Byrne and Eno: Bullish On Sound - eMusic Spotlight: "The entire recording is like a page out of the American songbook where Byrne/Eno come off more like a pomo version of Lieber and Stoller than two middle-aged avant-hipsters, seeking one more close encounter with the weird kind.
Solid. That is how I would describe the energy on Everything. Grounded, full bodied and rich, two seasoned vets taking a vintage ride out for a leisurely and beautiful tour of the soul's countryside. The energy of Taurus, especially practiced on this project is confident, unhurried and layered with resonant and multiple meanings."
Thursday, March 18
David Byrne's Journal: 02.01.10: The Good News and The Bad News and the Good news
David Byrne's Journal: 02.01.10: The Good News and The Bad News and the Good news: "...the night before at the nominee party, Tia Carrere asks me: 'What category are you nominated in?'
'We are up in the most significant and glorious category of them all: Packaging!'
'Oh, you are wrong dear, wrong. 'Best album notes' do KICK YOUR ***.'"
'We are up in the most significant and glorious category of them all: Packaging!'
'Oh, you are wrong dear, wrong. 'Best album notes' do KICK YOUR ***.'"
YouTube Blog: Broadcast Yourself
YouTube Blog: Broadcast Yourself: "For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately 'roughed up' the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko's to upload clips from computers that couldn't be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt 'very strongly' that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube."
Wednesday, March 17
Know any good music covers I should hear? | Ask MetaFilter
Know any good music covers I should hear? | Ask MetaFilter: "Know any good music covers I should hear?"
Tuesday, March 16
The Next Bison: Social Computing and Culture
The Next Bison: Social Computing and Culture: "The TED format is the most un-academic I’ve experienced. I’m not sure if I’ve ever been to a conference before where there was absolutely no interaction onstage. 18-minute talks, no questions. No panels. The speakers speak, the audience listens. And as much as the TED liturgy tells everyone that the audience are as important and interesting as the speakers, the format says otherwise."
"Jesus was a Nazi. So's your preacher" - Roger Ebert's Journal
"Jesus was a Nazi. So's your preacher" - Roger Ebert's Journal: "Beck's oversight is that all religions teach social justice. That's sort of what they're about. 'My church doesn't,' said Beck, who is a Mormon. Not for the first time, he was dead wrong, and the mountains of Utah rang with the thunder of outraged Mormon elders. I know now, and did not know before, that before statehood the Mormons in the Utah territory provided universal health care and care for the poor as a matter of their duty."
Insured, but Bankrupted Anyway - Prescriptions Blog - NYTimes.com
Insured, but Bankrupted Anyway - Prescriptions Blog - NYTimes.com: "The forecast for this year is that there will be 1.4 million to 1.5 million total bankruptcy filings. Our data say 62 percent of those will be medical. That works out to around 900,000 cases, and each one affects about 2.7 people. That makes roughly 2.4 million people who will suffer from new medical bankruptcy filings in 2009 alone."
Monday, March 15
Mark Hyman, MD: How to Rid Your Body of Mercury and Other Heavy Metals: A 3-Step Plan to Recover Your Health
Mark Hyman, MD: How to Rid Your Body of Mercury and Other Heavy Metals: A 3-Step Plan to Recover Your Health: "Besides taking a developmental history, she does a thorough laboratory evaluation, testing for numerous things. Her treatment protocols include casein- (from dairy), gluten-, allergy- and seafood-free diets, removal of amalgam fillings, and detoxification support.
Key to the treatment is careful detoxification of heavy metals after repletion of cellular nutrients, repair of gut dysfunction, and enhancement of liver detoxification chemistry. Supplements and treatments may include multivitamins and minerals, essential fatty acids, magnesium, digestive enzymes, Coenzyme Q10, and antioxidants like selenium, zinc, and vitamins C, E, and A."
Key to the treatment is careful detoxification of heavy metals after repletion of cellular nutrients, repair of gut dysfunction, and enhancement of liver detoxification chemistry. Supplements and treatments may include multivitamins and minerals, essential fatty acids, magnesium, digestive enzymes, Coenzyme Q10, and antioxidants like selenium, zinc, and vitamins C, E, and A."
Takeshi Kitano: One original gangster | Art and design | The Guardian
Takeshi Kitano: One original gangster | Art and design | The Guardian: "Kitano won the Golden Lion at the 1997 Venice film festival for Hana-Bi; the next thing he did on television was parade down the streets of Tokyo in his underwear. You wouldn't have caught Kurosawa doing that. Or even Chris Tarrant."
Sunday, March 14
E-Readers Will Survive the Onslaught of Tablets | Gadget Lab | Wired.com
E-Readers Will Survive the Onslaught of Tablets | Gadget Lab | Wired.com: "Earlier this month, Freescale announced a new processor designed exclusively for e-readers that could bring down their cost to $150 and lower."
Books of The Times - Michael Lewis’s ‘Big Short’ - Investors Foresaw Meltdown - Review - NYTimes.com
Books of The Times - Michael Lewis’s ‘Big Short’ - Investors Foresaw Meltdown - Review - NYTimes.com: "To begin with, there’s Steve Eisman, who had started out “a strident Republican” and was on his way “to becoming the financial market’s first socialist” as he grew increasingly convinced that “an entire industry, called consumer finance,” basically “existed to rip people off.” Mr. Eisman and his team “had a from-the-ground-up understanding of both the U.S. housing market and Wall Street,” Mr. Lewis writes, and by performing the sort of nitty-gritty credit analysis on mortgages (that should have been done before the loans were made in the first place), they realized that they could make a fortune by shorting the worst of the worst."
A New Breed of Guard Dog Attacks Bedbugs - NYTimes.com
A New Breed of Guard Dog Attacks Bedbugs - NYTimes.com: "Not only would he have to live with bedbugs to train and feed his new roommates, Cruiser and Freedom, he would have to feed the bugs, too. Remember that dinner for a bedbug is a nice long quaff of human blood; Mr. Ecker rolled up a sleeve to reveal a horrifying tattoo of old bites. (Bedbugs don’t carry disease, but their bites can itch like crazy.)"
Saturday, March 13
LDS.org - Support Materials Chapter - “God Will Provide Himself a Lamb” �
LDS.org - Support Materials Chapter - “God Will Provide Himself a Lamb” �: "President Hugh B. Brown said that God commanded Abraham to sacrifice Isaac because “Abraham needed to learn something about Abraham” (in Truman G. Madsen, The Highest in Us [1978], 49)"
Friday, March 12
So I'm at the library and someone had a seizure. Another patron was a former EMT, and he took care of the man until the emergency workers arrived. Many people stood around and watched. Oddly, I was reading "When You Reach Me," by Rebecca Stead. One of the characters has epilepsy. The man in the library had not taken his medicine that morning, apparently.
A few years ago I was reading some William Gibson at the Provo Borders. I was at a point in the book where there was a motorcycle chase. I heard a loud thump and apparently a young woman had ridden her boyfriend's motorcycle into the brick wall of Borders.
I need to either take EMT courses, so I can be of some help when these things happen, or quit reading.
French bread spiked with LSD in CIA experiment - Telegraph
French bread spiked with LSD in CIA experiment - Telegraph: "Mr Albarelli said the real 'smoking gun' was a White House document sent to members of the Rockefeller Commission formed in 1975 to investigate CIA abuses. It contained the names of a number of French nationals who had been secretly employed by the CIA and made direct reference to the 'Pont St. Esprit incident.' In its quest to research LSD as an offensive weapon, Mr Albarelli claims, the US army also drugged over 5,700 unwitting American servicemen between 1953 and 1965."
Thursday, March 11
Ribbon Hero
Ribbon Hero: "Ribbon Hero is a�game for�Word, PowerPoint, and Excel 2007 and 2010, designed to help you boost your Office skills and knowledge. Play games (aka 'challenges'), score points, and�compete with your friends while improving your productivity with Office.�"
A Paler Shade of White : The New Yorker
A Paler Shade of White : The New Yorker: "At the United Palace, even though the music was surging in all the right places, I was weary after six songs. My friend asked me, “Do they play everything in the same end-of-the-world style?”"
Monday, March 8
I'd like to send this letter to the Prussian consulate in Siam by aeromail. Am I too late for the 4:30 autogyro? | MetaFilter
I'd like to send this letter to the Prussian consulate in Siam by aeromail. Am I too late for the 4:30 autogyro? | MetaFilter: "I lived in England in 1977 and I remember if you didn't get up at the crack of dawn to bring your milk in, the birds would break through the foil top and drink the cream."
Rage on the Right | Southern Poverty Law Center
Rage on the Right | Southern Poverty Law Center: "The signs of growing radicalization are everywhere. Armed men have come to Obama speeches bearing signs suggesting that the 'tree of liberty' needs to be 'watered' with 'the blood of tyrants.' The Conservative Political Action Conference held this February was co-sponsored by groups like the John Birch Society, which believes President Eisenhower was a Communist agent, and Oath Keepers, a Patriot outfit formed last year that suggests, in thinly veiled language, that the government has secret plans to declare martial law and intern patriotic Americans in concentration camps."
Rage on the Right | Southern Poverty Law Center
Rage on the Right | Southern Poverty Law Center: "The number of hate groups in America has been going up for years, rising 54% between 2000 and 2008 and driven largely by an angry backlash against non-white immigration and, starting in the last year of that period, the economic meltdown and the climb to power of an African American president."
Rage on the Right | Southern Poverty Law Center
Rage on the Right | Southern Poverty Law Center: "Rage on the Right
The Year in Hate and Extremism"
The Year in Hate and Extremism"
World War II vets make emotional pilgrimage to Iwo Jima - CNN.com
World War II vets make emotional pilgrimage to Iwo Jima - CNN.com: "'I hated him and he hated me. We met for the first time three days before the wedding. And he said, 'Any man that could fly a P-51 against the Japanese and live must be a brave man, and I want the blood of that man to flow through the veins of my grandchildren.''"
Que Sera Sera: I hope they don't have kids in hell
Que Sera Sera: I hope they don't have kids in hell: "“We could tell them that a long time ago, before Mommy and Daddy met, Mommy had a whole other family, but one day those children were too loud, so Mommy had to leave them and get a new family, this one here with you and Daddy. It’s okay because we know you’ll never be that loud, especially in the mornings.”"
