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Last Sunday, Reed biology major was supposed to lead a demonstration on “how to properly slaughter, clean and dress a chicken.” In his mind, the course was supposed to help students build a closer connection to their food and understand how to eat poultry in a more responsible fashion, with an eye toward sustainability. “In Portland, there’s a great movement toward urban agriculture and urban homesteading,” Holt said. “Freshman year, I lived in a co-op on campus and got into gardening. When I moved off campus, I had my own garden at the house. Then, the summer after my sophomore year, I got chickens and started taking care of them to get fresh eggs. There’s a point where chickens stop laying eggs, though. … Between my housemates and me, we’ve collectively killed five to eight chickens.”
He used store nought chickens instead. And believes animal activists stole his chickens.
WHAT'S THE ETYMOLOGY OF THE TERM "CAREER COLLEGE?Students who attend for-profit colleges have comparable and often higher retention and graduation rates than those at other institutions, according to the findings of a study released on Wednesday by the Imagine America Foundation, a nonprofit organization that provides research and support for career colleges.
Advocates of for-profit colleges point to the study's results as further evidence of the sector's relevance within higher education.
January 2010 Archives
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On Monday, Australia's Daily Telegraph reported that a woman had been the victim of an "online sexual assault" while playing the Playstation game, Home. The story broke after her roommate complained on the game's online forum: "This morning I learned that my roommate was sexually assaulted near the Festive Tree ... She would move and the harasser would follow. Each time trying to get behind her and use the crouch gesture ... The harasser was warned multiple times and laughed at the thought that someone might report him for his actions, which was eventually done." The woman's roommate went on to suggest that Playstation institute everything from virtual restraining orders to Home Jails to "automatic tomato guns" to deal with virtual assaults.
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On a Monday morning earlier this month, top Pentagon leaders gathered to simulate how they would respond to a sophisticated cyberattack aimed at paralyzing the nation’s power grids, its communications systems or its financial networks.
The results were dispiriting...
In the latest clash of copyright law and instructional technology, the University of California at Los Angeles has stopping allowing faculty members to post copyrighted videos on their course Web sites after coming under fire from an educational media trade group.The policy, enacted earlier this month, has been planned since last fall, when the Association for Information and Media Equipment — a group that protects the copyrights of education media companies — charged the university with violating copyright laws by posting the videos to the password-protected course Web pages without the proper permissions.
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Bill Gates praises the potential of online learning today in his annual letter about the priorities of his foundation, which has a $34-billion endowment.
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STUNNING STORY: "The last thing I want to do is continue to keep building beds," he says, standing inside one of the cells. "I think there should be some opportunities to release them, put them back into society, allow them to go to classes and go back to work and report for trial when the trial date comes."
But as he's about to walk out of the cell, Gutierrez, who has been elected in three landslide victories over the past 11 years, pauses. He knows the risk for any politician to suggest such an alternative — even if it means taxpayers save money, even if it means victims will get restitution, even if it means the only reason he can fill this new jail is because the people filling it are poor.
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Intuit blocks feature -- "IN the digital age, filing income tax returns should be a snap. The important data from employers and financial institutions have already been sent to the government’s computers. Yet taxpayers are still required to perform the anachronistic chore of preparing a return from scratch. And, in many cases, they pay a software company for the privilege."
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The overwhelmingly liberal tilt of university professors has been explained by everything from outright bias to higher I.Q. scores. Now new research suggests that critics may have been asking the wrong question. Instead of looking at why most professors are liberal, they should ask why so many liberals — and so few conservatives — want to be professors.
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Is America going to hell? After a year of economic calamity that many fear has sent us into irreversible decline, the author finds reassurance in the peculiarly American cycle of crisis and renewal, and in the continuing strength of the forces that have made the country great: our university system, our receptiveness to immigration, our culture of innovation. In most significant ways, the U.S. remains the envy of the world. But here’s the alarming problem: our governing system is old and broken and dysfunctional. Fixing it—without resorting to a constitutional convention or a coup—is the key to securing the nation’s future.
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A SNIPPET: A Single Man, quite apart from its theme of loss and redemption, is characterised by Isherwood’s vitriolic disdain for American bourgoise values and consumerism.' I have that same criticism’, Ford says. 'I am disgusted by the dumbing down of America; disgusted by where we are as a culture - I’m disgusted by the obesity in America. Obesity - it’s such a perfect metaphor for the over-abundance of everything.’
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A push by celebrities, athletes and the first lady encouraging text-message donations for earthquake relief in Haiti has contributed to a fund-raising bonanza for the American Red Cross, which a little over a year ago was so strapped it turned to Congress for a bailout.
