Killing an animal to eat it isn’t cruel. Making it live a miserable existance is.

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Why Don’t Farm Animals Get the Respect Pets Do? – NYTimes.com.

This article is well worth the read. It makes me sick to see animals living like the ones in the HSUS video. Now, understand that I do not trust the HSUS one bit – their agenda is to eliminate ALL animal ownership FOREVER. No more animals used in medicine, no more animals used as beasts of burden, not more farm animals, and NO MORE PETS. However, cruelty is cruelty and in North America (life for many animals is FAR FAR worse elsewhere in the world) I would say that the animals who are doomed to live the most miserable of lives are pigs and chickens. Think about that when you eat eggs, or bacon, or the next time you go to KFC.

Birds being let out to pasture in the morning.

The truth of the matter is, it doesn’t have to be that way, and we can STILL enjoy bacon, eggs, and chicken soup. Sure, it will probably cost more, but then again it SHOULD. We pay FAR too little for our food. The only way to bring food to the store that cheaply is to do it badly: treating animals like stuff, and pouring loads of pesticides and artificial fertilizers on our plants – and don’t even get me STARTED on GM foods.

You may think, yea, well, it’s not my problem. What can I do about it anyways? Well, the truth of the matter is that the sad and miserable lives these animals are forced to lead IS YOUR FAULT. You keep buying this crap. You demand cheap meat.

Are you willing to stop buying pork from factories? Eggs? Chicken? Ever eat veal? That’s another horror story. Do you know how they manage to get the meat to look so pale and be so tender? The calves live in the dark, have no room to move around, and are fed a liquid diet (i.e. they have diarrhea their entire, short, depressed lives). Yum, eh? I quit eating veal years ago.

Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I do actually eat KFC from time to time. I also eat bacon, and wieners, …. So here’s the thing, if we all ate LESS meat from animals that are cruelly raised, and MORE meat from animals that are humanely raised, things would in fact change. The market will respond. Isn’t that what they keep telling us is the magic of capitalism?

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Easy-Bake Oven Is About to Become Hard to Use – DailyFinance

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Easy-Bake Oven Is About to Become Hard to Use – DailyFinance.

AND…. home-made incubators. I have instructions for building your own incubator that relies on the fact that light bulbs give off heat.

You also can’t use the ‘new’ bulbs to heat baby birds in a brooder. I am now stockpiling 40-watt bulbs – especially the red ones – they are perfect for providing just a little bit of extra heat for baby ducks, chicks, and turkeys when they are raised in the house. (The red ones provide a more subdued light so that the babies actually sleep at night.)

Obviously, Morticia the kitty likes the heat too. (Digit’s thinking “Wanna Play?”)

I’ve also gone back to using regular Christmas light strings around the farm because the others don’t provide enough light. I prefer the 5 watt ones (and could probably get away with 3 or 4 watts per bulb). Those LED ones simply don’t provide enough light to do ANYTHING by.

Also, isn’t it time we stopped trading one environmental problem for another? I’d be happy to switch, if we could find something that worked as well, AND that didn’t also polite the environment…. AND when they find something that is not classified as toxic waste when it no longer works.

We really need to look at the WHOLE cost of something – and not just the bit that happens while WE have it in our hands. What does it cost to MAKE, USE, and GET RID OF? For example, by that measure, it is far better for the planet to continue to maintain and use an existing older car than it is to buy a brand new one, no matter HOW energy efficient it claims to be.

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Public LMS Evaluations | Mark Smithers

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Public LMS Evaluations | Mark Smithers.

This is an interesting post on decisions made by some universities regarding which LMS to choose.

Thanks to Rod Corbett for putting this in my path.

I must say that I found Moodle pretty easy to install, set up, and maintain. Since I did this on my own with NO funding, an enterprise system was not even a possibility.

 

I STILL think that a school could hire several full-time people dedicated to maintaining Moodle and still spend less money than they would for something like BlackBoard.

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What discourages girls from math and science?

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It is true that fewer women than men break into science and engineering careers today because they do not choose such careers. What isn’t true is that those choices are truly “free.”

Does hidden sexism discourage girls from math and science? – By Shankar Vedantam – Slate Magazine.

I KNEW it! Although, I’m still not comfortable with the notion that this is necessarily sexism. It might be, but I really think we should look at this more. Still,

subtle and unconscious factors skew the “free choices” we make.

Some interesting results reported in the article:

when Stout and Dasgupta evaluated how much the students identified with mathematics, they found that women ended up with less confidence in their mathematical abilities when their teachers were men rather than women. This happened even when women outperformed men on actual tests of math performance.

Even though girls are increasingly outperforming their male counterparts in math and science in school, they STILL don’t choose careers in STEM fields. Why? This article points at the fact that there aren’t enough women faculty in these fields at university.

HAH! I KNEW I was making a difference. I’d love to know the numbers on how many women in STEM fields get driven out by incompetent department heads and their sycophant sidekicks, like I did. In may case, the better I got at working with my students, the more I was attacked.

From the article:

They measured, for instance, how often each student responded to questions posed by professors to the classroom as a whole. At the start of the semester, 11 percent of the female students attempted to answer questions posed to the entire class when the professor was male, and 7 percent of the female students attempted to answer questions posed to the entire class when the professor was female. By the end of the semester, the number of female students who attempted to answer questions posed by a male professor had not changed significantly: Only 7 percent of the women tried to answer such questions. But when classes were taught by a woman, the percentage of female students who attempted to answer questions by the semester’s end rose to 46.