Lessons of a $618,616 Death - BusinessWeek
Lessons of a $618,616 Death - BusinessWeek: "31% FOR PAPERWORK
Health-care costs represent 17% of today's U.S. gross domestic product. Medicare devotes about a quarter of its budget to care in the last year of life, according to the policy journal Health Affairs. Yet as I fought to buy my husband more time, it didn't matter to me that the hospital charged more than 12 times what Medicare then reimbursed for a chest scan. It also didn't matter that UnitedHealthcare (UNH) reimbursed the hospital for 80% of the $3,232 price of a scan, while a few months later our new insurer, Empire BlueCross & BlueShield, paid 24% for the same test. And I didn't have time to be thankful that the insurers negotiated the rates with the hospital so neither my employers nor I actually paid the difference between the sticker and discounted prices.
Looking at that stack of documents, it is easy to see why 31% of the money spent on health care went to paperwork and administration, according to research published in 2003 in the New England Journal of Medicine. That number has stayed the same or grown since then, says Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, a professor at Harvard Medical School and a co-author of the study. Often Terence's bills, with their blizzard of codes, took days to decipher. What did 'opd patins t' or 'bal xfr ded' mean? Was the dose charged the same as the dose prescribed?"
Health-care costs represent 17% of today's U.S. gross domestic product. Medicare devotes about a quarter of its budget to care in the last year of life, according to the policy journal Health Affairs. Yet as I fought to buy my husband more time, it didn't matter to me that the hospital charged more than 12 times what Medicare then reimbursed for a chest scan. It also didn't matter that UnitedHealthcare (UNH) reimbursed the hospital for 80% of the $3,232 price of a scan, while a few months later our new insurer, Empire BlueCross & BlueShield, paid 24% for the same test. And I didn't have time to be thankful that the insurers negotiated the rates with the hospital so neither my employers nor I actually paid the difference between the sticker and discounted prices.
Looking at that stack of documents, it is easy to see why 31% of the money spent on health care went to paperwork and administration, according to research published in 2003 in the New England Journal of Medicine. That number has stayed the same or grown since then, says Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, a professor at Harvard Medical School and a co-author of the study. Often Terence's bills, with their blizzard of codes, took days to decipher. What did 'opd patins t' or 'bal xfr ded' mean? Was the dose charged the same as the dose prescribed?"
R.I.P. The Tonight Show | Videogum
R.I.P. The Tonight Show | Videogum: "Hauling a failure back an hour and a half and putting a potted plant in the corner doesn’t hide the obvious fact that it is a failure."
Books in the Age of the iPad — Craig Mod
Books in the Age of the iPad — Craig Mod: "Books in the Age of the iPad
— Craig Mod, March 2010
Print is dying. Digital is surging. Everyone is confused.
Good Riddance.
As the publishing industry wobbles and Kindle sales jump, book romanticists cry themselves to sleep. But really, what are we shedding tears over?
We’re losing the throwaway paperback.
The airport paperback.
The beachside paperback."
— Craig Mod, March 2010
Print is dying. Digital is surging. Everyone is confused.
Good Riddance.
As the publishing industry wobbles and Kindle sales jump, book romanticists cry themselves to sleep. But really, what are we shedding tears over?
We’re losing the throwaway paperback.
The airport paperback.
The beachside paperback."
Search Harper's Index: Numbers and statistics for "mormon"
Search Harper's Index: Numbers and statistics for "mormon": "5/85Percentage increase in members of the Mormon Church since 1975: 56
3/94Number of Samoans who are Mormons: 51,000
11/95Acres of English farmland purchased by the Mormon Church since 1993: 8,879
9/95Number of Holocaust victims baptized posthumously into the Mormon church without their families’ permission: 380,000
1/99Percentage of the funds spent fighting Alaska’s gay-marriage initiative last year that came from the Mormon Church: 79
5/07Ratio of American Mormons to non-American Mormons worldwide in 1980: 5:2
����Ratio today: 4:5"
3/94Number of Samoans who are Mormons: 51,000
11/95Acres of English farmland purchased by the Mormon Church since 1993: 8,879
9/95Number of Holocaust victims baptized posthumously into the Mormon church without their families’ permission: 380,000
1/99Percentage of the funds spent fighting Alaska’s gay-marriage initiative last year that came from the Mormon Church: 79
5/07Ratio of American Mormons to non-American Mormons worldwide in 1980: 5:2
����Ratio today: 4:5"
Apple's Mistake
Apple's Mistake: "One way to appeal to programmers is with software. If you could think of an application programmers had to have, but that would be impossible in the circumscribed world of the iPhone, you could presumably get them to switch."
Sunday, March 7
Japan: It's Not Funny Anymore - tim rogers - Kotaku
Japan: It's Not Funny Anymore - tim rogers - Kotaku: "SOME JAPANESE OFFICE TRADITIONS ARE GENUINELY TERRIFYING
Every once in a while, you're outside, and you find a huge crowd of people in suits and ties. They take up all of the sidewalk. They're all drunk. They just got out of a mandatory company party in the nearest wooden-submarine-like Japanese restaurant whose menu consists of whatever fell off the garbage truck as it peeled away from a flock of particularly aggressive crows that morning. They're standing a circle, completely of their own accord. The boss is nowhere in sight. Someone in this group of juniors influenced them all to get into this circle. Anyway, they start chanting something. You can hardly understand what it is, even if you fluently understand the language. What the hell are they doing? The chant soon becomes a scream. This group of maybe forty young men and women in suits are screaming in unison."
Every once in a while, you're outside, and you find a huge crowd of people in suits and ties. They take up all of the sidewalk. They're all drunk. They just got out of a mandatory company party in the nearest wooden-submarine-like Japanese restaurant whose menu consists of whatever fell off the garbage truck as it peeled away from a flock of particularly aggressive crows that morning. They're standing a circle, completely of their own accord. The boss is nowhere in sight. Someone in this group of juniors influenced them all to get into this circle. Anyway, they start chanting something. You can hardly understand what it is, even if you fluently understand the language. What the hell are they doing? The chant soon becomes a scream. This group of maybe forty young men and women in suits are screaming in unison."
Op-Ed Columnist - The Up-or-Down Vote on Obama’s Presidency - NYTimes.com
Op-Ed Columnist - The Up-or-Down Vote on Obama’s Presidency - NYTimes.com: "The more serious debate about Obama is being conducted by neutral or sympathetic observers. There are many hypotheses. In Newsweek, Jon Meacham has written about an “inspiration gap.” He sees the professorial president as “sometimes seeming to be running the Brookings Institution, not the country.” In The New Yorker, Ken Auletta has raised the perils of Obama’s overexposure in our fractionalized media. (As if to prove the point, the president was scheduled to appear on Fox’s “America’s Most Wanted” to celebrate its 1,000th episode this weekend.) In the Beltway, the hottest conversations center on the competence of Obama’s team. Washington Post columnists are now dueling over whether Rahm Emanuel is an underutilized genius whose political savvy the president has foolishly ignored — or a bull in the capital china shop who should be replaced before he brings Obama down."
Building a Better Teacher - NYTimes.com
Building a Better Teacher - NYTimes.com: "When researchers ran the numbers in dozens of different studies, every factor under a school’s control produced just a tiny impact, except for one: which teacher the student had been assigned to. Some teachers could regularly lift their students’ test scores above the average for children of the same race, class and ability level. Others’ students left with below-average results year after year. William Sanders, a statistician studying Tennessee teachers with a colleague, found that a student with a weak teacher for three straight years would score, on average, 50 percentile points behind a similar student with a strong teacher for those years. Teachers working in the same building, teaching the same grade, produced very different outcomes. And the gaps were huge. Eric Hanushek, a Stanford economist, found that while the top 5 percent of teachers were able to impart a year and a half’s worth of learning to students in one school year, as judged by standardized tests, the weakest 5 percent advanced their students only half a year of material each year."
Zachary Mason’s Calculus of Writing, Applied to a Classic - NYTimes.com
Zachary Mason’s Calculus of Writing, Applied to a Classic - NYTimes.com: "“What I’m interested in scientifically is understanding thought with computational precision,” he explained. “I mean, the romantic idea that poetry comes from this deep inarticulable ur-stuff is a nice idea, but I think it is essentially false. I think the mind is articulable and the heart probably knowable. Unless you’re a mystic and believe in a soul, which I don’t, you really don’t have any other conclusion you can reach besides that the mind is literally a computer.”
Without an agent to help him, Mr. Mason was just as methodical in his effort to get “The Lost Books” into print. In 2007 he entered it in a competition sponsored by Starcherone Books, a small, independent press based in Buffalo, and won first prize: $1,000 and publication.
“This book was so perfect from the moment I first saw it that it was obviously destined for something spectacular,” said Ted Pelton, Starcherone’s founder. “It didn’t even feel to me like a real person had written it. Instead, it felt like one of those born-from-the-head-of-Zeus things.”"
Without an agent to help him, Mr. Mason was just as methodical in his effort to get “The Lost Books” into print. In 2007 he entered it in a competition sponsored by Starcherone Books, a small, independent press based in Buffalo, and won first prize: $1,000 and publication.
“This book was so perfect from the moment I first saw it that it was obviously destined for something spectacular,” said Ted Pelton, Starcherone’s founder. “It didn’t even feel to me like a real person had written it. Instead, it felt like one of those born-from-the-head-of-Zeus things.”"
Friday, March 5
Future of Video Game Design - Jason Rohrer's Programming Online Games - Esquire
Future of Video Game Design - Jason Rohrer's Programming Online Games - Esquire: "A lawn has a wound response. Most people don't know that. Cut a lawn and it emits harmful hydrocarbons, like a car. 'Here we go,' Rohrer says, flipping through his files. ' 'Air Pollution and the Smell of Cut Grass.' I have a scientific study.' In fact, he has a whole stack left over from his 2005 court case. That year, the Village of Potsdam arraigned Rohrer for an ordinance about lawn height. Rohrer pleaded not guilty. He recruited an expert witness to testify to the salutary environmental effects of natural meadows, and he wrote a nine-page brief enumerating how the village was violating his right to free expression. The prosecution asked him if he couldn't just grow the meadow in his backyard and not in the front. Rohrer said, no, that would defeat the whole point. He argued that 'our ability to speak with our landscape would be drastically reduced if our desired landscape was restricted to our backyard, since very few people could see it.'"
Future of Video Game Design - Jason Rohrer's Programming Online Games - Esquire
Future of Video Game Design - Jason Rohrer's Programming Online Games - Esquire: "The game, in its own small way, is trying to reverse decades of infantilism in video games and culture, in which you get coins for doing stupid shit. It's not going to coddle: awesome job!"
