Hate remembering passwords? Or do you ever get frustrated after you've worked hard to score well on a quiz - only to find that you weren't signed in and your score wasn't recorded? This actually happens quite a bit. It could be that you took a break and got timed out (sessions time out after 90 minutes of inactivity), or it might simply be that you forgot to sign in at all. We've created a 'stay signed in' solution to this problem.
All you need to do is check the box on the sign in page that says, 'Keep me signed in'. This will ensure you never have to sign in again from that device. It works by creating a small cookie in your browser that links your computer/laptop/tablet/phone with your account. After you sign-in with this selected, you will always be connected on that device. Anytime you visit Lizard Point, for up to a year later, you will be automatically connected to your account. However, there are a few important points to remember:
Don't use this on a shared device. Anyone else accessing that device can connect to Lizard Point - as you - and perhaps mess up your account. It's even possible for someone to copy your cookie and use it later on a different device to impersonate you.
You can't stay signed in to your account from two different devices. If you have selected 'keep me signed in' from one device, and then select it from a second device, your first device will no longer be able to automatically sign in. (But you can have one device automatically sign in and have another sign in the normal way).
If you ever want to disable the 'stay signed in' feature - just click Sign out. This will invalidate the cookie on your device. You will have to sign in with your password to reset it if you wish.
And, of course, if you clean out your cookies for whatever reason, or switch to a different browser - you will have to re-sign in and check the box again.
We're hoping this feature is useful for you, and encourages you to do even more quizzes.
When we implemented custom quizzes a few months back, all custom quizzes had the same behavior: if a country, France for example, isn't included in the customized version of the Europe quiz, it is coloured differently (a very light white-grey) to make it plainly obvious that it is not in the quiz. And if you click on it, the response is "France is not included in this quiz. No points lost. Try again", and you still have the same number of tries left - that is, it does NOT count as a guess.
This set-up works out quite well when you're trying to learn a smaller chunk of what might otherwise be an overwhelming quiz: it lets you focus on just what you need to learn.
But when it comes to test time, your teacher probably isn't going to cross out the countries you don't need to know. So we're now offering a choice of 2 options when you set up your custom quizzes:
colour the excluded areas normally (and scoring penalty for any wrong answer)
colour the excluded areas grey (and guesses to excluded areas do not count as a guess)
I've set up 2 sample quizzes so you can see the difference. Each quiz has the exact same set of 5 questions: United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and Portugal. One quiz has the all the excluded areas coloured normally, and the other quiz has excluded areas coloured grey. Go ahead and try them out and see the difference... click on France to see the difference. (If you're not sure where France is, use the labels on button and look for France).
When you create a custom quiz, the way you select which option you want is just above the list of places you can choose, as shown in this screenshot:
When you are selecting your countries to include in your custom quiz, you will not see the difference on the map - you won't see the effect of it until you save the quiz.
If you don't like the option you chose, you can always, at any time, edit your quiz and switch options.
Need a reminder of what the options mean? Hold your mouse over the question mark icons (or tap on your touch screen) to see the explanation:
Anytime there's a new 'thing' combining geography and geeky - you know someone at Lizard Point is going to be on it. UK's Geographical site just published a piece describing how the British Geological Service (BGS) has recently completed a rendering of Great Britain done entirely in MicroSoft's wildly popular Minecraft world.
Minecraft is one of the most popular videogames in the world, especially among children. It's in a class of games called massively multiplayer online games (MMO). These games place the player in immersive environments where they can interact with other players and explore their environment. Minecraft is particularly interesting as it gives the players the ability to actually create and shape the worlds that they are exploring.
It would be incredibly interesting to simply explore existing surface geography in the Minecraft world, but the BGS has taken it another step further, or deeper. Steven Richardson, the geospatial applications developer at the BGS, says ‘we added the geological data too so that when players are looking at this map, they’re not just seeing where the M1 goes upcountry, they can dig down into the blocks and see what the geology is. It adds a third dimension to this data’.
It isn't hard to imagine the educational possibilities that this presents geographers. Instead of lecturing alone, or poring over maps - Minecraft would actually provide students a way to immersively experience the world and (in this case) see the geological layers under their feet.
We just got a nice email from a trivia fan telling us how much he and his kids enjoyed the quizzes. It reminded me that I'd been meaning to do a blog post on the making of the quizzes.
We started publishing them last summer, and we now have about 66 available. Our overall average score comes in at around 60% (remember, though, that we only record completed quizzes - and I have a feeling that some of the really tough ones don't get completed). You can see from the chart below that our all-time high average score was 80%. That was on April 19th, 2015. Pretty well every question on that quiz was answered smartly. The toughest ones score an average of about 45%.
The question that you all found the easiest (97%) was identifying the pictured G20 leader on Jan 25th, 2015 (but then, he is a fairly well known politician). And the toughest (23%) was this: Which of the following cities is most populous (metro population)? Seoul, Mumbai, Calcutta, Mexico City. That question was asked on November 16th, 2014.
By the way, we always state the average score on the quiz after you complete it, so you can compare your score to other Lizard Point quiz-takers. The quizzes are published at midnight EST on Sunday mornings. Real early birds won't see the average score since we collect a few hundred before publishing the average.
We try to make the questions engaging - and we do take any feedback we get to heart. So you'll see we've reduced some of the unpopular questions (like distances between cities). We try to focus on geography - but you will also see a sprinkling of questions on astronomy, geology, history, climate etc... We'd love to hear more from you about types of questions you'd like to see (comment, comment).
This year the National Geographic Society marks the 100th anniversary of their cartographic department. And Geography Awareness week seemed a good time to celebrate this milestone. The magazine's current issue features stories on some of the more interesting maps produced over the last century.
In reviewing it, you just can't help but be impressed with the breadth of maps and the unbelievable detail needed to render accurate, timely documents. One illustration shows some of the work necessary after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. This event necessitated changes to 90% of the place names in the Ukraine alone. I was certaintly struck by how manual this whole process looked. (At Lizard Point we are well aware of the detailed work involved in adjusting maps - but at least we do it all with programs and databases). In the case of the Ukraine, the illustration below shows printing and pointers overlaid on an analog map plate.
With a century of history to draw on, the National Geographic also has many rich memories. They feature the map that General Dwight D. Eisenhower carred across Germany during the Allied offensive in 1945. They also mention the story of Admiral Chester Nimitz landing lost in a rainstorm, utilizing the Society's map of the Pacific war theatre.
One featured map from 1968 really caught our attention. It charts the map of the floor of the Atlantic Ocean based on work of early geophysicists. Besides the beauty of the art work, what really stands out is the degree of detailed elevation in a part of the world that we are used to seeing as a uniform, flat, pale blue. This map brings home the reality of plate tectonics in a way that thousands of words could never convey.
The article closes with some words on the future of cartography with some tantalizing comments on the role of 'crowdsourced' cartography and the use of wearable technologies to increase the capture of geo-data. We can't wait.