advocacy

Teaching is actually kind of hard

Teaching is actually kind of hard:

Teaching, as “soft” as skill as it may be, is really hard to do well. You have to manage, lead, inspire, guide, correct, encourage, praise….all of it. The only people who think that’s easy are the ones that suck at it. I’ve taught before, I know how hard it is to do well. I like CodeYear’s enthusiasm, I think their hearts are in the right places, but heart and enthusiasm are only inspiration. You still have to do more than dump information on people and assume they’ll get it.

[I teach all the time. It’s awesome, but it’s not easy. it’s why the whole situation in our schools is so heartbreaking. Bad teachers slide by, good teachers are not properly rewarded… feh.]

Source: bynkii.com

Ad Hominem and false humility

Warned: This post contains what some consider offensive language.

Oh here we go:

Me calling the anticommentarian arguments, by and large, pretentious bullshit is not Ad Hominem. Me calling MG Siegler, Matt Gemmell, and Gruber pretentious idiots, vapid hipsters, or <pick your pejorative, it really doesn’t matter> is not Ad Hominem. Calling people you disagree with names is not “Ad Hominem”. It is not nice, and is probably being an Asshole, but it’s not Ad Hominem. For it to be Ad Hominem, I’d have to say something like “MG Siegler is a hipster, therefore, he’s wrong”. THAT is Ad Hominem. Stop using that fucking concept to cover people being foulmouthed rantmavens.

[and later -Ed.]

If I could ban one thing from human discourse, it would be the false humilty we require of people when it comes to opinions. “In my humble opinion”. Oh bullshit. If you’re offering an opinion, it’s not humble. You’re taking a fucking stand on an issue. Could be a minor issue, could be a major issue, but an opinion is inherently not humble. If you want to have a humble opinion, shut the fuck up and stop blathering about it. People can be humble. Opinions cannot be humble. Who the fuck cares about an opinion if the person giving it is being a vacillating wussy about it?

[I aspire to be a foulmouthed rant maven. I may never get there, but a man can dream. (oh hush, I know.) About the second paragraph I quoted… I can have a opinion without belief that it is highly important to anyone but me. You might be able to argue about the precision of the phrase “humble opinion,” but that doesn’t make me a vacillating wussy. Other things might, but I doubt it.]

Source: bynkii.com

d: Technology is no longer progress.

If I buy a hybrid car, but I’m still stuck in daily traffic have I improved anything? When I’m stuck in that traffic with five other hybrids have we as a society accomplished anything at all?

A faster phone with a bigger screen is not progress. Phones these days are amazing devices. But faster and larger are not useful qualities in and of themselves. They can well be detriments (shorter battery life being one obvious downside).

It’s often noted that the best technology is the result of someone solving a problem for themselves.

If we could use technology to improve the current system so that it is sustainable, are we missing the chance to ask whether the current system really delivers “the good life”? Aren’t we missing the opportunity to have happier people, a happier planet, and fewer people struggling just to eat well and drink clean water?

What if we replace GDP with some measure of contentment?

The problem I am trying to solve is the engineering (social, personal, technological, what have you) of the “good life.”

Kempt – The Phone Stack

Kempt – The Phone Stack:

It works like this: as you arrive, each person places their phone facedown in the center of the table. (If you’re feeling theatrical, you can go for a stack like this one, but it’s not required.) As the meal goes on, you’ll hear various texts and emails arriving… and you’ll do absolutely nothing. You’ll face temptation—maybe even a few involuntary reaches toward the middle of the table—but you’ll be bound by the single, all-important rule of the phone stack.

Whoever picks up their phone is footing the bill.

[A brilliant solution if you have highly interrupted meals. My friends, family etc. have no issue ignoring their phones…]

The “fractional horsepower” http server joins the Nikon D4 party.

[Emphasis is mine -Ed.]

Nikon D4 overview: Digital Photography Review:

WT-5 Wireless Transmitter with web-browser camera control interface 

With the D4 comes a new WiFi transmitter, the WT-5, which is a neat little unit that screws onto the side of the body and draws it’s power from the camera’s battery. Its real party trick, though, is a built-in web browser-based remote camera control interface that doesn’t require you to download or install a specialized app. Essentially, you can log into your camera (with a username and password) using your laptop, tablet or smartphone and its standard web browser, at which point you’re presented with a camera control panel with live view feed. You can adjust a wide range of parameters – exposure mode, shutter speed, aperture, exposure compensation, ISO, white balance and so on, and initiate remote shutter release or video recording.