Future of Video Game Design - Jason Rohrer's Programming Online Games - Esquire
Future of Video Game Design - Jason Rohrer's Programming Online Games - Esquire: "Rohrer doesn't use deodorant. He washes his hair only twice a month. He doesn't put on a new pair of clothes in the morning, because he gave most of his clothes away years ago. He owns four pairs of boxer shorts. If he owned any more, he or his wife would have to spend more time washing them, which would make them both more reliant on electricity to run the washer. He keeps his fridge unplugged for the same reason. No fridge, no meat; no meat, no spoilage in an electrical storm. Open the fridge and all you see are vegan grains. 'There, that's quinoa. You had quinoa before? It's really good.' He bakes a loaf of bread every other morning and feeds it to his family at lunch, along with lentil soup. Every day, same lunch. For weeks at a time. The alternative is to starve. Despite his consulting fee from EA, the family budget is $14,500 a year, the income pieced together from PayPal donations from his Website, freelance writing consulting, occasional speaking fees, and monthly checks from his 'patron,' a wealthy software-industry figure who has taken a liking to his games."
Future of Video Game Design - Jason Rohrer's Programming Online Games - Esquire
Future of Video Game Design - Jason Rohrer's Programming Online Games - Esquire: "The first person to cry playing Passage was Rohrer himself, as he was programming it. All that summer, he watched one of his neighbors die of cancer. She was a nice old woman with a beautiful garden. 'Her whole life, she had said if she ever got cancer, she wouldn't want to go through chemotherapy,' Rohrer says. 'But once it happened to her, she changed her mind....We watched her go through chemotherapy, and she essentially just rotted away. And she died in six months anyway.' It wasn't only sad. It was irrational. So Rohrer, a few months shy of his thirtieth birthday, made a game about the inevitability of death. 'Yes, you could spend your five minutes trying to accumulate as many points as possible,' he wrote in a twelve-hundred-word creator's statement, 'but in the end, death is still coming for you.'"
Wheelchairs may hinder recovery - Channel 4 News
Wheelchairs may hinder recovery - Channel 4 News: "Dr Magnuson said: 'Most people when they first see the rat wheelchair, their first response is the chuckle, because it does look comical, but then they realise we are trying to address some pretty important questions.'"
Thursday, March 4
Teaching Graduate Students - ProfHacker.com
Ha! I feel like this when I teach seniors!
I’ve started to combat these feelings in a number of ways. First, I’ve been up-front with students about how huge the field is, where I’m most comfortable and knowledgeable, and where I’m not as well informed as I’d like to be. I’ve revealed my desire to know everything, or at least to look like I know everything, and talked about how unrealistic—and even damaging—that expectation is for all involved. Two simple routines have also helped me feel more confident in this course:"
LIFE ON THE COUCH: Plenty of reasons to just say no to Leno - Living - ReviewJournal.com
LIFE ON THE COUCH: Plenty of reasons to just say no to Leno - Living - ReviewJournal.com: "If you have any business sense whatsoever, don't watch 'The Tonight Show.' During his last two weeks on the air, Conan stopped being intimidated by 'The Tonight Show' and started making captivating television. While Leno's ratings ticked up slightly, Conan's surged. Then there was the 'Evita'-style scene with hundreds of Conan fans rallying for hours in the driving rain outside his studio. By contrast, Leno played The Mirage two days earlier, only doing one show instead of his customary two, and the venue had to offer half-price tickets. And NBC still dumped its newly minted folk hero in favor of the weasel with whom only 4 percent of Oprah's audience, some of the most forgiving viewers in the world, sided."
Tuesday, March 2
Why We Gain Weight As We Age : NPR
Why We Gain Weight As We Age : NPR: "Building Strength At Any Age
And that's where exercise comes in. Wanagat says countless studies have shown that exercise — even among individuals in their 80s — works. It actually helps the muscle cells get bigger. And beyond size, it makes the muscles stronger.
'We aren't sure exactly how exercise makes muscles stronger, but we know that when we measure the grip strength of the hands or feet, grip is strongest just after exercise, even among people in their 80s and 90s. So weightlifting at any age offers low risk and great benefit, says Wanagat."
And that's where exercise comes in. Wanagat says countless studies have shown that exercise — even among individuals in their 80s — works. It actually helps the muscle cells get bigger. And beyond size, it makes the muscles stronger.
'We aren't sure exactly how exercise makes muscles stronger, but we know that when we measure the grip strength of the hands or feet, grip is strongest just after exercise, even among people in their 80s and 90s. So weightlifting at any age offers low risk and great benefit, says Wanagat."
Monday, March 1
Young Americans dropping out of religion, other American Grace findings by Putnam/Campbell � Social Capital Blog
Young Americans dropping out of religion, other American Grace findings by Putnam/Campbell � Social Capital Blog: "Religious Americans are better citizens than non-religious ones (they give more to secular causes, volunteer more for secular causes, and join more, to mention a few markers of good citizenship). However, it is not their particular theology that predicts good citizenship, but the extent to which they are embedded in a friendship network of religious others (regardless of their religion). [Putnam refers to these religious friends as 'powerful, supercharged friends.']� So it is religious social networks, not teachings from the pulpit that are key to them being 3-4 times more generous than the most secular Americans."
Young Adults Doing Religion on Their Own? Blame It on Politics -- Politics Daily
Young Adults Doing Religion on Their Own? Blame It on Politics -- Politics Daily: "'We seek to explain why American adults became increasingly likely to express no religious preference as the 1990s unfolded. Briefly summarized, we find that the increase was not connected to a loss of religious piety, and that it was connected to politics. In the 1990s many people who had weak attachments to religion and either moderate or liberal political views found themselves at odds with the conservative political agenda of the Christian Right and reacted by renouncing their weak attachment to organized religion.'"
Sunday, February 28
Depression’s Upside - NYTimes.com
Depression’s Upside - NYTimes.com: "For Darwin, depression was a clarifying force, focusing the mind on its most essential problems. In his autobiography, he speculated on the purpose of such misery; his evolutionary theory was shadowed by his own life story. “Pain or suffering of any kind,” he wrote, “if long continued, causes depression and lessens the power of action, yet it is well adapted to make a creature guard itself against any great or sudden evil.”"
Saturday, February 27
The Associated Press: Emotional orca show marks 1st since trainer killed
The Associated Press: Emotional orca show marks 1st since trainer killed: "The audience seemed thrilled, applauding and cheering as the whales zipped around their tank and splashed spectators during the show — with the theme of 'believe,' about a young boy who sees an orca and dreams of one day becoming a whale trainer. It was a fitting tribute to Brancheau, whose family said she always wanted work with the giant whales.
At one point during the show, a young girl was brought on stage and given a whale tail necklace.
'I just wanted to be here for this show. It's so special,' said Russell Thomphsen, 65, who said he is a season-ticket holder for SeaWorld. 'This touches so many lives.'"
At one point during the show, a young girl was brought on stage and given a whale tail necklace.
'I just wanted to be here for this show. It's so special,' said Russell Thomphsen, 65, who said he is a season-ticket holder for SeaWorld. 'This touches so many lives.'"
Thursday, February 25
Wednesday, February 24
The Curious Cook - Better Bread With Less Kneading - NYTimes.com
The Curious Cook - Better Bread With Less Kneading - NYTimes.com: "Look for recipes that give ingredient weights, and avoid measuring in cups and spoons, which include variable amounts of empty space. This will also let you calculate dough hydrations and avoid overly wet recipes. Just divide the total liquid weight by the total flour weight, and if the answer is much above 0.75, expect a relatively flat loaf."
Serial Suicides Continue at France Telecom Amid Restructuring - AOL News
Serial Suicides Continue at France Telecom Amid Restructuring - AOL News: "Because most France Telecom employees have civil servant status and are almost impossible to fire, sources within and outside the company say some have been bullied and harassed in an effort to get them to quit. In some cases, specific jobs have been eliminated, but since those who hold them can't be fired, they continue at the company, often as pariahs without any real work to do."
McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Could It Be That the Best Chance to Save a Young Family From Foreclosure is a 28-Year-Old Pakistani American Playright-slash-Attorney who Learned Bankruptcy Law on the Internet?
McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Could It Be That the Best Chance to Save a Young Family From Foreclosure is a 28-Year-Old Pakistani American Playright-slash-Attorney who Learned Bankruptcy Law on the Internet?: "COULD IT BE THAT THE BEST CHANCE TO SAVE A YOUNG FAMILY FROM FORECLOSURE IS A 28-YEAR-OLD PAKISTANI AMERICAN PLAYRIGHT-SLASH-ATTORNEY WHO LEARNED BANKRUPTCY LAW ON THE INTERNET?"
VIDEO: Owner Describes Surviving Out Of Control Lexus - The Consumerist
VIDEO: Owner Describes Surviving Out Of Control Lexus - The Consumerist: "'I put the car into all available gears, including neutral,' she recalled about her fruitless attempt to slow the car down. Ms. Smith says she even put the car into reverse, in which position the gearshift remained as the car quickly reached a speed of 100mph.
After putting both feet on the brake and employing the emergency brake to no avail, Ms. Smith began to think that her only choice was to run her car into the guardrail, if only to save the other drivers on the highway."
After putting both feet on the brake and employing the emergency brake to no avail, Ms. Smith began to think that her only choice was to run her car into the guardrail, if only to save the other drivers on the highway."
Tuesday, February 23
OpenEducation - by IdeaScale
OpenEducation - by IdeaScale: "Stanford University professor Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D. and her colleague Lisa Sorich Blackwell, Ph.D. developed a program for school children to learn that it is possible for them to succeed in learning beyond what they may currently believe about themselves.
http://www.brainology.us/
Along the way, children are given the impression that only certain people can succeed at learning certain subjects or in general.
Once the idea takes hold in a child's mind or a classroom full of children, it severely limits the progress the students will make."
http://www.brainology.us/
Along the way, children are given the impression that only certain people can succeed at learning certain subjects or in general.
Once the idea takes hold in a child's mind or a classroom full of children, it severely limits the progress the students will make."
Video: Reality TV, the iPhone & the Future of Technology — Why It’s All a Game – GigaOM
Video: Reality TV, the iPhone & the Future of Technology — Why It’s All a Game – GigaOM: "Forget everything you did today. Clear your schedule and spend the next half hour watching this video. It’s a presentation by Jesse Schell, founder of Schell Games and former creative director of the Disney Imagineering Virtual Reality Studio. A veteran game designer, he is also on the faculty of the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University."
