Zainab Oni (High School student) learned about becoming a Reality Hacker from Mozilla's programs. We learned that hacking doesn't only happen with computers. You can hack clothes, games, decorations, styles, etc. We also learned that hacking isn't always illegal and you can hack for good sometimes. After learning more about hacking, our hacking definitions changed. We also hacked Monopoly and Tic Tac Toe by creating our own set of rules for the games and inventing new ways to play them. (Digital Literacy)

Summary: recommendations for improving quality of life in the Third World (more)

Jim Webb says he's running for US President. He sought to carve out a niche for himself by working for criminal justice reform, but left office before any political momentum developed on the issue. And then he left, after one term, leaving Democrats to defend a purple seat against Allen.

I gave a weird talk to some Barrington Il Prairie Middle School 8th graders about life as an Internet Start Up CTO. I used a FreeMind Mind Map for my talk: the MindMeister version is here. Turned into a whole World View thing, of course. (more)

Barack Obama made a recess appointment of Dr. Donald Berwick to head CMS. Berwick is a big proponent of "PatientCenteredMedicine", which sounds like a good thing. The Science Based Medicine crowd fears that his Consumerist approach supports quackery like the Anti Vax and CAM crowd. His presence at a Summit On Integrative Medicine confirms that fear. He mentioned homeopathy and acupuncture, not to criticize them as health claims, but only to warn that they shouldn’t compete with each other, or with other modalities, for limited health care resources... As an aside, it’s ironic that Berwick leans toward Single Payer health care. His radical “I want what I want when I want it” model of patient centeredness could never function in any conceivable form of single payer care in the U.S.

Dada /ˈdɑːdɑː/ or Dadaism was an art movement of the European Avant Garde in the early 20th century. Many claim Dada began in Zurich, Switzerland in 1916, spreading to Berlin shortly thereafter but the height of New York Dada was the year before, in 1915.[1] The term Anti-art, a precursor to Dada, was coined by Marcel Duchamp around 1913 when he created his first readymades.[2] Dada, in addition to being anti-war, had political affinities with the radical left and was also anti-bourgeois.[3] Dada activities included public gatherings, demonstrations, and publication of art/literary journals; passionate coverage of art, politics, and culture were topics often discussed in a variety of media. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dada

The Gates Foundation is giving a $200 million grant to establish an initiative called "The Grand Challenge-s in Global Health." The objectives are to identify (Public Health) research areas with the greatest promise for saving and improving lives in the developing world (Third World); to fund novel, interdisciplinary approaches among researchers seeking solutions; and to get the rich-world scientific community to apply its experience to pivotal health questions of the developing world... It's tragic how little is spent on Malaria and TB (tuberculosis), but it's not surprising: 99% of sufferers live in developing countries. (more)

Chris Locke pulls a quote from Paul Feyerabend's Against Method (anarchistic theory of knowledge/science): However Anarchism, as it has been practised in the past and as it is being practised today by an ever increasing number of people has features I am not prepared to support. It cares little for human lives and human Happiness (except for the lives and the happiness of those who belong to some special Core Group); and it contains precisely the kind of Puritanical dedication and seriousness which I detest... It is for these reasons that I now prefer to use the term Dadaism... A DadaIst (DaDa) is convinced that a worthwhile life will arise only when we start taking things lightly and when we remove from our speech the profound but already putrid meanings it has accumulated over the centuries...

Mobile OS created in 2010 by merging Intel's Mob Lin and Nokia's Mae Mo. (Linux[[OS]]) (more)

Peter Diamandis: Stone Soup (more)

expensive custom IBM software for NYC Public School system (Educating Kids In Nyc) (more)

application for editing text... (more)

I want a Folding Text Editor equivalent to Active State Win Python running on MacOs X (more)

Chirag Kulkarni: 5 Non-Traditional Education Systems Doers Should Consider (Alternatives To A College Degree) (more)

Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with reality, existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language.[1][2] Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational argument.[3] In more casual speech, by extension, "philosophy" can refer to "the most basic beliefs, concepts, and attitudes of an individual or group".[4] The word "philosophy" comes from the Ancient Greek φιλοσοφία (philosophia), which literally means "love of wisdom".[5][6][7] The introduction of the terms "philosopher" and "philosophy" has been ascribed to the Greek thinker Pythagoras.[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy (more)

George W Bush program on Educational Reform. Driven mainly by Standardized Test-s. (more)

Mike Caulfield has discovered Christopher Alexander's Pattern Language model (see Alexander Patterns), and is chewing over how it could apply to Course Design. So if the patterns are the same, how do designs end up different? Because you start with different constraints... Your students have certain backgrounds, various strengths. Your institution has certain facilities and your technology has certain affordances. Just as a limited number of grammar rules produce an infinite number of sentences based on the needs of the moment, so learning design patterns combined with the circumstances and aims of instruction can produce infinitely expressive learning designs... What excites me about this is it is a way to combine research and practice without succumbing to an industrial paradigm. (more)

SciFi writer, Futurist (more)

There's the standard Wiki Name rule, but there are lots of annoying cases which make me crazy. (Please don't generate new pages by clicking on brackets!) The goals of this page are: (more)

the label for a Wiki page that attempts to support an ongoing discussion among people, vs a coherent statement (known as Document Mode) (more)