James Brown, Rest in Peace

James Joseph Brown, Jr. (May 3, 1933 – December 25, 2006) passed in an Atlanta hospital after being diagnosed with severe pneumonia.

The Godfather of Soul and the hardest working man in the entertainment industry. What esle can you say? We will remember you every time we hear one of the songs you made us love.

Connected Thinking and Learning

Some mid-term exams and some final exams just happened in my classroom. The one I had fun with was a question that used the NYT and BBC reports on the Holocaust Deniers' Love Fest in Tehran.

How could you go wrong with targets like David Duke, the Neturei Karta (or as they are known, the Unorthodox Jews), and the ever popular President Ahmadinejad headlining along with French and German jailbirds who just can't understand why their governments don't want them to spread falsehood world wide.

I asked the kids to identify the semantic tactics used and the errors of thinking, then explain them.

So far, so good. Taking a photo of dead people who were killed with bullets, gas, and starvation and saying they died of typhus. Unsubstantiated, but plausible. So if they want to deny the eye witness accounts and go with something merely plausible they can do it. (Just keep it to yourself and don't express it aloud.)

Expressing it aloud is stupid. It is not "ignorant" because they know there are first hand witnesses and affidavits. It is deliberate distortion of fact in the service of some other lie they are attached to. Generally these are lies that the perpetrators think will benefit them in some way.

And this is the real purpose of the essay assignment. To get my students to make the connection between the Holocaust Deniers and people who deny other facts.

Facts like the predictable decay of radioactive isotopes proving the age of minerals and fossils.

Facts like the relationship of increase of CO2 in the atmosphere to increasing temperature.

These people really have only two choices. North Korea or outer space. Life on another planet is a lot like life in North Korea. No news. Nothing unapproved gets in. Nothing. Nothing at all, just like the world they want. Ignorant and circumscribed by the rest of the universe.

I really liked the story last week of the young lady who had lived on a large farm with her extended family. She was doing some research and found a description of how religious cults work. She read a bit and thought "Hmm...that sounds a lot like my life." After reading a lot and talking to people, she realized that everybody's granddaddy didn't diddle them like hers did. She got pissed off and called the cops.

Too bad the citizens of North Korea can't call the cops.

Welcome Visitors!

On Wednesday, I had a bunch of visitors. Bangalore India, Antalya Turkey, Rishon LeZiyyon Israel, Sundsvall Sweden, Manchester UK, Winnipeg Canada, in teh US, Redlands, Los Angeles, SanFrancisco, Provo, Carrollton, Washington DC, Huntington, Raleigh, Troy, Metairie, Berkeley, Tampa, and of course my loyal fan base in Fort Lauderdale.

What can I say except "Go Manchester!" One of my students is moving somewhere near Manchester and I told him he had better be ready for the IB curriculum when he gets there. For some reason he didn't think I was serious, but I *know* his Dad is.

New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1568480,00.html

"This is a story about the big public conversation the nation is not having about education, whether an entire generation of kids will fail to make the grade in the global economy because they can't think their way through abstract problems, work in teams, distinguish good information from bad or speak a language other than English.

This week the conversation will burst onto the front page, when the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, a high-powered, bipartisan assembly of Education Secretaries and business, government and other education leaders releases a blueprint for rethinking American education from pre-K to 12 and beyond to better prepare students to thrive in the global economy."

"Mike Eskew, CEO of UPS, talks about needing workers who are "global trade literate, sensitive to foreign cultures, conversant in different languages"-

"... premium on creative and innovative skills, seeing patterns where other people see only chaos," says Marc Tucker, an author of the skills-commission report and president of the National Center on Education and the Economy."

***** problem *******
"Developing good people skills. EQ, or emotional intelligence, is as important as IQ for success in today's workplace. "Most innovations today involve large teams of people," says former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine."
******
I didn't know anybody had proven that EQ exists. I'm not really comfortable with our institutionalized treatment of IQ.

