The way technologies like fMRI are applied is aproduct of our brainbound orientation; it has not seemed odd or unusual toexamine the individual brain on its own, unconnected to others.

the brain stores social information differently thanit stores information that is non-social. Social memories are encoded in a distinctregion of the brain. What’s more, we remember social information moreaccurately, a phenomenon that psychologists call the “social encodingadvantage.” If findings like this feel unexpected, that’s because our culturelargely excludes social interaction from the realm of the intellect. Socialexchanges with others might be enjoyable or entertaining, this attitude holds, butthey’re no more than a diversion, what we do around the edges of school orwork. Serious thinking, real thinking, is done on one’s own, sequestered fromothers.

Humans’ tendency to“overimitate”—to reproduce even the gratuitous elements of another’s behavior—may operate on a copy now, understand later basis. After all, there might begood reasons for such steps that the novice does not yet grasp, especially sinceso many human tools and practices are “cognitively opaque”: not self-explanatory on their face. Even if there doesn’t turn out to be a functionalrationale for the actions taken, imitating the customs of one’s culture is a smartmove for a highly social species like our own.

It is very important that your gem reopens the modules ActiveJob and ActiveJob::QueueAdapters instead of defining them. Because their proper definition lives in Active Job. Furthermore, if the project reloads, you do not want any of ActiveJob or ActiveJob::QueueAdapters to be reloaded. Bottom line, Zeitwerk should not be managing those namespaces. Active Job owns them and defines them. Your gem needs to reopen them.

I sometimes wondered why the VS Code team put so much effort into the built-in terminal inside the editor. I tried it once on Linux and never touched it again, because the terminal window I had right next to my editor was just massively better in every way. Having used Windows terminals for a while, I now fully understand why it’s there.

Power over Ethernet (PoE) is a network technology that allows us to deliver both data and power over a single standard Ethernet cable. So we can use network cables like Cat5/Cat5e/Cat6/Cat6a cables to provide data connections and power to a Wifi access point, IP camera, VoIP phone, PoE lighting or any other device.

But it is more difficult in a world of manuscriptsthan in the era of printing to evaluate what constitutes a note—that is, a piece ofwriting not meant for circulation but for private use, say, as preparatory toward afinished work

Printing made books affordable to greater numbers than before, as various humanist observers noted, whether they felt this was for the better (Andrea de Bussi, Ludovico Carbone) or for the worse (e.g., Hieronymo Squarcia- fico).17

4.3.9 undefined value primitive value used when a variable has not been assigned a value 4.3.11 null value primitive value that represents the intentional absence of any object value

I believe we serve our students better by helping them find a note-taking system that works best for them.

One study found that while doing online research, students who used matrix-style notes and were given time limits were much less likely to become distracted by other online material than students without those conditions (Wu, & Xie, 2018).

Some researchers have found no significant difference in performance between paper-based and digital note-takers (Artz, Johnson, Robson, & Taengnoi, 2017).

Studies have shown that students who take notes by hand learn more than those who take notes on a laptop (Mueller & Oppenheimer, 2014; Carter, Greenberg, & Walker, 2017).

Topic A topic was once a spot not a subjecttopic. to ̆p’ı ̆k. n. 1. The subject of a speech, essay, thesis, or discourse. 2. A subject of discussion or con-versation. 3. A subdivision of a theme, thesis, or outline.*With no teleprompter, index cards, or even sheets of paper at their disposal, ancient Greek and Roman orators often had to rely on their memories for holding a great deal of information. Given the limi-tations of memory, the points they chose to make had to be clustered in some meaningful way. A popular and quite reliable method for remembering information was known as loci (see Chapter 9), where loci was Latin for “place.” It involved picking a house you knew well, imagining it in your mind’s eye, and then associating the facts you wanted to recall with specifi c places inside of that house. Using this method, a skillful orator could mentally fi ll up numerous houses with the ideas he needed to recall and then simply “visit” them whenever he spoke about a particular subject. The clusters of informa-tion that speakers used routinely came to be known as commonplaces, loci communes in Latin and koinos topos in Greek. The great Greek philosopher Aristotle referred to them simply as topos, meaning “places.” And that’s how we came to use topic to refer to subject or grouping of information.**

So, if you are still in a quandary for your iOS mobile app development, hang on; the blog would throw light on which technology can work like a boon for your project.

