A great improvement over an inexplicably beloved brand franchise:
Category Archives: education
“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 question of whether my son, going through his first language acquisition process, would acquire it like any human language,” Speers said. “He was definitely starting to learn it.”
So when Ultralingua, a dictionary, translation and grammar software company in Dinkytown, honored requests from customers to create applications for a Klingon dictionary, they turned to Speers, a self-employed software consultant.
“It was right square in my sweet spot,” said Speers, who graduated from Georgetown University in 2002 with a doctorate in computational linguistics.
If he'd used Europanto, his son would still speak it fluently.
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 it out at various sizes, tape it over the relevant parts of your cultural-literacy visions test charts, and get back to us about the remarkable improvement in your patients’ “vision.”
Then maybe think about updating the WWII-era icon of a Jeep to reflect childrens’ experiences with cars in light of (e.g.) NTSA regulations regarding child car seats.
[*] In what probably is one of the best pediatric group practices in the US.
Healthcare debate: generational warfare
under economics, education, energy, environment, food, government, trend
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 and wedded to the postwar cult of youthfulness, painfully aware that as its ideals fade its healthcare costs will rise. They’ve grown fat on a diet of screwing younger people out of everything: cognitive capture through branding empires imprinted (literally) from diapers onward, consumer culture that’s cheap in substance only (young pay old), the compounding bloat of educational costs (we skipped out on our student loans therefore you can’t), the abyss of debt culture, the wilderness of mirrors called credit reporting, skyrocketing housing costs (lease-to-own mutated into default-to-turns-out-you-rented-sucker), the infinite proliferation of unaccountable “fees,” dwindling pay (and the threat of endless “internships”), the informalization of work (and destruction of labor), a ubiquitous cult of waste (whose roving shrine is the “SUV”), and social safety nets as frail as the generations that benefited from them. The old-timers are terrified on two fronts that granny really will be unplugged: first, because they secretly identify with “granny” and, second, because they (also secretly) know the values they’ve inculcated in their young all but guarantee it.
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 (68 cents a piece), which, while convenient, do not rise to the level of necessary. Sales of the latter are falling[....] Parents, it seems, are doing the math, and deciding that a few more accidents in cloth underwear is worth the money saved not buying the disposable kind.
So now we know how the economy is shaping potty-training now; the question is how will potty-training now express itself (e.g., shape the economy) decades from now?
Low bar
Creepy email .sig:
In any large population, there are some people who aren’t very bright. That’s not their fault, it’s just in their genes. As an engineer, I have a responsibility to design things that won’t kill off the slower ones, just as I have a responsibility to design things that won’t harm my neighbor’s dog.
(risks)
Journalistic ethics, NYT edition
under architecture, art, economics, education, energy, environment, government, international, language, law, media, medicine, military, neighborhood, religion, science
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 sciences when he writes:
There’d be no reason to visit Pere Lachaise if it did not provide a physical link to Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison.
Except for, say, Abelard and Heloise, Apollinaire, Balzac, Bernard, Bichat, Bizet, Bourdieu, Champollion, Colette, Comte, Corot, Daumier, Delacroix, Vivant Denon, Doré, Duncan, Éluard, Ernst, Fontaine, Fourier, Fuller, Gay-Lussac, Haussmann, Lyotard, Marceau, Méliés, Merleau-Ponty, Modigliani, Moliere, Nadar, Nerval, Ophuls, Piaf, Pissarro, Proust, Rossini, Roussel, Saint-Hilaire, Seurat, Signoret, Stein, and Toklas. And the Mur des Fédérés.
(photo: agramainio)
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:
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 theater, analogholes kids.
(df)
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 was faced with the need to slash costs amid collapsing capital markets. “We were at the point where we couldn’t make a student loan at a profit,” Chief Executive Albert L. Lord said during a conference call. Sallie Mae quickly scuttled jobs overseas as part of a plan to save about $300 million over a 12-month period. “The company had to re-engineer itself. It had to cut jobs and it had to move jobs. At least that’s how we felt at the time,” Lord explained. Once the cost cuts were made, Sallie Mae started to look into returning those positions to the U.S. [AP, 6 apr ’09]
And now for the bad news... Choose all that apply:
- Employment numbers are tanking and will continue to do so.
- Graduating students won’t find jobs.
