A Film that I Imagined Making Once Upon a Time

Do some good for a cause close to your heart and invites others by watching this film; two for the price of one.

Inspired by love and concern for his two daughters, and wondering what kind of planet they will inherit, actor and award-winning director Turk Pipkin traveled the world to pose the toughest questions of our time to some of today's greatest minds. The result is Nobelity, a highly acclaimed documentary that explores the crises and possibilities facing the environment, education, economics, family, peace, social justice, and spirituality. Pipkin's odyssey took him across the United States, and overseas to France, England, India, and Kenya. One of the distinguished Nobel laureates he spoke to was Rev. Desmond Tutu (Nobel Peace Prize, 1984) who talks about the power of love and forgiveness, and the human capacity to accomplish great things. Pipkin says 'The most moving of the meetings was with Sir Joseph Rotblat, a 96 year old nuclear physicist (Nobel Peace Prize, 1995) who fifty years earlier had joined with Albert Einstein in signing an open letter to the world calling for an end to nuclear proliferation. Sir Joe confided to me that the mission for the remaining days of his life was to fulfill the task that Einstein left to him, and put America and the world back on the track to nuclear disarmament.' ("Event Detail: Nobelity." Artsopolis. 01/01/2007. Artsoplis. 1 Jan 2007 . )

Bumped into details of this courtesy of an advertisment during my listening to a a stream of the December 24, 2006, re-broadcast of Childhood Matters' "Using Stories to Explore the World". Also, disovered a new children's author--Uma Krishnaswami.

If you build, they will come...

Aren't the naysayers missing the point of the now-$150 laptop education initiative? Part of the problem in un-, under-, poor, [insert negative adjective] places, is that children miss out because they just never get to have certain experiences that many can easily take for granted elsewhere. The One Laptop Per Child effort is attempting to short circuit that problem in one arena for one segment of the world.

No one knows what will be possible if you make this type of technology available on such a grand scale. The mere exposure will change the landscape for some. Besides laughing at Bill Gates' questioning

whether the concept is “just taking what we do in the rich world” and assuming that that is something good for the developing world, too

I did note that philanthropy is having an impact on his worldview.

I think a more useful response is to imagine what _____ will kids be better able to make happen because of these odd little laptops. Maybe, it'll only give rise to a rash of third world hackers but regardless they will enrich the global landscape.

The idea was to put something immediately usable requiring as little capital as possible in the hands of the young. What's not to love in that? And, the capitalist marketplace will still be standing at the end of the day.

Things Left Out of Parenting Books

No one mentions what a bear schooling is. Yes, there's the question of whether public or private depending on your income level and your residence within any given city or neighbhorhood. But no one really prepares you for the extent to which a child's education is a massive engagement for those of us who practice anything resembling attachment parenting or just simply trying to be an engaged parent in ways that parents of the sixties generally weren't. Having an above average school-aged child in an urban setting consumes energy; make that child a boy and a minority and the weight only gets heavier. Make him intelligent, an extrovert and in need of challenges; and I suddenly understood all the choices my mother made as it related to the education of my sister and I.

In the big picture it breaks down into the system, the school, and your child. You got to monitor the school system on the political level (school board, funding, etc), be present at the school enough to know when you're not finding out about matters, checking that homework even if completed is actually understood, engaging the child so as to quantify his experience of the teachers and classmates, and the list goes on.

Given that we continue to have a child in an urban public elementary school (his third and favorite, I should interject), I think this 20061126 New York Times article "What It Takes to Make a Student" gets at why I worry about his education and his understanding of the world around him; its review of selected research reminds me why the politicians are stupid to think a better testing student is so easily attainable. The battle is against a multi-faceted moving target. A point not covered in the article, and one I wonder if is explored in any literature, asks about the relevance of nuanced but similarly important concept involving ethno-cultural factors that may eclipse class under certain settings.