Capybara can get us part of the way there. It allows us to work with an API rather than manipulating the HTML directly, but what it provides isn't an application specific API. It gives us low-level API methods like find, fill_in, and click_button, but it doesn't provide us with high-level methods to do things like "sign in to the app" or "click the Dashboard item in the navigation bar".

I had to convince the police that he did not belong in jail

In 1898, Māori man Te Kōkau and his son, Rāwairi Te Kōkau,began recording traditional star knowledge in the Māori language.After 35 years, they had amassed a 400-page manuscript that

Indigenous scholars conducting scientific research combine formalacademic training and a personal lived experience that bridgesIndigenous and Western ways of knowing. In the United States andCanada, this concept is called Etuaptmumk, meaning ‘Two-EyedSeeing’. Etuaptmumk comes from the Mi’kmaw language of easternCanada and Maine, and was developed by Elders Dr Albert Marshalland Murdina Marshall.

‘Yes, ofcourse we have science! We’ve been saying that for years, but noone will listen.’

Science is something anyone can do, and everyone has done. Theprocess on paper is simple: closely observe the world, test what you learn,and transmit it to future generations. Just because Indigenous cultureshave done this without test tubes doesn’t make them unscientific—justdifferent.

The HTMLLabelElement.htmlFor property reflects the value of the for content property.

Research shows that people who are asked to write on complex topics,instead of being allowed to talk and gesture about them, end up reasoning lessastutely and drawing fewer inferences.

I caution against investing too much in the image of a little person in your brain who acts in this manner. Executive control is a function, not a person. (If you posit a little person inside your brain, you still have the problem of describing how that little person makes decisions

immediately purchased

ue un ingeniero y científico estadounidense.[1]​ Es conocido por el papel político que tuvo en el desarrollo de la bomba atómica y por su idea Memex

At the back of Dr Duncan's book on the topic, Index, A History Of The, he includes not one but two indexes, in order to make a point.

Also, we shouldn’t underestimate the advantages of writing. In oralpresentations, we easily get away with unfounded claims. We candistract from argumentative gaps with confident gestures or drop acasual “you know what I mean” irrespective of whether we knowwhat we meant. In writing, these manoeuvres are a little too obvious.It is easy to check a statement like: “But that is what I said!” Themost important advantage of writing is that it helps us to confrontourselves when we do not understand something as well as wewould like to believe.

Taking smart notes is the deliberate practice ofthese skills. Mere reading, underlining sentences and hoping toremember the content is not.

Probably the best method is to take notes – not excerpts, butcondensed reformulated accounts of a text.

Different independent studies indicate that writing byhand facilitates understanding. In a small but fascinating study, twopsychologists tried to find out if it made a difference if students in alecture took notes by hand or by typing them into their laptops(Mueller and Oppenheimer 2014). They were not able to find anydifference in terms of the number of facts the students were able toremember. But in terms of understanding the content of the lecture,the students who took their notes by hand came out much, muchbetter. After a week, this difference in understanding was still clearlymeasurable.

speaks about how each of us can, like her, become a creative genius

Then, in 1862, Abraham Lincoln pulled the ultimate Manifest Destiny power move with the Homestead Act.

For most people, the most efficient method to get a quality paper done is to sit down and write it. Short of a project like a dissertation, most people can handle the organization of an essay without a lot of front-loading.  Predictably, then, kids start resenting being forced to outline for no reason. Ditto studying habits or notetaking; most of my “good” students hate taking notes because … why should they bother? They’re going to remember most of what they actually need to know without having to study, not least of which because they’re more likely to be tested on skills than knowledge.

Values, rather than numbers, should drive decision-making. Ask whether what you measure accurately reflects your priorities. Many of our most cherished values are not amenable to quantitative measurement.

Different people have different responses to technology, even on the same platform. Scholars call this phenomenon “differential susceptibility” to media effects among a subgroup of people, and it holds equally for the differential well-being and mental health impacts of social media on young adults.

Node is entirely at liberty to limit the design the same way we crash the process on errors (which browsers do not).

Point being (again), definitions seem to differ, and what you call "full stack" is what I call "batteries-included framework". Full stack simply means (for me) that it gives you a way of building frontend and backend code, but implies nothing about what functionality is included in either part.

Nothing in "full-stack" requires having a validation library in order for it to be full-stack, that would more be leaning towards the "batteries included" approach to a framework instead of strictly being about "full-stack".

but you want to style your components yourself and not be constrained by existing design systems like Material UI

I'm using both - the 401 for unauthenticated users, the 403 for authenticated users with insufficient permissions.