Is it possible that this high powered group has problems with critical thinking?

"Can our public schools, originally designed to educate workers for agrarian life and industrial-age factories, make the necessary shifts?" I assume they are talking about our private institutions as well since the students there still "sit in chairs much as their grandfathers did and listen to teachers lecture."

"...organizations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Asia Society are pouring money and expertise into model programs to show the way."

Bill Gates spends ten thousand dollars a student. That's one way to skin a cat.


Then they say, use the IB curriculum. That's good because we will save untold dollars fooling around with figuring out what Johnny must know at every school district on the planet. Over. And over again.

Here's a classic. She had to . . . "learn the names of all the rivers in South America. That was the assignment given to Deborah Stipek's daughter Meredith in school, and her mom, who's dean of the Stanford University School of Education, was not impressed. "That's silly," Stipek told her daughter. "Tell your teacher that if you need to know anything besides the Amazon, you can look it up on Google."

How nice. You would think that the dean of an education department would not interfere in a way that demeans her daughter's teacher in front of the child. I wonder how she speaks of her colleagues? Furthermore I'll bet mom wouldn't be able to google the answer all that quickly. There is a LOT of luck involved with that kind of search.

"Last year, in response to demand from colleges, the Educational Testing Service unveiled a new, computer-based exam designed to measure information-and-communication-technology literacy. A pilot study of the test with 6,200 high school seniors and college freshmen found that only half could correctly judge the objectivity of a website."

What Time doesn't say is that the test uses an interface that is alien to the students and somewhat unsettling to use because it is not anything they have previously encountered. The other thing is that the results of the search are presented as summaries which gives them automatic authority in a student's eyes.

I have an idea. Since it will be difficult to raise the critical thinking level of the American citizenry in a rapid fashion, why not start by closing down Fox News? Then regulate religion in a way that causes dogma to adhere to a standard of reasonableness. Every religion would have to give up the crazy stuff and it might help people stay sane a while. Oh yeah, let gay people do what they want. And, um sew Hannity's lips shut.

Web 2.0 / Semantic Web hits students - smack!

We all know how cool the new writing and spreadsheet tools attached to Gmail are, right? I mean, how hard was it to set up realtime collaborative editing over the internet behind your NAT, huh?

My students learn about the semantic web in class and the Web 2.0 stuff that lays on top of it. (I honestly don't understand why people insist on making a distinction.) Massive data storehouses and bringing data together from collections with different scales. Mind boggling stuff when you consider the difficulty of creating an extensible ontology that will serve people who are just kids now who will have information needs you can only guess at in order to make connections you never thought of.

Not too long ago I ran into this: Gapminder which is a really cool utility that Hans Rosling presented at TED 2006. The presentation link is on the left at the top of the page.

Rosling is one of the heroes of the semantic web because he is insisting that the UN make its data warehouse open up to the world. If the people at the UN understood what he was talking about, he wouldn't be a hero. But Professor Rosling keeps banging his head against the door and someday they will figure it out with his help.

Sorry about the digression, but you will see why it is important to kids in a minute.

Rosling's work allows you to see a graphic depiction of moving data across a long baseline that elucidates longevity, GNP, family size, and infant mortality as a measurement of overall quality of life. It opens up a new view on Globalization and allows you to see just how provincial our education is.

Now, Google has made the creation of graphic display from LIVE data possible not just for wonks, but for students!

Google Blog article

GoogleFinance focuses just on financial data from Google Finance. Using a similar syntax, you can look up the price of Google stock [=GoogleFinance("GOOG")] or the 52-week high of Apple [=GoogleFinance("AAPL", "HIGH52")]. And since stock prices tend to change more often than, say, the capital of California does, we update them in your spreadsheet automatically. So if you leave your portfolio spreadsheet open, you should see numbers get updated as you would on Google Finance itself. Of course, we also have the same 20-minute delay on financial data.