How come its so obvious to me that there's not just one way to educate a child. After all private schools have long educated dumb white kids using teachers without advanced degrees; yet, they somehow emerge functionally more competent than their similarly or better endowed counterparts. What the research really gets at is that certain parents don't leave education at the school and however they supplement it in the home makes the difference....more so than any particular school. The whole rigamarole I learned can be quantified as "concerted cultivation". I'd venture to guess it's why you can have the off-the-radar successes of Sudbury Valley types of schools and other alternatives. In the end,

“noncognitive” abilities like self-control, adaptability, patience and openness — the kinds of qualities that middle-class parents pass on to their children every day, in all kinds of subtle and indirect ways — have a huge and measurable impact on a child’s future success

The expectation is a minimal success of graduation and somehow it has to be gotten. (Yes, there are cheaters but...most do finish nominally proficient.) Research coming out of UPenn's Positive Psychology Center characterizes it as tenacity, or grit. Pretty much explains me.

For the meatier version of matters, see "Self-discipline outdoes IQ in predicting academic performance of adolescents" in Psychological Science.

Statistics channeling East Coast rap = ... ?

The question remains is "Statz-4-life" stranger than product from Weird Al? .

Pinball Coffee Table

This has a high lust factor!!

" Friends With Money "

A funny read a few days after listening to a "disadvantaged" teen sorting through her Yahoo! [junk] mail looking for responses to some recent job applications speaking aloud to herself affirming she'd like a credit card whereupon the clinician at the site tried to get her to see why credit cards + joblessness + adolescence were a bad mix. And, this blog post somehow relates to a discovery, in the same week, that a college acquaintance named Vibe and summers in Key West -- because he can; all that from an old Vibe that I wasn't sure why I hadn't tossed but which called me to start reading after I'd finally figured out how to cable correctly the DVD recorder in the kitchen. Yep, it takes me about a year to hook up any new technology we acquire. We have more DVD players than people living here.

There are two laptops in our household (XP and OS X) and one desktop (W2K) mostly situated/isolated for the child to surf and to play any of his variations of Zoo Tycoon; all of these PCs are wirelessly taking advantage of our 24/7 DSL connection in our tiny 5-room apartment on the 3rd floor of a triple decker in Dorchester, MA. Furthermore, there are 2 non-networked pre-OS 8 macs in our kitchen and dining room with educational software for the child and that I use for music listening. Technically, we possess six televisions although only three (each with cable and some not-so-current game box attached) are in regular use.

What is money, exactly? Access to better choices?

One of the female teens I was teaching about computers asked me why I didn't "hock" all my technology and get my car fixed. And, at the site for my other job one of the male teens with whom I worked asked if I was rich--a query prompted by my pulling out my digital camera from my fanny pack.

I'm clearly not rich, but some of my friends are. Maybe. Some people with whom I'd even conversed in college probably are judging by the movie deals I read about in the media but my closest friends are across the spectrum but generally range from artists with jobs of some sort (usu. part-time or grad school-based) to college profs. In between, you'd find an eclectic bunch including a personal trainer, a school psychologist, consultants, a college counselor at a private school, and some who've likely inherited and already earned more money than I'll probably ever see in my lifetime. C'est la vie. Meanwhile, I'm barely employed by an assortment of NPOs. and where we live our 8-year son thinks bad things are routine to the extent that he won't play in the huge Ronan Park around the corner.

Proof as to Why We Were All Screwed in OH

1. The Conyers Report, aka Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio
2. GAO Report 50-956 Elections: Federal Efforts to Improve Security and Reliability of Electronic Voting Systems Are Under Way, but Key Activities Need to Be Completed

The real post--A-bomb Hiroshima, a 1st person acct 60 yrs late

After the physicality of an event in time all else is interpretation. And, journalists are not necessarily any better than any other human at defining boundaries. How different would our understanding of Vietnam if we'd had only embedded reporting upon which to rely. It's 60 years later til we can read 1st hand accts, and only recently has other scholarship begun to re-define the textbook account of what happened. A slightly shorter summary of the matter can be found in the Japan Times "Pair want reporter's Pulitzer for '45 story on A-bomb revoked". Good luck @ finding the finally released text. I can find selections of it in Google Cache. George Weller's "A Nagasaki Report": Parts 1, 2, 3, 4,

The clarity of simple thinking!