There's a problem with 401 Unauthorized, the HTTP status code for authentication errors. And that’s just it: it’s for authentication, not authorization. Receiving a 401 response is the server telling you, “you aren’t authenticated–either not authenticated at all or authenticated incorrectly–but please reauthenticate and try again.” To help you out, it will always include a WWW-Authenticate header that describes how to authenticate.

So, for authorization I use the 403 Forbidden response. It’s permanent, it’s tied to my application logic, and it’s a more concrete response than a 401. Receiving a 403 response is the server telling you, “I’m sorry. I know who you are–I believe who you say you are–but you just don’t have permission to access this resource. Maybe if you ask the system administrator nicely, you’ll get permission. But please don’t bother me again until your predicament changes.”

+----------------------- | RESOURCE EXISTS ? (if private it is often checked AFTER auth check) +----------------------- | | NO | v YES v +----------------------- 404 | IS LOGGED-IN ? (authenticated, aka user session) or +----------------------- 401 | | 403 NO | | YES 3xx v v 401 +----------------------- (404 no reveal) | CAN ACCESS RESOURCE ? (permission, authorized, ...) or +----------------------- redirect | | to login NO | | YES | | v v 403 OK 200, redirect, ... (or 404: no reveal) (or 404: resource does not exist if private) (or 3xx: redirection)

Indicates that though the request was valid, the server refuses to respond to it. Unlike the 401 status code, providing authentication will not change the outcome.

software design on the scale of decades: every detail is intended to promote software longevity and independent evolution. Many of the constraints are directly opposed to short-term efficiency. Unfortunately, people are fairly good at short-term design, and usually awful at long-term design

it seems we’re moving to that direction

If your data is high quality, you want improved taxonomic resolution, and you are not concerned about the intra-genomic heterogeneity in the targeted marker genes, an ESV-based approach could be advantageous. Otherwise, a more standard OTU-based approach might be your best bet.

JavaScript is actually surprisingly fast because the demand for fast web browsers is huge

Instead, [Peter was saying] they do it all probablistically.

Type aliases and interfaces are very similar, and in many cases you can choose between them freely. Almost all features of an interface are available in type, the key distinction is that a type cannot be re-opened to add new properties vs an interface which is always extendable.

POC vs MVP: What to Choose to Build a Great ProductDmitryCEOMVPHomeBlogEntrepreneurshipPOC vs MVP: What to Choose to Build a Great ProductPublishedNov 10, 2021UpdatedNov 11, 202115 min readWhen it comes to creating a new product or implementing a new feature, you need to test it first. The best way to do so is to check your idea with the appropriate steps. There are several software product stages: PoC, prototype, MVP, etc. What is the difference between proof of concept vs. MVP? Why are these stages essential? When should you build a Minimum Viable Product? This article focuses on two fundamental approaches that help test your idea quickly and create a successful solution.

we could look at at these sort of transitions in a sort of a two-dimensional uh graph in a sense and so we can start out and say okay groups can have more or 00:09:22 less conflict within them and groups can have more or less cooperation occurring within them and so if they are 00:09:34 down here in the left hand lower quadrant you basically are looking at more or less individuals so competitors so conflict not so much cooperation 00:09:48 if you move to the right hand side you start to form simple groups again individuals may come together to reap certain benefits and these benefits can be as simple as sort of 00:10:01 a selfish herd reducing predator risk predation risk and so on so not necessarily a lot of overt cooperation not necessarily a lot of 00:10:14 conflict going on then as you move to the upper left-hand quadrant you have groups that are now societies in other words there there might be rules as to who belongs 00:10:27 to the group uh there might be more cooperation within that within that group but also more conflict in the sense that the cooperation is producing benefits 00:10:38 and there may be conflicts over who is required to actually produce the benefits and how those benefits are actually shared within that group and then finally 00:10:49 uh if you can reduce that conflict uh such that everyone everyone more or less cooperates and doesn't doesn't there's the in any senses conflict with each other you can 00:11:02 actually turn the group into or the society into a coherent uh single organism at which point you may go back and start the whole process again

online is different for different disciplines; labs will need more

Alternatively, you could create a weak relationship: interface WeakHashmap<V> { [key: string]: V[keyof V]; }

type Hashmap<K, V> = { [k in K]: V; }

Many of the types here should have been built-in. You can help by suggesting some of them to the TypeScript project.

// Second case (unexpected) interface C { [x:string]: number } interface D { x: number } const d: D = { x: 1 }; const c: C = d; // error // Type 'D' is not assignable to type 'C'. // Index signature is missing in type 'D'.