The researchers also measured how often students approached professors for help after class. Around 12 percent of the female students approached both male and female professors for help at the start of the semester. The number of female students approaching female professors was 14 percent at the end of the semester. But the number of female students asking for help from a male professor dropped to zero.

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Serious Game Classification : The online classification of Serious Games

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This came across the Serious Games list today and I thought it was worth sharing:

Serious Game Classification : The online classification of Serious Games.

This just came across the serious games list and may be of interest.

This is a new site that catalogs and classifies serious games on the net. This site includes all Serious Games though, and not just educational games. There are currently 2225 games listed.

People are forever looking for examples of serious games they can show to people and describe.

 

After a very superficial look, this site seems quite promising.

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The Decorative Media Principle in Action

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There are thousands (maybe even millions) of examples of the Decorative Media Principle out there in the Internets. The Decorative Media Principle involves creating a visually pleasing background and other decorations for a worksheet, website, etc. that is usually thematically connected with the instruction. The principle, although unproven is that the decoration helps to increase interest and may also increase the conceptual coherence of the learning object.

I came across this one today (this one isn’t even thematically connected):

Thinkuknow – home.

It looks fine. With the exception of the fact that it isn’t obvious how I find out who these people are and what they’re about (I suppose they assume we will just know), as a web page, it works OK.

So, what’s the problem?

Well, now that you asked……

  1. It’s NOT a game. Unless we start calling all multiple choice questions games. Sure, this one wraps the questions and answers with visually pleasing backgrounds and graphics. It even gives you sound effects when you click on something, but to call it a ‘shooting gallery’ is really stretching it. I didn’t get to shoot anything. I got to click on buttons. Somebody should tell these people that shooting games involve aiming and firing something (guns and bullets, or slingshots and hamsters, or some such). Shooting games also involve a chance (that really should be greater than zero) that you might MISS. It’s hard to miss clicking a button.
  2. I assume that this is supposed to be EDUCATIONAL. If I get a question wrong, TELL ME WHAT IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN. I don’t actually learn anything for the answers I get right. If I get on wrong, and you don’t tell me what is was supposed to be, I learn almost nothing. And really, this is not fun enough that I would play it just to get a high score.
  3. Newsflash: Edutainment is DEAD. Wrapping boring content inside a game failed as a strategy in the 1980’s and it continues to fail now.

And to think, I could have told my first-year computer science students that they weren’t writing a final exam at all – they were playing a game. Who knew that all I needed to do was hide the scantron sheet under some pictures and make noises when they fill in a bubble. I coulda done that!

Decorative Media does NOT make anything a game.

Mark my words:

We have a limited amount of time to demonstrate that games are effective as instructional technology. LOTS of people in industry get it. The military gets it. Healthcare gets it. Social change organizations get it too. Why can’t formal education figure it out?

If we screw this up like we did in the 1980’s, we will NOT get a third chance. Formal educational institutions will reject games as a viable instructional technology and the growing chasm between 21-st century learning and early 20th-century schools will widen.

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Facebook gives up on Social Media and goes all-in for marketing…

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Facebook Like button takes over Share button – CNN.com.

“it should ultimately increase traffic to publishers’ websites”

There’s the money line.

In spite of what FB says, FB is no longer about social ANYTHING, it’s all about the marketing.

It should really be called Marketing Media, not Social Media. What we want is really far far less important than what advertisers and marketers want.

I think I will start being very careful about what I ‘like’. I apologize in advance to all my actual friends. I used to use ‘like’ as a way to make brief contact and to be supportive. Maybe I’ll just start sending little emails. Anybody have a quick-mail app for browsers?

But WAIT, there’s MORE….
order now and get TWICE as much junk.
All for one LOW, LOW price
(your soul?)

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Are Household Bugs A Risk To Human Health?

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Are Household Bugs A Risk To Human Health?.

Date: 26 Jan 2011 – 4:00 PST

Well, DUH! Of COURSE they are!

Do they really not think that feeding antibiotics to farm animals as if they were regular feed is going to have NO effect on the ecology of everything that comes in contact with those animals?

Are they really that stupid, or are they just hoping WE are?
Given the widespread ignorance of how our animals are raised these days, I suspect the answer is the latter. Even many small scale farmers seem to think it’s OK to treat with antibiotics without even diagnosing the problem. Your rabbit feeling a bit off? Give it some penicillin – just for a day of two though -till it seems better. Your goats having some issues? Don’t bother calling the vet or figuring out why they are off, just get out the terramycin and give ‘er!

The ignorance of the general population about how their food is produced is FAR more dangerous to our survival than playing violent video games. Oh, and don’t think that being a vegetarian, or even a vegan lets you off the hook. Claiming purity simply because you don’t eat meat, will NOT protect you from the kind of plague that could hit the planet once 99.9% of all germs have been eliminated.

You can’t expect the bull not to charge simply because you don’t eat beef.

I have news for you guys, it’s not the 99.9% of the bugs you can kill with your hand sanitizer that are going to kill you – it’s the 0.1% that SURVIVES!

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