I love reading/hearing/seeing Alan Kay!

Today, science (a concern with what is real) is mixed with mathematics (a concern with what is true) is mixed with engineering (a concern with how something can be made). Each worker in each of these fields also partly works in the other two. Each field has a different temperament associated with it: mathematicians tend to be idealists, scientists realists, and engineers pragmatists. And each finds themselves temporarily adopting a borrowed temperament when they use the other areas to aid advances in the one they most love.

So saith the man in the foreword to Mark Guzdial's Squeak: Object-Oriented Design With Multimedia Applications, (Prentice-Hall, 2001).

"Do what you love, forget the money"

Can One Be Smart Enough about Blogging?

Another unintended consequence of techne too intertwined in our lives? Or, another to file under eth-tech @ del.icio.us. From TVC Alert Research News, 7 September 2005:

(2 Sep) In this follow-up column, Ivan Tribble offers cautious advice to bloggers, who are also seeking new employment, especially in an academic environment. He continues to argue that it's especially important for bloggers to 'be careful [about] what you say.' SEE: Bloggers Need Not Apply Chronicle of Higher Education, 8 July 2005 (Tribble's original article) RELATED: Why I Blog Under My Own Name (A University of Maryland professor's response to Tribble's original article)

Also, see other interesting leads @ TVC Alert on Microsoft suing the European Commission & the on-going debate with regard to copyright and the Google library program.

political doublespeak

Reality re-defined by the power of language? Try to understand better and Google it—define:doublespeak!

BBC News [UK] August 30th, 2005 Families of Israeli Arabs shot dead on a bus in Galilee are not considered terrorism victims because their killer was Jewish, the defence ministry says. Under Israeli law, only attacks by "enemies of Israel" are considered terrorism, the ministry said. The ruling means families of the four victims will not be entitled to the lifelong monthly payments given to Israeli victims of Palestinian attacks. The ministry says it has offered them an unspecified one-off payment. The Arabs were killed by a 19-year-old Israeli army deserter who was thought to be trying to derail the evacuation of Jewish settlements in Gaza.

Courtesy of bedouin @ News From Babylon.

Must blobbing heads and clueless commentators annoy!!!

Ahhh, nothing like another disaster whose magnitude forces me to crawl out from my cave and actually want to see news coverage. But, it's mere moments before I need to run screaming far away from reality because (1) OK, this ain't brain surgery, to quote a former professor and (2) could I have some actual analysis of why the circumstances are what they are. Is that too much to ask? I listened to one news commentator/anchor ask some question about whether the New Orleans residents in the SuperDome were allowed to go outside. Now, I suppose it could have been an innocent query as opposed a value-laden message suggesting that those in question were either prisoners or somehow lost their right to exercise their freedom to move. But there is hope tonite with PBS's NOW's "Katrina: Why the Devastation Was So Bad" an update to a 2002 piece where it took on just such a question what happens when a big hurricane hits the Gulf coast. The original reporter, NPR's Daniel Zwerdling , will be in the house. (Props to truthout.org for the data bit.)

    PBS Airdate: Friday 02 September 2005 at 9:00 p.m. on PBS. 

(Check local listings at http://www.pbs.org/now/sched.html.)

---

What you don't know about Katrina and the Gulf Coast. NOW investigates why the devastation was so bad. With the death toll rising and the damage estimates in the billions, NOW reports on why New Orleans was virtually defenseless against hurricane Katrina. ...explores how one of the biggest civil engineering projects in US history-the levying of the Mississippi River-set off an environmental chain reaction that helped destroy the natural barrier protecting New Orleans from catastrophic storms.