So now the question is, why does Session, an interface, not get implicit index signatures while SessionType, an identically-structured typealias, *does*? Surely, you might again think, the compiler does not simply deny implicit index signatures tointerface` types? Surprisingly enough, this is exactly what happens. See microsoft/TypeScript#15300, specifically this comment: Just to fill people in, this behavior is currently by design. Because interfaces can be augmented by additional declarations but type aliases can't, it's "safer" (heavy quotes on that one) to infer an implicit index signature for type aliases than for interfaces. But we'll consider doing it for interfaces as well if that seems to make sense And there you go. You cannot use a Session in place of a WithAdditionalParams<Session> because it's possible that someone might merge properties that conflict with the index signature at some later date. Whether or not that is a compelling reason is up for rather vigorous debate, as you can see if you read through microsoft/TypeScript#15300.

Check whether a value is defined (non-nullable), meaning it is neither `null` or `undefined`. This can be useful as a type guard, as for example, `[1, null].filter(Boolean)` does not always type-guard correctly.

The type-fest package contains only types, meaning they are only used at compile-time and nothing is ever compiled into actual JavaScript code. This package contains functions that are compiled into JavaScript code and used at runtime.

I very much agree with you that the “American” practice of forcing punctuation inside a close quote is absurd.

In addition, Google designed Chromium to be easy and intuitive for users, which means they compromise on transparency and control of internal operations.

I like minimal languages and I have dwelled in the realm of Smalltalk minimalism for a long time, and as a Smalltalker I am also accustomed to a very high level of productivity, interactivity and sophistication of development environment. Nim may be productive once you get going - in fact - many people say they indeed are. But when it comes to interactivity and development environment, its very … early in the game.

if you're going to try to claim he's somehow "privileged"

Hoy en día están en boga términos como aprendiza-je colaborativo y aprendizaje cooperativo. Estos dos pro-cesos de aprendizaje se diferencian principalmente enque en el primero los alumnos son quienes diseñan suestructura de interacciones y mantienen el control sobrelas diferentes decisiones que repercuten en su aprendi-zaje, mientras que en el segundo, es el profesor quiendiseña y mantiene casi por completo el control de laestructura de interacciones y de los resultados que se hande obtener [Pani97]. En el aprendizaje cooperativo se da,esencialmente, una división de tareas; en el aprendizajecolaborativo se necesita estructurar interdependenciaspositivas para lograr una cohesión grupal

re had evolved, which the propagandists of discipline regarded with dismay. Josiah Tucker, the dean of Gloucester, declared in 1745 that "the lower class of people" were utterly degenerated. Foreigners (he sermonized) found "the common people of our populous cities to be the most abandoned, and licentious wretches on earth

Some studies in the field of physics education found that students’ understanding of the subject is less accurate after an introductory college physics course.

Continual engagement with the mental rigors of modern life coincided in many parts of the world with improving nutrition, rising living conditions and reduced exposure to pathogens. These factors produced a century-long climb in average I.Q. scores — a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect, after James Flynn, the political philosopher who identified it.

Couldn't start client Svelte

the bug is actually in webpack, related to fs in the web target.

You can help make Node.js and browsers more unified. For example, Node.js has util.promisify, which is commonly used. I don’t understand why such an essential method is not also available in browsers. In turn, browsers have APIs that Node.js should have. For example, fetch, Web Streams (The Node.js stream module is awful), Web Crypto (I’ve heard rumors this one is coming), Websockets, etc.

The main reason I love Node.js is that I don’t have to deal with the awfulness that is JS front-end tooling.

Cut a dado groove with a 3/4” diameter router bit and you’ll almost certainly have a too-loose joint when you try to plug some 3/4” plywood in place. Under the guise of metrification, sheet material thicknesses have all shrank enough to cause problems with joinery if you rely on the old, Imperial thickness designations. And besides, material thickness varies enough from sheet to sheet that it can make a difference when it comes to prominent joinery. This is even true in the USA that still uses Imperial more or less exclusively. Sheet goods remain thinner than their name specifies.

Side note: When I flagged yours as a dupe during review, the review system slapped me in the face and seriously accused me of not paying attention, a ridiculous claim by itself since locating a (potential) dupe requires quite a lot of attention.

Airtable evolves with you and your team, so you can build a solution with increasing sophistication and capability.

therefore in practice it's a bit academic to worry about which lines inside that block the compiler should be happy or unhappy about. From falsehood, anythihng follows. So the compiler is free to say "if the impossible happens, then X is an error" or "if the impossible happens, then X is not an error". Both are valid (although one might be more or less surprising to developers).

