<div style="position: fixed;"><div id="new_selection_block0.017883485913577468" style="border: medium none ; overflow: hidden; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; text-align: left; text-decoration: none;"><br /><br />Read more at: <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lenore-skenazy/as-goes-halloween-so-goes_b_340163.html" target="_blank_">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lenore-skenazy/as-goes-halloween-so-goes_b_340163.html</a></div>I feel bullied, or at the very least treated with the assumption that anyone copy-pasting from HuffPo intends to steal the content.
No child has been poisoned by a stranger's goodies on Halloween, ever, as far as we can determine. Joel Best, a sociology professor at the University of Delaware, studied November newspapers from 1958 to the present, scouring them for any accounts of kids felled by felonious candy. And...he didn't find any. He did find one account of a boy poisoned by a Pixie Stix his father gave him. Dad did it for the insurance money and, Best says, he probably figured that so many kids are poisoned on Halloween, no one would notice one more.Well, they did and dad was executed. That's Texas for you. Another boy died after he got into his uncle's heroin stash and relatives tried to make it look like he'd been killed by candy. And that's it.
Now look at how the fear that our nice, normal-seeming neighbors might actually be moppet-murdering psychopaths has turned the one kiddie independence day of the year into yet another excuse to micromanage childhood. --Lenore Skenazy, Huffington Post
Razor blades in apples! Poison in home-made cookies! Hospitals offer to X-ray your candy for you (while passing out brochures featuring smiling doctors in front of gleaming new equipment). In 2003, The Onion memorably spoofed the Halloween candy fear in "Generic Candy Corn Will Give You AIDS."
So let's see. Assuming their number is right -- 160 billion divided by 1 million. Does that mean the stimulus costs taxpayers $160,000 per job?
Jared Bernstein, chief economist and senior economic advisor to the vice president, called that "calculator abuse."
He said the cost per job was actually $92,000 -- but acknowledged that estimate is for the whole stimulus package as of the end of 2010. --Jake Tapper, ABC
While much of the talk covered well-known libraries (SDL, OpenAL), game engines (Ogre, Irrlicht), physics engines (Bullet, Tokamak), and content creation tools (Blender, GIMP), there were a few surprises. One was how many open source game-creation systems I found (4, more than the zero I expected). These are Game Editor (2d with export to some mobile devices), Construct (2d, some 3d), Novashell (2d), and Sandbox (3d). Another surprise was the game Yo Frankie! (pictured above), which has very high quality animation and artwork, and was produced using Blender. --Jim Whitehead
For anyone curious about what I've been reading, here's the list of what I've read to get an introduction to this area:
- "Why We Play Games: Four Keys to More Emotion Without Story" by Nicole Lazzaro.
- "GameFlow: A Model for Evalucating Player Enjoyment in Games" by Penelope Sweetser and Peta Wyeth.
- "An Experiment in Automatic Game Design" by Julian Togelius and Jürgen Schmidhuber.
- A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster.
One other thing that I've not yet read but am interested in is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. It's not targeted at games, and in fact looks at fun from a psychological perspective, but it's cited by most of what I've read so far, and is the product of some very thorough research.
Here you'll find the educational sites where my kids play online, and that are most often recommended by other parents who value fun learning games for their children.
"My goodness. What a coincidence," a shocked, shocked Schwarzenegger spokesman Aaron McLear is quoted by the Associated Press as saying. "I suppose when you do so many vetoes, something like this is bound to happen."
What can be learned from Fitzgerald's tax returns? To start with, his popular reputation as a careless spendthrift is untrue. Fitzgerald was always trying to follow conservative financial principles. Until 1937 he kept a ledger--as if he were a grocer--a meticulous record of his earnings from each short story, play, and novel he sold. The 1929 ledger recorded items as small as royalties of $5.10 from the American edition of The Great Gatsby and $0.34 from the English edition. No one could call Fitzgerald frugal, but he was always trying to save money--at least until his wife Zelda's illness, starting in 1929, put any idea of saving out of the question. The ordinary person saves to protect against some distant rainy day. Fitzgerald had no interest in that. To him saving meant freedom to work on his novels without interruptions caused by the economic necessity of writing short stories. The short stories were his main source of revenue. --William J. Quirk, The American Scholar
A few years ago, my daughter was thrilled to receive a hand-me-down
fanny pack. (See the price tag hanging on my spiffy new one?)Miraculously, I, [Name], am able to create my own web pages. The unthinkable is possible. My ignorance about the computer world is coming to an end. I am a student at the University of Eau Claire and I'm creating several web pages for English 110. Come and check out my first web page at meet the family. This link briefly summarizes a few childhood memories, personality traits, and individual hobbies.
