Category — General

craigslist: blacksburg classifieds for jobs, apartments, personals, for sale, services, community, and events:

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personally, i never thought that i’d see the day… but… blacksburg has a craigslist.

Does your life suck? – Life – The Phoenix :
If Second Life truly takes hold, millions will spend hours doing business, meeting people, and just living inside the virtual world. As future upgrades are made, there will likely be short-term advances: voice-over technology, fewer system crashes, photo-realistic environments. But in the longer term, humans might someday be able to upload their memories, their personalities, their entire lives, into their avatars. And they might be able to program them to live and breathe and interact for all eternity inside Second Life. Humanity’s great quest for immortality might finally be solved.

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seems a bit optimistic…. hehehe

Amsterdam clinic offers gamers path back to reality – Yahoo! News:
AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – Addiction expert Keith Bakker hopes
the serenity of a 16th century townhouse on one of Amsterdam’s
canals will coax those snared in the fantasy world of online
games back to reality.

“Like many others he started out with a handheld GameBoy aged 12 but progressed to multiplayer online games that offer open-ended stories set in virtual universes that can support tens of thousands of players.”

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is it that bad?

social interaction online…. the new drug! not.

I have about 4 shelf-feet of dungeons and dragons, middle-earth roleplaying game and related materials that i’m selling for $75 plus shipping (probably close to $100). If you love rare and not so rare role-playing stuff drop me a note. They can be yours.

Also if anyone in blacksburg is reading this…. I have about a cubic meter of books that i’m going to give away to whomever comes to help me move… excellent reference, philosophy, ethics, sts, theory, and related things.

H-Info:
H-Info focuses on the interdisciplinary, international study of information and information institutions, broadly construed. It includes the foundations and history of print culture; reading and reception histories; the history and foundations of library and information sciences; and the history of libraries, archives, document-based cultural repositories, and other information institutions
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as i’m a knowledge junky… i signed up for this a few days ago…

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.

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?

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.

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.