Copenhagen Consensus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Copenhagen Consensus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Copenhagen Consensus is a project that seeks to establish priorities for advancing global welfare using methodologies based on the theory of welfare economics. It was conceived[1] and organized by Bj�rn Lomborg, the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and the then director of the Danish government's Environmental Assessment Institute. It is now run by The Copenhagen Consensus Center[2] under Lomborg's directorship at the Copenhagen Business School. The project considers possible solutions to a wide range of problems, presented by experts in each field. These are evaluated and ranked by a panel of leading economists. The emphasis is on rational prioritization by economic analysis, justified as a corrective to standard practice in international development, where, it is alleged, media attention and the 'court of public opinion' results in priorities that are often far from optimal."
Joseph Smith's "White Horse" Prophecy
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Editorials & Opinion | Don't confuse them with facts | Seattle Times Newspaper
Editorials & Opinion | Don't confuse them with facts | Seattle Times Newspaper: "At this point, Judi forwarded me their correspondence, along with a despairing note. She is probably somewhere drinking right now.
You see, like me, she can remember a time when facts settled arguments. This is back before everything became a partisan shouting match, back before it was permissible to ignore or deride as 'biased' anything that didn't support your worldview.
If you and I had an argument and I produced facts from an authoritative source to back me up, you couldn't just blow that off. You might try to undermine my facts, might counter with facts of your own, but you couldn't just pretend my facts had no weight or meaning.
But that's the intellectual state of the union these days, as evidenced by all the people who still don't believe the president was born in Hawaii or that the planet is warming. And by Mr. Thompson, who doesn't believe Henry Johnson did what he did."
You see, like me, she can remember a time when facts settled arguments. This is back before everything became a partisan shouting match, back before it was permissible to ignore or deride as 'biased' anything that didn't support your worldview.
If you and I had an argument and I produced facts from an authoritative source to back me up, you couldn't just blow that off. You might try to undermine my facts, might counter with facts of your own, but you couldn't just pretend my facts had no weight or meaning.
But that's the intellectual state of the union these days, as evidenced by all the people who still don't believe the president was born in Hawaii or that the planet is warming. And by Mr. Thompson, who doesn't believe Henry Johnson did what he did."
Debate Over Huntsville, Ala., Professor Accused in Killings - NYTimes.com
Debate Over Huntsville, Ala., Professor Accused in Killings - NYTimes.com: "scientists who have looked at Dr. Bishop’s r�sum�said they saw no evidence of genius, no evidence of a cure for diseases like A.L.S., no evidence that she even could have gotten tenure at a major university.
Most of her work was on nitric oxide, a gas that can transmit signals between nerves. High levels of nitric oxide, she proposed, might set off degenerative diseases like A.L.S., and cells treated with low levels of the gas might build resistance. But that is far from proven, scientists said, and the idea was not original with Dr. Bishop."
Most of her work was on nitric oxide, a gas that can transmit signals between nerves. High levels of nitric oxide, she proposed, might set off degenerative diseases like A.L.S., and cells treated with low levels of the gas might build resistance. But that is far from proven, scientists said, and the idea was not original with Dr. Bishop."
Mind - New Research Focuses on the Power of Physical Contact - NYTimes.com
Mind - New Research Focuses on the Power of Physical Contact - NYTimes.com: "Momentary touches, they say — whether an exuberant high five, a warm hand on the shoulder, or a creepy touch to the arm — can communicate an even wider range of emotion than gestures or expressions, and sometimes do so more quickly and accurately than words."
Target Cancer - After Long Fight, Melanoma Drug Gives Sudden Reprieve - Series - NYTimes.com
Target Cancer - After Long Fight, Melanoma Drug Gives Sudden Reprieve - Series - NYTimes.com: "In a kind of “pinch me” exercise, the six doctors sent one another “before and after” CT scans of their patients.
One was of Mark Bunting, 52, an airline pilot in Sandy, Utah. His initial scan in early October showed the cancer in his bones, an incursion considered virtually impossible to reverse. After two months on the drug, it had all but disappeared."
One was of Mark Bunting, 52, an airline pilot in Sandy, Utah. His initial scan in early October showed the cancer in his bones, an incursion considered virtually impossible to reverse. After two months on the drug, it had all but disappeared."
Saturday, February 20
Chronic joblessness looms over recovery | Deseret News
Chronic joblessness looms over recovery | Deseret News: "Some labor experts say the basic functioning of the American economy has changed in ways that make jobs scarce — particularly for older, less-educated people.
Large companies are increasingly owned by institutional investors who crave swift profits, a feat often achieved by cutting payroll. The declining influence of unions has made it easier for employers to shift work to part-time and temporary employees. Factory work and even white-collar jobs have moved in recent years to low-cost countries in Asia and Latin America. Automation has helped manufacturing cut 5.6 million jobs since 2000 — the sort of jobs that once provided lower-skilled workers with middle-class paychecks."
Large companies are increasingly owned by institutional investors who crave swift profits, a feat often achieved by cutting payroll. The declining influence of unions has made it easier for employers to shift work to part-time and temporary employees. Factory work and even white-collar jobs have moved in recent years to low-cost countries in Asia and Latin America. Automation has helped manufacturing cut 5.6 million jobs since 2000 — the sort of jobs that once provided lower-skilled workers with middle-class paychecks."
Obama's Big Sellout : Rolling Stone
Obama's Big Sellout : Rolling Stone: "What's taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history. Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place. This new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside."
Wall Street's Bailout Hustle : Rolling Stone
Wall Street's Bailout Hustle : Rolling Stone: "Con artists have a word for the inability of their victims to accept that they've been scammed. They call it the 'True Believer Syndrome.' That's sort of where we are, in a state of nagging disbelief about the real problem on Wall Street. It isn't so much that we have inadequate rules or incompetent regulators, although both of these things are certainly true. The real problem is that it doesn't matter what regulations are in place if the people running the economy are rip-off artists. The system assumes a certain minimum level of ethical behavior and civic instinct over and above what is spelled out by the regulations. If those ethics are absent — well, this thing isn't going to work, no matter what we do. Sure, mugging old ladies is against the law, but it's also easy. To prevent it, we depend, for the most part, not on cops but on people making the conscious decision not to do it."
Ten rules for writing fiction | Books | guardian.co.uk
Ten rules for writing fiction | Books | guardian.co.uk: "Margaret Atwood
1 Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can't sharpen it on the plane, because you can't take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.
2 If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type.
3 Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.
4 If you're using a computer, always safeguard new text with a memory stick.
5 Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.
6 Hold the reader's attention. (This is likely to work better if you can hold your own.) But you don't know who the reader is, so it's like shooting fish with a slingshot in the dark. What fascinates A will bore the pants off B."
1 Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can't sharpen it on the plane, because you can't take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.
2 If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type.
3 Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.
4 If you're using a computer, always safeguard new text with a memory stick.
5 Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.
6 Hold the reader's attention. (This is likely to work better if you can hold your own.) But you don't know who the reader is, so it's like shooting fish with a slingshot in the dark. What fascinates A will bore the pants off B."
Friday, February 19
Single-engine plane crash in Austin, Texas | MetaFilter
Single-engine plane crash in Austin, Texas | MetaFilter: "Whenever I hear about engineers doing things that are radical, I'm reminded of the 2006 podcast I listened to by Marc Sageman where he talks about how many among the 9/11 folks were engineers. The Anarchist movement in the early 20th century were engineers and physicians. About 15 minutes into the mp3 [MP3 link] he describes this. It echoes here because the 9/11 'falls prey to an unusual reading of the Koran' and start from first principles and ignore years of religious interpretation. The way the guy cites the tax code reminded me of that too."
Wednesday, February 17
TED2010: Ten fascinating people you've never heard of - CNN.com
TED2010: Ten fascinating people you've never heard of - CNN.com: "Jane McGonigal is one of the most interesting inventors you've never heard of.
The bubbly game designer -- whose optimism seems to flow out of her wild blond hair -- is trying to get the world to play a lot more online video games, and not just for the sake of fun.
The cooperative skills and hopefulness that people learn while pecking away at online games like World of Warcraft will help our society address real-world problems like climate change and nuclear arms proliferation, she says. To get people to use less oil and mentor entrepreneurs in Africa, she also is developing games that merge the digital and real worlds."
The bubbly game designer -- whose optimism seems to flow out of her wild blond hair -- is trying to get the world to play a lot more online video games, and not just for the sake of fun.
The cooperative skills and hopefulness that people learn while pecking away at online games like World of Warcraft will help our society address real-world problems like climate change and nuclear arms proliferation, she says. To get people to use less oil and mentor entrepreneurs in Africa, she also is developing games that merge the digital and real worlds."
alternative modernity
alternative modernity: "ALTERNATIVE MODERNITY?
PLAYING THE JAPANESE GAME OF CULTURE
by Andrew Feenberg
If games both fashion and reflect culture, it stands to reason that to a certain extent a whole civilization and, within that civilization, an entire era can be characterized by its games.
������������������� Roger Caillois, 'Les jeux dans le monde moderne'
The writer's irony is a negative mysticism to be found in times without a god.
��������������������� Luk�cs, The Theory of the Novel
Introduction: Games as Rational Systems"
PLAYING THE JAPANESE GAME OF CULTURE
by Andrew Feenberg
If games both fashion and reflect culture, it stands to reason that to a certain extent a whole civilization and, within that civilization, an entire era can be characterized by its games.
������������������� Roger Caillois, 'Les jeux dans le monde moderne'
The writer's irony is a negative mysticism to be found in times without a god.
��������������������� Luk�cs, The Theory of the Novel
Introduction: Games as Rational Systems"
Tuesday, February 16
How a Heart Attack Gave the Giraffes’ Aaron Lazar a New Lease on Life -- New York Magazine
How a Heart Attack Gave the Giraffes’ Aaron Lazar a New Lease on Life -- New York Magazine: "Lazar returned to New York and met with his doctors and a rep from the ICD manufacturer. One doctor confronted him directly. “She said, ‘You really should not be doing what you’re doing,’” Lazar says. “And I said, ‘This is what I do.’” He then literally haggled with them over a new ICD trigger. “The doctor’s like, ‘Okay, let’s make it 195 for two and a half minutes,’” remembers Lazar. “And I was like, ‘Couldn’t you make it 200 for five minutes?’ It was like buying a mattress from Russians.”"
Knuth: Retirement
Knuth: Retirement: "My full-time writing schedule means that I have to be pretty much a hermit. The only way to gain enough efficiency to complete The Art of Computer Programming is to operate in batch mode, concentrating intensively and uninterruptedly on one subject at a time, rather than swapping a number of topics in and out of my head. I'm unable to schedule appointments with visitors, travel to conferences or accept speaking engagements, or undertake any new responsibilities of any kind. I'm glad that the WWW makes it possible for me to respond to questions that I don't have to see or hear."
