January 2010
37 posts
“It just feels right to hold the Internet in your hands as you surf it!”
—Scott Forstall, SVP iPhone Software—my favorite part of the iPad video
Automated Attendance
Gone are days when classes start with roll-calls. FutureGov reveals how schools in Hong Kong, Japan, India and Singapore have taken the load off teachers by deploying biometric or smart card technology to track students’ entering and leaving the campus.
Serving Fung Kai Innovative School’s 700 students every morning are 20 kiosks. As students arrive, they stand in front of the camera to have their face scanned and key in their password. Based on facial recognition technology, the scanned image is matched to the schools’ database. At the beginning of the day, teachers can access a real-time attendance record either at a kiosk or via their lap top. (FutureGov)
Computers Should Be More Like Toasters!
9to5Mac claims that they’ve talked to a few content publishers (magazines, newspapers), and those publishers are claiming inside knowledge about the device. Most importantly, that it’ll be “[nowhere] near $1000, as has been reported elsewhere.” [Giz]
Will have been not wrong.
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Comfort Food?
A combination of ecological and ironic perspectives Wnally demands that we look critically at the way the substance and sym- bolism of food deWnes connections and conjunctions between Af- ghanistan and our own “corner of the world.” And so we return to the thriving industry in comfort food. On September 12, 2001, a Dallas Morning News article described the efforts of Mike Rawlings, president of Pizza Hut, to bolster the American way of life by in- structing his 7,000 restaurants to “stand at high alert and prepare for an onslaught Tuesday night. Pizza, after all, is an American comfort food. ‘Families are going to gather, and they aren’t going to want to cook,’ [Rawlings] said from company headquarters in Addison. ‘We need to be ready—not in a crass, commercial way—but as a support system” (Hall 2001). Another article, which began as a quasi-spiritual analysis of why it is that, “at times of darkness and desolation … food can help us Wnd our way back to life,” went on to quote the writer’s wife who, at the time of the attacks, was stuck in Japan on a business trip, with limited access to English news media and uncer- tain travel prospects. On her return home, she reXected, “if only I could have had some Krispy Kreme doughnuts, I would have felt better” (Mehegan 2001). This heartfelt paean to comfort and Ameri- can values resonates through the Toronto Star’s announcement of the arrival of Krispy Kreme in Mississauga, underlining its reassuring message that, after months of post–September 11 anxiety, we can all start to feel a little better. (Susie O’Brien, “On Death and Donuts”)
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Inappropriate metaphors of the environment are those that are non- ecological and those that separate humans from nature. Examples and their im- plications include the following:
a. A machine (nature can be made more efacient, faster, and uniform via the work of rational, atomistic, interest-maximizing actors);
b. A laboratory (nature can be modeled and controlled and new natures can be innovated);
c. A bank (interest accrues automatically and the principal can grow indeanitely);
d. A store (goods and services are available, for a price); e. A park (nature is preserved, amenities are enjoyed);
f. A frontier (resources are plentiful, many untapped); g. A threat (nature attacks us so it must be repulsed, vanquished, tamed);
h. The “commons” (nature jointly owned is tragic requiring a Leviathan or private ownership);
i. A colony (nature is in the periphery requiring resource delivery to the core and waste deposition back to the periphery).
Metaphors of the environment appropriate to GEP and to the goal of sustainability are those that are ecological, adaptive, and oriented to complex systems and the far future. Candidates and their implications are several:
i. Spaceship Earth (a fragile life-support system); ii. Planet Earth (limits to growth);
iii. A watershed (always an upstream and a downstream); iv. Saving the seed (restraint in consumption across time makes sense);
v. A scale (in balance, right sized); iv. The tide (ebb and oow, cyclic, renewing);
v. A network (complex and with emergent properties); vi. A homestead (crops, shelter, neighbors);
vii. A gift (precious, nonproprietary); viii. A national banking system (depends ultimately on trust).
Pre-cuddling
If you’re looking for a job in the hospitality industry and have highly refined snuggling skills, some Holiday Inns in Britain might have just the job for you. They’re offering guests the opportunity to have their beds pre-warmed by a member of the hotel staff. Yes, a hotel employee will climb into your bed wearing fleece pajamas, stay there until the bed reaches a temperature of 68 degrees Fahrenheit, and then go away. (Consumerist)
My dad has had an iPhone for less than 12 hours and already discovered one of the most useful iPhone apps I have ever seen! CardStar stores all of your membership rewards cards. Never hold up the CVS line fumbling for your rewards card again!
If you printed Twitter.
- … the seven billion tweets to date are composed of 104,860,000,000 words, as many as 133,000 copies of the the King James version of the Bible.
- … it would cover 350 million sheets of paper, which is 37 times the number of pages used in bills introduced in the United States Congress since 1955.
- … the paper would weigh three and a half million pounds, the equivalent of 82 school buses fully loaded with 84 happily tweeting kids.
- … and did nothing but read tweets throughout the entire work day, it would take 2,912 years to get through it.
- … and laid the pages end to end, they would stretch 60,763 miles or two and a half times around the earth.
- … on an average HP Inkjet printer, it would cost you $24,500,000 to print in black ink or $55,606,250 to include the Twitter blue.
- … keeping up with the 26 million tweets daily would require 30 inkjet printers working around the clock to print more than 1,300,000 pages every day. (mashable)
Remember when google’s latitude was going to be a thing? I was so excited about it a year ago. Ha.
Hey leggy, remember that time you decided to play 52 card pick up and lost all the 2 of clubs in that deck?
So Close … So Far
Does anyone play solitaire with a deck of cards anymore? Sitting in front of the fireplace, visiting with family, I shuffled and dealt. After a few hands, it looked like I was going to win. All the cards were up, but I was still one card away from winning. The 2 of clubs was missing from the deck. So, if the deck had been complete, I’d have won, right? Not necessarily! Inserting that one missing card, would have changed the whole order of play.
In work, life and cards when one critical component is missing, you can’t declare victory. (Everything’s Connected)
This is exciting!
7/8 required texts for my Realism to Modernism class are available for Kindle!
My first real attempt at Kindle-ing in the classroom.
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Iron Chef, White House
Michelle Obama’s vegetable garden serves as the battleground on the two-hour season premier of Iron Chef America, which airs Sunday at 8 p.m.
In an episode filmed this summer, three professional chefs and White House chef Cristeta Comerford are welcomed by the first lady and allowed to use anything found in the garden to create their meals.
The chefs - Mario Batali, Emeril Lagasse and Bobby Flay, plus Comerford - then return to The Food Network’s Kitchen Stadium in New York, where Flay and Comerford face off against Batali and Lagasse, each team producing five dishes showcasing the ingredients. (Baltimore Sun)
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