Author: Daniel

Daniel https://turnings.phrasewise.com/ In the 4th grade Daniel was asked to step in into the hall because he was coaching fellow students on a similarity assignment he provided the class. Since then, Daniel’s passion for helping people has propelled him to be a creative developer of software and systems, and a team coach who excels at successfully delivering business value. Daniel founded QuietlyHelping in 2009 in order to have a direct hand in helping families with the struggles of debilitating disease. QuietlyHelping is an organization of compassion and empathy that brings ease, comfort, smiles, laughter, healing, and love to people battling cancer and other diseases. Spare time activities include cycling, occasional work as a musician, woodworking, photography, and reading books he never got around to in school. Unsurprisingly, Daniel is able to cook minute rice in just under thirty seconds.

From Finland, an Intriguing School-Reform Model

From Finland, an Intriguing School-Reform Model:

More bear than tiger, Finland scorns almost all standardized testing before age 16 and discourages homework, and it is seen as a violation of children’s right to be children for them to start school any sooner than 7, Dr. Sahlberg said during his day at Dwight. He spoke to seniors taking a “Theory of Knowledge” class, then met with administrators and faculty members.

“The first six years of education are not about academic success,” he said. “We don’t measure children at all. It’s about being ready to learn and finding your passion.”

[snip -ed]

He emphasized that Finland’s success is one of basic education, from age 7 until 16, at which point 95 percent of the country goes on to vocational or academic high schools. “The primary aim of education is to serve as an equalizing instrument for society,” he said.

Dr. Sahlberg said another reason the system had succeeded was that “only dead fish follow the stream” — a Finnish expression.

Finland is going against the tide of the “global education reform movement,” which is based on core subjects, competition, standardization, test-based accountability, control.

[Sounds right to me.]

The Too-Much-Running Myth Rises Again

The Too-Much-Running Myth Rises Again:

We are curious as to whether Wen and colleagues have data about long-term survival in individuals who did vigorous exercise for more than 50 min per day. Do the mortality benefits begin to erode away as the daily time spent doing vigorous physical activity increases beyond 1 h?

Wen and colleagues reply that yes, they do have data — and it doesn’t show what O’Keefe et al. hope:

By 120 min [per day], the hazard ratio for all-cause mortality was around 0·55 [which is better than it was for 60 min per day], with even better hazard ratios for cardiovascular diseases… The adverse effects of strenuous exercise for incremental efforts for more than an hour a day did not seem to outweigh the benefits. We were not able to identify an upper limit of physical activity, either moderate or vigorous, above which more harm than good will occur in terms of long-term life expectancy benefits.

This exchange took place before the recent spate of review articles about the dangers of too much exercise was published. And yet the study is still being cited as evidence that doing more than an hour a day of exercise is bad for you. As a subsequent letter to the journal from Michael Bubb of the University of Florida put it, “The interpretation of the data provided in the review by O’Keefe et al is misleading, particularly given the response of the authors of the original data.”

To reiterate, I’m not flipping to the other extreme and arguing that there’s no point of the diminishing returns for exercise, or even that there’s no possibility of heart damage associated with extreme ultraendurance exercise. These are open and legitimate questions. But this scaremongering about relatively modest amounts of exercise in favor of “hunter-gatherer” exercise is silly. We can speculate all we want about “potential” risks and benefits, but the real-world epidemiology is crystal-clear: if you exercise for an hour a day, you’re likely to live longer than if you exercise less than an hour a day.

[I just wanted to make sure that both sides of this get some play. Overdoing anything is bad for us (spread over a population, not necessarily any individual). But this news that too many people wish to embrace “See, I told you. I’m going back to the couch…)]

Buffet nails it

A Minimum Tax for the Wealthy – NYTimes.com:

This outrage points to the necessity for more than a simple revision in upper-end tax rates, though that’s the place to start. I support President Obama’s proposal to eliminate the Bush tax cuts for high-income taxpayers. However, I prefer a cutoff point somewhat above $250,000 — maybe $500,000 or so.