As of late Sunday, the organization had collected pledges of $103 million, about $22 million of which came through the text-messaging program. The National Football League’s promotion of text-message donations during its weekend playoff games produced stunning results, with money “coming in at the rate of $500,000 an hour,” said Roger Lowe, a Red Cross spokesman.
I don't buy Zuckerberg's argument that Facebook is now only reflecting the changes that society is undergoing. I think Facebook itself is a major agent of social change and by acting otherwise Zuckerberg is being arrogant and condescending.
When I learned that Mark Zuckerberg effectively argued that 'the age of privacy is over' (read: ReadWriteWeb), I wanted to scream. Actually, I did. And still am.
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THEIR EDITORIAL: The most likely outcome is that Google loses access to an important market, Chinese customers lose access to its services, and the government loses face. Google's decision in 2006 that entering the mainland market was a net positive for information flows was well reasoned. The tragedy is that the Chinese government became so aggressive in its repression that this is no longer the case.
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China still has a long way to go before it's considered rich. And some sympathetic analysts argue that it's not fair to hold China's civic development to American standards. The United States had China's present-day economic profile—per-capita GDP of about $5,000, 40 percent of the work force in agriculture, 30 years of industrialization and urbanization—in 1900, a time when there were no direct elections for Senate, women couldn't vote, and segregation reigned in the south.
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How could anyone be against transparency? Its virtues and its utilities seem so crushingly obvious. But I have increasingly come to worry that there is an error at the core of this unquestioned goodness. We are not thinking critically enough about where and when transparency works, and where and when it may lead to confusion, or to worse. And I fear that the inevitable success of this movement--if pursued alone, without any sensitivity to the full complexity of the idea of perfect openness--will inspire not reform, but disgust. The "naked transparency movement," as I will call it here, is not going to inspire change. It will simply push any faith in our political system over the cliff.
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And maybe that's good enough, or better than nothing, or something. On the other hand, there's real value in occasionally letting legislators work through this stuff outside the glare of the cameras. The fact that government should be held to higher standards than other institutions doesn't mean the people in it work differently than the people at other institutions. No business would decide to televise or webcast all of its meetings, and for obvious reasons. Televising all of the government's meetings means, in practice, that more of those meetings are informal and there's less assurance of broad representation.
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Change comes slowly to the venerable shows that grip the attention of a small but committed segment of TV watchers every Sunday morning. And taking risks almost never happens... The shows are particularly ripe targets for critics who see them as the epitome of insider Washington and conventional wisdom. James Wolcott, writing in Vanity Fair last year, for example, described watching the show that Stephanopoulos recently vacated to be “like receiving an engraved invitation to apoplexy.”
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/31311.html#ixzz0cmvBHNXT
The Center for Health and Social Issues at Georgia College & State University (GCSU) has been awarded a $360,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) to improve opportunities for physical activity and access to healthy, affordable foods for children and families in Milledgeville and Baldwin County.Based on a rigorous selection process that drew 540 proposals from across the country, Milledgeville is one of 41 sites selected for the RWJF Healthy Kids, Healthy Communities initiative.
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DHL’s director of humanitarian affairs, who has worked in disaster relief in tsunami- and hurricane-hit countries for five years, said, “I’ve got the feeling that this one is going to turn out worse than all of them because the airport itself is part of the victim in all of this.”
Rescue teams trying to leave the airport to start work in Port-au-Prince waited more than two hours for transportation to the American Embassy, just three miles from the terminal. ... Large shipments of supplies cannot yet reach the capital by sea either because of heavy damage to the nation’s largest seaport at Port-au-Prince. Richard Lebrun, a spokesman for Terminal Varreux, the company that operates the main port facilities, said that its two terminals in Port-au-Prince were both destroyed by the quake.
Thirty dockworkers who were unloading freight drowned when the quake struck Tuesday, the company said. ... “I think it’s going to be worse than anyone still understands”
It got some news and photos out, but it is unclear whether it did anything at all to get info in to Haiti. "Indeed, an effective and coordinated global relief effort depends on detailed information and communications, and the mainstream media is still an important part of that process."
Last night, Sky News was the first international news platform to have pictures from on the ground and a live interview from Haiti – we were the first to know what was going on. Here’s why.Unsurprisingly, the earthquake took out all the landline and mobile phone lines in Haiti immediately. This obviously disabled the country spectacularly – as well as the pressing issue of not being able to speak to each other, it meant that Haitians were not able to speak to the rest of the world. ... However, those with generators still had access to the internet...and a few still had the web on their phones. At the beginning of the night, there was nothing coming in from the news agencies, who were having no better luck than us at finding out what was going on. So we turned to the crowd – what were people saying on the ground, right now?
