What I'm Reading | 2016-06-12 - 2016-06-18

June 12, 2016

We don’t even have a password for our root user yet. We’ll want to select something random and complex. We use a password manager’s password generater set to the most difficult setting.
ssh keys are better than passwords only because they contain and require more information.
There are usually two camps. Those who use IPtables directly and those who use a handy interface called ufw which is a layer on top of IPtables meant to simplify things.
fail2ban is a great package that actively blocks suspicious activity as it occurs.

Over the past decade, neuroscientists have demonstrated with increasing clarity how severe and chronic stress in childhood—what doctors sometimes call toxic stress—leads to physiological and neurological adaptations in children that affect the way their minds and bodies develop and, significantly, the way they function in school.
On a cognitive level, chronically elevated stress can disrupt the development of what are known as executive functions: higher-order mental abilities
The most important environmental factor in children’s early lives, researchers have shown, is the way their parents and other adults interact with them.
Calm, consistent, responsive interactions in infancy with parents and other caregivers create neural connections that lay the foundation for a healthy array of attention and concentration skills.
With the neurobiological research in mind, it’s easy to see that kind of behavior—refusing to do what adults tell you to do, basically—as an expression not of a bad attitude or a defiant personality but of a poorly regulated stress-response system
Farrington has distilled this voluminous mind-set research into four key beliefs that, when embraced by students, seem to contribute most significantly to their tendency to persevere in the classroom: I belong in this academic community. My ability and competence grow with my effort. I can succeed at this. This work has value for me.

when students take notes using laptops they tend to take notes verbatim, writing down every last word uttered by their professor
New research by Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer demonstrates that students who write out their notes on paper actually learn more.
Thus, taking notes by hand forces the brain to engage in some heavy “mental lifting,” and these efforts foster comprehension and retention. By contrast, when typing students can easily produce a written record of the lecture without processing its meaning, as faster typing speeds allow students to transcribe a lecture word for word without devoting much thought to the content.
Because longhand notes contain students’ own words and handwriting, they may serve as more effective memory cues by recreating the context (e.g., thought processes, emotions, conclusions) as well as content (e.g., individual facts) from the original learning session.
The research by Mueller and Oppenheimer serves as a reminder, however, that even when technology allows us to do more in less time, it does not always foster learning. Learning involves more than the receipt and the regurgitation of information.