Business: May 2004 Archive Page

[It's a visual site with little text to quote.] --Don't Buy It: Get Media Smart (PBS Kids)

Found via watercoolergames, where the "make a cereal box" utility was featured. I couldn't get that to work on my computer, which is too bad, because I really wanted to make a Jerz's Literacy Weblog cereal box, and maybe a cereal box icon for each of my classes in the fall. I don't know why I decided to do that, but if the boxes are cool I can probably retrofit some pedagogical rationale to it. Or not. Er... what was this blog entry supposed to be about? Oh, yeah.

A well-designed site that doesn't overwhelm with text (as I probably would if I were trying to teach the same lesson). I would appreciate more links off-site to more in depth resources, but maybe that's stuff is somewhere on the site -- I didn't look through it in depth.

Traditional sources of water collection are from dams, springs, rivers, streams and farm reservoirs, with the introduction of boreholes where these traditional sources of water are unavailable. Until now such boreholes have been operated by handpumps as the use of modern alternatives such as diesel, petrol or electric pumps are costly to install and have the concomitant constant financial burden of fuel and maintenance costs. --Children's roundabout solves the water problem in remote areas (www.roundabout.co.za)

Harnessing the energy of kids playing. Not as efficient as the system featured in The Matrix, perhaps, but still innovative.

I wonder, though... if, as the manufacturer's website says, the chore of carrying water has traditionally fallen to women and children, what will happen when a community depends on a patented roundabout play pump for its water?

My culture teaches me to let kids be kids, and not to give them too many chores. I don't know enough about the cultures being served by this invention to know whether people really would starve, or perhaps not draw enough water for proper hygeine, if the kids didn't have "fun" while doing it. By making water-drawing "fun", is that training a generation of kids not to do anything that isn't fun?

The pump installation also features billboards, two of which are designed to carry health messages, and two more designed to carry local advertising. The income from the advertising is supposed to pay for the maintenance of the facility.

In America we tend to be very sensitive about the presence of advertisements in playgrounds. I personally feel like a sell-out whenever I take the kids to a McDonaldland play gym.

Via metafilter, which points to some interesting discussion on worldchanging.

Jurors sentenced Carmack to seven years for convictions in March of forgery, identity theft and falsifying business records. He must serve a minimum 3 1/2 years. --Carolyn Thompson --Spammer Sentenced to 7 Years in Prison (AP/MyWay)

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!

If you?re curious about how much you think like a leader versus thinking like a manager, answer the following fifteen True or False questions. Then follow the link at the bottom of the page to see the answers and a brief discussion of each question. --Are You A Leader? Part I: The Leadership Self Test (Schuler Solutions)

One of my responsibilities is advising the student newspaper. It's really the editor in chief who is the leader of that organization; my job is to troubleshoot. Our new editor was an ROTC leader in high school, but a newspaper staffed mostly by volunteers is going to feel very different.

Via an interesting collection of leadership links from Lisbeth Klastrup, who's temporarily levelling up.

You can choose to fight evil alone, or you can join a gang of good guys. As humiliating as it might be, you could become a sidekick apprentice to characters with more developed skills. So far, the player community is welcoming; there aren't many foul-mouthed teens and crabby veterans. Newbie-friendly areas exist, and subscribers so far welcome the uninitiated. Do-gooders won't have any trouble forming their own Justice League or X-Men. --Scott Steinberg --Wanted: Heroes to Rescue City  (Wired)

But the surprise for Xbox was Advent Rising from Majesco, a super-stylish "Star Wars"-meets-"The Matrix" action adventure, which is being written by sci-fi author Orson Scott Card, best known for the "Ender's Game" series of novels. When writers of his caliber want to work on videogames, it's more proof that electronic entertainment is no passing fad. --N'Gai Croal
--Technology: Your Next Videogame (http://msnbc.msn.com)

Movable Mena?Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Six hundred trackbacks, and Six Apart backtracks... partly.

mmmmmmm Free beer..... GULP GULP GULP.. mmm MORE free beer GULP GULP GULP... (footstep) (footstep) (footstep) "HEY! stop blocking the bathroom door man, i gotta pee... What do you mean its $25 to use the bathroom!!! This is an OUTRAGE!!!" --Re:Good example of why open source != free (Slashdot)

Movable Type isn't an open source product, but this is an interesting comment attached to discussion of the Movable Type pricing change.

When recruited athletes make up such a substantial fraction of the entering class in at least some colleges, is there a risk that there will be too few places for other students, who want to become poets, scientists, or leaders of civic causes? Is there a possibility that, without realizing what is leading to what, the institutions themselves will become unbalanced in various ways? For example, will they feel a need to devote more and more of their teaching resources to fields like business and economics -- which are disproportionately elected by athletes -- in lieu of investing more heavily in less "practical" fields, such as classics, physics, and language study? Similarly, as one commentator put the question, what are the effects on those students interested in fields like philosophy? Could they feel at risk of being devalued? --James L. Shulman and William G. Bowen
--How the Playing Field Is Encroaching on the Admissions Office (Chronicle)

An old article, but on a subject that weighs on my mind from time to time.

He began calculating frantically. He gathered data on 616 auctions, observing how much each item sold for in U.S. dollars. When he averaged the results, he was stunned to discover that the EverQuest platinum piece was worth about one cent U.S. ? higher than the Japanese yen or the Italian lira. With that information, he could figure out how fast the EverQuest economy was growing. Since players were killing monsters or skinning bunnies every day, they were, in effect, creating wealth. Crunching more numbers, Castronova found that the average player was generating 319 platinum pieces each hour he or she was in the game ? the equivalent of $3.42 (U.S.) per hour. "That's higher than the minimum wage in most countries," he marvelled. --Clive Thompson --Game Theories  (The Walrus)

There isn't really anything new in this article, but it's told in an engaging way, which would make it a great introductory piece. Via KairosNews.