Monday, February 15
Saturday, February 13
Friday, February 12
hmarisagallagher David Rockwell: as an architect (usually focused on permanence) creating temporay events pushes creativity and a sense of play #TED
Play, permanency and literacy
The $5 Guerrilla User Test � Bumblebee Labs Blog
The $5 Guerrilla User Test � Bumblebee Labs Blog: "Users aren’t so much unintelligent as they are distracted and indifferent"
Thursday, February 11
Wednesday, February 10
Community colleges, another view :: Grant McCracken
Community colleges, another view :: Grant McCracken: "Perhaps as a reply to the TV show that now holds the community college up to ridicule, Kay Ryan, the US poet laureate, has this to say:
“I simply want to celebrate the fact that right near your home, year in and year out, a community college is quietly—and with very little financial encouragement—saving lives and minds,” said Ryan. “I can’t think of a more efficient, hopeful or egalitarian machine, with the possible exception of the bicycle.”"
“I simply want to celebrate the fact that right near your home, year in and year out, a community college is quietly—and with very little financial encouragement—saving lives and minds,” said Ryan. “I can’t think of a more efficient, hopeful or egalitarian machine, with the possible exception of the bicycle.”"
Pet Rats: Has our rat had a stroke?, pet rats, sniffles
Pet Rats: Has our rat had a stroke?, pet rats, sniffles: "Now for the bad news:
Your rat has a pituitary tumor on the base of her brain. The signs are all there, from her inability to eat, lethargy, and finally, the neurological signs; unable to grasp with her forelimbs and inability to chew. Swallowing is also pretty hard for her."
Your rat has a pituitary tumor on the base of her brain. The signs are all there, from her inability to eat, lethargy, and finally, the neurological signs; unable to grasp with her forelimbs and inability to chew. Swallowing is also pretty hard for her."
Tuesday, February 9
PeteSearch: How to split up the US
PeteSearch: How to split up the US: "Mormonia
The only region that's completely surrounded by another cluster, Mormonia mostly consists of Utah towns that are highly connected to each other, with an offshoot in Eastern Idaho. It's worth separating from the rest of the West because of how interwoven the communities are, and how relatively unlikely they are to have friends outside the region.
It won't be any surprise to see that LDS-related pages like Thomas S. Monson, Gordon B. Hinckley and The Book of Mormon are at the top of the charts. I didn't expect to see Twilight showing up quite so much though, I have no idea what to make of that! Glenn Beck makes it into the top spot for Eastern Idaho."
The only region that's completely surrounded by another cluster, Mormonia mostly consists of Utah towns that are highly connected to each other, with an offshoot in Eastern Idaho. It's worth separating from the rest of the West because of how interwoven the communities are, and how relatively unlikely they are to have friends outside the region.
It won't be any surprise to see that LDS-related pages like Thomas S. Monson, Gordon B. Hinckley and The Book of Mormon are at the top of the charts. I didn't expect to see Twilight showing up quite so much though, I have no idea what to make of that! Glenn Beck makes it into the top spot for Eastern Idaho."
Millionaire gives away fortune which made him miserable - Telegraph
Millionaire gives away fortune which made him miserable - Telegraph: "'More and more I heard the words: 'Stop what you are doing now – all this luxury and consumerism – and start your real life',' he said. 'I had the feeling I was working as a slave for things that I did not wish for or need.
I have the feeling that there are lot of people doing the same thing.'
However, for many years he said he was simply not 'brave' enough to give up all the trappings of his comfortable existence."
I have the feeling that there are lot of people doing the same thing.'
However, for many years he said he was simply not 'brave' enough to give up all the trappings of his comfortable existence."
Exile in Greenville - The Atlantic (March 2010)
Liz Phair goes to Nascar.
(March 2010): "I’ve never been to a NASCAR race. I picture a bunch of rednecks dousing themselves with beer and slapping their wives on the ass. I’m more familiar with the environmental crowd, and expect to have zero fun at the expo learning a lot of depressing facts about the future that I’ll feel helpless to do anything about."
CSCW 2010: The 2010 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work
CSCW 2010: The 2010 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work
This looks great. I think I saw Marcy Bauman mention it on FB.
Monday, February 8
Soccer Dad | Ask MetaFilter
Soccer Dad | Ask MetaFilter:
"How do you keep your sense of adventure when you sit in a cubicle and have to pick up the kids at 5 o'clock?"
The Ten-Cent Solution - The Atlantic (March 2007)
The Ten-Cent Solution - The Atlantic
(March 2007): "Better results are what they get. After comparing test scores for literacy and basic math, Tooley has shown that pupils in private schools do better than their state-school equivalents—at between a half and a quarter of the per-pupil teacher cost. In some places, such as Gansu, China, the researchers found that private schools serving the poor had worse facilities than comparable state schools; in Hyderabad, they were better equipped (with blackboards, desks, toilets, drinking water, and so on). Regardless, the tests so far show that private-school students do better across the board."
(March 2007): "Better results are what they get. After comparing test scores for literacy and basic math, Tooley has shown that pupils in private schools do better than their state-school equivalents—at between a half and a quarter of the per-pupil teacher cost. In some places, such as Gansu, China, the researchers found that private schools serving the poor had worse facilities than comparable state schools; in Hyderabad, they were better equipped (with blackboards, desks, toilets, drinking water, and so on). Regardless, the tests so far show that private-school students do better across the board."
Amazon.com: How to Differentiate Instruction in Mixed Ability Classrooms (2nd Edition) (9780131195004): Carol Ann Tomlinson: Books
Amazon.com: How to Differentiate Instruction in Mixed Ability Classrooms (2nd Edition) (9780131195004): Carol Ann Tomlinson: Books: "How to Differentiate Instruction in Mixed Ability Classrooms"
There are days when I think I could really use this book.
Notes from the Atlantic teaching article:
First, great teachers tended to set big goals for their students. They were also perpetually looking for ways to improve their effectiveness. For example, when Farr called up teachers who were making remarkable gains and asked to visit their classrooms, he noticed he’d get a similar response from all of them: “They’d say, ‘You’re welcome to come, but I have to warn you—I am in the middle of just blowing up my classroom structure and changing my reading workshop because I think it’s not working as well as it could.’ When you hear that over and over, and you don’t hear that from other teachers, you start to form a hypothesis.” Great teachers, he concluded, constantly reevaluate what they are doing.
Superstar teachers had four other tendencies in common: they avidly recruited students and their families into the process; they maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning; they planned exhaustively and purposefully—for the next day or the year ahead—by working backward from the desired outcome; and they worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls.
Alex Payne — On the iPad
Alex Payne — On the iPad: "The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today. I’d never have had the ability to run whatever stupid, potentially harmful, hugely educational programs I could download or write. I wouldn’t have been able to fire up ResEdit and edit out the Mac startup sound so I could tinker on the computer at all hours without waking my parents. The iPad may be a boon to traditional eduction, insofar as it allows for multimedia textbooks and such, but in its current form, it’s a detriment to the sort of hacker culture that has propelled the digital economy."
The iPad and Higher Education
The iPad and Higher Education: "Without changing the system of copyright, licensing, or even the idea that the textbook is central to educational experience, I would suggest that little will be changed. In fact quite the opposite, the big textbook manufactures will gain more purchase in this realm. What is worse, is that all indications from Apple seem to be that this will strengthen DRM and copyright."
Sunday, February 7
slacktivist
slacktivist: "The Supreme Court has ruled that corporations are persons and that money is speech and that, therefore, corporations have a greater right to free speech than other, mortal persons with actual mouths but not as much money. These poorer, merely human persons also don't get to enjoy the apparently divine right of limited liability.
Among the more intriguing repercussions of this astonishing and absurd ruling is that foreign corporations are also now free to buy up all the airtime they can afford to run attack ads against American elected officials. The xenophobic right wing seems only dimly aware of this so far, but I can't help but wonder how they will respond when, say, America Movil -- the Latin American mobile phone company owned by Carlos Slim Helu, the world's third-richest man -- decides to run campaign ads attacking U.S. politicians opposed to illegal immigration."
Among the more intriguing repercussions of this astonishing and absurd ruling is that foreign corporations are also now free to buy up all the airtime they can afford to run attack ads against American elected officials. The xenophobic right wing seems only dimly aware of this so far, but I can't help but wonder how they will respond when, say, America Movil -- the Latin American mobile phone company owned by Carlos Slim Helu, the world's third-richest man -- decides to run campaign ads attacking U.S. politicians opposed to illegal immigration."
slacktivist: I think maybe part of the reason you're so angry is you keep demanding that you get screwed and then, not surprisingly, you keep getting screwed
slacktivist: I think maybe part of the reason you're so angry is you keep demanding that you get screwed and then, not surprisingly, you keep getting screwed: "The only hope you have of ever seeing another pay raise is if Congress passes health care reform. Without health care reform, the increasing cost of your health insurance will swallow this year's raise. And next year's raise. And pretty soon it won't stop with just your raise. Without health care reform, the increasing cost of your health insurance will start making your pay go down."
Saturday, February 6
Overview | Pew Internet & American Life Project
Overview | Pew Internet & American Life Project: "14% of online teens now say they blog, down from 28% of teen internet users in 2006"
Friday, February 5
Ideal line length for content | Max Design
Ideal line length for content | Max Design: "The ideal line length for text layout is based on the physiology of the human eye… At normal reading distance the arc of the visual field is only a few inches – about the width of a well-designed column of text, or about 12 words per line. Research shows that reading slows and retention rates fall as line length begins to exceed the ideal width, because the reader then needs to use the muscles of the eye and neck to track from the end of one line to the beginning of the next line. If the eye must traverse great distances on the page, the reader is easily lost and must hunt for the beginning of the next line. Quantitative studies show that moderate line lengths significantly increase the legibility of text.
Web Style Guide – Basic Design Principles for Creating Website
Patrick J. Lynch and Sarah Horton
2nd edition, page 97."
Web Style Guide – Basic Design Principles for Creating Website
Patrick J. Lynch and Sarah Horton
2nd edition, page 97."
Thursday, February 4
The Inform 7 Handbook
The Inform 7 Handbook: "In teaching small classes of middle-school-age kids how to write their first games using Inform 7, I learned two things: First, kids take to I7 programming very naturally. It's fun for them! But second, they often find the built-in Documentation in the I7 application difficult to deal with. I've heard similar comments from adults who sent emails to thank me for the Handbook.
