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Messages - Chris

#31
General Discussion / Re: szm-files locked
December 06, 2009, 08:53:26 AM
If you don't have a license, the files are locked after some time. This is to remember that using Stackz without license is only permitted for the trial phase, not for a longer time. (Nevertheless, you can unlock the files even without license - but it will reset the learning statistics in your file...) So if you have a license, simply enter the license code and they will become unlocked.

The mail issue is probably not related to Stackz, but to your operating system and its settings...
#32
Please note that the Match Dialog only accepts successful matches if all the entries are selected for the first time - otherwise one could try and error until a lucky match occurs. Maybe that clears the situation, or are you referring to a different issue?
#34
The Stackz Wordlists / Re: Edit Attributes
August 31, 2009, 11:34:44 AM
Quote from: cweinhofer on August 31, 2009, 03:30:20 AM
The problem is that I have no way of sorting the remaining unmemorized vocabulary for priority without altering the current file (which is broken into lessons and reviewed periodically )beyond what I would prefer.

For the time being I can use your suggestion above to artificially move the unmemorized but un-useful words up to level 5 and where they can be more easily ignored.

You are right, there is no concept in Stackz at the moment of classifying the entries according to "relevance" or "importance". Every entry is considered as of equal relevance.

Your idea certainly will work fine, but only with the ColorMode "RepeatAdvisor", with difficulty estimation set to "promotion level". In this setting, the repetition interval depends on the card's refresh date and the promotion level (longer for high promotion levels, see Repeat Advisor ColorMode detail settings). The other ColorModes are based on the card refresh date and/or past success/failure counts, which does not depend on the promotion level.

Background: The ColorMode visualizes the card's "good or bad" state with a color, and the study tools process the selected cards in the "bad to good" order. The ColorMode "RefreshDate" simply uses the last positive test for classification (the oldest card is processed first). The RepeatAdvisor extends the RefreshDate algorithm by highlighting (and processing first) the cards that are "overdue", i.e. "current difficulty estimation is worse than the threshold (for this level)". This corresponds to the well known "spaced repetition" algorithm.

The question is just whether you want to have the "not so important" words in your list in the first place. You could also move those cards to different lessons (e.g. "Lesson 1 optional", or "all optional words") or even to a special file. But then you would have to decide yourself when you want to study those words, as opposoed to the algorithm telling you to look at a less relevant word (while you are studying relevant words).

Future considerations in the Stackz system go in the direction of adding "flags" for the entries. A parameter "relevance" could be an extended flag (or parameter). Such developments have low priority at the moment, and we also try to avoid overloading the system.
#35
The Stackz Wordlists / Re: Edit Attributes
August 24, 2009, 02:27:24 PM
The "test state" represents the statistics of your test activities, i.e. how many times the word was declared as known or unknown. You can't alter these values, but you can reset them.

The "level" corresponds to the column where the card is located. You can move the cards manually to a different level, e.g. using the cut and paste functionality. Or, in the stack edit dialog, use the context menu "maintenance/move to stack...".

To isolate some words, the recommended practice is to group them into a lesson. Cards can be moved from one lesson to another in the same way it can be moved from one level to another (cut/paste).

In what way would you like to isolate cards? If it is according to the "type of word", then it is best to split the cards into individual lessons representing the required types. If it is according the current learning state, then using the accumulated "test state" (without modifiying) in combination with the appropriate "ColorMode" would be the best solution.

Please note that at the moment there are no "tags" that can be attached to the cards and then be used for isolating matching cards.
#36
If you use "add to new lesson", it will be placed in the leftmost stack. When using "add to selected lesson", then it is added to the central stack indeed - we will have a look at this problem!
#37
Yes of course we are still here, at the moment we focus our efforts mainly in preparation work for future ideas. Your question seems not to have received the attention it merits... thank you for reminding us about this unsolved problem, we will try to improve our reaction time.

Our mobile developer had a first look at this when I last talked to him, but he did not find the time to completely solve it yet. He promised me to attack it as soon as he can.

Please apologize the unusual long delay of this issue!
#38
The feature is already there, you can edit the currently tested/learned card. Deleting it is not supported, but you can add a comment, e.g. "TO_BE_DELETED" or so, and later on search for the entries with this comment in the stack edit dialog, where you can then delete them.
#39
We are facing a very busy time at the moment, and development time is rare... but we are still looking into this platform and doing some progress. But please don't expect a real application soon.
#40
There has been only little progress in the last few weeks due to a lack of time... we hope to come up with a first version in the next few months.
#41
Stackz - New Feature Requests / Re: "Pause" feature
January 19, 2009, 09:21:47 PM
What you are looking for is called "revert to last test", which can be found in the "admin" submenu of the stack context menu. This function moves all test statistics forward for the number of days without any tests.

Some Additional notes:
Learning breaks are not really a special situation for the Stackz system because highlighting all cards that have not been refreshed for a certain period is the one fundamental function of Stackz. Sure, the highlighting refresh interval that has been useful during an intensive learning phase will highlight much more cards after a learning break, most likely leading to a situation where ?everything must be refreshed?.

