GitHub for Mac

Interesting study.  Intelligence and conscientiousness are pretty much fixed by age 18.  Can intellectual curiosity be improved at that age?  Would this cause improvement in student performance?

“who rated their own intellectual curiosity, among other factors.”

For the ones who rate their intellectual curiosity as “low”, is the rating before or after they were turned off to academic learning by the academic format of stuffing a constricted battery of knowledge into the student?

As to their point that “intelligence is the single most powerful predictor of academic performance”, I refer to Miraca Gross’ longitudinal study of the exceptionally gifted on when this correlation inverts.
http://www.hoagiesgifted.org/underserved.htm

“My UG grades were not stellar, in part because I pursued things I was
curious about, sometimes at the expense of classwork.  But they said
they didn’t want graduate students whose only redeeming quality was
getting excellent grades.”

Nice bobfutrelle.  This is me too, but they don’t want people like us anymore, at least not at the schools I’m at and applied to.  It’s like being the bottom layer of a ponzi scheme.

Is Kruger and Dunning’s “Unskilled and Unaware of It” applicable here?

I may be long in the tooth, but once we spoke of a love for and of learning, and since it had to be driven by something, we called that something “curiosity.” Rachel Carson called it “a sense of wonder.”

Gazing into the sky on a summer night, “Once or twice a meteor burned its way into the earth’s atmosphere. It occurred to me that if this were a sight to be seen only once a century or even once in a human generation, this little headland would be thronged with spectators. But it can be seen many scores of nights in any year, and so the lights burned in the cottages and the inhabitants probably gave not a thought to the beauty overhead: and because they could see it almost any night perhaps they will never see it.” –Rachel Carson, “A Sense of Wonder,” Harper and Row Publishers, 1965

I’m not sure you can teach intellectual curiosity. I’ve spent far too many years among herds of mediocre students who among them possessed less than an iota of curiosity, combined.

Cheering, prodding, coaching, leading, beggin, pleading…. the answer remained the same: “what do I need to do to get an ‘A’ in your class? My parents want me to be on the Deans’ List”

(I give up)

I’ve used a lot of version control software over the past ~20 years but do you have any recommended pointers to “intro to git” URLs that highlight how to do the basics and what is unique about git that has made it the version control system of status at the moment?

Thank you George. I hadn’t checked that link out earlier because I’d had exposure to version control in general.

I use Bazaar for version control (http://bazaar.canonical.com). It seems to be similar to Git, is free as in freedom—not that I care about it since I am a Mac user, apparently ;)
Bazaar has its own GUI which kinda sucks but I am gradually moving to the command-line which is more practical once you get a hang of it. The GUI itself is helpful in making the switch since it outputs the command-line instructions for everything you do. Downside is, it does not seem to like accents in file names.

Version control is particularly helpful if one works with packaged files such as Apple’s iWork. I took the additional step of preventing iWork from compressing the index.apxl inside the packages. Not that I would want to manually edit these files, although I have already succeeded in merging two Keynote presentations using diff. Anyway, version-controlling uncompressed packages, incrementally, makes a lot more sense than doing it with huge binary files (some of my Keynote slideshows can take up as much as 80MB) which will be wholly backed up and replaced for every minor change.