Flush with the necessities, we offered food and water to passing families and individuals. Many decided to stay and join us. Our encampment grew to 80 or 90 people. From a woman with a battery powered radio we learned that the media was talking about us. Up in full view on the freeway, every relief…
—Bus-ted! Update (Junkyard Blog) This satellite photo shows some 255 unused buses in a flooded New Orleans lot. (Found via Instapundit.) The photo — found, I presume, via Google Earth, and mailed to a weblog by a reader — depicts an unused escape route for some 15,000 New Orleans citizens. The blog, which defends George Bush…
A memo sent to departments ranging from residential life to counseling to public safety reminds employees: “We will not solve problems for students because it robs students of an opportunity to learn.” […] “We get quoted the price tag frequently,” said Dean of Student Affairs Jim Terhune. “But what you’re paying for is an education,…
User interface agents are increasingly used in software products; perhaps the best-known user interface agent is the Microsoft Office Assistant (“Clippy the Paperclip”). This thesis explores why many people have a negative response to the Office Assistant, using a combination of theoretical, qualitative, and quantitative studies. Among the findings were that labels–whether internal cognitive labels…
A magical Walt Disney World family vacation was ruined last weekend by the stringent policies and protocol of the Walt Disney Company. […] The Mahaffeys’ dissatisfaction began soon after their arrival. Despite being in a huge, open park with dozens of attractions, the family was unable to roam freely, confronted at every turn by signs…
Jesus suffered (i.e. “permitted”) the little children to come unto him. Some were probably squalling. Emily Kasky blogs about an inconsiderate mother who didn’t take her disruptive child out of Mass. I wouldn’t be so hasty to equate non-spanking with lack of discipline, or to equate spanking with the teaching of empathy. I don’t mean…
For the most part, we are blind to the mediated nature of desire. But the great writers, according to Girard, are more lucid about this. They reveal the inner logic of desire, including its tendency to spread — and, in spreading, to generate conflict. When several hands reach for the same object, some of them…
Taken in isolation, NO always means NO. But in a conversation, there is always a surrounding context for the use of the word “No.” In a routine conversation, we extrapolate or infer a ton of non-verbal information and automatically apply it to attempt to determine the “real” meaning. For example, let’s say I offer you…
I’m Humbler than You Are! Na na-na na-naah! (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) I’ve been thinking a lot about improvization in education, thanks in part to recent posts on Pedablogue, but also due to Mike Rubino’s occasional blog entries about The Cellar Dwellers. Kids offer great material for improvisation. I’m immune to the “Are we there yet?” question,…
“Psychiatrists believe that these auditory hallucinations are caused when the brain spontaneously activates, creating a false perception of a voice,” says Professor Hunter of the university’s psychiatry department. “The reason these voices are usually male could be explained by the fact that the female voice is so much more complex that the brain would find…
She banned competitive activities during school hours. —The Evil of Excellence (JoanneJacobs.com) There’s a good discussion sparked by an American School Board Journal article (the content of this URL will probably change when the next issue comes out) that strongly discourages any kind of competition in the classroom. Even a teacher who praises “Madison” for cutting…
Ku Klux Kryptonite (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Are comic books suffering because they are trying to emulate the action of videogames, rather than the edgy, thought-provoking content that only a fringe medium can provide? In a striking series of radio episodes in the 1940s, Superman took on the Ku Klux Klan, after activist Stetson Kennedy spent time…
“Middle world is like the narrow range of the electromagnetic spectrum that we see,” he said. “Middle world is the narrow range of reality that we judge to be normal as opposed to the queerness that we judge to be very small or very large.” He mused that perhaps children should be given computer games…
The students were deliciously amused as the blinds fell. . . but the screen rose — or else the video was out-of-focus, or the sound intermittent, or worse. How I hoped to orchestrate the class! Instead, the room orchestrated me, and the technology orchestrated the room. Are lecture halls more vulnerable to the lure of…
All in all, I enjoy my job very much, and I’m thankful that in return for my work, I make enough for my family to live on (with the help of some summer work). I may not see my family as much as I’d like, but I know that what I’m doing is right for…
If you saw her in Santa Monica, even in her Mex red apron, you would assume she was an actress. She could easily fill in for a bad blonde in a Mexican telenovela. Yet she shows little animation in her work, and falls short even in the conventional friendliness that I?ve received from checkers at…
If you are skidding out of control at 95mph in your broken down Winnebago on an ice covered interstate, when a semi-truck filled with both poorly packaged fireworks and loosely bundled spark plugs slams on its brakes, it‘snot the right time to discuss with your passengers where y?all would like to stop for dinner. But…
Between 1990 and 2000, the over-all mean G.P.A. of high-school students increased from 2.68 to 2.94, which is attributable in part to grade inflation and in part to the fact that students are working harder. Last year, more than a million students took at least one A.P. course. During the nineteen-nineties, the percentage of students…
BreakAway has collaborated with the nonprofit group Believe in Tomorrow to create Splash, which helps pediatric cancer patients cope with painful treatments by donning headsets for a virtual scuba dive. CyberLearning Technology sells a $548 game system to treat kids with attention deficit disorder in more than 80 therapy clinics. It uses neurofeedback sensors to…
Over the last 50 years, we’ve had to cope with an explosion of media, technologies, and interfaces, from the TV clicker to the World Wide Web. And every new form of visual media – interactive visual media in particular – poses an implicit challenge to our brains: We have to work through the logic of…