At the University of Eau Claire's home-page, you find information on UWEC's registration process, available classes, student services, job opportunities, blugold system, International exchange, and much more. Search the UWEC home page to get a look at what the college has to offer.
My English Professor, Dr. Jerz, and some of his students have created several web pages for faculty members and students to benefit from. The Online Reading Room will guide you to helpful information on how to create a web page, how to write effective e-mails, top 5 tips for note taking, and more.
If you like to play amusing, addicting computer games, try playing Eliza. You make conversation with Eliza who listens and talks back. She asks a lot of questions about your problems and sometimes does not make sense.
English 110 with Dr.Jerz is not like the other English 110 classes. His course page is the student's syllabus explaining the guidelines to assigned papers and projects. Helpful examples of problems students run into when writing papers and creating web pages are also found at this site.
My essay on how the Internet has affected my education. The challenges that I came across at college with computers were frustrating, but later greatly appreciated. Computer skills are critical for college classes and in the end the frustration turns into gratitude.
Read Martha's essay one her web page about how the Internet has affected her education. She used the Internet in high school for fun and for note taking. In college she now uses her computer skills for academic purposes. Even though Martha uses the computer daily, she still feels much has to be learned.
Danielle's essay is about her experience with the Internet. She had some computer experience in her high school anatomy class looking at a fetal pig, but she came familiar with e-mail in college. Now Dr. Jerz is challenging her and every student in English 110 to become less ignorant about the computer world.
For my creative hypertext, I wrote three essays from three different perspectives. I wrote one essay from my dad's point of view, one from my point of view, and one from my point of view if I would still be living in Kansas today instead of living in Minnesota. The three blurbs below give a brief summary of each essay.
Most students spent their spring break somewhere warm while I spent my break in Kansas visiting relatives. A little conversation never hurt anyone even if it's farm talk. With age comes an appreciation of understanding to not take history for granted.
Read from Dad's perspective of Kansas. He tells how the vacation was through his eyes telling the highlights of the trip were seeing his sister, brother, and old friends. Abilene recaptures old memories and by visiting he creates new.
Just imagine what life would be like if I would have remained living in Abilene. Read the what if life where lived differently. I go to college in Kansas, I am going to school to become a Vet (I hate animals), and I never had the chance to travel. For my spring break, my brother and I take a trip to New York to visit my sister and trust me cowboy boots and hats don't fit in with the New Yorkers.
I've wrapped the blogs up, tidied them up, corrected & updated them and put them into 1 handy ebook for you to download and take home. It means you have have an all-in-one desktop reference to giving your multimedia journalism more spark, and getting in the entrepreneurial mindset.
Chapters include: video, audio, storytelling and branding.
It'll be available from Monday, it's 100% free and there's no registration or anything. Just click on the button and you'll be able to download it outright. --Adam Westbrook
It's been more than two decades since Robert Fulghum published the oft-quoted (and oft-mocked) essay "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten." The piece describes a bucolic world of wonder, a place for cookies and afternoon naps.
That world is long gone.
Earlier this year, the nonprofit advocacy group Alliance for Childhood, based just outside Washington, D.C., issued a report titled "Crisis in the Kindergarten: Why Children Need to Play in Schools," drawing from nine new studies of public school classrooms around the country. Kindergartners in the studies spent four to six times as much of the school day being drilled in literacy and math as they did playing.
Recess has been truncated or has disappeared entirely in some schools, a double whammy, since children are stressed out by the demands and also deprived of their major stress reliever. The report cites study after study showing increasing stress, aggression, and other behavior problems, and even breakdowns.
