APA 6th edition

I bought a copy of the APA Style Guide, 6th edition soon after it came out. According to this petition, it is riddled with errors, and everyone should get a corrected copy free of charge.

This makes sense if the book does indeed have so many errors. However, the petition doesn’t mention what the errors are; nor does it link to a blog post or similar where the errors are detailed. Seems a bit irresponsible to me.

Update: Here is an errata PDF  produced by the APA. And here is the APA Style Blog, which I never knew existed. An Inside Higher Ed article has more details on the situation.

Update on rackets

I was advised by my coach to restrict myself to 5-ply all-wood rackets, and as I mentioned before I wanted something light. I also decided that I should go for something that was fairly slow. My reasoning was that this would allow me to hit harder as circumstances allow with less risk of hitting off the end of the table, and also give me flexibility with rubber choices; rubbers as a whole are getting faster, and I figured that even a fast rubber probably wouldn’t be too uncontrollable if put on a slower blade.

Several of the ones I was looking at initially ruled themselves out because they contain carbon or similar materials. Others, such as the Ma Lin Extra Offensive, looked like they were a bit too fast. And anything heavy, or whose weight I was unable to find out easily, was knocked off the list. Most obviously, most blades simply aren’t available with a Chinese pen handle, so the list was short to begin with.

Since I don’t really know what’s going to suit my long term, I also decided to go cheap. And because I decided to go cheap, I eventually opted to buy two rackets with similar specs. The idea was that alternating two rackets would allow me to get a sense for how rackets differ in feel, and this would also allow me to try out 4 different rubbers.

So here’s what I got:

• Donic Appelgren Allplay Senso V1, with Yasaka New Era and Donic Vario Big Slam
• Xiom Fuga, with Andro Plasma 380 and JUIC 999 Elite Ultima.

My coach said I really needed to put the New Era aside for a year and use something softer and spinnier, so I’m thinking of replacing it with a Xiom Yanus.

Of course, trying two blades with different rubbers means it’s difficult to compare either the blade or the rubbers because each depends on the other to quite an extent. So I may try moving the rubbers around at some point.

At the moment, my feeling is that the Appelgren setup suits me best.

PowerPointless?

I agree with one of the ThinkFold people (Participo: PowerPointless?) that PowerPoint or Keynote slidestacks can lead to a lot of useful information being locked away in a pretty inaccessible way. Not taking anything away from his arguments, which are sound, but it’s always seemed to me that Apple or Microsoft could improve things with a fairly obvious change.

How about adding a metadata pane to every slide (not just every presentation), allowing us to search (and eventually, I hope, browse, too) our individual slides, independently of the slidestacks, or presentations, they belong to.

This could alleviate to some degree the “locked away” nature of a slidestack, allowing us to access the information therein as necessary, as well as repurpose individual slides in new slidestacks.

Chinese pen-style table tennis rackets

There are lots and lots of shakehand rackets available for table tennis. And, at least in Japan, there are lots of single-sided penhold rackets available, too. But it’s a bit more difficult to get hold of a good Chinese penhold racket, which have rubber on both sides and are typically quite a lot heavier than the Korean/Japanese-style penhold rackets. They also tend to be balanced so that they’re lighter on the handle end and heavier at the playing end.

Two kinds that I have seen around are the Yoshida Kaii racket, and the Ma Lin family of rackets. The Ma Lin family comes in several flavors:

• Ma Lin Extra Offensive
• Ma Lin Carbon
• Ma Lin Soft Carbon

There are some other types of Chinese-style rackets that I haven’t seen in the wild, but have found in catalogues and through net searches:

• the Kan Yo Fiber Special (80g)
• the Butterfly Chinese AL
• Waldner Senso Carbon

Does anyone have any recommendations? I think I’d like to keep the weight of the blade down to around 80g, to allow more flexibility with rubber thicknesses. But I don’t really know what 80g feels like compared to 90g, and it’s possible that weight increases from rubber thickness would dwarf 10g from the blade. Any insights?

Read free journal content in the Education Reading Room of Springer

Read free journal content in the Education Reading Room of Springer. SpringerLink offers free access to a small subset of its education journals, changing the selection every 2 months. The present selection includes Instructional Science, Volume 36, Numbers 5-6 of which are a special issue on constructivist learning environments. Well worth checking out if you don’t already have free access through a large university’s library.