- Their parents are strapped as well.
- Forbearances and defaults will skyrocket.
- Having foreign national dun recent grads for money would be really bad PR.
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 the company’s headquarters. “We just feel this is part of our core mission. There is fantastic information in books. Often when I do a search, what is in a book is miles ahead of what I find on a Web site.”
Amazing!
Revenue will be generated through advertising sales on pages where previews of scanned books appear, through subscriptions by libraries and others to a database of all the scanned books in Google’s collection, and through sales to consumers of digital access to copyrighted books. Google will take 37 percent of this revenue, leaving 63 percent for publishers and authors.
“Privatization” was an unfortunate choice for describing the process by which one generation arrogates the right of redefining the relationship between a society and its patrimony, because what we have here is a privatization of the private.
See also: “From the ontological-hysterical archives.”
Down again; or whatever happened to Windy Smith?
under education, government, international, law, media, military, security
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.”
More (“Tugging at Heartstrings is Political Fiddling,” LAT [14 Aug ’00]):
When Smith finished, the ovation for her rivalled the intensity of those given later for Dick Cheney and Bush. In the wake of Smith’s public talk, leading Down Syndrome advocates have also cheered her inclusion. The appearance culminates a decade of growing national exposure, largely over television, for people with Down Syndrome, who number 350,000 in the United States, advocates said.
Be careful what you wish for, as the old saw goes. That event seems to been the culmination (that is, end) of the growing exposure, and that exposure seems to have been limited to television—right when everyone switched to the net. Thus:
(Then again, anyone can write a Wikipedia entry.)
Dave Reynolds, (“Media Still Leaves Voices out,” Ragged Edge Online [May/June ’03]) spells out one way in which this exploitation operates:
Managing expectations
under education
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 hapless school officials ran around the school searching for the remaining missing chickens that had never actually existed.
The rest is chatter—the link is just for due credit.
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 must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
...could lead to some obvious services...
...which is pretty much what Google is up to anyway.
The Birth of poptimism
under architecture, design, education, international, media
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!
under education, finance, government
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 through a public–private field dominated by profit-maximizers. And no one is responsible, of course. Now, no amount of market-mongering can excuse preying on young people (an 18-year-old’s credit score?) or anyone else seeking to educate him- or herself. The only way to stop it—this is the received wisdom, yes?—is by deterring it. So what would be an effective deterrent for the systematic financial exploitation of young people? Environmental crime could serve as a useful analogy.
(Some of the other GSEs aren’t doing so well; so when will the credit crunch topple the Student Loan Marketing Corporation a/k/a “Sallie Mae”?)
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” (emphasis added).
Alfred S. (son of Henry) Regnery, “Regnery on Regnery,” humanevents.com (8 Nov ’07):
To anyone in the book publishing industry they’re laughable. I’m a lawyer and know that the contracts they signed are clear and transparent, and are similar to the contracts used throughout the industry. I also know that Regnery puts marketing muscle and expertise behind its books like nobody else in the business—something that each of the five authors involved benefited from enormously. These disgruntled authors are, perversely, complaining about that muscle. But it’s one of the reasons why Regnery has the success it does in putting conservative books where the New York Times doesn’t want them—on its bestseller list.
[...]
Regnery is publisher of The American Spectator
The Future
under education, government
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 at the school,” had the child “equipped with a GPS unit ... that provided [‘nonstpop’] audio records of everything that was going on around her.”
(Random observations | City News [.ca])
Foreclosure, expulsion
under education, finance, neighborhood
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 their children at their current schools, some in the field say.
The rest of the article is a shop of horrors: a private dick who does “blitz runs” and claims he’ll “save districts a total of $12.2 million next year through removing students,” and Palm Beach County officials who “say they have heard of families illegally sharing homes in upscale areas that are zoned for single-family homes.” One advocacy organization estimates that “two million children are likely to be affected by the wave of foreclosures on subprime mortgages, mostly this year and next.”
According to the article, the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act etc.—signed into law by Reagan—“says school districts can't deny enrollment to children who are homeless because of foreclosure or other economic hardship.” Not so, says the unavoidable source: it’s a “conditional funding act” to which states are subject only if they accept optional federal funding.
Where’s the school-voucher crowd when we need them?
McCain vs Obama, round one
under education
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 is yourself.” And so on.