Okay, I think China has just cornered the cute auto market. Aside from the death trap size of them on American roads, I would love to drive some of these.
From Wired.
From Bei Jing Li Shi Guang Ming Automobile Design Co.
Most of the good pictures are on the Chinese side. Third link on the menu for those who don't read any Chinese (like me).
Okay, another chapter on the politics of academe and what I said to lose me an adjunct position at a school where I had previously held tenure for a period of time.
As a recap:
4 -- Copy to the Check
3 -- Open Source College Textbooks
2 -- Copy to the Door
1 -- Copy to the Left, Copy to the Right
I want to make a bold pronouncement here.
Intellectual property rights are bad for education.
Now, let me be the first one to say they are important, and even necessary. They certainly benefit the owners of the intellectual property.
The problem is that they can negatively impact the quality of education.
So let's start at first principles ... what is education? Well, it is the system of educating others, for helping to grow and develop and to give them the knowledge they need to function in some context or another. From the general context of a well-rounded public education to the specific contexts that one finds in Ph.D. programs and technology training programs. (Okay, I can't believe I just put those two on an equal footing in the same sentence either.)
So it is the sharing of knowledge. The knowledge, at least in the dumbed-down super-simplistic model, flows from the instructor to the students. This means that, by definition, education is about the sharing of knowledge so that others can take it and make use of it.
Intellectual property is, on the other hand, about the protection of knowledge, preventing others from using it without express permission of the author / originator. And already you begin to see the problem. Even if, by teaching a class, the instructor has implicitly agreed to allow students to use the knowledge they have chosen to structure in a particular way in its presentation, there is already a slippery slope where students have to worry about what portions of what they have learned they are and are not allowed to use beyond the confines of the originating classroom.
Fortunately, that can be resolved with the original research concept, where students are supposed to go beyond their instructors and further the realm of knowledge, either through day to day application or through the creation of new intellectual properties. It may still be a minefield of legal pitfalls, but at least it comes with a map and a clearly marked exit. (This is only a problem when different instructors give you contradictory maps and insist you use theirs to the exclusion of all others.)
But really, instructors assume students are going to make use of what they are taught, so that is a pretty weak opposition to intellectual property. The problem is that it is only the tip of the iceberg. It is what we see, and what we think of as education. But as with the iceberg, most of what education is exists below the waterline, beyond the classroom.
In order to educate, instructors must educate themselves. They must then document what they have learned in order to educate others. That process of documentation is the point at which new intellectual property is generated.
There are two ways in which instructors can educate themselves. One is by locking themselves away with the works of others and hunting for answers. The other is communicating with other instructors and sharing ideas and works to build something that works.
This is where intellectual property law throws a wrench in the machine.
Although many instructors, at least at the university level, are happy to collaborate on research, they seem significantly less happy to collaborate of pedagogy. Thus you hear endless horror stories from college adjuncts having opportunities to teach a class only to find all three full-time faculty have entirely different syllabi, outlines, and expectations from the course and none of them are willing to share any of the actual course materials unless they are teaching canned courses purchased by the school. This can inspire many an adjunct aspiring to be a tenured faculty member some day to go into private industry instead. Especially the competent ones.
This is a problem.
What it means is there is no quality assurance between sections of the class, no collaboration between faculty to find weaknesses and strengths in each other's work, and large quantities of duplicated effort (every second of which is agonizingly complained about) as each faculty member strives to reinvent the wheel. Practical upshot: Two students taking the same course at the same institution with two different instructors have no guarantee of having the opportunity to learn the same material at the same levels of depth and breadth.
Moreover, with each faculty member striving to reinvent the wheel we find many faculty end up opting for lowest-common-denominator education because there just isn't enough time to do that really good job they all secretly want to do. (Academics are rabid perfectionists, otherwise they wouldn't put up with what they put up with to do what they do.) It also creates dismay among faculty who would like to be spending more time doing research and less time doing course prep. Admittedly, more an issue for junior faculty not teaching things they have taught for 20 years, but those are also the ones trying to establish a publications record, be a good institutional citizen, and get tenure.
So, and I wish I could say this is purely hypothetical, intellectual property rights in the academic setting leads to inconsistent and mediocre educational quality. The places that avoid this are the ones that actively encourage (if not mandate) sharing between faculty.
In order for education to be truly successful, instructors need to actively and freely share their course materials and ideas with one another to ensure consistency across courses and sections. This would reduce their work loads, provide initial support networks for adjuncts and new faculty, and strengthen pedagogy through simple peer review.
Sharing is critical to education. There is no room for "mine, mine, mine" in the pedagogical frame. It needs to be about "we" and "us" and, most importantly, about students. It is not about egos. Okay, the problem is that it is about egos, and it shouldn't be.
