Parenting, Education and Inspiration for Sunday May 17, 2009

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Inquirer: Bari Pepe, 46, Years of trauma behind her, now she wants to aid others – ex-addict acheives master’s in social work. Very inspiring story. Read it.

The Boston Globe: Inside the baby mind: It’s unfocused, random, and extremely good at what it does. How we can learn from a baby’s brain. – “Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will.” – Metafilter thread.

New Yorker: The secret of self-control. – let your toddler’s imagination be free, encourage creativity, to try and try again, and understand that we have the power of choice.

Hacking Education – A New York Venture Capital Fund Focused on Early Stage & Startup Investing

NYTimes: Marc C. Taylor: End the University as We Know It – straight up inspiration about tearing down the status quo to meet the needs of today and tomorrow.

CSMonitor: In tough times, graduates (and parents) assess the worth of a liberal arts education – just an opinion – I think liberal arts majors are well positioned for the economy of today and tomorrow.

Deseret News: Universities will be ‘irrelevant’ by 2020, Y. professor says

The Atlantic: Who Needs Harvard?: The pressure on smart kids to get into top schools has never been higher. But the differences between these schools and the next tier down have never been smaller

Chronicle: What Colleges Should Learn From Newspapers’ Decline – Newspapers are dying. Are universities next? The parallels between them are closer than they appear.

Tom Baker: Getting Involved in Higher Education – software engineers should seriously consider teaching, here’s why.

Slashdot.org: With a Computer Science Degree, an Old Man At 35?

Inquirer: Daniel Rubin: Grads, please note: It’s not about you

xkcd: 1000 Times – its all about context isn’t it?

Smart aggregation and API use in NPRbackstory

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NPRbackstory is an automated Twitter feed that attempts to add context to the news stories trending popular today according to Google’s Hot Trends. It leverages NPR’s archives (very smart, as Joshua Benton notes archives are underused assets), and Yahoo! Pipes to produce a RSS feed that is fed into the NPRbackstory account. It was developed by Keith Hopper of NPR’s Public Interactive group.

Read Joshua Benton’s piece at Nieman Journalism Lab

Read more about it at Keith Hopper’s blog.

Check out his other Twitter related project – Twitterstars – a tool to find local Twitter power tweeters.

Refresh Philly Followups

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Following Refresh Philly May have been some great discussions in its related Google Group.

Technically Philly posted two followups: City CIO’s $100 million Digital Philadelphia vision and Editorial: City government calls for tech support

Jonny Goldstein, on his blog, envizualize, had literally, visualized the discussion with some art live at the discussion that is just terrific, you got to take a look: Visual Notes From Philly CIO Allan Frank at Refresh Philly

Two efforts to collect what people want from Philly governments online efforts and the data it makes available have been launched by participants in the discussion:

Wikispaces: phillydata

Google Moderator: Philadelphia – What can we do for you?

Special guest Alllan Frank at tomorrow night’s Refresh Philly

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Kellie Carter and Dave Cooksey will lead a discussion on user-centered design and ways in which to improve Philadelphia.

For details on Monday’s get together check out refreshphilly.org.

Its an important discussion and I believe some positive efforts for the city are bound to spring from it.

Netbeans Beta 6.7 setup

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For whatever reason, the latest release of Netbeans was giving me some issues. Over at “Java How To…” was an excellent short piece on avoiding common Java heap space configuration errors in all sorts of containers, environments, and IDEs. It’s one for your bookmarks.

Another tip – close the Tasks pane – it triggers excessive scanning on large projects. Open it when you have the opportunity to. But the last thing you want is to shut down with it open – it will simply make start up intolerable if you have a very large project opened.

There is an open ticket working on the worst offender keeping me from adopting Netbeans enthusiastically – excessive “Project scanning”.

Yesterday’s BarCamp NewsInnovation Philly

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Yesterday afternoon, encouraged by Roz, I found a way to attend BarCamp NewsInnovation Philly. I’m happy I listened to her. It was a great event.

I was late, but in time for four discussions, the biggest highglight of those was TechnicallyPhilly. They gave an enthusiastic, concise description of what they do, how central community and chosen niche were to it, and even had some hints on how to earn a living doing it. Other interesting discussions included Scott Karp’s presentation on Publish2 and collaborative news rooms, and the folks behind copress.org, who while working to solve problems commonly found in college online news organizations, are inadvertently addressing many of the problems found in large mainstream online news organizations. There is another presentation, on how to make money on the Internet, that was infuriating for how it looked down on people. As Chris Krewson ponintedly asked, “The take away seems to be that the public is stupid and so are your advertisers”.

Biggest highlight for me was getting to meet Amy Z. Quinn after all these years. Amy is someone I “met” online via Philly Future more than three years ago. As were meeting Howard Weaver and Scott Karp for the first time and getting a chance to hang out and catch up with Wendy Warren, Chris Krewson, Aaron Couch, and Chris Anderson.

BTW, if you want a terrific summary of how news gets chosen for Philly.com’s (and more than likely the majority of news orgs) home page, the tensions present in its production and what drives it, Chris’s research paper: “Web Production, News Judgment, and Emerging Categories of Online Newswork in Metropolitan Journalism” is where you want to go.

Yesterday’s Comcast Cares

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Yesterday was quite a day. In the morning I went out with fellow co-workers to Hunting Park to help do some clean up and planting for Comcast Cares Day. It was a small personal victory for me. Previous two years I haven’t been able to attend due to the back pain issue. This year, not only could I attend, but I was able to assist for a few hours. There are pictures up on Flickr. Felt great to go out and lend a helping hand with fellow friends.

Some interesting music and children links for today

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Boston Globe: Can’t get it out of my head: A father’s yearlong quest to grasp the infant musical mind

NPR: Bringing Up Baby, As Music Lovers Might

Muppet Wiki: Joe Raposo

Thankfully, Emma’s tastes are all over the map, like her Daddy. For example, just this morning she kept replaying The Mother of All Funk Chords – which I could listen to on repeat myself.