MT has become crippleware, and *expensive* crippleware! No one is happy about it, and I only wonder what Six Apart were thinking when they did this.

[...]

I find it difficult to believe that Six Apart have done this ... after the history of offering a fully featured free version, I suspected that they may have a more featured pay version, but not a limited, restricted release. The present free version, limited to one author and three blogs is great, fine, and I'd recommend it to anyone who's needs it fits, but it doesn't fit mine.

I'm actually quite appaled by this move. I've been watching the alpha, and beta forums and blogs, I've reported bugs etc, and not once did I see this coming.

The community is in uproar right now, I can only imagine the droves of people who will abandon MT now. I'm sticking with this, fully featured, non crippled beta for a while, it does what I need, but eventually, I may have to leave for something else. --Show me the money! (Blogroll.org)

Oh, crap. This doesn't look good...

Previously educational versions had been free, but now educators are invited to contact the company for discounted pricing.

I don't begrudge a company trying to make money from its software, but I certainly hope the pricing is reasonable.

It's rather amusing that MoveableType's own "trackback" innovation shows how many bloggers are unhappy with the announcement on the MoveableType website.

Search giant Google plans for the first time to sell ads that include images, a surprise reversal for a company that has won regard for its pioneering use of text-only marketing pitches and for keeping its home page religiously free of banner advertising. --Google to sell banner ads (ZD Net)

I'm still waiting to hear back from Six Apart regarding their educational license fee, but here's hoping that Six Apart and Google will both resist the power of the Dark Side.

Today I'm feeling something like the way I felt when I learned the sweet, intelligent Catholic girl I had a crush on the summer after high school was a fan of heavy metal music. More pedestals have come crashing down!

The truth about the campaign, which Mini USA and Crispin Porter call "interactive fiction," is to be finally revealed this month. Wall posters are to go up in big cities like Los Angeles and New York, featuring the Mini Cooper logo above images of the "motorbots." Those images will also turn up on the brand's official Web site (miniusa.com).

The goal of the unconventional campaign - the most recent in an innovative series from Crispin Porter since the Mini Cooper came out in March 2002 - is to help generate that elusive quality known as buzz for the car, particularly among mechanical-minded male drivers who may be put off by women's praise of it as cute. --Stuart Elliott --Pursuing Marketing Buzz (NY Times (will expire))

An ad agency has "concocted an elaborate advertising campaign disguised as a debate over whether a British engineer has built robots out of Mini car parts".

The retro design of "Colin Mayhew's home page" is appeaing, though overall the whole thing is so slick with advertising money that it simply doesn't look cheesey enough to be real.

All in all this campaign is very reminiscent of Bigredhair's more engaging and creative treatment of "Biolerplate."

I'm not at all comfortable with the the ethics of putting deliberately false information out there on the Internet, when the purpose is to draw attention to a real product. For some reason, I was less bothered by the hype around the Blair Witch Project or the game that went along with the movie Artificial intelligence. But this seems somehow to be crossing the line.

The admission, during an interview with CNN, undermined Moore's claim that Disney was trying to sabotage the US release of Fahrenheit 911 just days before its world premiere at the Cannes film festival.

Instead, it lent credence to a growing suspicion that Moore was manufacturing a controversy to help publicise the film, a full-bore attack on the Bush administration and its handling of national security since the attacks of 11 September 2001. --Moore accused of publicity stunt over Disney 'ban'  (Independent)

My guess is that Bush is so unpopular with so many people right now, Moore couldn't depend on the kind of ready-made controversy that helped make Mel Gibson's The Passion of Christ a huge hit.

By vilifying Disney, Moore appears to tapping into the vague uneasiness that many people feel when confronted by anything that is universally and unfailingly cheerful (like the Olsen Twins, or 50s housewives, or the Michelin Man), and is using his media skills to promote the meme that he is being persecuted by a Disney-Bush alliance.

Since plenty of the very conservatives Moore despises are also unhappy with Disney (with its gay-friendly policies, its use of pagan and native religions [Hercules, Pocahontas], a history of distributing films decried as anti-Catholic [see the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights boycott of Disney]), Moore's choice of Disney as his persecutor just seems farcical...

A little digging for Disney dirt reveals an incident when ABC TV (owned by Disney) spiked a scathing 20/20 report on a book highly critical of Disney corporate culture: "There's sexual harassment, child labor violations, and how management allows Disney World to have twice the injury rate than the amusement park average - because handling the injury lawyers is cheaper than fixing the problem." ("Disney Spikes 20/20: Where's the Left?")

So there's plenty of evidence that Disney is corrupt... is that enough to justify Moore's spin on something he knew a year ago, but announced in time for news outlets (who love controversy) to pounce on, thereby generating lots of publicity for himself? Moore knows how to manipulate the media to his advantage, and it looks like this time at least a few journalists aren't so keen on being used by Moore. In the years since the civil rights movement became mainstream, it has been mostly conservatives who have been good at enraging the rank-and-file to hold protests and boycotts, some of them fueled by misunderstandings and misinformation, but few of them fueled by media hype (such as is the case with Moore, who knows how to give anti-establishment journalists a juicy story).

I've blogged before on the Bowling for Columbine Teacher's Guide. There has been some interest here in using Moore's materials as part of the Seminar in Thinking and Writing course, so I'm just sort of keeping on top of Moore's activities.

Update, 10 May: Disney responds to the NY Times editorial accusing Disney of "cowardice".