The WT-5 connects to the socket on the lower left of this image. In the center you can see the microphone and headphone sockets. On the lower right is the Ethernet port.
The web interface also allows you to control multiple cameras simultaneously, including the ability to release their shutters simultaneously. You can even autofocus anywhere in the scene, simply by touching your iPhone or iPad’s screen. Because this is all web-based, you don’t have to physically close to the camera either – in principle you could operate it from a different continent. 

Nikon has clearly paid attention to professional photographers’ workflow requirements when shooting, and has tried to set the camera up so there’s no need to use a laptop alongside it any more. To this end the D4 allows photographers to add full IPTC data to all of their image files as they shoot, and can store 10 data presets each containing 14 fields. There’s a new network setup wizard to configure the camera for use over wired LAN, or WiFi in FTP and HTTP mode. The camera can even use the GP-1 GPS receiver to automatically set its internal clock, so multiple cameras can easily be synced and specific events from a shoot identified by the time at which they occurred.

[I’m so glad to see this begin to happen. And the number of ports on this thing is impressive. Allez!]

Transparency and Technology: Secrets of Small Farm Success

Transparency and Technology: Secrets of Small Farm Success:

But there are a number of advantages to being small. Chief among them may be the ability to connect with individual customers and achieve a level of transparency impossible (or at least undesirable) for larger, factory type farming operations.

“I think a lot of people are finding out – not just farmers, but also fish providers and other producers – that transparency in and of itself is a great marketing tool,” says Barry Estabrook, James Beard award-winning food journalist and author of Tomatoland. “That means encouraging your customers to visit your farm, to talk about how you produce food if you serve a market or CSA.” For its part, the government is at least aware of a growing desire among consumers to learn about where their food comes from. In 2009, the USDA launched the Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food (KYF2) to help strengthen local and regional food systems by helping consumers “connect with their food and the people who grow and raise it.”

[It grow ever more obvious to me that in a world filled with “marketing” that lacks substance that the solution is purchase as much as possible from people. The environment benefits, your community benefits, you benefit. A triple play.]

Source: Blog: Slow Food USA

Polka-dotted joy

Polka-dotted joy:

It’s a good thing on this blog when something like consensus emerges, and so many of you have sent this my way that it seems we all agree: This is joyful!

An interactive installation at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art by the self-described “obsessive artist” Yayoi Kusama, The obliteration room offers a whitewashed home interior as a blank canvas for children visiting the museum to cover with colorful dots. It’s a joyful exercise in participatory art, in abundance, in layering and accretion. Visitors leave their traces on the space. Their experience of the exhibit becomes manifest in the exhibit. And through the innocent randomness of children’s choices, a pleasurable kind of order emerges. The impulses to cover and to cluster — to cover and conquer a new white space or to cluster around a social crowd of others — make the distribution playful and human.

[How incredibly awesome. I now declare 2012 the year of the dot.]

Source: aesthetics of joy

Be generous with your links

Warned: This post contains what some consider offensive language.

One minor point on the comment bullshit:

I’ll reference the article(s) in question in a reasonably clear way. I may even use the title, (In this case, it’s “Comments Still Off” on Siegler’s parislemon tumblr blog.) That way, I’m still attributing “correctly”, (for at least smallish values of “correctly”.) But even the minimal SEO value I generate, I’m not giving that away just because someone’s too fucking snotty to allow their precious genius to be “tainted” by comments. You want me to link to you? You want me to help boost your SEO? For Free?

Fuck You. Pay Me, as Mike Montiero is fond of saying.

[I disagree. I get it, but links make the web. No links, no web. Be generous.]

Source: bynkii.com

On opinion

Fanboy theory – Marco.org:

It’s impossible to express a useful opinion to any significantly sized audience without inadvertently angering someone enough to hurl irrational insults at you.

[And so it has always been. But as it is noted, what’s the point without them? And why deny having them? Everyone has them, and everyone knows you have one (or more). Enjoy.]

Spotify v. Radio – A Study in Dubious Conclusions

Spotify v. Radio – A Study in Dubious Conclusions:

…radio trumps Spotify both in terms of revenue and in terms of promotion. A single radio spin will not only bring in more money than thousands of Spotify streams, but will also put your music in front of thousands (millions?) of people who would’ve otherwise had to actually seek it out in order to hear it.

[Without any certainty to the numbers the whole thing is kind of a farce. But I believe that the aggregation of listeners or fans must belong to the artist.]

Source: The Cynical Musician