The current trends in attitudes toward intellectual property are giving us educators who feel that the resources they have created for learning are tools from them to profit from and not tools to help others to learn. I am not entirely sure the two are commensurable.
This needs to change.
This doesn't mean that faculty members need to do the same with all their research, just with their course materials. Independent research, as well as being a tool to further knowledge, is rather openly a tool for personal gain on the part of the researcher. Otherwise why give up having a life in order to spend all that time on a topic maybe 1% of the world has any interest in, if you're lucky. That works better through collaboration too, but what I am talking about with course materials is open and unfettered sharing, not unlike MIT does with its course materials.
Okay, in my next rant on the topic, I will take a stab at how it can change and some if the ideas we need to think about in order to make sharing palatable for the greedy and the paranoid (alas, a common breed among underpaid, overworked, entirely stressed out academics).
Nagi Noda, 1973-2008
Slightly more distressing because she did all this awesome stuff and is nearly a decade younger than me. I am both saddened and humbled. Or at least made to feel a little pathetic.
Some Links:
My personal favorite music video of hers, from Halcali, and how I first found her work. (As a side note, no wonder I couldn't find ハリカリ online after getting back to the States ... I kept putting that extra "i" in there ... oh well.)
Moo's rez-day is Sepetember 16th, so we're holding a big party for her at the Mubar Cafe and Gardens.
SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Pulu%20See/136/204/2
And if that sounds like total gibberish to you, then this post is probably not for you.
It is an open event (which means you're all invited) with an awesome lineup of people. The party starts at 7pm with the following line-up:
The event will be listed in the SL events board as well.
More futures Paolo Soleri stye:
From Japan, where arcologies are a staple in their science fiction fare (yes, the Superdimensional Space Fortress counts too):
Spain brings us the bionic tower.
And from treehugger: Paolo Soleri is Hot Again
Was cleaning out my mail boxes and found this. It was a gem. Brightened my day with a good laugh. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.
Hello, my name is Gurn Blanston and I am a technical recruiter with the Computer Markup.
We are among the top 34 Information Technology Services Companies nationally with revenues approaching $200 million for 2008 and provide a variety of information technology consulting assignments, permanent placement, managed staffing and project services to our mature client base that include state, local and federal organizations as well as Fortune 1000 companies. We have over 5,000 consultants working at our clients today.
I am contacting you because your resume looks excellent for a technical position with a prestigious client for which we are currently sourcing. I’d like to speak with you at your earliest convenience and can be reached at 1-800-000-0000. If you prefer to contact me via email my address is gbl@markups.com.
If you’d like, please also visit our website, www.markups.com. It will be very helpful in having you learn more about us. I look forward to speaking with you soon.
Sincerely,
Gurn
POSITION DESCRIPTION
Mail Clerk
[the rest is omitted because there isn't much else to say.]
Something about all that hype, reaching someone with nearly 20 years of industry experience, then I get to the job description. Was too funny to be offended.
Only in Japan could you get cookies as commercial tie-ins to the current prime minister ...
From Pink Tentacles.
Haven't quite figured out the connection between French Lounge and J-Pop, but it is there.
Here's an example from boingboing.
And here is the site for the album it goes with.
And, of course, even before that ... Gainsbourg Made in Japan.
Okay, and this is just irresistable ... :)
And just one more ... honest.
Just in case you don't think the world isn't paying attention. Or reporting the news with a different spin.
The best part is the "party" quote. I wonder if there was cake at the party.
Okay, the next one is kind of funny too. Apparently, anarchists want to go back to an anarchist government, just like we used ot have before some point or another, I guess, maybe, sort of ... ummm ... nevermind.
Freaky cool video trying to give you a visual sense of magnetic fields and how they behave.
Plenty of other cool visualizations of the abstract on the site. They attempt to take difficult concepts in science and explain them through art.
A interesting article from airroots on how the real world is dependent on the virtual world. This virtual world being the abstract one of friendship -- connections that have no basis in the physical world through kinship, but rather operate on another plane. It makes an interesting argument that new communications technologies are not inferior to formal literacy and verbose communications systems, but rather a more accurate reflection of our own internal abstract interaction mechanisms.
A slightly different, and perhaps more anthropological, interpretation of "virtual" than perhaps many of us are used to.
A very interesting video where it appears the police tried to plant rioting anarchists in the crowd as an excuse to charge in and start beating heads.
Problem is that someone in the audience, on video, accused them of being cops. At which point they "charged" the police line and were summarily "arrested" and taken away.
Aside from the video, an interesting point is the still photo, showing that the purported rock throwing anarchist were not only wearing the exact same standard issue boots as the police on the site, but they were all shiny, new boots with a pretty poor attempt made to look them old and well worn.
There is no record of any of the men in question being charged with anything.
