Category Archives: Public Service, Civics, Government, Activism

If you’re not going dark, help others get informed: Be a Better Activist Day is today

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Embedded in this post is a stream to an event, starting this morning at 10AM, on getting informed on how Congress works, organized by the author of “Information Diet”, Clay Johnson. There is a fantastic set of speakers that will help all of us better navigate the system and make change.

The stream below will remain blank to around 10AM. Click the link if you don’t see the stream starting then. Related links below the video.

Related Links:

Information Diet: “Dear Internet: It’s No Longer OK to Not Know How Congress Works”

Mother Board: “Dear Congress, It’s No Longer OK To Not Know How The Internet Works”

O’Reilly: “Stop SOPA”

EFF.org: “Stop the Blacklist Legislation: a Guide to In-Person Meetings with Your Congressional Representatives” and “Strike Against Censorship”.

Fight for the Future: “Stop American Censorship”

Google.com: “End Piracy, Not Liberty”

Wikipedia: “SOPA and PIPA – Learn more”

YouTube.com: “Our Internet”:

Daphne Koller of Stanford on Technology as “Passport to Personalized Education”

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NYTimes: “Death Knell for the Lecture: Technology as a Passport to Personalized Education”:

…our approach to education has remained largely unchanged since the Renaissance: From middle school through college, most teaching is done by an instructor lecturing to a room full of students, only some of them paying attention.

How can we improve performance in education, while cutting costs at the same time? In 1984, Benjamin Bloom showed that individual tutoring had a huge advantage over standard lecture environments: The average tutored student performed better than 98 percent of the students in the standard class.

Until now, it has been hard to see how to make individualized education affordable. But I argue that technology may provide a path to this goal.

Community Computer Center Opens in Frankford

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The Frankford Gazette has a post on the new computer center that opened in one of my old neighborhoods, maybe I can stop by and help: “Community Computer Center Open in Frankford”:

The majority of the residents of Frankford do not have internet access. The Free Library Branch does offer some service which is very well utilized all day long by students and others but those facilities cannot come close to meeting the demand. The new computer center will help to close the gap.

Alistar Croll: “much of human interaction has shifted from atoms to bits”

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Read his post on O’Reilly Radar: “The feedback economy”:

In a society where every person, tethered to their smartphone, is both a sensor and an end node, we need better ways to observe and orient, whether we’re at home or at work, solving the world’s problems or planning a play date. And we need to be constantly deciding, acting, and experimenting, feeding what we learn back into future behavior.

We’re entering a feedback economy.

60 Minutes 2011 reports on family homelessness are must-sees

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They titled the report, “The Hard Times Generation” and it was a revealing look at families fighting homelessness.

60 Minutes: 14 minute video: “Hard Times Generation: Families living in cars”:

60 Minutes: 2 minute video: “Something with a roof: Scott Pelley asks homeless students to describe their ideal homes, they have only a few modest requests: a roof, a bed and most importantly, their families.”:

Read the story behind the report.

Related Stories:

CityPaper: “One Occupy legacy: it gave the homeless cover to live in public.”

Metafilter: “Inequality highest in thirty years across most of the developed world.”

Esquire: “Income Inequality Is a Symptom, Not the Disease”

thestateman: “Census shows 1 in 2 people are poor or low-income”

NYTimes.com: “How Anger Took Elites by Surprise”

NYTimes: “Camps Are Cleared, but ‘99 Percent’ Still Occupies the Lexicon”

CSMonitor: “Homeless children at record high in US. Can the trend be reversed?”

Billy Bragg: “Billy Bragg: The biggest enemy we face is… the deadly lure of cynicism”

Salon: “How 2011 became the year of compassion”

A parent who finds a way to build an App helping his Autistic son

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The Startup Toolkit profiles Aeir and profiles the person behind it, Joseph Hill. It is an inspiring story: “A man, a mop, a year, and an app – Joseph Hill on Aeir Talk”.