Profiling via web presence (or, the company you keep tells us a lot about you.)

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I’ve always told people that they should assume that anything they put on the web should be considered public, whether it is on a public site or not. If you don’t want the information known, then don’t put it out there.

Thanks to modern data mining techniques, we can now predict whether or not you are gay by looking at your friends on Facebook.

That’s kind of interesting, though personally, I don’t really care if someone is gay or not. It doesn’t (or shouldn’t) affect their ability to be a decent person.

On the other hand, I am FAR more interested in finding out whether they are honest or not;  loyal or not; bullies or not. THAT would be useful. I wonder if looking at someone’s FB friends can tell us that?

I have now lost track of how many people I *thought* were my friends, who have let me down by not standing up for honesty and integrity and for treating people decently and fairly. They always have an excuse, but the truth is, it is easier to lie than to be honest, and it is easier to be indifferent than decent. Cowardly, but definitely easier.

One thing I have learned is that people who defend someone who is dishonest or mean are a bad risk.

A righteous man is cautious in friendship, but the way of the wicked leads them astray. – Proverbs 12:26

At MIT, an experiment identifies which students are gay, raising new questions about online privacy.

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All Videogames, All the Time?

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Now, I’m a big fan of Serious Games, but I’m also quite sure that this is one of those cases where more is not necessarily better. What is important is balance. I suppose it may be difficult to make sure students have exposure to natural things too, given that they are in Manhattan (http://q2l.org/), but I am quite convinced that ultimately, a lack of connection with nature and living things will have far more negative consequences than spending too much time online.

I’m talking negative on an epic scale.

Here is the article:

New York Launches Public School Curriculum Based on Playing Games

Video games and learning exercises form the core of a new public school curriculum

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Divinely inspired? Get a grip….

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I have often suspected that many Americans see their Constitution as a ‘sacred’ document, written by ‘prophets’.

I have now seen it admitted on a semi-public social site – this person said they had always believed the founding fathers to be divinely inspired. To be fair, this person re-defined “divinely inspired” to simply mean “idealistic”, but there is no denying that many Americans have an idolized (and pathological) attachment to their Constitution, Founding Fathers, and The Office of The President (and with it, the White House).

What about separation of church and state? Don’t you believe in that too? That seems to be a concept either lost or forgotten for at least some (a very vocal some, it seems). Those of us who are not American see a different perspective: I daresay all the other free countries have no such reverence for their governments. A healthy skepticism is a good thing.

Newsflash: the US Constitution is NOT sacred. The founding fathers were HUMAN.

Granted, collectively, they were pretty bright, but the constitution would never have seen the light of day if it had been created in any kind of democratic way. It was written by a group of like-minded men. For a country of 13 states.

The world was a different place then.

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Either fish or cut bait.

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I don’t usually talk about political stuff online, but I am starting to get really tired of the American “Health Care Debate”.

Much of the rhetoric is, to be honest, ridiculous, and does little more than show the rest of the world just how ignorant (as in, uninformed and, apparently quite proud of it) many Americans really are.

Wake up.

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How to do it right on the Web (I)

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When advertisers realize how the web is different from print…

(thanks Todd Scott MacIsaac for posting this)

http://producten.hema.nl/

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Some people still get it… decent and varied lives for the animals.

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Those who no longer have a connection with nature, with the animals whose lives we take for our food, and those who don’t live with animals, have lost something that in the end will turn out to have been very important.

I’ve been doing a “Hatching in the Classroom” program with local schools for 20 years – for many kids this is their first ever contact with a living animal. That’s scary.

Not only does industrial agriculture have no soul – our willingness to ignore how this industry puts cheap (in all senses of the word) food on our table robs us of our soul too.

Food for the Soul

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: August 23, 2009
The central problem with modern industrial agriculture is not just that it produces unhealthy food. More fundamentally, it has no soul.

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Discovering stuff (a.k.a. Seeking) is one of our most powerful motivators.

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That explains a lot. But, how much of it is useful (i.e. productive) and how much is mindless chasing of lights? And what does this say about people who seem to have little or no interest in seeking? AND how do we use this to help motivate people when we are teaching?

Interesting article.

Seeking

How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that’s dangerous.

By Emily YoffePosted Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2009, at 5:40 PM ET



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Do Teachers Need Education Degrees?

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Saw this on the New York Times (Opinion) today:

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/education-degrees-and-teachers-pay/?8ty&emc=ty

Do Teachers Need Education Degrees?

By The Editors

Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

In a Room for Debate forum in June on the value of liberal arts master’s degrees, one group of readers — teachers and education administrators — generally agreed a higher degree was well worth the investment. They pointed out that pay and promotion in public schools were tied to the accumulation of such credentials and credits, specifically from colleges of education.

But current teacher training has a large chorus of critics, including prominent professors in education schools themselves. For example, the director of teacher education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Katherine Merseth, told a conference in March that of the nation’s 1,300 graduate teacher training programs, only about 100 were doing a competent job and “the others could be shut down tomorrow.” And Obama administration officials support a shift away from using master’s degrees for pay raises, and a shift toward compensating teachers based on children’s performance.

Should the public schools reduce the weight they give to education school credentials in pay and promotion decisions? Is this happening already, and, if so, what is replacing the traditional system for compensating teachers?

Here are my initial thoughts:

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