billion people on the Internet and 4 billion mobile phones, the ability to gain information, to process it computationally, to organize collective action with others, to publish and broadcast has been radically democratized -- but whether or not that democratized communication and coordination capability will lead to more or less democracy is not a function of the technology but of the social, political, economic activities of the people who use it.
The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete
At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics. It calls for an entirely different approach, one that requires us to lose the tether of data as something that can be visualized in its totality. It forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later. For instance, Google conquered the advertising world with nothing more than applied mathematics. It didn't pretend to know anything about the culture and conventions of advertising — it just assumed that better data, with better analytical tools, would win the day. And Google was right.
via wired.com
Imagination Engines
What excited him was how noisy and creative the process of dying was. It gave Thaler ideas. What if, he asked, I don't cut the connections, but just perturb them a little? Thaler built another neural network and trained it to recognize the structure of diamonds and some other super-hard materials. He also built a second network to monitor the first one's activities. Then he tickled a few of the network's connections, and something began to happen. The tickling, akin to a shot of adrenaline or an electrical jolt in the brain, produced noise. In this sense, noise is not sound, but random activity. And the noise triggered changes in the network. The result was new ideas.
via ultrafuzz.net
Baby Einstein Recalled: Videos Don't Help
Parents using Baby Einstein as a babysitter might want to rethink their plan: Disney is now offering refunds on the videos, after recent research showed "watching TV from ages 1-3 could actually cause attention problems" (via Truthdig).
via blogs.com
About Me
sean kearneySean P. Kearney (the P is for Phantastic!) is a stand-up multimedian, consultant, researcher, writer and all-around living genius who enjoys writing about himself in the third person.
Sean's work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Rocky Mountain News and Computer World. Past clients include AT&T, Best Buy, Comcast, IBM, the Japanese E-Learning Consortium, Time Warner Cable, and the US Army.
In early 2007, Sean started Node Magazine which University College London professor / Guardian literary critic John Sutherland calls “the future of literary criticism” and scifi legend William Gibson describes as “cheap A.I.”