Additionally, we need Congress, right now, to enact a minimum tax on high incomes. I would suggest 30 percent of taxable income between $1 million and $10 million, and 35 percent on amounts above that. A plain and simple rule like that will block the efforts of lobbyists, lawyers and contribution-hungry legislators to keep the ultrarich paying rates well below those incurred by people with income just a tiny fraction of ours. Only a minimum tax on very high incomes will prevent the stated tax rate from being eviscerated by these warriors for the wealthy.

Above all, we should not postpone these changes in the name of “reforming” the tax code. True, changes are badly needed. We need to get rid of arrangements like “carried interest” that enable income from labor to be magically converted into capital gains. And it’s sickening that a Cayman Islands mail drop can be central to tax maneuvering by wealthy individuals and corporations.

But the reform of such complexities should not promote delay in our correcting simple and expensive inequities. We can’t let those who want to protect the privileged get away with insisting that we do nothing until we can do everything.

[I agree with everything he said in this piece.]

Problems with e-education

Thoughts on Amazon Whispercast:

Essentially, the eBook problem comes down to: you, the publisher, want me to buy everyone a brand new copy of the book. I’m happy to do that, but you want £9.99 per copy. We’re more used to paying £9.99 and giving it to 10 children over the course of years. Make your eBook £1 per copy and we can talk.

On the other hand, I’ll buy 30 copies at £9.99 but I need to be able to reallocate those books next year.

Is there a way to square this circle? Maybe.

Whispercast, like the iTunes Store, requires that each Kindle have a separate Amazon account associated with it. Unlike the iTunes Store, Whispercast can bulk-create these accounts for you, which is handy.

Perhaps the model is this: create 20 generic “First Grade” accounts (e.g. fg01@example.edu through fg20@example.edu) and buy 20 copies of the First Grade reading list. Have the students use that account for a year. When they move on, give the account and password to the next set of pupils coming in.

This is harder to do in the Apple world because the use of AppleID/iCloud is so pervasive across the system. With the Kindle system (at least on the e-Ink Kindles, if not the Fire), it would potentially be easier as there’s less actual data being stored in the user’s account. The pupil logging into the account the next year would – I presume – find the last owner’s book locations, highlights and notes in there but that’s hardly different to the common experience of getting someone else’s used textbook.

Such a deployment model might work in primary education – where everyone is in the same class, likely reading the same class novel at the same time. It doesn’t really work for secondary education unless you buy all the books for every account because the pupil using the account next year is unlikely to be taking the same mix of classes as the last pupil.

I don’t know whether Apple or Amazon is going to get this right first but the company who finally cracks it stands to win a lot of business the education market.

[Yet another mess to fix.]

Source: Fraser Speirs

Road Built Around House, Family Refuses to Leave

Road Built Around House, Family Refuses to Leave:

Luo Baogen and his wife refuse to leave their home in Wenling, Zhejiang, China because they believe that the relocation compensation offered by the government is not enough money for them to rebuild.

See more photos on Enpundit

Source: Design You Trust

[I wouldn’t want to live there, but I give them credit for not giving in. I also give folks credit for building the road anyway, although I think they could have done a prettier, safer job of it. Just because you’re stubborn doesn’t mean you can’t find an answer.]

Feeling grateful yet? Teenage poultry farmer dishes straight talk – The Denver Post

Feeling grateful yet? Teenage poultry farmer dishes straight talk – The Denver Post:

Last thing: Farming is very hard work. I don’t make a lot of money doing it, and people do not support what you are doing. I live out in the country. As new folks move in, they complain about the name of your farm, smells, mooing cows, bleating sheep and crowing roosters, even though these things were there before they built a million-dollar house and moved in. I do not plan on farming in the future.

If you want sustainable, wholesome, pasture-raised organic, hormone- and antibiotic-free food, you have to support it. You can not get these things by talking about it and not paying for it.

The next time you shop at a farmers market, think about what it cost me to grow it. Don’t ask me to take less and then tell me you can get it cheaper at a big-box store. I know you can — but it will not be as fresh or as good as what I have, and you won’t make me cry.

