Roger Schank has some big desires for redesigning Schooling, framing them as Public Policy changes for Barack Obama. Abandon Common Core... stop pushing College Education... get rid of courses (including MOOC-s).

an economy based on packaging memorable experiences for people - as for living, our servants can package that for us (more)

William Deresiewicz thinks Foodism has become the new high Culture. *Foodism has taken on the sociological characteristics of what used to be known — in the days of the rising postwar Middle Class, when Mortimer Adler was peddling the Great Books and Leonard Bernstein was on television — as culture. It is costly. It requires knowledge and connoisseurship, which are themselves costly to develop. It is a badge of membership in the higher classes, an ideal example of what Thorstein Veblen, the great social critic of the Gilded Age, called conspicuous consumption. It is a vehicle of status aspiration and competition, an ever-present occasion for snobbery, one-upmanship and social aggression... Food now expresses the symbolic values and absorbs the spiritual energies of the educated class. It has become invested with the Meaning Of Life. (more)

Clay Shirky notes the fit between the Internet and Democracy. *The thing that most changed my mind was a book by Pierre Rossonvallon called Counter Democracy, which unearths the aspects of democratic participation that are about citizen suspicion of the state. Rossonvallon says that the ways that we stop the state from doing certain things are not only an underappreciated part of democracy, but logically and historically exist prior to establishing mechanisms like voting and parliaments. (more)

Timothy Ferriss's 4HourChef book, published by Amazon, will be an interesting test of the Book Store channel. *Barnes And Noble, struggling to remain relevant in Amazon’s shadow, has been emphatic that it will not carry its competitor’s books. Other large physical and digital stores seem to be uninterested or even opposed to the book. Many independent stores feel betrayed by Mr. Ferriss, whom they had championed... Crown, a division of Random House, took on Mr. Ferriss in 2007, after more than two dozen publishers said no to him. “Crown put in a lot of effort to promote those books,” Mr. Petrocelli said. “He decided to walk away. That’s his decision to make but I can’t say I applaud it. I think writers should be supportive of publishers that are supportive of them.” (more)

Number Two Son has a science project (PBL) to make a mousetrap-powered car. It needs to go 3m. (more)

biggest levers in New Economy future: Education, HealthCare, Leisure - 2007-01-18-KlingFogelFocusEducHealthLeisure (more)

Cordless Phone-s often fail to work in NYC apartments with thick heavy walls. (more)

Syncopated Music art project. (more)

Creating semi-FreeMarket rather than Command And Control system within a corporation, for allocating resources and making other decisions (Idea Futures) (more)

Dee Hock sent Joi Ito an email in response to his Emergent Democracy paper. Unless new Culture-s are able to consciously visualize, create and implement new forms of Governance (remember, that means the codification and regulation of its new relationships and values), the old forms of corporate and political governance will assert themselves, penetrate the new culture and turn it to the same old ends. The Internet culture was too enthralled by new toys to pay attention to such mundane matters as governance. It failed to "Institutionalize its deinstitutionalization."

Barbara Kiviat (Time Magazine) on Idea Futures inside BigCo operations. Companies from Microsoft to Eli Lilly and Hewlett Packard are bringing the market inside, with workers trading futures contracts on such "commodities" as sales, product success and supplier behavior... Ultimately, "you may someday see someone in a desk job or a manufacturing job doing day trading, knowing that's part of the job," says Thomas Malone, a management professor at MIT who has written about markets. "I'm very optimistic about the long-term prospects."... "You have to get people used to the idea of being accountable in a very different way," says Mary Murphy Hoye, senior principal engineer at Intel, which has been experimenting with Internal Market-s. "I can now tell if planners are any good, because they're making money or they're not making money." Quotes from Robin Hanson, Bernardo Huberman.

Seth Kahan [interviewed](http://www.sethkahan.com/Resources_0John Seely Brown.html) John Seely Brown. *Why Story Telling? Well, the simplest answer to your question is that stories talk to the gut, while information talks to the mind. You can't talk a person through a change in religion or a change in a basic mental Model. There has to be an emotional component in what you are doing... (more)

Michael Abrash on the Organization Model at Valve Software, and his research there into Augmented Reality. (more)

My new Personal Finance For Busy Parents service is live. Please take a look!

By 2017, the first wave of students of P Tech — Pathways in Technology Early College High School — is expected to emerge with Associates Degree-s in applied science in computer information systems or electromechanical engineering technology, following a course of studies developed in consultation with IBM. (Vo-Tech, Educating Kids In Nyc) (more)

Onyx Ashanti has created a "BeatJazz" Midi Wind Controller. (Syncopated Music) (more)

Apple Computer finally announced the Mini (7") IPad. The 16GB/WiFi model costs $329 (vs $249 for Nexus7 - 2012-06-27-GoogleAsusNexus7Tablet).

Seth Godin has a new manifesto out on Educating Kids called StopStealingDreams. Free EBook in a variety of formats. (more)

Number One Son's 2-1/2yr-old MyTouch phone has become unusably slow. So I told him we'd replace it. (more)