So as GoogleLookup and Google Finance let you pull data from the web into your spreadsheet, we've also make it easier to put your data back out onto the web by publishing it. If you go to the "Publish" tab at the upper-right of your spreadsheet, you can publish your entire spreadsheet (or just one sheet of it) so that other people can view it as HTML, PDF, or even as an Atom or RSS feed. You can finally share your spreadsheets with others without them having to sign in to their Google Account. And if you go to the "more publishing options" link, you'll find some other cool options (duh!).

This is a killer app for teaching the value of the semantic web.

Microsoft the Official OS of Creationists (humor)

Creationists have overwhelmingly chosen Microsoft's IE7 as their browser of choice. The reason? Microsoft has pledged to support "backward compatibility." Creationists have long felt that backward-ness is a core belief, one of the cornerstones of family values. Family values issues have made them successful in redirecting the policies of the United States government away from "progressive" decisionmaking toward the sound moral principles set forth in ancient texts such as the bible.

Here is a quote from a Microsoft representative that so touched the members of the 700 Club that they gave him a signed photograph of their founder Pat Robertson at a White House coctail party with Ted Haggard and Jerry Falwell.

I’d like to explain why we so adamantly disagree with that position (following standards and common sense rules), and why we work so hard at backwards compatibility.

We feel it is vitally important for web sites and applications that worked with yesterday’s IE work with today’s IE, and continue to work with tomorrow’s IE. We feel this is a deeply held expectation by the millions of IE users.

Microsoft Internet Explorer Blog

This was a test of the emergency humor broadcast system. If it had been an actual alert, you would have been told to go to the closest sanity shelter and kiss your loved ones goodbye.

Teaching and technology

I teach in a magnet program and have a classroom with 25 workstations. I have run Moodle (a web based content delivery and evaluation system that has just about everything you could ever ask for) for a bit over four years in the classroom and teach a curriculum that includes Science and Society mixed with information architecture lessons and content creation. The educators still insist on calling it "Web Design." Yes, I have all the bells and whistles.

That said, I have a terrible time even communicating my vision of one hundred dollar thin clients and web services for all students to administrators. They think computers are huge honking things that cost two thousand dollars just to light up and that a school of twenty-five hundred students can run with a handful of labs. Nor do they understand that administrating it would be easy as pie. No moving parts in the computer. No software to purchase for every seat. Just a browser, a calculator, Google, Open Office and thee.

When you speak of the value of computers, it should be in a real context of efficiency. The discussion about whether children can score perfectly on the SAT and not have a computer is irrelevant. Just engaging in the discussion is like having an argument with a creationist. Remember, computers are just tools. On the other hand, the network is almost alive and keeping children away from it may turn out to be a *very* bad idea.

For this reason and others, I declare the digital divide to be situated INSIDE schools, not outside.

OTHER REASON: Since you can buy a computer for under two hundred dollars and get an Internet connection for about ten dollars a month, the lack of computers for children is an adoption issue, not a money issue.

FUD from Inhofe - Tore and the Town on Thin Ice

"New UN Children’s Book Promotes Global Warming Fears to Kids" reads a headline at the wingnut publication NewsBusters in a direct ripoff from Senator Inhofe's press release:
http://epw.senate.gov/fact.cfm?party=rep&id=265811

In fact this bit of vitrol hit a number of conservative blogs simultaneously. Not exactly bastions of original thinking.

No, it is not true that scientists have "defected" from the global warming camp. There is no camp because it consists of virtually every normal scientist on earth at this point. There may be several hundred deniers, but there are many thousands of scientists, including the ones who count, the climatologists who are firmly convinced. There is no real reason to discuss it because there is virtually no evidence contradicting global warming at this time that has not been deliberately altered or fabricated. Yes, the things Senator Inhofe quotes are distortions or lies if you feel like calling them that. The camp belongs to people who are directly funded by Exxon. You can check Exxon's corporate citizenship report for last year and then go to the exxonsecrets site to see which of the foundations Exxon gave money to employ the so-called climate experts who deny there is such a thing as global warming.