Introduced in the perfectly named “Typescript and validations at runtime boundaries” article @lorefnon, io-ts is an active library that aim to solve the same problem as Spicery:TypeScript compatible runtime type system for IO decoding/encoding

It means that when having a type guard:TypeScript and JavaScript runtime are tied to the same behaviour.

Inside the if statement, TypeScript will assume that amount cannot be anything else than a string, which is true also at the runtime thanks to typeof JavaScript operator.

there’s no spec for a search engine, since youcan’t write code for “deliver links to the 10 web pages that best match the customer’s intent”

when you're reading some fresh code in your browser, do you really want to stop to configure that test harness

il faut envisager ici l’échelle de la machine en adéquation avec celles des énergies terrestres et concevoir des structures qui, dans le temps, épouseront les cycles de l’ère géologique que nous habitons

Are you more comfortable with multiple inheritances that modules provide, or do you prefer composition?

as a more experienced user I know one can navigate much more quickly using a terminal than using the hunt and peck style of most file system GUIs

consumer friendly

There is a tendency to hold unrealistic expectations regarding “spiritual”leaders and teachers, and likewise for what spiritual practice might eventually do for ourselves. One is that mindfulness and Insightcan somehow magically transcend the causes and conditions that shaped ourlives and personalities. To paraphrase the Buddha, what arises in dependence on causes and conditions onlyceases dueto causes and conditions! Meditation and dharma practice create the specific causes and conditions for certain things to arise and others to pass away–but not everythingwe might wish for. Ihave discovereddeeply embeddedautomatic patterns of respondingin fundamentally unhealthy waysto certain situations. Theseautomatic response patterns are the productof an extreme emotionally, psychologically, and physically traumatic childhood, compounded by coping methods I developed in the decade or so after leaving home at 15. From being a homeless adolescent living on the streets, never attending much less graduating high school, I obtained a PhD andhaveled a successful and rewarding professional and spiritual life. However, those conditioned response patterns and coping strategies that had served me well in a life with such difficult beginningswere ultimately disastrous –in my interactions with my wife,then whenconfronted bythe Board of Dharma Treasure. Within themlies the root of much of my unskillfulness.The personal work and therapy I’m doing now continues to clarify these. Becoming aware of them has allowed me to make progress in overcoming them.What I realized through working with my therapist and a life coach was that, for all my life,I’ve had almost no ability to establish and maintain clearpersonal boundariesin interpersonal interactions. If someone was upset, angry, hurt, disappointed, afraidorwhatever, I tendedtotakepersonal responsibilityfor their mental state. Regardless of the cause, or whether or not I hadanything to do with their being upset.Or even the reasonableness or unreasonableness of their reactions!Iwouldbecome inappropriately over-committed to relieving their distress, and likewise inappropriately over-committed in every other part of my life as well. I havealsobeenextremelyconflictavoidant.When confronted with angerand/or aggression,I woulddo almost anything to placate. Itendedto avoid conflict by beingexcessively compliant, acquiescingtoo quickly, andengaginginvariousconflict avoidance strategies.I too readily acceptedtheviews ofothers,or triedto find waysto side-step issues of conflict, to relieve another’s pain and anger whiledisregarding the cost to myself or future consequences. If attempts to placate failed, and full-blown conflict seemedinevitable, I wouldoften disengage, withdraw, surrender, and even take a beating if necessary.

Then, client apps can show the error messages to end users, so they might correct the right fields in a form, for example.

In general, top-level errors should only be used for exceptional circumstances when a developer should be made aware that the system had some kind of problem. For example, the GraphQL specification says that when a non-null field returns nil, an error should be added to the "errors" key. This kind of error is not recoverable by the client. Instead, something on the server should be fixed to handle this case. When you want to notify a client some kind of recoverable issue, consider making error messages part of the schema, for example, as in mutation errors.

to be honest I think it is more about sentiment than actual engineering practices now.

Runs headless by default, but you can configure it to run in a headful mode.

When it came to testing the whole product, end-to-end, owning both sides gave us not only more options to consider, but also more tools to choose from.

We chose to define the frontend in one technology stack (Angular+TypeScript/JavaScript) and the backend in another (Ruby+Ruby on Rails), but both came together to fulfill a singular product vision.