Twitter proved invaluable.
Text HAITI from your cellphone, this is the way "MGive typically charges a licensing fee for its software platform, $4 to $1,500 a month, depending on the scale of the fund-raising effort and the additional services the company provides. In addition, after the charity receives the total amount raised from the wireless carriers, mGive charges a transaction fee for each collected donation.
In the case of the Haiti disaster, however, Mr. Aiello said the company had elected to waive all software and transaction fees.
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I will watch as he watches what goes down. For the moment, his is the take I put most credence in: "In a strange and striking way there is an inversion of recent Chinese and U.S. roles. In the switch from George W. Bush to Barack Obama, the U.S. went from a president much of the world saw as deliberately antagonizing them to a president whose Nobel Prize reflected (perhaps desperate) gratitude at his efforts at conciliation. China, by contrast, seems to be entering its Bush-Cheney era. For Chinese readers, let me emphasize again my argument that China is not a "threat" and that its development is good news for mankind. But its government is on a path at the moment that courts resistance around the world. To me, that is what Google's decision signifies."
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There’s a study from the Project for Excellence in Journalism which uses a small data set from Baltimore to reach some conclusions we all could have guessed at: Much of the news blogging consists of annotating the reporting of others. This post will be no different.
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Google took a step toward entering the energy business with the creation of a subsidiary called Google Energy and a request with a federal agency to buy and sell electricity on the wholesale market.
The search giant formed a Delaware-based company called Google Energy on December 16 of last year, according to Delaware state records. The Federal Register on Tuesday referenced Google Energy's request to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), the agency with oversight over the power grid.
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By offering a lineup of phones that is essentially carrier-independent (with the radio compatibility caveat), Google has separated the two previously interlocked parts of the phone/plan-buying experience—phone selection and carrier selection—and has done so in a way that threatens one of the most important enablers of carrier lock-in.
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Nexus One wins
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The Nexus One has some cool features and some clunky ones, but in the end, we should root for the success of the Google Store.
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Call me a naysayer, as it's certainly contrary to conventional wisdom, but I believe that this move is an indication that Google has misread the market, and now faces a choice between a fragmented Android marketplace or abandoning the core precepts of Android (as an open, hardware vendor-neutral software platform play) in order to go toe-to-toe with Apple in areas that, I would note, Google hasn't proven to be strong at; namely, hardware design, user experience, and developer tools.
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You pick your phone first -- the Nexus One for now, but more devices coming in the future, Google promises -- and THEN you pick your carrier.
Today, it's available to work with tiny T-Mobile in the States. Coming soon, Verizon Wireless, the biggest U.S. carrier, and giant Vodafone in Europe.
The big change -- and the whole point -- is that Google, not the carrier, is now the distributor. The carrier simply offers voice and data service.
Once again, Apple has seized the early lead, launching a revolutionary product that is taking the world by storm. Once again, consumers are head-over-heels in love and Apple investors are dynastically wealthy and certain of the company's future world dominance. Once again, Steve Jobs is God.And, once again, Apple is insisting on selling a tightly controlled, fully integrated hardware and soltware device while its major competitor--Google--is spraying low-cost (free) software across dozens of hardware manufacturers, driving for platform ubiquity.
Even though it's thin, fast, bright, and beautiful, with amazing sensor-based capabilities ... The real turning point is Google's commitment to making the Nexus One a web-native device. ... Overall, though, it seems to me that Google's experience in delivering cloud-based data-driven applications is aligned with long-term trends in a way that Apple's device-bound heritage is not. Apple is playing catch-up in cloud infrastructure, building its own location services, for instance, but iTunes and the App Store excepted, Apple's cloud experience is limited, especially in the area of algorithmically driven applications, which I believe is so central to the future of computing. Meanwhile, Google has so many data assets, and so much experience in algorithmic applications, that it may be difficult for Apple to compete in the long term.
This is the best Android powered phone to date. It’s also the fastest and most elegant smartphone on the market today, solidly beating the iPhone in most ways. In this rapidly evolving market there is sure to be something better just around the corner. But if you are looking to buy a high end smartphone right now, this is the phone for you. The Nexus One is the Android signature device.
there is one fundamental difference – business model choice.When Apple launched the iPhone, it was able to secure an unprecedentedly strong business relationship with AT&T. Not only did Apple want control over the user interface, something carriers had been extremely reluctant to cede, it also wanted previously unrealized economics for a handset or OS designer. Apple insisted on upfront revenue dollars as well as a cut of the cellular service stream. AT&T, desperate for a win vs. Verizon, acquiesced. ... While Apple may have opened the proverbial Walled Garden, it is Google, with its aggressive Android offering, that aims to obliterate it. ... paying incentives to hardware vendors and carriers, protecting its ad market, not caring about hardware or software profits. Android won't compete directly w/iPhone, it’s after the other 3.95 billion cell phone users that are highly likely to consider Android a step up from their current feature phone.
today we're pleased to announce a new way for consumers to purchase a mobile phone through a Google hosted web store. The goal of this new consumer channel is to provide an efficient way to connect Google's online users with selected Android devices. We also want to make the overall user experience simple: a simple purchasing process, simple service plans from operators, simple and worry-free delivery and start-up.The first phone we'll be selling through this new web store is the Nexus One — a convergence point for mobile technology, apps and the Internet. Nexus One is an exemplar of what's possible on mobile devices through Android — when cool apps meet a fast, bright and connected computer that fits in your pocket. The Nexus One belongs in the emerging class of devices which we call "superphones." It's the first in what we expect to be a series of products which we will bring to market with our operator and hardware partners and sell through our online store.
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Imagine going online to buy your next phone, and being able to browse a list of different carrier options to go with it.
Maybe you’d prefer to run it on the Verizon network. Or maybe Sprint (or Vodafone) offers a combination of subsidy and monthly pricing plan that best suits you. If these and other carriers all listed their offers in one place, it would change the experience of buying a phone.
It would be a true Nexus - a Website that sits at the centre, where all the options come together.
According to this year’s annual survey by the Campus Computing Project, far fewer community college students — 35 percent — own laptop computers than at other types of colleges, where the ownership rate averaged 70 percent. The overall rate at which colleges have or are currently phasing out their computer labs is still low, at 11 percent. But at community colleges it is less than 5 percent, with 11 percent expecting to review the existence of their labs in the coming year.
ChangeWave Research reports the public is more excited than ever to buy an Android based handset -- at the expense of Apple, Microsoft, and Palm.
While it’s tempting to focus on the flaws in older brains, that inducement overlooks how capable they’ve become. Over the past several years, scientists have looked deeper into how brains age and confirmed that they continue to develop through and beyond middle age.Many longheld views, including the one that 40 percent of brain cells are lost, have been overturned. What is stuffed into your head may not have vanished but has simply been squirreled away in the folds of your neurons.
She's on Fox News several days a week. She's about to open up her own strategic communications shop. She's one of the last Bushies standing. And she was just nominated for a federal post by President Barack Obama. So what is it, exactly, that Dana Perino is trying to accomplish?
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The details are a bit convoluted, but basically, a group of people critical of what was being said on a website issued a series of DMCA takedowns to keep the site down every time it came back up following a counternotice. This seems like a perfect case where the takedown issuers should be hit with sanctions of some sort, but the case was dismissed on procedural grounds instead, which seem to be based on a misunderstanding of the DMCA itself.
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An argument for journalists to be involved in the business: "Journalists need to be equally responsible in ensuring they produce news and information that has value. They need to be responsible for ensuring their new organizations create the revenues and organizational strength needed to carry out high quality journalism. They need to ensure that organizational decisions make the organizations and the journalism offered viable.
If journalists continue to deny responsibility for the operation and survival of their news enterprises, it will be impossible to create sustainable news organizations for the future."
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That tagline sounds so ... 2006. But I think people may nevertheless be overlooking the importance of the Internet in shaping the political landscape that we have today. In other words, a lot of the things that feel "new" about politics circa 2009 are in fact new, but have a lot more to do with information technology than is generally acknowledged.
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New article on BPI: The company, Beef Products Inc., had been looking to expand into the hamburger business with a product made from beef that included fatty trimmings the industry once relegated to pet food and cooking oil. The trimmings were particularly susceptible to contamination, but a study commissioned by the company showed that the ammonia process would kill E. coli as well as salmonella.
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Old article on BPI. Quote from founder & chief exec: "I did not have one day of college, nor did the three top people in the company. But I am not against it. I even had a tough time in high school. We know how to do things in this company, not because we are smarter than anybody else. We know how to do things because we do things."
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So if I had a choice in the matter and knew then what I know now, would I choose to be on the list? I'm not sure, but I think probably not. But, since I am, I wanted to try to do something interesting before either the suggested user list disappears or I ask (As Jay Rosen did) to be removed from the list.... I'm proposing a simple contest to solicit ideas for what information people are interested in mining from the account of someone on the suggested user list, and I'll provide a prize to one random person who suggests and idea, as well as one random person who contributes code to help.
Ads 'n Such
Love them...