Here is a link to the actual text from the United Nations Environment Programme website.
http://www.unep.org/PDF/TORE.pdf

Do you find it scary? Take a look at the last two pages. It offers sensible suggestions for energy conservation everybody can use. I don't like the sea level predictions and don't think they belong in a children's book.

Some facts and figures on climate change

1Earth’s temperature has varied naturally over thousands of years. We know this from studying coral
reefs, fossils, growth rings of trees—and the air trapped in ancient ice deep down in Greenland and
Antarctica. But the current warming appears to be caused mostly by humans and is unusually rapid.

2The atmosphere now contains about 33 per cent more carbon dioxide, the major heat-trapping gas,
than it did 150 years ago. It was then that people started using large amounts of energy to fuel the
Industrial Revolution in Europe and North America.

3Europe, Japan and North America burn the most fossil fuels and so have pumped the most carbon into
the air. The U.S. alone produces about 25 per cent of the carbon dioxide added by humans.

4The planet’s average surface temperature has risen nearly one degree Fahrenheit over the past 30 years,
more in regions such as the Arctic. In Alaska, Canada and Russia, permafrost is melting. As frozen
ground thaws and softens, roads, pipelines, and hundreds of buildings are being badly damaged.

5Computer models show that over the next 100 years, temperatures will probably rise quite a bit
more—as if the planet had a fever. Some places, such as Siberia in northern Russia, may get warmer and
easier to farm. But North America’s ‘breadbasket’ will probably grow drier, disrupting farming there.

6Climate change will hit the poorer countries hardest, even though they emit less carbon dioxide. For
instance, people in Africa may face more droughts and related famines.

7Sea levels are already rising and are expected to climb another 15 to 95 cm this century. If the
enormous ice shelves of Greenland or Antarctica slide into the ocean, sea levels would jump nearly 610
cm (20 ft). Places that could disappear beneath the waves include island nations in the Pacific, much of
Bangladesh, Shanghai in China, Lagos in Nigeria, New York in the U.S. and many other coastal cities.

8People are now working to reduce the ‘fever’—mostly by using renewable energy instead of fossil fuels.
Experts think that by 2030, renewable sources could produce all the electricity we need.

9Today, about 2 million households harness solar energy for electricity to light their houses. Nearly 40
million households use the sun to heat water. Millions more get power from the wind, mostly in
Europe, the U.S. and India. Scotland is capturing the power of ocean waves. Iceland is developing
hydrogen from water as a major energy source.

10In Brazil, ethanol made from sugar cane has replaced 44 per cent of the country’s petrol. Ethanol is in
use in China, India, and the U.S. as well. Drivers in many countries can choose to cruise in a car
powered largely by battery.

11From Vietnam to Australia, Kenya to Mexico, people are banding together to plant trees. Trees provide
shade, wood, nuts, fruit and other products—and can slow climate change by absorbing carbon dioxide.

What can you do?

1Plant and care for trees. Join or create an environmental club. You could do an energy ‘audit’ to explore
how your school could save energy and how it might be able to use renewable energy.

2Turn off appliances, heating and air conditioning when you’re not using them. Computers and other
electronics draw energy even when turned off—so be sure to unplug them, too.

3Recycle papers, bottles and plastic whenever you can. Recycling saves energy compared to using new
materials.

4Use your consumer-power. Buying climate-friendly goods—such as energy-efficient light bulbs or
electronics—can encourage manufacturers to go green. Less packaging also helps save energy.

5Walk, bicycle or take a train or bus. Only drive in a car if you must. Cars add far more carbon per
person to the air than public transport.

6Write to your political leaders. Petition for cleaner cars, better public transport or renewable energy.

Who Won?