Aside from the fact that I consider W. the best worse case example of a legacy child and mediocrity, I can only fantasize that some good will emerge from the cascade of disasters now embodied in the latest miasma -- Katrina's aftermath; the good would occur if somehow, some way more people could see fit to heep more blame on W. What can I say, I want a leader who sees a global community; the good leader owns the current situation as well as the detritus and barnacles along for the ride -- even if he knows they are external to his control and admininstration. Instead the best that W. has to offer is a tautalogy: well those who are now suffering in New Orleans are poor are Brown; that's why they are suffering. They are what they are. So I've been incredibly reductionist but it's not that far off the mark. And, the science writer for the Houston Chronicle wrote on Dec. 1, 2001:

"New Orleans is sinking. "And its main buffer from a hurricane, the protective Missis sippi River delta, is quickly eroding away, leaving the historic city perilously close to disaster. ... "So vulnerable, in fact, that earlier this year the Federal Emergency Management Agency ranked the potential damage to New Orleans as among the three likeliest, most catastrophic disasters facing this country." The other two were an earthquake in San Francisco and a "terrorist attack on New York City."

Culturally Situated Design Tools: teaching math through culture

Very cool if you're into elementary math and relating geoblocks/patterns to different ethnicities.

Gifted males and the "Bartleby Syndrome"

Because, I ask you -- can we ever know enough about genius and gender?

"Hyena People of Nigeria"

Pieter Hugo's photo series shows that there are more than one way to live tough.

define:melungeon

OK, watching Weird USA last nite/this morning, I learned the existence of a word of which I'd never heard - "melungeon" - whose meaning seems, to me, a more specific type of mulatto. Googling for a definition brings up a lone Wikipedia entry. Yet another example of serendipity?

• In May 2005, while looking for who all might be of mixed Japanese-black ancestry because of international nite @ Jordan's school, I bumped into a list of largely known, or safely-guessed-at terms at MixedFolks.com.
• I have this unattached interest in "invisible" ethnic minorities such as Japan's Burakumin.

All of which connect to my fascination w/ linguistic anomalies as in foreign accent syndrome, regionalisms and translation idiosyncracies as described in "Minority Wonders" and "Lost in Translation".

Finding comics on the brain

First, I bumped into the amusing "Whatever happened to Speedy Gonzalez?" via growabrain: Comics & Cartoons Archives. Then, yet another encounter with Shujaat, from Al-Jazeera; this time in his (?) "Choppers for Food Programme" , again, courtesy of growabrain. Encountered some Middle East heroes in AK Comics, then with some time to spare, wandered over to Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children.

girls' development as explained in "the pizza story"

My interactions w/the K-4 set makes me curious as to what does happen @ schools. I recall some of what I think I wasn't taught @ school & much of what I merely imbibed in the home of one, often, angry black woman. My most vivid memory is of a conversation w/her (aka my mom), my brother (approx. 20 yrs my senior) about the solution to South Africa was arming legions of us folk and aiding in an actual revolution. Child development is a mecurial transformation on so many levels. From a review of Tomboys! Feisty Girls and Spirited Women, we learn:

New York University professor Carol Gilligan, author of In A Different Voice, acts as a talking head. She emphasizes socialization and other factors that threaten a girl's development. In a pithy synopsis, Gilligan retells what's known as "the pizza story." She says, "Ask a 11 year-old girl what she wants on her pizza and she'll say, 'Peppers and onions.' Ask a 13 year-old girl what she wants on her pizza and she'll say, 'I don't know.' Ask a 15 year-old girl what she wants on her pizza and she'll say, 'Whatever you want.'"

MBTA riders in search of better outcomes

And, "MBTA resolves to coordinate trains" [May 2005].

Pat of Plymouth says that after rushing home from caring for her 93 year-old mother in Pennsylvania to tend to her hospitalized husband, she got the boot from a Plymouth & Brockton bus. She wasn't loud or drunk or throwing food. She was $2.13 short on her $16 one-way fare.