Roz Brezenoff taught kindergarten in the Boston Public Schools for 36 years, retiring five years ago. "I have heard stories of kids having what they call psychotic breakdowns in kindergarten, kids who are distressed because they are 'kindergarten failures' because they can't read and they can't write," she says.
To be sure, many children thrive in an academic environment, and some parents seek out institutions like the Edward Brooke Charter School in Roslindale, which bills itself as "unapologetically college preparatory." Teachers there assign nightly homework in kindergarten. But many children that age are not ready for that kind of work, and all are being held to new standards. --Patti Hartigan, Boston.com
For more schadenfreud, see Cake Wrecks, Photoshop Disasters, and Fail Blog.
Item for today: =
In Donald Knuth and Luis Trabb Pardo's article on the history of computers, the note the moment at which = moves from equivalency to assignment. Here is a moment where mathematical notation and code separate on the basis of assignment, where it moves from a real that represents abstractions to a realm that controls memory locations.
For all intents and purposes
Algebra: x = 0; and computer code: x=0;
seem to mean the same thing.However, on the most fundamental levels, they are not. The one establishes equivalence of signs. The other tells the computer to store the value 0 in the location represented by x.
In CCS, we have not just a mathematical system, for surely much of algorithms is mathematical. However, when critics talk about the materiality of these performative declarations in programming languages, they are talking about this latter notion of x=2.
Again, I don't want to rule out the possibility of critically analyzing mathematics. I just want to talk about this moment of the separation, where the computational instructions gain additional semantic meaning because there signs are not just representations, but commands with material ramifications. --Mark Marino, Critical Code Studies
Margin of Error deserves better than the throw-away line it gets in the bottom of stories about polling data. Writers who don't understand margin of error, and its importance in interpreting scientific research, can easily embarrass themselves and their news organizations. --Robert Niles
Clearly, the computer re-energized Bukowski and gave him new life as a writer. Yet much of Bukowski's late writing was about old age and death. The computer fit into this. In poems, letters, and in The Captain, Bukowski chronicled his struggles with the computer. The shutdowns, the lost poems, the time at the shop for repairs. This mirrored Bukowski's own health problems and trips to the hospital. The computer represented the writer in old age. The computer and the digital revolution also suggest the end of the book and of print. As a result, the computer spelled the death of the traditional author, a fact that must have struck Bukowski as he faced death himself. Yet all was not doom and gloom as the computer (old age and death) also provides the material and means for new poems. So the computer also represents the old writer's creative impulse. Jed Birmingham, Reality Studio
Movie critics are sometimes asked why all movies cost the same to view, even though some may have cost $100 million to make, and others $500,000. It's a reasonable question. I suppose the reasoning is that you get about two hours of movie either way. Now 3-D has provided exhibitors with a subterfuge to force consumers to subsidise their upgraded projection facilities -- which is deceptive, because most theatres are upgrading to digital projectors anyway. This could be called the 3-D children's tax.
Do kids really care? --Roger Ebert, Spectator
On April 13, 1844, Edgar Allan Poe wrote an article in The New York Sun, chronicling how Monck Mason, leaving England for Paris drifted off course and had traveled across the Atlantic in three days, landing safely on Sullivan's Island near Charleston South Carolina, while riding an ``egg-shaped gas-filled balloon'', named the Victoria.
The story caused such a stir that an excited mob quickly gathered outside of the editorial offices of the Sun, hoping to land a copy of the historic edition. Not until two days later did the New York daily publish a correction, noting the story was pure fiction. The published correction read: ``We are inclined to believe the intelligence is erroneous.'' -- The Morning Delivery
When Heene appeared, he instead simply displayed a box into which he invited the media to submit questions, to be answered this evening. --CBSWell, he's managed to extend his fame by another 15 minutes.
New filings to the court, he said, "state for the record that the AP is correct about which photo I used...and that I was mistaken. While I initially believed that the photo I referenced was a different one, I discovered early on in the case that I was wrong. In an attempt to conceal my mistake I submitted false images and deleted other images."
In February, the AP claimed that Fairey violated copyright laws when he used one of their images as the basis for the poster. In response, the artist filed a lawsuit against the AP, claiming that he was protected under fair use. Fairey also claimed that he used a different photo as the inspiration for his poster.