Last year I had a new student gamely start with Chapter 1 of the Documentation and almost give up IF entirely on hitting pages 1.7 and 1.8, which deal with the Skein. I had forgotten to tell the class, 'Don't read those pages. They're confusing, and you don't need to know about the Skein yet.'"
Last year I had a new student gamely start with Chapter 1 of the Documentation and almost give up IF entirely on hitting pages 1.7 and 1.8, which deal with the Skein. I had forgotten to tell the class, 'Don't read those pages. They're confusing, and you don't need to know about the Skein yet.'"
Wednesday, February 3
Educational challenge-based interactive fiction. Of a sort. � Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling
Educational challenge-based interactive fiction. Of a sort. � Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling: "Back in 1993 I [Emily Short] was tutoring my sister in algebra. Her quizzes and tests were always made of word problems with a running storyline involving many recurring places and characters. I tied the fate of the main characters to how well she did on the previous quiz, so a good performance brought them good fortune.
Unfortunately, one test she completely bombed, and, well, this is a transcription of the quiz she got next. (On behalf of my younger self, I apologize to the people of Argentina, the spirit of Goethe, and hypnotists. [Hi, Conrad.])"
Unfortunately, one test she completely bombed, and, well, this is a transcription of the quiz she got next. (On behalf of my younger self, I apologize to the people of Argentina, the spirit of Goethe, and hypnotists. [Hi, Conrad.])"
The GigaOM Network - Salon.com
The GigaOM Network - Salon.com: "Wolverine has�chosen to orient its Black Tonic app around a handful of basic principles that differentiate it from existing services:
Instant “experience sharing,” synchronizing browsers for all those watching a presentation.
Placing control in the hands of the presenter alone.
Stripping back the interface to give prominence to the slides’ content, rather than the app itself."
Instant “experience sharing,” synchronizing browsers for all those watching a presentation.
Placing control in the hands of the presenter alone.
Stripping back the interface to give prominence to the slides’ content, rather than the app itself."
Healthcare Reform - Salon.com
Healthcare Reform - Salon.com: "Gawande's third book, 'The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right,' explores how doctors and other professionals, overwhelmed with the complexity of their work, have become more likely to fail. Gawande's proposed solution is simple and inexpensive, if not terribly sexy: a checklist. Sound too mundane? Keep in mind that Gawande proved, in conjunction with the World Health Organization, that doctors and surgical teams who use checklists save lives."
Giz Explains: Why HTML5 Isn't Going to Save the Internet - HTML5 - Gizmodo
Giz Explains: Why HTML5 Isn't Going to Save the Internet - HTML5 - Gizmodo: "Here, try this: Right-click anywhere on this webpage, and click 'View Page Source,' or 'View Source,' or something to that effect. Your eyes will be assaulted with a wall of inscrutable text. You'll see evidence of syntax, but your brain won't be able to parse it. Your eyes will glaze over, and you will close the window. This, my friends, is HTML. But you probably already knew that, because it's 2010, basic web languages are basically in our drinking water. So what's this '5' business?"
BBC News - Why do people vote against their own interests?
BBC News - Why do people vote against their own interests?: "For Mr Westen, stories always trump statistics, which means the politician with the best stories is going to win: 'One of the fallacies that politicians often have on the Left is that things are obvious, when they are not obvious.
'Obama's administration made a tremendous mistake by not immediately branding the economic collapse that we had just had as the Republicans' Depression, caused by the Bush administration's ideology of unregulated greed. The result is that now people blame him.'"
'Obama's administration made a tremendous mistake by not immediately branding the economic collapse that we had just had as the Republicans' Depression, caused by the Bush administration's ideology of unregulated greed. The result is that now people blame him.'"
Tuesday, February 2
Op-Ed Contributor - Playing to Learn - NYTimes.com
Op-Ed Contributor - Playing to Learn - NYTimes.com: "THE Obama administration is planning some big changes to how we measure the success or failure of schools and how we apportion federal money based on those assessments. It’s great that the administration is trying to undertake reforms, but if we want to make sure all children learn, we will need to overhaul the curriculum itself. Our current educational approach — and the testing that is driving it — is completely at odds with what scientists understand about how children develop during the elementary school years and has led to a curriculum that is strangling children and teachers alike."
A Study Finds Mental Benefit of Fish Oil - WSJ.com
A Study Finds Mental Benefit of Fish Oil - WSJ.com: "Fish oil pills may be able to spare some young people with signs of mental illness from a progression into fully developed schizophrenia, according to a preliminary study of 81 patients in Austria."
Monday, February 1
DEVONthink Pro and Scrivener – Tools for Writers
DEVONthink Pro and Scrivener – Tools for Writers: "Both DEVONthink and Scrivener are great tools for brain dumping information from different sources – something I do a lot of – and I could see either being useful in a day to day way to full time bloggers looking to get themselves organized."
Steven Poole: Goodbye, cruel Word
Steven Poole: Goodbye, cruel Word: "For the first time, I no longer have a copy of Microsoft Word installed on either of my computers. That’s some change. I wrote my first two books, and many hundreds of articles, in Word. But I’m writing my third book in an inexpensive yet wonderful piece of Mac-only software written by a single person instead of a “business unit” at Redmond. Scoured of Word, my computers feel clean, refreshed, relieved of a hideous and malign burden. How did it come to this?"
My newest new system – Text files, Notational Velocity, and SimpleText — Jack Baty
My newest new system – Text files, Notational Velocity, and SimpleText — Jack Baty: "Every 6 months or so I tend to throw out whatever “systems” I’m using and start fresh. It happened again this past weekend after I stood behind someone and watched him open up TextEdit and make a note in it. TextEdit! Can you believe it? What year is this? I kept watching and he just wrote what he needed to write and saved the file to a folder on his drive with an easy-to-remember name. Done."
Why My Mom’s Next Computer Is Going To Be An iPad
Why My Mom’s Next Computer Is Going To Be An iPad: "The iPad is a computer for people who don’t like computers. People who don’t like the idea of upgrading their 3D drivers, or adjusting their screen resolution, or installing new memory. Who don’t understand why their computer gets slower and slower the longer they own it, who have 25 icons in their system tray and have to wait ten minutes for their system to boot up every day."
Cornish Journal - A Recluse? Well, Not to J.D. Salinger's Neighbors - NYTimes.com
Cornish Journal - A Recluse? Well, Not to J.D. Salinger's Neighbors - NYTimes.com: "Mr. Salinger was a regular at the $12 roast beef dinners at First Congregational Church in Hartland, Vt. He would arrive about an hour and a half early and pass the time by writing in a small, spiral-bound notebook, said Jeannie Frazer, a church member. Mr. Salinger usually dressed in corduroys and a sweater, she said, and would not speak. He sat at the head of the table, near where the pies were placed."
Choice of Games Blog : Introduction to ChoiceScript
Choice of Games Blog : Introduction to ChoiceScript: "What is ChoiceScript?
ChoiceScript is a simple programming language for writing multiple-choice games (MCGs) like Choice of the Dragon. Writing games with ChoiceScript is easy and fun, even for authors with no programming experience."
ChoiceScript is a simple programming language for writing multiple-choice games (MCGs) like Choice of the Dragon. Writing games with ChoiceScript is easy and fun, even for authors with no programming experience."
Why are you so terribly disappointing?
Why are you so terribly disappointing?: "Our disappointment begins to curdle, to turn back on itself, poison the heart, turn us nasty and low. It shifts from merely being a national mood or general temperament, into a way of being. A wiring, deep and harmful and permanent. It's all very disappointing, really."
Sunday, January 31
Evan Williams | evhead: They're not talking to you
Evan Williams | evhead: They're not talking to you: "Most user-generated content is created as communication in small groups, but since we're so unused to communications media and broadcast media being mixed together, we think that everyone is now broadcasting. This is a mistake. If we listened in on other people's phone calls, we'd know to expect small talk, inside jokes, and the like, but people's phone calls aren't out in the open. One of the driving forces behind much user-generated content is that conversation is no longer limited to social cul-de-sacs like the phone.'"
Saturday, January 30
Homosexual behavior due to genetics and environmental factors | Eureka! Science News
Homosexual behavior due to genetics and environmental factors | Eureka! Science News: "Homosexual behaviour is largely shaped by genetics and random environmental factors, according to findings from the world's largest study of twins. Writing in the scientific journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, researchers from Queen Mary's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, and Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm report that genetics and environmental factors (which are specific to an individual, and may include biological processes such as different hormone exposure in the womb), are important determinants of homosexual behaviour."
Thursday, January 28
Febraury 2010: William Langewiesche on American Snipers | vanityfair.com
Febraury 2010: William Langewiesche on American Snipers | vanityfair.com: "he does not look like a warrior, and warriors often do not. He made that point to me not about himself but about a fat and clownish soldier who had fought resolutely beside him in a number of battles. The first was a ferocious ambush in Afghanistan on a road that offered no cover. In the midst of it Crane saw this soldier put down his weapon and coolly help himself to a pinch of chewing tobacco before calmly resuming the fight. Crane said, “You never know it about someone. You can’t tell it in advance. The guys with the badges and the strut, a lot of times they’re gonna be hiding.” He seemed to have a certain Special Forces team in mind."
Killing with a personal touch | Quiet Babylon
Killing with a personal touch | Quiet Babylon: "If you didn’t watch the drone criticism video I linked to above, watch it now. The deep dread and hatred of handcrafted kills raises it head here. Carefully selecting targets and aiming to remove them with a minimum of other casualties? Not OK. Combat operations with all the collateral damage to infrastructure, economy, people, and environment? Part of the cost of war."
The New York Times > Books > Sunday Book Review > Essay: Tool for Thought
The New York Times > Books > Sunday Book Review > Essay: Tool for Thought: "Having all this information available at my fingerprints does more than help me find my notes faster. Yes, when I'm trying to track down an article I wrote many years ago, it's now much easier to retrieve. But the qualitative change lies elsewhere: in finding documents I've forgotten about altogether, documents that I didn't know I was looking for."
Sunday, November 8
My wife's experience in re-taking first-year writing after 28 years and a double major from the University of Oregon would indicate that we are not teaching habits that persist indefinitely. That is to say that academic writing is a rarefied collection of habits that can be lost over time despite fluency in other areas.
This is not news, but interesting to see in practice.
This is not news, but interesting to see in practice.
Thursday, June 11
When the Bat Signal calls :: The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It
When the Bat Signal calls :: The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It: "My view is that Wikipedia and projects like it belong at the heart of a high school and college education. Instead of turning to a handful of approved sources and paraphrasing them to write a ten-page U.S. History paper that will be viewed and graded only by the teacher – who looks at a stack of papers and anticipates the same bad movie, twenty times – you can be asked to demonstrate a sustained and original contribution to a Wikipedia article on an important topic, having to contend with conflicting sources and others’ arguments, learning to discern and then defend truth amidst chaos – and to refine your own view in light of what you discover. There are few things as devastatingly disarming to others as admitting when you’re wrong."
Friday, June 5
Teaching with Technology Idea Exchange Hunting, Gathering, and Growing Open Educational Resources: "A significant movement in education concerns the use of open educational resources. By “open” it is generally meant that the resource is available at no cost to others for adaptation and reuse in different contexts. These resources could include books, lesson plans, syllabi, slide shows, etc. There are several examples of individuals and institutions providing open educational resources. The open education movement is introduced, and we discuss how to find and organize open educational resources, specifically within the context of the Open High School of Utah."
Hunting/Gathering/Collecting
John Hilton is emphasizing the reusability component of open coursware, something I brought up during the roundtable discussion with instructure. I hadn't made the important reusability/open content connection before now.
Reusable content needs to be modified for particular contexts, rather than phoning it in. Someone, maybe Gladwell, wrote about art that is created through gradual refinement rather than in a burst of genius (see Chris Lott post) and open courseware's reusability would tend to promote this sort of growth.
David Wiley's 4rs of Openness:
Reuse
Redistribute
Revise
Remix--take two or more existing resources and combine them to create a new resource (e.g. take audio lectures from a course and combine them with a slideshow from another course to create a new course).
** Creative Commons is a key enabler of open educational resources
-attribution
-share alike
-noncommercial
-no derivative works
Commercial schools, teaching for profit, can't use many Open resources.
Q: what's the relationship between fair use and open content?
A: (me) Fair use is being eaten alive by corporations
Hunting/Gathering/Collecting
John Hilton is emphasizing the reusability component of open coursware, something I brought up during the roundtable discussion with instructure. I hadn't made the important reusability/open content connection before now.
Reusable content needs to be modified for particular contexts, rather than phoning it in. Someone, maybe Gladwell, wrote about art that is created through gradual refinement rather than in a burst of genius (see Chris Lott post) and open courseware's reusability would tend to promote this sort of growth.
David Wiley's 4rs of Openness:
Reuse
Redistribute
Revise
Remix--take two or more existing resources and combine them to create a new resource (e.g. take audio lectures from a course and combine them with a slideshow from another course to create a new course).
** Creative Commons is a key enabler of open educational resources
-attribution
-share alike
-noncommercial
-no derivative works
Commercial schools, teaching for profit, can't use many Open resources.
Q: what's the relationship between fair use and open content?
A: (me) Fair use is being eaten alive by corporations
Teaching with Technology Idea Exchange Build your Audience like a Virus: "Learn how one small professional development program has taken advantage of free and low-cost Web 2.0 and text messaging technologies to keep in touch with our core participants, reach out to previously untapped audiences and expand our “viral marketing” efforts"
I'm attending this session at #ttix. Victoria Williams is moving through a list of technologies that she's used to promote UEN's offerings.
Blogs: kind of stagnant, and no dialogue ensued
Youtube: 250,000 hits, but few of them from the core audience
Text alert systems: 200 subscribers. Using http://www.txtwire.com Sent out text alerts to promote under-enrolled courses.
Facebook: haven't really exploited that much. 49 "fans."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJW0nWJaB4g
Chick-Fil-A asked the user who created their facebook page to administer the site, because the corporate approach doesn't always work. "They just come in with the MBA approach" Of course, education isn't chicken sandwiches.
A lot of corporate involvement in social media consists of barging in on other people's conversations. [yes].
**** Use facebook to LISTEN to what your audience is saying. Not as sold on FB as a dissemination tool.
Twitter: 26 followers. Ugh. "We haven't really got a huge strategy for using this."
"tech tips tuesday" and "websites wednesday"
Most hardcore twitter users are posting ten times a day. The weekly strategy seems anemic.
using http://twitterfeed.com
Is hoping to combine twitter and blogs. It strikes me that, after three years, there need to be cultural changes to encourage participation. Everyone wants to have fun.
"I can usually see a spike in registration within 24 hours of a newsletter going out" (magnet mail, a paid service)
I'm attending this session at #ttix. Victoria Williams is moving through a list of technologies that she's used to promote UEN's offerings.
Blogs: kind of stagnant, and no dialogue ensued
Youtube: 250,000 hits, but few of them from the core audience
Text alert systems: 200 subscribers. Using http://www.txtwire.com Sent out text alerts to promote under-enrolled courses.
Facebook: haven't really exploited that much. 49 "fans."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJW0nWJaB4g
Chick-Fil-A asked the user who created their facebook page to administer the site, because the corporate approach doesn't always work. "They just come in with the MBA approach" Of course, education isn't chicken sandwiches.
A lot of corporate involvement in social media consists of barging in on other people's conversations. [yes].
**** Use facebook to LISTEN to what your audience is saying. Not as sold on FB as a dissemination tool.
Twitter: 26 followers. Ugh. "We haven't really got a huge strategy for using this."
"tech tips tuesday" and "websites wednesday"
Most hardcore twitter users are posting ten times a day. The weekly strategy seems anemic.
using http://twitterfeed.com
Is hoping to combine twitter and blogs. It strikes me that, after three years, there need to be cultural changes to encourage participation. Everyone wants to have fun.
"I can usually see a spike in registration within 24 hours of a newsletter going out" (magnet mail, a paid service)
Thursday, May 28
Dual Perspectives Article
Dual Perspectives Article: "Everyone complains about 'e-mail overload' — getting so much stupid corporate e-mail that you miss out on important messages. But Byron Reeves has figured out a way to solve the problem.
How? By turning corporate e-mail into a game.
Reeves, a communications professor at Stanford, had studied the spectacularly popular online game World of Warcraft, and he knew that people inside the game place enormous value on the game's artificial currency of gold pieces. They'll go on quests and spend hours doing boring tasks just to earn it. That gave him an idea: Why not create a system where users earn virtual currency by intelligently using e-mail?"
How? By turning corporate e-mail into a game.
Reeves, a communications professor at Stanford, had studied the spectacularly popular online game World of Warcraft, and he knew that people inside the game place enormous value on the game's artificial currency of gold pieces. They'll go on quests and spend hours doing boring tasks just to earn it. That gave him an idea: Why not create a system where users earn virtual currency by intelligently using e-mail?"
Games Without Frontiers: The Game of Politics Is Ready for Its Upgrade
Games Without Frontiers: The Game of Politics Is Ready for Its Upgrade: "But let me suggest another way to look at it. Maybe American democracy really is a game -- and maybe that's the best thing about it.
What, after all, is a game? A game is a set of rules that gives players a set of goals but also constrains their behavior in striving for those goals; it architects their behavior in an interesting and hopefully enjoyable way. A really well-designed game is 'balanced' and self-correcting. In a game of pool, for example, if you take an early lead by sinking a ton of balls, you quickly discover that -- whoops -- the game gets harder because your opponents' balls block all your shots. In MMOs like World of Warcraft, different classes of players do different things; as a result, no one class can run roughshod over all others."
What, after all, is a game? A game is a set of rules that gives players a set of goals but also constrains their behavior in striving for those goals; it architects their behavior in an interesting and hopefully enjoyable way. A really well-designed game is 'balanced' and self-correcting. In a game of pool, for example, if you take an early lead by sinking a ton of balls, you quickly discover that -- whoops -- the game gets harder because your opponents' balls block all your shots. In MMOs like World of Warcraft, different classes of players do different things; as a result, no one class can run roughshod over all others."
Wednesday, May 27
The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online
The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online:
"Instead of gathering on collective farms, we gather in collective worlds. Instead of state factories, we have desktop factories connected to virtual co-ops. Instead of sharing drill bits, picks, and shovels, we share apps, scripts, and APIs. Instead of faceless politburos, we have faceless meritocracies, where the only thing that matters is getting things done. Instead of national production, we have peer production. Instead of government rations and subsidies, we have a bounty of free goods."
"Instead of gathering on collective farms, we gather in collective worlds. Instead of state factories, we have desktop factories connected to virtual co-ops. Instead of sharing drill bits, picks, and shovels, we share apps, scripts, and APIs. Instead of faceless politburos, we have faceless meritocracies, where the only thing that matters is getting things done. Instead of national production, we have peer production. Instead of government rations and subsidies, we have a bounty of free goods."
Saturday, April 4
two items I stumbled across are both interesting and troubling. First, the University of Virginia, citing 99% laptop ownership among its students, is closing down their computer labs over three years to cut costs:
http://www.metafilter.com/80409/Rethinking-the-higher-education-computer-lab-at-U-of-VA
And in other news, the venerable Networked Writing Environment closed down last summer. I never used it, but over the years I've kept stumbling across it and reading references to it. It seems like a lot of good scholars worked in that lab and now it is gone as well:
http://www.nwe.ufl.edu/writing/closing/
I feel really fortunate that our two labs are student-funded, but I also have noted that increasingly more laptops are showing up in class. These issues have cropped up on Techrhet repeatedly over the years, of course. Perhaps the economic climate is accelerating certain changes to the technological context of writing instruction.
http://www.metafilter.com/
And in other news, the venerable Networked Writing Environment closed down last summer. I never used it, but over the years I've kept stumbling across it and reading references to it. It seems like a lot of good scholars worked in that lab and now it is gone as well:
http://www.nwe.ufl.edu/
I feel really fortunate that our two labs are student-funded, but I also have noted that increasingly more laptops are showing up in class. These issues have cropped up on Techrhet repeatedly over the years, of course. Perhaps the economic climate is accelerating certain changes to the technological context of writing instruction.
Thursday, April 2
Wednesday, February 18
Sunday, November 23
Thursday, November 13
Tuesday, November 11
Tuesday, May 13
The New York Times > Business > What Corporate America Can't Build: A Sentence
The New York Times > Business > What Corporate America Can't Build: A Sentence: "'E-mail is a party to which English teachers have not been invited,' Dr. Hogan said. 'It has companies tearing their hair out.'"
Saturday, May 10
Thursday, May 1
Theory of Margin
Theory of Margin: "A new area of study that has emerged from McClusky's Power-Load-Margin theory is the degree to which instructors of adults contribute to the depletion or reduction of discretionary energy (margin) in adult students. This work has been pioneered by Day and James (1984) at the University of Wyoming. In a series of interviews with adult students, they found numerous examples of instructor-generated load that they clustered into four areas: attitude, behavior, task, and environment. Examples of each are as follows:"
Tuesday, April 22
Tuesday, April 8, 2008: Monthly Program (BayCHI)
Tuesday, April 8, 2008: Monthly Program (BayCHI): "aking Amy Jo Kim�s principles to heart, it�s possible to make even the most productive social interactivities 'fun.' We already knew we could lose track of time and become immersed in our work but now we know how to help others fall into 'flow'. Kim reviews three case studies of social media � YouTube, Twitter and FaceBook -- implementing specific qualities of game mechanics."
