Author Archives: Karl

More year end reflections, resolutions, predictions

Posted on by

I, Cringely makes his predictions for 2003.

NYTimes: The Idea Was Not to Have a New One – The year in entertainment. Decries the formula approach everyone seemed to be trodding down. But hidden deep in the article… “Teen pop ? the apotheosis of shallow, overprocessed, image-driven music ? is clearly on the way out, giving way to more R & B, hip-hop and old-fashioned rock; Britney Spears has already been replaced as girl of the moment by the punkette Avril Lavigne.”

IWantMedia: Top Media Stories of 2002

Good News Magazine: What is your calling?. Another good read. via Dave King.

Yahoo!: Music sales again down in 2002. Reuters: Rap and Country dominated the year.

PC-World: Top Tech News 2002 – Good one.

Mark Pilgrim, after analyzing his logs, calls 2002 the year of the news aggregator.

Mark Gardner, Rafe Colburn reflect more on What Should I Do With My Life?.

Dave Rogers posts about not letting what makes you comfortable keep you from moving forward.

Some links for myself…

Posted on by

Occupational Outlook Handbook: Teaching

Occupational Outlook Handbook: Teaching Postsecondary

Occupational Outlook Handbook: Social Scientists

Occupational Outlook Handbook: Musicians, Singers, and Related Workers

Occupational Outlook Handbook: Tomorrow’s Jobs

Recruiting New Teachers, Inc.

recruitingteachers.org

So You Wanna: …be a teacher?

The Pennsylvania Department of Education

School District of Philadelphia

Temple’s College of Education

History Matters

Peter N. Stearns: Why Study History?

William H. McNeill: Why Study History?

American Historical Association: Why Become A Historian?

Common-Place.org

The American Council on Education

Teachers.net

Who Gets Hired To Teach

What to expect your first year of teaching

Teaching.com

Resolutions, goals, new years hopes and dreams

Posted on by

Happy New Year Folks. Here goes some New Years thoughts from fellow webloggers.

Garret publishes a great Mark Twain quote.

Cameron Barrett is still on weblogging hiatus till he figures out what to do with his life. Check out that article folks.

Rafe Colburn reflects on the above article. I agree with him.

Oliver Willis is hoping for some intelligence.

Shelley urges us on to look to the new year with hope.

Jonathan Delacour posts his resolutions, inspired by Mark Pilgrim’s terse, straight to the point list.

Dave Winer has decided upon a new direction for his life and I want wish him well.

Bill posts a poem that’s one to read.

A coup by inches

Posted on by

Waiting until the last possible day, Gov. Schweiker signed legislation yesterday granting the suburbs more power than Philadelphia in running the Convention Center – and Mayor Street immediately responded by saying the city might no longer support financing half of the center’s much-coveted expansion.

Read the rest in in today’s Inquirer.

I tell ya, I find it ironic that the party whose central theme is the principal of local governance has been taking so much power away from it. The Convention Center and The Parking Authority. I’m making a bet your town has stories as well. City rights being transfered to the state. State rights being trumped by the federal government. All three threatened by corporate rights. Hamilton over Jefferson?

Just ironic.

Year In Review

Posted on by

Some sites for your browsing pleasure…

CNN: Year in Review – No one can compete with CNN. See reports on previous years as well.

CSMonitor: Monitor Milestones: 2002 Year in Review – Culling their coverage of the big stories this year. The only year end review that mentions the horror and progress simultaneously occuring in Africa.

Popular Science: The Best of What’s New – Gadgets and other consumer goodies.

NewScientist.com: The year in technology. A little less high tech and closer to home is CNET’s Best of the Buzz.

Wired: The Year In Privacy – Citizens lose.

Google: Year-End Zeitgeist – Check out what people searched for at Google. Looks like a mixed bag.

Lycos: Top 50 – Some human analysis on what people searched for – Example: Boy bands out, talent in.

Yahoo!: Year in Review – Lots here but why don’t they have music?

Time: Persons of the Year – They made the right choices.

Space.com: Top 10 Space Science Images of 2002.

NewsWeek: The Year of Living Dangerously.

WashPost: Dave Barry: Poking cautiously through the wreckage of 2002.

Alternet: The Good, The Bad, The Worst and Townhall.com’s Diana West: Questions for reflection – From the Left and Right respectively.

NYTimes: James Traub: Osama, Dead or Alive.

Inquirer: Joseph N. DiStefano: The Year of Corporate Scandal.

Inquirer: Tom Moon: Music: Cynicism was out, replaced by sincerity. Meaningless pop is dead – or at least wounded. Britney and Christina bombed this year. Pink didn’t. Think about it. “Ironic/Angst Ridden/My Life Sucks and I’m just gonna cry in my room or hit your face” meaningless crap – gone. No more Limp Bizkit. It was a prime time for some lyrical music. Shame Metallica wasn’t back in their best mid-80s form. Woulda kicked some ass.

NYTimes: Chuck Klosterman: The Ratt Trap: Dee Dee Ramone, B. 1952; Robbin Crosby, B. 1959 – the demise of Ramone completely overshadowed the demise of Crosby – why? – what does it say about you?

Inquirer: Clea Benson: Small steps take hold for a Philadelphia on the rise – Most Philadelphians don’t realize how well it’s been dealing with the recession in comparison to the rest of the country. We had crime drop here. Change has been slow, but it’s happening. Things set in motion years ago are making a positive effect in the here and now.

Shorter careers than athletes

Posted on by

CSMonitor: Faced with foreign competition and an ever-faster pace, many engineers are dropping out of a once-safe field.

In 2000, near the end of the high-tech boom, industry CEOs convinced Congress to nearly double the number of H-1B visas, allowing up to 195,000 skilled workers from India and elsewhere into the US. Some engineers contend that those CEOs kept many of those H-1B workers while cutting higher-paid US citizens.

“About 80,0000 engineers were unemployed a few months ago. If you take out the H-1Bs who came in, you’d have jobs for all of them,” the IEEE-USA’s Bryant says. The organization is lobbying Congress to lower the number of H-1B issued.

Connecting The Dots…

Posted on by

The Philadelphia Inquirer: New woe as jobless aid ends.

The NYTimes: Dividend Tax Cut: Winners and Losers. via Garret.

CommonDreams.org: Corporate Personhood Is Doomed (boy that title is a little too optimistic…). via Garret. via a great MetaFilter thread.

Democracy Unlimited: First Local Government in the United States Refuses to Recognize Corporate Claims to Civil Rights. via Garret.

The Founding Brothers struggled with where to draw the line between Federal and State governance. They probably couldn’t foresee the rise of Corporations competing with the Federal government and States for rights. It’s an evolution that’s been slow and subtle over the last 100 years or so. Probably due from our transformation from a farming to an industrial economy. Simple generalizations slamming Republicans won’t do. But if the Dems want a platform – I’m with Garret – this is it. They won’t go for it however. No one bites the hand that feeds them.

And hey – if you didn’t catch the drift – go check out Garret’s site. He’s knocking on a door I’d like to see opened up by other webloggers. Common you Dem webloggers… this is what you should be talking about.