After Fairey's admission, a spokesman for the Associated Press issued a statement saying that Fairey "sued the AP under false pretenses by lying about which AP photograph he used."
Fairey said that his lawyers have taken the steps to amend his court pleadings to reflect the fact that "the AP is correct about which photo I used as a reference and that I was mistaken." --Los Angeles Times
Although I explained how I track and archive my students' Twitter activity, I didn't describe what they actually do on Twitter.That's because I wasn't sure myself what they do.
I mean, of course I've reading their tweets and sending my own, but I hadn't considered in a systematic way how my students use Twitter. That lack of reflection on my part echoes my initial guidelines to the students: my instructions were only that students should tweet several times a week at a minimum. I was deliberately vague about what they should tweet about. I didn't want overly specific guidelines to constrain what might be possible with Twitter. I wanted my students' Twitter use to evolve organically.
Now, six weeks into the semester, clear patterns are discernible and I can begin to analyze the value of Twitter as a pedagogical tool.
My most surprising find? Twitter is a snark valve. --Mark Sample
I'm not quite sure why anyone would be surprised to find snark on Twitter, but I think Sample's greater point is that snark requires some level of engagement. A student in my journalism class tweaked me for publishing an editorial a few years ago that didn't follow all the guidelines I provided to the class. The result was an opportunity for me to model an appropriate response to criticism, and I ended up revealing a bit more to the class about my reasons for writing that editorial.
BTW, I would not say the student was being snarky; his oppositional stance does, however, demonstrate the kind of energy that an opposing view brings to the discussion, which is part of the reason Sample recognizes and celebrates snark... not to encourage meanness and the knee-jerk rejection of nuance, but rather in the line Matt Barton's celebration of plagiarism as a means of forcing those of us who teach writing to confront our own limitations as authors and our need for power structures to wall of what counts as unacceptable stealing of ideas, so that we can continue the very different kind of stealing of ideas that we can masque with citations and present as acceptable academic discourse).
In a bid to save money, the station is planning to reassign the technicians who operate the electronic prompters that feed scripted news copy to the anchors while they're on the air. Instead, the station wants its anchors to do the job themselves.
[...]"Instead of orchestrating coverage, fact-checking, handling breaking news, paying attention to the [newscast], engaging reporters, questioning authorities, covering bad writing and technical mistakes, anchors will now spend most of their time" running the prompter, said one newsroom employee, who asked not to be identified because he's not authorized to discuss the change. "It's kind of like a literal one-man band -- singing, banging a drum, crashing cymbals, playing a trumpet and strumming a guitar . . . except we're not playing show tunes here." Washington Post
When people can more easily fire off all sorts of messages--from updates about their breakfast to questions about the evening's plans--being able to figure out which messages are truly important, or even which warrant a response, can be difficult. Information overload can lead some people to tune out messages altogether.Such noise makes us even more dependent on technology to help us communicate. Without software to help filter and organize based on factors we deem relevant, we'd drown in the deluge.--Jessica E. Vascellaro, Wall Street Journal
The article is more about the rise of microcommunication tools than it is about the end of e-mail, but it does a fair job explaining the difference.
"It's egregious," said John Foubert, an associate professor of education at Oklahoma State University, who bought two copies of the book - one for his office and one for home - when it was released in July. "These are the standards for how we write our manuscripts and how our students write their papers .... The irony is so thick."
The corrections include four pages of "nonsignificant typographical errors" and five pages correcting errors in content and problems with sample papers in the book. The APA also released four corrected sample papers in their entireties. One correction is "Page 88 - Change last line under 'Exception' to read 'Spacing twice after punctuation marks at the end of a sentence aids readers of draft manuscripts.' " Another is "Page 64 - First paragraph, line 2, insert a comma after 'e.g.' " --Inside HIgher Ed
In the figure of the coltish, resolute Sigourney Weaver, Alien may just be the film that overhauled the old, unreconstructed horror genre and dared to put a woman centre-stage. Because make no mistake: a horror movie is what Alien is. "It's basically a haunted house film," explains the critic David Thomson. "The only difference is that the old dark house just happens to be a spaceship." --Xan Brooks, GuardianAlien came out thirty years ago. Thirty years ago!