Process based parallelisation is simpler than thread based due to well, the GIL on MRI rubies and lack of 100% thread safety within the other gems. (I'm fairly certain for example that there are threaded bugs lurking within the mocks code).

Parallel testing in this implementation utilizes forking processes over threads. The reason we (tenderlove and eileencodes) chose forking processes over threads is forking will be faster with single databases, which most applications will use locally. Using threads is beneficial when tests are IO bound but the majority of tests are not IO bound.

The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford  described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.”

a principle I use is: If you have an accessor, use the accessor rather than the raw variable or mechanism it's hiding. The raw variable is the implementation, the accessor is the interface. Should I ignore the interface because I'm internal to the instance? I wouldn't if it was an attr_accessor.

Also, Sandi Metz mentions this in POODR. As I recall, she also advocates wrapping bare instance variables in methods, even when they're only used internally. It helps avoid mad refactoring later.

But suddenly I'm using a raw instance variable, which makes me twitch. I mean, if I needed to process has_sauce before setting at a future date, I'd potentially need to do a lot more refactoring than just overriding the accessor.

And this has some immediate benefits: more efficiency, significantly faster to process, supports indexing (which can be a significant advantage, as we'll see later), simpler schema designs (replacing entity-attribute-value (EAV) tables with jsonb columns, which can be queried, indexed and joined, allowing for performance improvements up until 1000X!)

Besides efficiency, there are extra ways in which you can benefit from storing JSON in binary form. One such enhancement is the GIN (Generalized Inverted Index) indexes and a new brand of operators that come with them.

The field/element/path extraction operators return NULL, rather than failing, if the JSON input does not have the right structure to match the request; for example if no such key or array element exists.

The globalThis property provides a standard way of accessing the global this value (and hence the global object itself) across environments. Unlike similar properties such as window and self, it's guaranteed to work in window and non-window contexts. In this way, you can access the global object in a consistent manner without having to know which environment the code is being run in.

Unlike browsers, you can access raw Set-Cookie headers manually using Headers.raw(). This is a node-fetch only API.

graphqlSync is a relatively recent addition to GraphQL.js that lets you execute a query that you know is going to return synchronously and get the result right away, rather than getting a promise. Since we know that introspection won’t require calling any asynchronous resources, we can safely use it here.

contact the API layer using internal DNS hostname of the API service for better latency. It can go straight to the application load balancer instead of passing through the external load balancer first

Nowadays when I want technical support I will email my web host and give them all the necessary information, i.e. what I have tried to do to resolve, what I think the problem is etc and usually it is fixed first time within a few hours. If I need urgent assistance I will ring them but 99% of the time email is sufficient and less stressful, rarely do I need to send a second email.

If you email helpdesk (us specifically), if you use appropriate technical detail you will probably get someone who knows what they're doing, and will greatly appreciate it. If you call, you will get me only. I will ask you lots of questions, with awkward pauses in between while I write my notes, and at the end of it I probably won't be able to help you. Technical detail is still welcome, but there are some questions I will ask you anyway even if they sound useless to you

Calling over e-mailing has a number of advantages, you're able to empathize with the person and they're able to hear how comfortable you are with the topic over the phone.

More importantly, using a plain email would save lots of time and effort. As a goal-driven-lazy person, that’s a good enough reason to start experimenting.

They don't look like advertisements. The second the recipient interprets your email as an ad, promotion, or sales pitch—and it does take just a second—its chances of being read or acted upon plummet towards zero. A plain email leads people to start reading it before jumping to conclusions.

They feel more personal. It's no handwritten note, but it's much more personal than an over-designed email with the recipient's first name crammed somewhere inside.

The plain, unstyled emails resulted in more opens, clicks, replies, and conversions, every time.

They're less likely to go into the "Promotions" tab in Gmail (used by ~16% of all email users), for the same reasons above. From my testing, the plain emails typically end up in the Updates tab and some times even in the primary tab. Of course, the text in the email also affects this.

The plain email—which took no time to design or code—was opened by more recipients and had 3.3x more clicks than the designed email.

Email tools/clients are inconsistent in how they render HTML and CSS. A designed email might look great in Gmail, broken in Outlook, and unreadable in Apple Mail. Half of all emails are opened on mobile devices (according to one study). Email looks good in different clients? Great, now make it work on a 4" screen just as well as on a desktop.

But decentralized learning goes farther than that: in a decentralized, Collaborative Learning environment, each team member participates in the learning process. They can identify their learning needs, request courses, give feedback on existing courses, and create courses themselves. We call this a bottom-up approach