There are three ways how one can cope with this situation:

  • Accept this situation as the correct representation of the current proficiency state and stick to the currently chosen tight refresh interval. The missed work must be done in the coming days, i.e. the huge highlighted collection must be reduced bite by bite. Here it is a good idea to do this catch up work in a meaningful way, i.e. start with the more relevant lessons and postpone the less relevant ones - maybe for a very long time :-)
  • Loosen the refresh interval, i.e. allowing longer repetition delays. The original tight refresh interval can be re-established step by step. This is basically the same solution as above, but a bit less frustrating because there are less highlighted cards in the beginning - but there is no manual decision what refresh material can be postponed.
  • Use the ?revert to last test? function. This causes the delay to disappear completely, i.e. the color statistics do not reflect the real refresh need (do not simulate the forgetting curve of the brain). Simply expect more tests to be negative, which on the long run has the same effect as the solutions above (increasing the highlighted part step by step).

A long discussion in german can be found in this forum, where Stackz users discuss the same thing:
http://20718.rapidforum.com/topic=102475894867&startid=6#p247589486731533166
#42
We try to make our tools affordable for people with little financial power who are using our tools for their studies so we lowered the price for students. The limitation to language courses is there to emphasize the intention. In addition, we try to encourage beginners (1st grade = 1st year) with a special discount, this is more a motivation boost for them than anyting else because the start is the hardest part.

Of course we are also interested in people following a course because they might then recommend our tool to their fellow students... :-)

We inspect the discount applications, if there is a doubt we contact the applicant to find out the situation and to negotiate the discount.

Besides, please also note our bigger 50% discount for anyone providing a wordlist, this is the better deal than the raw discount for anyone who is willing to share their wordlist with us.

Please do not hesitate to contact us per email if you are still not sure about your personal discount situation.
#43
PocketStackz / Re: Which pocket Pc ?
November 08, 2008, 05:59:05 PM
This seems to be an ARM architecture as well, check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XScale.

#44
a bit more than one year... but now I finally managed to fix the problem with opening your files.

The libraries used with Stackz 7.0 or later does not accept some non-standard characters, which resulted in a load failure. They were accepted in the libraries used in older Stackz versions... These are non-vital characters that were probably included in the text that you copied from somewhere.

The latest version, Stackz 7.1.01, detects these incompatible characters and replaces them with a '?' character when opening the file. It informs about the changes made in a dialog box when opening the file. It is easy to manually fix the concerned parts of the corrected file afterwards.
#45
Thank you for your continuous useful input, Tarix!

In fact it was only three days ago when I started implementing what I have mentioned in this thread more than one year ago:
Quote from: Chris on June 07, 2007, 03:18:51 AM
Note:
The extended fail/pass function, translated to the Stackz world, would be a "directly send to level x". This would speed up the classification, but at the cost of lower accuracy (the success ratio is based on repeated tests). In addition, the user interface would become more complex, which we try very very hard to keep at an absolute minimum. But this has been requested before, and if more people wish it, we will introduce that one day. But not in the next release :-)

Now the time of this feature has finally come, and I think I found a way to integrate the new feature seamlessly in the existing context.

I added a new "promotion system" called "manual distribution" that painlessly extends the existing two promotion systems:


Now the bigger departure is to get rid of the arrow buttons in the study dialogs. If this system is selected, we need some sort of direct "send to" buttons.
Something like that:



Note that you can define your own labels for the five levels and use them for whatever purpose you want. Of course it makes sense to use this in combination with the RepeatAdvisor ColorMode, where you can define the repetition delay for each level individually:



I feel that there is little complexity added to the program; in fact many existing concepts can be easily extended with the new ideas.

Things that must be sorted out are:

  • In this mode, one would probably expect that the entries are refreshed even if moved to the left. Stackz up to now only considers a positive test as a relevant point in time; negative tests are not resetting the appearance delay of a card (it may come at a later day if moved to a column with a longer delay, but the wait period will only consist of the delay difference). Now I feel that this will have to change for the new mode - if the card is sent to a level on the left, it should NOT appear until the entire waiting time of that level is over - after all I sent it intentionally to that column with that delay in mind. That's why I tried adding the option "Mark entries as refreshed" on the bottom of the first screenshot. Currently it's hardcoded to the suboptimal version as the checked radio button indicates.
  • Now this "mark entries as refreshed" option could become a global option, allowing the user to adjust the refresh style for the other modes as well. I guess then it would be easier to understand for a new user because the overall feature would be more symmetric..?
  • Another side effect comes from the fact that the proposed design intentionally allows treating the 5 levels as unrelated decks of cards, not necessairly as linked steps in a process. I could e.g. name them according to the days of the week, and simply process the "due stack" each day, manually pushing the card to the day when I will review it again. Or I might want to separate the words according to their importance... or any other criterion, I'm sure the users will have other ideas. And the existing concept would allow that without problems as long as the user knows what he is doing. BUT: what happens to the "success count", "failure count", "success ratio" color modes? These statistics are built when moving the cards across the levels... The flexibility of allowing arbitrary level purposes introduces a problem here... one solution would be to add another option to indicte the type of dependency between the chosen level names, e.g. a checkbox "[ ] levels represent increasing proficiency" or something like that...

OK there were many thoughts in here, I hope it was not too confusing. It's mainly a "flexibility versus complexity" tradeoff.
It would be interesting to hear your comments! I will upload the current version in the latest version section for anyone interesteed.