Presume that your opponent has good reasons for disagreeing with you. Talk to people on the other side, and include some of their eloquent, well-argued points. Carefully and respectfully explain why your position is nevertheless more accurate (or ethical, or practical, or inspirational, or whatever).
- Avoid trying to make your opinion seem stronger by distorting the other side, either through exaggeration ("Animal rights groups would rather millions of people from cancer than have one animal die during a scientific experiment") or by using unflattering labels ("nicotine addicts who oppose my right to breathe fresh air..." "reactionary tea-baggers whose pathetic world-view is threatened by Obama's heroic economic vision..." ).
- Making "the other side" look evil or stupid may fool people who don't know what you are talking about, but people who do know something about the subject can (and will) write a letter to the editor correcting your misrepresentations.
This is Kev and his daughter Alice. They're living on a couple of park benches, surviving on free meals from work and school, and the occasional bucket of ice cream from a neighbour's fridge.
Financial wires have long charged higher rates for the timeliest delivery of such information as stock quotes, so the approach is not without precedent. As more and more news organizations wrestle with the need to create premium products, the AP's experiments will emerge as valuable case studies in high-stakes bets.
Time-based pricing could take any number of forms, including early access to an index of stories that would enable participating search engines to begin crawling the news sooner than the other guys.
Another option under discussion is the earlier release of actual stories, in effect setting up some AP customers as places that users would come to rely on for the earliest look at AP content.
What's interesting about these ideas is that they could generate much-needed revenue without jeopardizing journalism's civic purpose of wide distribution of news. --Bill Mitchell (Poynter)
I've blogged on this before.Both sides have very different forecasts. The Met Office says that warming is set to resume quickly and strongly.
It predicts that from 2010 to 2015 at least half the years will be hotter than the current hottest year on record (1998).
Sceptics disagree. They insist it is unlikely that temperatures will reach the dizzy heights of 1998 until 2030 at the earliest. It is possible, they say, that because of ocean and solar cycles a period of global cooling is more likely. --BBC
Course management systems (CMSs), used throughout colleges and universities for presenting online or technology-enhanced classes, are not pedagogically neutral shells for course content. They influence pedagogy by presenting default formats designed to guide the instructor toward creating a course in a certain way. This is particularly true of integrated systems (such as Blackboard/WebCT), but is also a factor in some of the newer, more constructivist systems (Moodle). Studies about CMSs tend to focus on their ease of use or how they are used by faculty: their application, for good or ill. Few discuss the ways in which they influence and guide pedagogy, and those that do only note their predisposition for supporting more instructivist methods. Current research also ignores the fact that many of the new wave of online teachers are Web novices entering the field without a deep understanding of online technology. A closer look at how course management systems work, combined with an understanding of how novices use technology, provides a clearer view of the manner in which a CMS may not only influence, but control, instructional approaches. --Lisa Lane, First Monday
Though moribund today, for decades Usenet was the paper of record for the online world, and its hundreds of millions of "newsgroup" postings chronicle everything from the birth of the web to the rise of Microsoft, as well as more trivial matters.In February 2001, Google rescued that history when it acquired the New York-based Deja.com, and with it a Usenet archive going back to 1995.
[...]
Flash forward nearly eight years, and visiting Google Groups is like touring ancient ruins. --Kevin Poulsen, Wired
On Wednesday, a federal district court in Los Angeles dismissed Brown's claim against Electronic Arts for the use of his image in its Madden NFL series. Judge Florence Marie-Cooper essentially found that video games are "expressive works, akin to an expressive painting that depicts celebrity athletes of past and present in a realistic sporting environment." Such works are protected by the First Amendment. --Kotaku
I've been a journalist for 27 years, and I love that romantic old notion of the newsroom as much as the next guy. But I recently canceled my two morning papers--The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal--because I got tired of carrying them from the front porch to the recycling bin, sometimes without even looking at them. Fact is, I only care about a tiny percentage of what those papers publish, and I can read them on my computer or my iPhone. And I can rely on blogs and Twitter to steer me to articles worth reading. --Daniel Lyons, Newsweek
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