This event happened in Quebec City, but it is important to note that in some other reports, the self-styled anarchists in the Twin Cities this week were chasing after the window smashing, dumpster burning members trying to stop them, some of them even stopping to clean up garbage cans that had been upended by them.
Though nice to see the coverage in the Twin Cities is getting a little more even handed, more clearly differentiating between trouble makers looking to incite violence and concerned citizens upset enough about something or another to consider it their duty to protest. A change of tone from what we were seeing earlier.
On a side note, I should point out, I have some good friends who are anarchists. What they mostly do is sit around over some coffee or wine and discuss how the world would be a better place if we could have a fully participatory democracy, and how would be going about doing that in a way that would work. Most of them are old, left wing academics ranging from Marxist to Libertarian in where their stances are coming from. Hardly the type who throw rocks (might strain something) or burn dumpsters (who knows what potential hazards are in there you don't want to be inhaling) or even marching about shouting about things (bad for the old ticker).
Okay, I tried to follow the convention coverage and to prep myself on the issues and the candidates and discovered that just doing that bit is a full time job plus some.
I mean, fewer than a dozen magazines, a bunch of blogs and video sites, and I am wiped after just trying to survive both conventions.
The new method of keeping people in the dark is to throw so much information at them that they burn out and give up. To much information may be worse than not enough. At least with not enough you can make stuff up.
On the other hand, this might explain why it always seems like the talking heads are just extemporizing and, well, making stuff up. Because they have given up on trying to understand it all and have decided that maybe it is better if they just try to bluff convincingly, hoping that people will be too busy to compare what they said this week to what they said last week (except for the good folks at the Daily Show, who just eat inconsistencies for 4th meal).
I was just in Brussels! How could I have missed this!
And an amazing staircase from stairporn.org.
Okay, let's not go there shall we ...
Though the comments are so far wonderfully flame free, if snarky. Wonder if it is moderated.
From Reason Magazine Hit & Run
Have to say the Libertarians are probably the most eclectic political bunch out there. And for that I like them. Disagree with most of them, but like them.
I am working on a small cafe in the garden. It is based on a picture of an interesting sake bar I found and adapted for second life. It is still a work in progress, but aims to be a nice intimate space.
The first shot is out the window. The color balance is a little off, but I really like what the default levels setting did to the wood tone in the shot. So I left it that way instead of manually tweaking.
The second shot is the still incomplete interior. This one is closer to true color. The harpsichord is a little out of place, but I like it and haven't found a proper home for it. Perhaps in the ballroom of the airship.
Still very much work in progress. Needs furnishing and some decor. And I think the roof needs beamwork.
Aaahhhh!
Feeling guilty about spending so much time reading about convention coverage over the last week or two when I should be out looking for a new job, prepping for taking the GREs (again), so I can go back to school and take another stab at a Ph.D.
Then I feel guilty about feeling guilty. After all, isn't this what we all should be doing? Certainly when compared to playing MMORPGs it is.
If anyone besides me somewhat disturbed by the fact that in U.S. cities hosting major political events, free speech is apparently delimited to specified free speech zones, outside of which, and sometimes in which, you will be arrested for such crimes as congregating, placard waving, speaking, singing, dancing, debating, and sometimes just plain trying to get through to the other side.
Some good reading in light of recent events.
Not McCain, per se, who tried very hard to do what is right, but the rest of his party and those who putatively support him are what is frightening here.
Hard to vote for someone when these are the people who he will bring with him to power.
Some more frightening bits. I realize they are trolls, and I realize that there are trolls on both sides of the fence, but the responses to the following news article are just chilling. Have we decided to the way to prove our honor and worth is through how deeply we can hate one another?
I confess, I generally assume anyone who preaches from a position of hate is wrong. Regardless of whether I agree with their politics otherwise or not. Because if you are preaching from hate, then any veneer of respectability you may put on your words through toeing some political or philosophical line or another is, simply put, a lie you are telling yourself to justify your hate.
Progress comes from finding common ground to build on, and working together to build something suitable for all, not building a tower that leans so far in one direction or the other that it will fall over as soon as the winds change direction. The only problem with the common ground approach is it leaves everyone only partially satisfied. And that gives the discontents room to squawk. Yes, it is better, they cry, but not better enough! How much better when those in power can be more satisfied at the cost of those not in power ... at least until the winds change direction.
Humans scare me at times. I mean, really really scare me. In the so this is where the twisted minds that make horror and slasher flicks come from ... from the depths of dark psyches seeking something to hate, something to fear, something to have power over.
Some interesting tidbits and additional comments can be found here:
An interesting Web site of maps of the world distorted based on a huge variety of demographics.
Kind of neat.
The next door neighbors have moved out to one side, so the garden is getting bigger.
A bamboo grove has sprung up next to the garden, as well as the wisteria just continuing to grow like crazy. And there appears to be something hidden behind all that new growth.
Posts
