Raising Successful Children – NYTimes.com:
But it is in the small daily risks — the taller slide, the bike ride around the block, the invitation extended to a new classmate — that growth takes place. In this gray area of just beyond the comfortable is where resilience is born.
[Well said. (Not just for children.)]
Microsoft: “Metro” out, “Windows 8-style UI” in, amid rumors of a trademark dispute:
I’m not saying I love Apple’s approach to these kind of disputes. But this is folding like a stack of cards, and then declaring that you actually folded like a stack of something else foldable, just in case “cards” are trademarked.
[I simply loved how he put this.]
Source: Coyote Tracks
→ Louis C.K. interview at The A.V. Club:
“Let’s find out if this is a huge mistake. Let’s find out. I’m willing to sacrifice my first theater tour and have the places empty and identify that it’s because I wouldn’t let the radio people participate. But we also might find out that it didn’t make a difference and that I never have to do it.” [Laughs.] Because you can’t roll that shit back once you’ve started.
There’s a lot of great wisdom in here that goes far beyond the comedy business.
[Interesting synchronicity here for me…]
Source: Marco.org
iTunes U Enrolment and Apple IDs:
Anyway, at first glance it seems that you absolutely need individual Apple IDs to enrol students in a course now. I’ve always been keen on handing over as much IT autonomy to the student as possible, and that’s where I think we should all be aiming, but changing your AppleID structures is a once-a-year thing to do and no small matter. Is there a workaround in the meantime?
It turns out that there is: to create a course that students can subscribe to without entering AppleID credentials, you have to:
Create the course in Course Manager – this creates a private course with an enrolment roster.
Submit the course to the person who controls your institution’s iTunes U Public Site Manager
Have them ‘hide’ the course in PSM.
This creates a course which has a direct URL for subscription (it’s referred to as the ‘Audit URL’ in iTunes U) but which does not require Apple ID credentials to subscribe to.
This isn’t an ideal solution as it requires coordination between all the course authors at an institution and the person running the Public Site Manager. Still, it works for now and the future is ever more clearly heading towards individual Apple IDs for individual students. That’s where I’m recommending all new 1:1s start their thinking but, still, always the two stumbling blocks of no Volume Purchase and COPPA’s lower limit of 13-years-old for an iTunes account. I hope we can get these things ironed out soon.
Source: Fraser Speirs
Q: What were our primitive roles, and what effect do they have on our behavior today?
A: Men were hunters; women were gatherers. The hunter locks in on one thing, which is why guys have a narrow focus, whether it’s watching TV, reading the newspaper or driving. They block everything else out because, as hunters, they had to focus on the rear end of an animal. On the other hand, women, as gatherers, had to take in the whole landscape. Their field of vision is wider.
Q: How do these differences manifest themselves in a shopping mall?
A: The hunter tracks one thing. If I need a shirt, I go and kill a shirt with my credit card and drag it home. The gatherer doesn’t know what she’s going for because she doesn’t know what’s going to be ripe or in bloom. She’s open to the environment. When I go shopping with my wife, I keep bugging her about what she’s looking for, and she says, “Don’t bother me; I’ll know it when I see it.”
[Genius.]
Source: Doc Searls Weblog
Best piece I’ve read in the aftermath of the Aurora massacre. I agree with every word.
[I can’t agree with every word because some of the words are factually wrong. However, I agree with the following:
“But this is not the time for reasonable people, on both sides of this issue, to be silent. We owe it to the people whose lives were ended and ruined yesterday to insist on a real discussion and hopefully on some real action.
In conclusion, whoever you are and wherever you stand on this issue, I hope you have the joy of family with you today. Hold onto them and love them as best you can. Tell them what they mean to you. Yesterday, a whole bunch of them went to the movies and tonight their families are without them. Every day is precious. ”
What Jason suggests is the one thing that we can do, because I do not believe that there is an answer in Washington for this problem, and never will be.]
Source: Daring Fireball
The real reason Marissa Mayer left Google: She had to:
As a sidenote, it’s interesting that most of the press (although not this piece) has focused on Mayer’s gender. I look forward to the time when female CEOs are so commonplace that a new one is no longer newsworthy.
In Mayer’s case, it’s also worth asking why so much coverage hasn’t focused on a different issue. Every time Apple loses one of its Senior VPs, we see stories questioning Apple’s leadership and future, suggesting that there may be significant inner turmoil.
Well, Google just lost one of its top people.
[Yeah to both points.]
Source: Marco.org
Amazon same-day delivery: How the e-commerce giant will destroy local retail.:
Why would Amazon give up its precious tax advantage? This week, as part of an excellent investigative series on the firm, the Financial Times’ Barney Jopson reports that Amazon’s tax capitulation is part of a major shift in the company’s operations. Amazon’s grand strategy has been to set up distribution centers in faraway, low-cost states and then ship stuff to people in more populous, high-cost states. When I order stuff from Amazon, for instance, it gets shipped to California from one of the company’s massive warehouses in Kentucky or Nevada.
But now Amazon has a new game. Now that it has agreed to collect sales taxes, the company can legally set up warehouses right inside some of the largest metropolitan areas in the nation. Why would it want to do that? Because Amazon’s new goal is to get stuff to you immediately—as soon as a few hours after you hit Buy. (Disclosure: Slate participates in Amazon Associates, an “affiliate” advertising plan that rewards websites for sending customers to the online store. This means that if you click on an Amazon link from Slate—including a link in this story—and you end up buying something, Amazon will send Slate a percentage of your final purchase price.)
[This and the credit card swipe fee changes (which will be bungled by most greedy people/businesses) are serious game changers for retail operations.]
But it’s not the what of this case that bothers me, it’s the how. Ends do not always justify means, and sometimes, in order to preserve higher values, you have to let guilty parties walk. In this instance, I’m less concerned about proving that Lance’s yellow jerseys are smudged than with the fact that USADA keeps mutating into what looks like a law-enforcement body, which it isn’t.
USADA, which participated in the federal investigation, isn’t part of the U.S. government and isn’t a judicial body. Newspaper stories tend to shorthand it as a “quasi-governmental” entity, but that’s not accurate. USADA is a private non-profit corporation hired to manage the anti-doping program for American athletes who hope to participate in the Olympics as well as various local, regional, national, and international competitions. And it’s gotten out of control.
[Worse yet, there’s nothing in this for anyone (outside the folks with the vendetta). It’s all ancient history from a sporting sense, and if you care about who winds up being listed as the winner of the races, there probably isn’t anyone in the top ten that I think was clean in those days. This simply seems predatory. Just when they thought Lance was gonna have to deal with the same sort of stuff Barry Bonds etc. did, there was no case. Now this smack of anger and retribution. Stop wasting everyone’s time and money. It’s over.]
Think about that for a moment. The current anti-doping superstructure started out as an effort to prevent cheating in privately run games. Now we’re talking about Interpol and international treaties and fudging American legal principles.
That’s why, if experts are correct—and Armstrong’s lawyers are setting up an attack on USADA’s methods and authority—we could be in for a big and very important battle. Even if you are a Lance hater, and it pains you to think that he doped and might get away with it, you might want to pull for him this time.
I’d like to propose a new theorem: On a long enough timescale, Dave Winer is usually proven right.
[I agree.]
Source: Marco.org
turnings :: daniel berlinger 