What happened this November? Democrats? Republicans? Conservatives, Liberals, Moderates? Who won and who lost?

My feeling is that the United States has just successfully defended itself from an attack by religious "fundamentalists."

Over the period since the Reagan presidency, the rise of the religious right and subsequent toadying by the Republican National Committee, the supporters of radical religious theories have tried time and time again to insert them into the corporate beliefs of the American people.

They have had successes and they have had failures. The successes have happened when the fears of people were manipulated.

Who could possibly benefit from this? People who create marketing engines fueled by fantasy benefit from it. Who are they?

Televangelists.

Television allowed the evangelist to be in thousands of places at one time, enabling him to pass a collection plate on unprecedented dimensions. Making money on a scale never considered possible by the preacher with a tent and a station wagon.

Competition among televangelists ensured the message delivered would gradually change to meet the expectations of the viewers. Miracles, angels, good guys and bad guys, basically getting God involved in everything, denying the precept of free will.

In an atmosphere of protestant theological revolution, evangelism became THE core belief supported by literal biblical interpretation in the late 1960's.

Later, mainstream churches reacted by adopting the wish-fulfillment fantasies and evangelical thrust of the fundamentalists in order to stem the loss of market share. Today there are few places where the direct intervention of God in everyday events to preserve the good humor of his worshipers is rejected.

The televangelists became as powerful a force to be reckoned with as the mainstream churches. Finally, politicians took notice after the evangelists began knocking on their doors asking about prayer in school, the abolition of abortion, and sex education in schools.

Each side took advantage of the other. Venal politicians got support from the religious and promised them access to the halls of power. The politicians adopted a religious camouflage in order to get support for their own pork. One thing led to another.

Finally we made the move from being against aborting fetuses to being against the destruction of any totipotent cell that has the potential to become a human being to make the religious happy. But we also rejected good science for the benefit of corporate support.

Unfortunately for the religious, the outright rejection of reality never works. You just can't walk on water. Neither can you pretend that a single cell is a teeny tiny human being. Finally the fantasy starts crumbling around the edges and the images of happy Iraqis are replaced by sad ones, the triumphant little blastulas are replaced by friends with parkinson's begging for help, spending cuts bump against the end of our ability to create efficiencies, and alternative institutions prove no better at serving the public than public ones. Some are worse. For instance a religious health support institution that rejects helping black homosexual men.

Say "BAAAAAA" (humbug) to Bush

My son got on the plane for Kuait this afternoon. I am upset of course.

1. Upset that his battalion never got fully equipped before shipping out because they ran out of money in June.
2. Upset that because of this they will have to take used equipment and that units in Iraq have as much as fifty percent of their vehicles in the garage waiting for parts.
3. Upset that the people who did the battalion's final evaluation gave it high marks when they deserved no such thing.
4. Upset that we are supporting an Iraqi government that got 1,500,000,000 for weapons and infrastructure and only spent 400,000,000. The rest disappeared.
5. Upset that the general staff at the Pentagon told the administration they could support a front in North Korea when they can do no such thing.

This is the result of the Administration putting "yes men" into crucial positions. Two obvious examples are the temporary chair of the FDA in 2005 and the gentleman who oversaw FEMA during Katrina. Both of these appointments have had dire consequences for citizens, but by far the greatest disaster could be opening another conflict anywhere in the world.

Meanwhile the RNC runs surveys that ask about taxes and home ownership, completely avoiding questioning people on anything of consequence. Nothing on stem cell research. Nothing on Iraq. Nothing on North Korea. Nothing on choice/abortion. Nothing on education. They want Republicans to tell them if they want the Federal Government to take over even more of the State's responsibilities.

They take sheep-like agreement of the party members as a given. Well baaaaa to them.

And yeah, I didn't put any links on this to substantiate it, so it's poor work. I did however take the poll from the RNC just an hour ago, so I DO remember what they asked.