Posts from — November 2007

GlamGuns.com! Guns for Girls and Glamorous Weaponry!:
The Glambo Signature Series “Hello Kitty” HK-AK-47
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one of the first posts on this blog was the hello kitty pistol. sadly that image is no longer linked, nor does it show up on the page that reverse cowgirl originally pointed to on “ladies weapons”. Of course you won’t find it on her new blog either.

Rush, Little Baby – The Boston Globe:
Rush, Little Baby
How the push for infant academics may actually be a waste of time – or worse.
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My colleague jason… teaches this stuff….

Gustavo Dudamel – Classical Music – Los Angeles Philharmonic – New York Times:
Across Venezuela the sistema has established 246 centers, known as nucleos, which admit children between 2 and 18, assign them instruments and organize them into groups with instructors. Typically practicing for two or three hours every day, the children are performing recognizable music virtually from the outset.
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This venezuelan program seems to be what i think we can do with most education. Just give the kids some PCR systems and let’s teach them some biology. Go for it, some kids won’t get it, some kids will be amazing. The key it seems to me is to ‘trust them’ as they are the future, so give them access to knowledge and let them practice and experiment from the start.

The Science Education Myth:
The Science Education Myth
Forget the conventional wisdom. U.S. schools are turning out more capable science and engineering grads than the job market can support
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so this is a myth, i was a bit suspicious. The thing to think of though… is not really that we are overproducing what the market can hold, but that if we are making them for the market, are we really making engineers and scientists that can… change the world. Perhaps they are scientists and engineers a bit more than they should be? perhaps they should be more animators and painters.

The Philips Machine « Organizations and Markets:
I was strolling through the section on computing when — quite unexpectedly, because I had no idea it was on display at the museum — I noticed the famous Philips Machine (here is a pic), essentially a hydro-mechanical analogue computer designed to exhibit the functioning of the economy from the point of a very crude Keynesian perspective. The Machine was constructed by Bill Philips, of Philips curve fame, and was the reason why 1950s macro is sometimes referred to as “hydraulic Keynesianism” (a term that was coined by the brilliant, but now forgotten Alan Coddington).
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The philips machine was a hydraulic analog computer, unlike other analog computers (which i was just reading about in the start of the Processing book) usually were electronic. The use of fluid as an analogue for economic processes is fascinating. It reminded me of the device in the recent Terry Pratchett book. So I thought I’d share the link