Posts from — July 2006

/Message: Edglings: A Well-Ordered Humanism and The Future Of Everything:
Here’s some thoughts on the emerging characteristics of web culture: the glue that holds Edglings — and through them, everything else — together:

These facets of society are arrayed in no particular order, and are strongly mutually reinforcing. They share, at the core, a strong predisposition to reject centralized authority, whether in business, goverment, media, or religion. The web allows us to change all the major axes of life, and to work our way onto a substantively different cultural ethos than what has preceded it, specifically the structures of life and work that have been thrown up by the industrial revolution and its aftermath.

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stowe boyd has some insights into a phenomenal he calla ‘edgelings’… to me it looks remarkably like postmodernity combined with a more personal informationalism and consumerism.

Foreign Policy: The State at Work:
Running a poor country has never been a tougher job. Civil servants are asked to do the people’s work with very little, sometimes with nothing at all. They see to it that the job gets done—or grinds to a halt. Meet the bureaucrats.

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this photoessay reminds me of many professor’s offices… only with fewer books.

Pete H’s Homemade Air Conditioner:
PETE’S HOMEMADE AIR
CONDITIONER

Credit goes out to Pete H. in
sunny England for this great build. This version of the homemade air
conditioner removes the need to drain water outside by using an
aquarium pump, and sits on a rotating base.
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brilliant.

New Scientist Breaking News – ‘Rewired brain’ revives patient after 19 years:
Surprisingly, the circuits look nothing like normal brain anatomy. A lot of the damage had been to axons that passed from one side of the brain to the other, torn by the force of the accident. But Schiff says that new connections seem to have grown across around the back of the brain, forming structures that do not exist in normal brains.

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if the brain can rewire itself… then why does it wire itself the way it does? and how do societies, cultures, and child raising traditions affect that wiring?

BOM:
The Bacon of the Month Club is the greatest of all gifts. I’m not making that up. I get calls from customers all the time that tell me this. In my humble opinion no other club in the universe gives you as much pleasure and sheer delight as The Bacon of the Month Club. The Bacon of the Month Club is the go-to gift for that person in your life who loves bacon, who has everything or who has very little. Join for yourself. Give yourself the gift of bacon.

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the greatest of gifts! it must be better than freedom, than happiness, than a grandson or granddaughter… etc. etc. which is quite a feat.

http://www.prattsenate.org/nytimes_07_02_06.htm
http://www.internationaled.org/mathsciencereport.htm
http://www.pekingduck.org/archives/003837.php

to the NYT articles and letters above…. I respond thusly:

I tend to agree more with the Letters, than with the nyt article and even less so with the report.

I think we have to be very careful about accounting for the cultural institutionalization of learning in China and the U.S. We need to be much more careful than the 29 page report. The report does not do that very well at all, it basically assumes a ‘most similar systems’ model of society and culture to make its comparison. This model is not justified in my mind. The U.S. and China are involved in fundamentally different projects in their educational systems though they have similar goals. Time on task type training, which is ‘efficient’ in China, might not be ‘efficient’ in the U.S. where we likely focus on a different sense of freedom, creativity and progress in learning.

I think it would be far more productive, policy-wise, to actually address the issues within the u.s. in regards to graduation and retention rates. Achievement measurement is grossly affected when there are an overwhelming percentage of people who are being ‘left behind’ or ‘unaddressed’ by the school systems in the u.s. In fact, i think we can probably fairly easily show that the single norm distribution basis for ’science and math education measurements’ is actually multi-modal and the arguments based on the covering norm are actually hiding very serious social and educational issues. If the needs of the people represented in the lower achieving modes of the population were addressed and they were taught and graduated, I think you would see the measured norm of science and math education change dramatically in the u.s.

What then is the real politics and policy behind the report? It seeks to legitimize national standards and national testing, taking away a power that has been relegated to local democracies and replacing it with national bureaucracies. It seeks to remove teacher control of the curriculum. It seems better teaching of teachers (ok, i agree with this one, give us educated and inspired teachers). It seeks to replace the open system of education and admissions with examination based access to education, (given what we know about cultural biases in the sat and act … ), etc. etc. In short, I think what we have is just a document that seeks to expand the currently promoted educational regime, which in the last 7 years or so has demonstrated significant problems addressing the needs of all students in the U.S.

ianhenderson.org – megazoomer:
Megazoomer makes windows full-screen. Just press Command-Enter, and the front-most window grows to fill your entire monitor. Press the same keys, and it shrinks again. Like Graffiti, you have to download SIMBL in order for it to work.
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sweet tool.

My Robot Brain Needs Beer:

Leslie Powell:

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the robots are missing!

that <a href=”http://lemmingworks.org/weblog/”>professor nolan</a> is having a birthday on the 7th of july. or that’s what amazon says.

SLurl: Location-Based Linking in Second Life: