Tag Archives: internet

Parenting, Education and Inspiration for Sunday May 17, 2009

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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.

Yesterday’s BarCamp NewsInnovation Philly

Posted on by

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.

Question to ponder: Is the Rock Star Dead?

Posted on by

comcast.net Music: JT Ramsay: Is the Rock Star Dead?:

The days of major labels turning ordinary people into rock stars is over. There will be pop hits here and there, but chances are you’ll never see someone reach the heights of (sustainable) fame in the manner that artists as disparate as Guns ‘N Roses and Britney Spears enjoyed again. You could blame Britney and Miley, but we’ve always had pop stars. We could just as soon blame Frankie Avalon!

But that’s not just because of the major label’s money woes. It’s that major music media just keeps disappearing, whether it’s in print or on television. It seems much tougher for stars to create myths about themselves at a time when we know even the most minute details about them, whether it’s through outlets like TMZ.com, or from the star’s themselves (or their ghost-tweeters) via Twitter.

Who was (is) right – Orwell, Huxley, or neither?

Posted on by

We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another – slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions”. In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

That is a quote from Neil Postman’s book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death”. That, and Huxley’s “Brave New World” are on my to read list. What do you think? Either of them right about the world we live in or will live in?

A thought for Garret – and others – on “The sky’s blue. Everything’s great. Buy. No, wait. There’s a cloud. Things suck. Sell. “

Posted on by

That quote is from dangerousmeta! on the daily seesaw in the stock market.

It *appears* that the slightest news breeze, positive or negative, seems capable of triggering domino effects where traders swing the market – and the nation’s health – for the good or ill – on the turn of a dime. This doesn’t make too much sense – traders have tons and tons of data to back up their decisions. The weight of over a hundred years experience in understanding the information contained within.

Garret suggests that maybe an alternative to Wall Street is in order. He may or may not have something but I have something I’d like to throw into the mix – maybe we’re finally seeing the result of “too much” poorly filtered and understood information. That, and an increasingly “think fast” culture that rewards first moves over smart decisions. Traders get rewarded on good (not necessarily growth) decisions that are made quickly.

I have no idea what I’m talking about here. I’m just a poorly educated software engineer. But I think there is an opportunity for those who can provide better filters to those who can effect matters collectively – filters that can encourage a culture of long term growth over short term gain.

Overseas markets are rising this morning – supposedly due to Geithner plan news. Tomorrow, someone may sneeze in Japan and America’s market will catch a cold.

News, data, our interconnectedness are more apparent now than ever before. Our tools and our culture need to catch up.

Fast.

For Arpit – who is Clay Shirky?

Posted on by

This is a backgrounder primarily for Arpit who discussed with a few thoughts on Clay Shirky’s latest piece on Newspapers.

I wrote an intro for readers of paradox1x, on Clay Shirky, back in September.

A few favorite pieces:

Help, the Price of Information Has Fallen, and It Can’t Get Up

A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy

Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality

Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing

Communities, Audiences, and Scale