Category Archives: education
Even George started small
A great improvement over an inexplicably beloved brand franchise:
“In an insane world, the sane man must appear to be insane”
Also sprach Hauptmann Kirk. LAT: With the birth of his son 15 years ago, dedicated linguist d’Armond Speers embarked on the ultimate experiment: He spoke to him only in Klingon — the language of the alien race of “Star Trek” fame — for the first three years of his life. “I was interested in the [...]
QOTD
Kottke on Lego: Man, when even the financial analysts are saying that you need more open-ended play toys, you’ve really gone off the rails. .
Vision, revised
A snapshot of a vision test currently administered[*] to young (age 4+) people: How many four-year-olds have seen enough Ma Bell–ish rotary desk phone to recognize it as a generic “phone” icon? Note to the legions of pediatricians with a DIY streak who read B1FF.ORG!!!: please save the following knocked-together image to your desktop, print [...]
Also posted in design, government, medicine, standards, trend Tagged children, healthcare, sight, test Leave a comment
Healthcare debate: generational warfare
That is why they’re bringing out the guns. It‘s not just the right-wing gothic imagination run amok (though it is that). It’s war. The healthcare debate in a nutshell: declining revenues + rising costs = growing competition for shrinking resources. And on one side of that conflict, an aging segment of the population, weaned on [...]
Also posted in economics, energy, environment, food, government, trend Tagged crisis, healthcare Leave a comment
Elimination communication
The NYT picks up on an AP story (Vereckey, “Frugal parents toss disposable training pants,” 29 Jul ’09): This year, it seems, the sagging economy is may now be having an unexpected effect on methods and timing of [potty] training. Disposable diapers are not cheap (an average of 42 cents each); neither are training pants [...]
Journalistic ethics, NYT edition
Randy Cohen, who currently “writes the The Ethicist for The New York Times Magazine” and will write another weekly column (“Moral of the Story”) “examin[ing] a news story from an ethical perspective,” shows either (a) sloppy writing, (b) a complete disregard for national sensibilities, or (c) a sort of carpet-bombing ignorance of the arts and [...]
Also posted in architecture, art, economics, energy, environment, government, international, language, law, media, medicine, military, neighborhood, religion, science Tagged cemetery, France, history, nyt, Pere Lachaise Leave a comment
Warning! Warning! Will Robinson!
After his TED talk, Gever Tulley’s Tinkering School is all the rage. He published these warning stickers in early 2007: Original PDFs here. See also: “1991,” “Pretty much.”
Terrorist training video
Chilling footage: Siracusa: At the DMCA 1201 hearings at the Copyright Office at the Library of Congress, representatives from the MPAA showed a video demonstrating how users can videorecord a TV set. They argue this is an acceptable analog alternative to breaking copy protection on a DVD. Don’t try this at home in the movie [...]
SLM: I Have good news and bad news
First the good news: Sallie Mae gave some hope to the unemployed Monday, announcing it will bring 2,000 jobs to the U.S. within the next 18 months as it shifts call center and other operations from overseas. The move marks somewhat of a turnaround for the nation’s largest private student lender, which two years ago [...]
Past not totally useless, streaming video at 11
(Tinklers diagram from Chemical Imbalance, ca. ’90[?]; running footer from the Fall, Perverted By Language.) NYT (M. Rich, “Google Hopes to Open a Trove of Little-Seen Books,” 4 Jan ’09): “We did not think necessarily we could make money,” said Sergey Brin, a Google founder and its president of technology, in a brief interview at [...]
Down again; or whatever happened to Windy Smith?
Martin Miller (“Is Campaigns’ Path to the Heart a Proper One?”, LAT [11 Aug ’00]), on Windy Smith’s cameo at the 2000 RNC: “What the nation witnessed was the passing of the torch,” said JoAnn Simons, president of the Atlanta-based National Down Syndrome Congress. “Individuals with disabilities don’t necessarily need people to speak for them.” [...]
Also posted in government, international, law, media, military, security Tagged disability, GOP, history, RNC Leave a comment
Managing expectations
Eve Fairbanks (“McCain Campaign Tries the Chicken Prank,” “The Stump” [TNR], 25 Aug ’08): a prank legendarily pulled at my high school in which students procured well fewer than 20 live chickens, numbered them 1 through 20 with magic markers (leaving some numbers out), set them loose, and then sat back and gleefully watched as [...]
Proposed Google service
“Don’t be evil” is too passive and, above all, too simple. A minor mod like this… Google may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. Google must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. Google [...]
The Birth of poptimism
The NYT has an “interactive” piece—an aggro Flash thing that takes its inspiration from OSX’s Dock—about development of the Olympic torch from 1936 to the present. Three alternate/additional designs for the Mexico City ’68 torch can be found at the site of Olympic Museum. Here’s a clearer detail of Type B:
F-ing students!
The headline for Ron Lieber’s “Danger Lurks When Shopping for Student Loans” (NYT, 26 July, ’08) is neutered in a typical way: it should read “Predatory Student Loansters *#@% Your Children for Shopping Around.” This isn’t a diffuse, inevitable danger, and it definitely isn’t “lurking”: it’s a morass of meticulously developed analyses and techniques implemented [...]
Great books
Motoko Rich, “Conservative Authors Sue Publisher,” NYT (7 Nov ’07): “Five authors have sued the parent company of Regnery Publishing, a Washington imprint of conservative books, charging that the company deprives its writers of royalties by selling their books at a steep discount to book clubs and other organizations owned by the same parent company” [...]
The Future
School officials who report suspected sexual abuse of a child based on a psychic‘s claim to an educational assistant that “a little girl by the name of ‘V’ … is being sexually abused by a man between the ages of 23 and 26” versus a mother who, “dissatisfied with the treatment her daughter had received [...]
Steve Cisler interview
A video’s worth a thousand tributes. …
Foreclosure, expulsion
WSJ, “School Districts Get Tough as Home Foreclosures Rise“: Districts from Florida to California are hiring private investigators, creating anonymous tip lines and imposing penalties when they believe people have registered at false addresses. [...] One reason for the crackdown is the rise in home foreclosures, which may prod parents into faking addresses to keep [...]
Also posted in finance, neighborhood Tagged bean-counter, foreclosure, privacy, public Leave a comment
McCain vs Obama, round one
Mr. Kerrey: “Mr. McCain is getting an honorary degree. He was invited to speak. First was Barak Obama. Both say yes and/or both say no.” Jean Sara Rohe’s prebuttal of McCain’s commencement speech, and her later explanation. McCain chief of Staff Mark Salter: “The only person you have succeeded in making look like an idiot [...]
Journal of Journal Performance Studies