Wednesday, April 16
Flexknowlogy � Defining “Creepy Treehouse”
Flexknowlogy � Defining “Creepy Treehouse”: "creepy treehouse
n. A place, physical or virtual (e.g. online), built by adults with the intention of luring in kids.
Example: “Kids … can see a [creepy treehouse] a mile away and generally do a good job in avoiding them.” John Krutsch in Are You Building a Creepy Treehouse?”"
n. A place, physical or virtual (e.g. online), built by adults with the intention of luring in kids.
Example: “Kids … can see a [creepy treehouse] a mile away and generally do a good job in avoiding them.” John Krutsch in Are You Building a Creepy Treehouse?”"
Ruminate � Blog Archive � I’m Not Interested in “the PLE”
Ruminate � Blog Archive � I’m Not Interested in “the PLE”
Chris Lott, who I discovered through John Krutsch.
Chris Lott, who I discovered through John Krutsch.
Wednesday, April 9
Self-employed technorati find places to network | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle
Self-employed technorati find places to network | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle: "'Rather than spending an extended period of time banging your head, the ability to shoot the question out to a room to get a response is really great,'' said Alex Hillman, who was an increasingly claustrophobic self-employed Web developer before founding IndependentsHall, a shared office space for his peers in Philadelphia."
Tuesday, April 1
Sunday, March 30
Friday, March 28
PmWiki | PmWiki / InitialSetupTasks
PmWiki | PmWiki / InitialSetupTasks: "Don't modify or rename pmwiki.php
PmWiki has been designed so that all customizations can be made without changing the distribution files -- one of its design goals is to provide seamless upgrades. PmWiki never writes to files in the local/ or cookbook/ directories, so placing your customizations here makes it easier to track the changes and upgrade PmWiki without losing the changes.
When changing the configuration of your site, always change the local/config.php file or add files to the cookbook/ or pub directories. Do not change pmwiki.php or the files in the scripts/ directory because the files are supposed to be overwritten upon upgrading.
You shouldn't rename pmwiki.php either. If you rename the file it will not be overwritten during an upgrade of the software and there will be a version mismatch. Many administrators add an index.php 'wrapper script' in the pmwiki directory that contains the following single line:
<?php include('pmwiki.php');"
Failure to heed this advice cost me a month or two of broken wiki when I upgraded and got too busy to troubleshoot.
PmWiki has been designed so that all customizations can be made without changing the distribution files -- one of its design goals is to provide seamless upgrades. PmWiki never writes to files in the local/ or cookbook/ directories, so placing your customizations here makes it easier to track the changes and upgrade PmWiki without losing the changes.
When changing the configuration of your site, always change the local/config.php file or add files to the cookbook/ or pub directories. Do not change pmwiki.php or the files in the scripts/ directory because the files are supposed to be overwritten upon upgrading.
You shouldn't rename pmwiki.php either. If you rename the file it will not be overwritten during an upgrade of the software and there will be a version mismatch. Many administrators add an index.php 'wrapper script' in the pmwiki directory that contains the following single line:
<?php include('pmwiki.php');"
Failure to heed this advice cost me a month or two of broken wiki when I upgraded and got too busy to troubleshoot.
Dual Monitors on OS X Leopard
Dual Monitors on OS X Leopard
Use when giving presentations to keep your annotations on the laptop and the slides on the public screen. I think.
Use when giving presentations to keep your annotations on the laptop and the slides on the public screen. I think.
Are You Taking Advantage of Web 2.0? - New York Times
Are You Taking Advantage of Web 2.0? - New York Times: "But you'll gain trust, goodwill and positive attention. You'll put a human face on your company. And you'll learn stuff about your customers that you wouldn't have discovered any other way."
Are You Taking Advantage of Web 2.0? - New York Times
Are You Taking Advantage of Web 2.0? - New York Times: "The audience loved that one; within seconds, there were 132 responses on the screen in a huge, scrolling list. 'Not enough money.' 'Don't understand it.' 'No technical resources.' 'Not enough manpower.' 'No visible return on investment.' 'Fear of ridicule.' 'Fear of slander.' 'Fear of permanence.' 'Fear of the public running amok.'
The fears are rational enough: over and over again, we've all seen blog comments devolve into juvenile, offensive bickering, backstabbing and grandstanding.
Even during my early blogging days, The Times's blogs didn't have comments. And yet, as several of my own readers wrote: Without comments, a blog is not a blog at all. It's just a Web page—Web 1.0.
The solution, of course, was moderation."
The fears are rational enough: over and over again, we've all seen blog comments devolve into juvenile, offensive bickering, backstabbing and grandstanding.
Even during my early blogging days, The Times's blogs didn't have comments. And yet, as several of my own readers wrote: Without comments, a blog is not a blog at all. It's just a Web page—Web 1.0.
The solution, of course, was moderation."
Web 2.0 and New Media Definitions - New Comm Biz - New media strategies for business
Web 2.0 and New Media Definitions - New Comm Biz - New media strategies for business: "Web 2.0 seems to be kind of an amorphous, nebulous entity. Everyone seems to have a different definition and no two are the same. Some even go as far to say that it doesn’t exist. VCs seem to be convinced of web 2.0’s existence however, and have proven so with their wallets."
Friday, March 21
Thursday, March 20
Friday, March 7
Monday, March 3
Friday, February 22
Tuesday, February 19
Tuesday, January 29
Tool Use Is Just a Trick of the Mind -- Balter 2008 (128): 2 -- ScienceNOW
Tool Use Is Just a Trick of the Mind -- Balter 2008 (128): 2 -- ScienceNOW: "Don't take that hammer for granted. Using tools may seem like second nature, but only a few animals can master the coordination and mental sophistication required. So how did primates learn to use tools in the first place? A new study in monkeys suggests that the brain's trick is to treat tools as just another body part."
Oooh, this is so activity theory!
Oooh, this is so activity theory!
Monday, January 28
Monday, January 14
With friends like these ... Tom Hodgkinson on the politics of the people behind Facebook | Technology | The Guardian
With friends like these ... Tom Hodgkinson on the politics of the people behind Facebook | Technology | The Guardian: "And does Facebook really connect people? Doesn't it rather disconnect us, since instead of doing something enjoyable such as talking and eating and dancing and drinking with my friends, I am merely sending them little ungrammatical notes and amusing photos in cyberspace, while chained to my desk? A friend of mine recently told me that he had spent a Saturday night at home alone on Facebook, drinking at his desk. What a gloomy image. Far from connecting us, Facebook actually isolates us at our workstations."
Wednesday, January 9
How Hot Did The Jet Fuel Heat The World Trade Center?
How Hot Did The Jet Fuel Heat The World Trade Center?: "'In the mid-1990s British Steel and the Building Research Establishment performed a series of six experiments at Cardington to investigate the behavior of steel frame buildings. These experiments were conducted in a simulated, eight-story building. Secondary steel beams were not protected. Despite the temperature of the steel beams reaching 800-900� C (1,500-1,700� F) in three of the tests (well above the traditionally assumed critical temperature of 600� C (1,100� F), no collapse was observed in any of the six experiments.'"
Tuesday, January 8
Monday, January 7
Gates bids farewell to tech gathering - MarketWatch
Gates bids farewell to tech gathering - MarketWatch: "In particular, he predicted that a key element in the next decade will be 'natural-user interface,' in which consumers interface with their devices in more natural ways. He even mentioned the iPhone - the iconic touch-screen wireless phone introduced last year by longtime Microsoft rival Apple Inc. (AAPL:
Apple Inc
News, chart, profile, more
Last: 177.64-2.41-1.34%
4:00pm 01/07/2008
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Sponsored by:
AAPL 177.64, -2.41, -1.3%) - as a key development in that area, and predicted that touch-screen and voice commands will play a much larger role in future electronics devices."
Apple Inc
News, chart, profile, more
Last: 177.64-2.41-1.34%
4:00pm 01/07/2008
Delayed quote data
Add to portfolio
Analyst
Create alert
Insider
Discuss
Financials
Sponsored by:
AAPL 177.64, -2.41, -1.3%) - as a key development in that area, and predicted that touch-screen and voice commands will play a much larger role in future electronics devices."
Sunday, December 30
Saturday, December 29
Wednesday, December 26
Saturday, December 22
Friday, December 21
Saturday, December 8
[my lawyer] asked me yesterday why it was that I never swore. He found me washing windows in this library, although nobody had ordered me to do that.
So I told my my maternal grandfather's idea that obscenity and blasphemy gave most people permission not to listen respectfully to whatever was being said.
I repeated an old story Grandfather Wills had taught me, which was about a town where a cannon was fired at noon every day. One day the cannoneer was sick at the last minute and was too incapacitated to fire the cannon.
So at high noon there was silence.
All the peole in the town jumped out of their skins when the sun reached its zenith. They asked each other in astonishment, "Good gravy! What was that?"
My lawyer wanted to know what that had to do with my not swearing.
I replied that in an era as foul mouthed as this one, "Good gravy" had the same power to startle as a cannon shot.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus
So I told my my maternal grandfather's idea that obscenity and blasphemy gave most people permission not to listen respectfully to whatever was being said.
I repeated an old story Grandfather Wills had taught me, which was about a town where a cannon was fired at noon every day. One day the cannoneer was sick at the last minute and was too incapacitated to fire the cannon.
So at high noon there was silence.
All the peole in the town jumped out of their skins when the sun reached its zenith. They asked each other in astonishment, "Good gravy! What was that?"
My lawyer wanted to know what that had to do with my not swearing.
I replied that in an era as foul mouthed as this one, "Good gravy" had the same power to startle as a cannon shot.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus
Friday, December 7
Thursday, December 6
Wednesday, December 5
Sunday, December 2
Friday, November 30
Wednesday, November 28
Tuesday, November 27
Monday, November 26
Wednesday, November 21
Tuesday, November 20
Monday, November 19
Friday, November 16
Thursday, November 15
Wednesday, November 14
Saturday, November 10
Tuesday, November 6
Wednesday, October 31
Saturday, October 20
Tuesday, October 16
Monday, October 15
Sunday, October 14
Saturday, October 13
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