Hi EdLabbers, In the past three weeks, I've been working closely with Daniel and Manav to implement the new UI design for Survey Sidekick. This is a very exciting moment as the page is getting more and more beautiful and user friendly. Below are some things I would love to share with you guys about the progress I've made on for Survey Sidekick. 1. Replace "Prototype" with "jquery". In the legacy version of Suvey Sidekick, the total front-end APIs were written by means of "prototype," which is an old library for javascript front-end coding. Although it is possible to create all of the fro...

Last Tuesday, International House (IHouse) welcomed a very special guest, Isaac Mizrahi. As a leader in design business for more than twenty years, Mr Mizrahi has been awarded four Council of Fashion Designers of America awards, including a special award in 1995 for the groundbreaking documentary "UNZIPPED". This time he came to IHouse to share his life stories with the hopes of inspiring younger people to pursuit their dreams. During his talk, he exhibited a sense of humor and kind of insatiable spirit as a fashion designer. He said it is very easy to become bored on what he designed, but ...

Hi EdLabbers, The last two weeks have been quite productive. For the front-end part, I finished the main edit page for users to edit, review, and analyze their surveys. Fortunately, this one is not varied a lot according to the updates from the design team. This one can be tailored and fit into a new main edit page. I also created a Django template tag to print the navigation bar. Actually the option of a new navigation bar is different from previous designs. This template tag can be easily tailored to meet the new requirements of the UI design. For the back-end part, I made diligenc...

Hi Edlabers, Yesterday after the completing of the EdLab Development & Research meeting on professional development videos and how we can use them to promote theUnderstanding Fiscal Responsibility (UFR) project, one idea suddenly occurred to me, and I would like to ask for feedback. I think this one might greatly help promote UFR as well as other EdLab projects. One way I figured out can mostly promote the ideas and let more people know about UFR is to organize an event in an influential public social forum where people can sign...

I learned some interesting techniques while working on the Survey Sidekick project, and I would love to share with you guys. I hope these will be useful and helpful to you: In PHP development, I found several techniques: 1. Calling magic: If a class implements __call(), then if an object of that class is called with a method that doesn't exist __call() is called instead. Example: (found in Survey SideKick\Models\AppModel.php.__call) /* function __call($method_name, $method_args) { return call_user_func_array( Array($this->dbms, $method_name), $method_args ); ...

Columbia Univerisity English Language Institute in China (CUELIC) Columbia University English Language Institute in China will provide specialized English language training for university students, business executives, and entrepreneurs located in Shanghai, China. Classes will focus on specific training areas that will help enhance the participants language abilities to further achieve cultural integration into their particular target populations. It will consist of highly interactive guided scenarios within small attentive classroom settings, leading to a certificate of completion. Te...

I've spent about a month working on the technique to improve the performance of Vialogues. Fortunately, big progress has been made. There are several techniques I'm using to decrease the running time of web application, and I will be pretty glad to share with all of you. 1. Efficiency improvement based on Python programming tip: There are quite a lot of blocks of code which is not written in the most efficient way. We can take advantage of the python built-in functions and technique to make it more efficient but not undermine the logic. For example, in plenty of cases, a list is def...