[Well that’s as straight up as any discussion on this topic is going to get.]

“Over the Top: The new war for TV”

“Over the Top: The new war for TV”:

As it is, I’ve been without cable/satellite for two years now, and I mostly don’t miss it, but I have very little interest in live sports. I’ve realized one big problem with the Apple TV approach, though. An application-centered interface paradigm is fine for a smartphone or tablet, but a television wants a content-centered interface. An icon for every service is passable (although not ideal) for replicating the channel surfing experience, but I want a screen which shows me all my subscriptions and favorites across every service on the device. If I want to answer the question “Are there any new episodes of ‘Castle’” I shouldn’t have to first answer “am I getting ‘Castle’ through iTunes, Hulu, Netflix, or the ABC app”.

[So filled with promise, so less than compelling. ]

Source: Coyote Tracks

Please design me a dog house

Please design me a dog house:

In June of 1956, Frank Lloyd Wright — a man posthumously recognised as “the greatest American architect of all time” by the AIA — received an unusual letter from 12-year-old Jim Berger, a boy looking to commission the design of a home for his dog, Eddie, by the same architect who designed his father’s house 6 years previous. Incredibly, Frank Lloyd Wright agreed and, as seen below, supplied a full set of drawings for “Eddie’s House” the next year. Construction was eventually completed by Jim’s father in 1963.

Eddie hated his new home. It was demolished in 1973.

The full exchange can be found below, along with a photo of the completed dog house. It was the smallest structure ever designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and possibly the least used.

[Remarkable.]

Source: Letters of Note

The Average Place on Earth

The Average Place on Earth:

Projections for the year 2050 predict that most of the 8 billion people on the planet will live in megacities, with populations over 30 million. And these megacity clusters will form a network made up of smaller cities over 1 million in population. But these incredibly dense clusters will weave through a countryside that is emptying. It is already common to find entire villages in China, India, and South America abandoned by its inhabitants who fled to the swelling cities, leaving behind a few old folks, or often, no one at all.

This is the pattern on Earth. Extremely dense and vast populations in a network of megacities connected to each other with nerves of roads and wires, woven over an empty landscape of wild land, marginal pastures, and lightly populated farms.

By 2050 and beyond, Earth will be a urban planet, while the average place on the planet will be nearly wild.

[Averages are tricky.]

Source: The Technium

What does tech in the “new office” look like?

Little, Big:

Part of me rebels against this observation, for “people like me” form a terribly skewed sample. We do a lot of things with our hardware that the Median User does not do—like install software. (If the majority of applications on your phone, pad or even computer didn’t come with it, you aren’t a Median User.) For people who want to have an iPad as an adjunct to their laptop, the Mini may be near perfect. For people who want to have an iPad as their one portable device, though—something that they really can do Serious Work on—the Mini may not be the right thing.

Yet I can’t shake the notion that I run into a paradox with that premise. Most “Power Users” wouldn’t want to replace their laptops with iPads, yet I suspect it’s only the Power Users (and a subset of them) who would look at an iPad and wonder if they could replace their laptop with it in the first place. The best way to use an iPad is not as a laptop replacement. It’s as an iPad. It’s quite possible that millions of people would rather have an iPad instead of a laptop. And it’s quite possible that many of those would, given a choice, rather have a smaller, lighter iPad, just like many of us who want an iPad and a laptop would.

So what does this mean for non-iPad tablets? If the iPad Mini is the better size, then all those other tablets were onto something, right? Yes, but the original iPad sells more than all other competitors combined. Either buyers vastly prefer 10″ tablets, or buyers vastly prefer iPads. Given that other 10″ tablets have been about as popular as a vegan activist at a Texas chili cookoff, I know which one of those I’d put money on.

[Working hard to understand exactly thee feelings as they relate to the new office. How many folks really need a laptop? desktop? iPad (or pad of some sort, but for now it’s really only Apple’s stuff, we’ll see what time brings.) Even a Chromebook might work for some. It’s certainly inexpensive enough. WHat do you think the new office will look like from this perspective.]