On one level of the story, it's almost a metaphor for what's happening to him, that he's struggling to create his work, and the difficulties he's facing. And naturally as a writer, to me it is familiar and something that I know a lot about. It felt like a very good way to bring additional depth into Alan Wake's story...
- I was also able to demonstrate the potential of Twitter for learning:
- for keeping up to date with colleagues and industry news
- for problem solving
- for serendipitous learning
- for resource and file sharing - and as an example of how partiicipants were quick and willing to contribute to the event, Jon Ingham @joningham quickly shared with us, in a tweet, some pictures he had taken on his iPhone - see the one at the top of this posting of me sitting near the screen, and the one below, which shows a few of the participants in the informal table-less setting (Note: 2 were using laptops and 2 were using phones to tweet)
- for synchronous learning - we were actually doing a form of that ourselves, but I also cited the example of #lrnchat
- for micro-learning - as in my 140university example
- for polling and feedback
- for group tweeting
- as well as alternatives to Twitter in the workplace
I often hear people talking about Facebook as though they were some sort of monopoly or public trust. Well, they aren't. They owe us nothing. They can do whatever they want, within the bounds of the laws. (And keep in mind, even those criteria are pretty murky when it comes to social networking.) But that doesn't mean we have to actually put up with them.
What gets me the most isn’t so much that Facebook’s developed a monopoly in this market. As I said, that’s pretty much a given, and user privacy issues aside Facebook’s got a good product to offer. What irks me is the way Facebook’s gone about establishing itself through what I see as anticompetitive practices, specifically, prohibiting users from using their username and password to log in to other websites or services.
Facebook, used to be fun and cool, but a large part of what I have to do on Facebook now is adapt to their changes on their terms. This is unacceptable to me, especially when I don’t see the website adding significant benefits.
You have to give it to the Ayn Rand Institute: They have figured out how to keep their author’s works alive. Are there any other such programs? None that I could find. Recently, Scholastic launched an initiative that promotes free books for kids through a Facebook campaign, where the books go to K.I.D.S., or Kids In Distressed Situations. But this and other similar worthy endeavors do not help public school teachers. And as kids become teens, programs become scarcer: It's easier to raise money for children’s books than it is for high school texts.Meanwhile, many high school English teachers are forced to scrounge through the school’s storage room year after year to find 30 copies of To Kill A Mockingbird. Or they get the Rand novels.
Q: Didn’t you once run in the Paris Marathon?
Joe: Yep. I ran three of them.
Q: Correct me if I’m wrong but is it also true that you never trained for any of them?
Joe: You shouldn’t really ask me about my training regime, you know.
Q: Why?
Joe: Because it’s not good and I wouldn’t want people to copy it.Q: Don’t make me beat it out of you.
Joe: Okay, you want it, here it is. Drink 10 pints of beer the night before the race. Ya got that? And don’t run a single step at least four weeks before the race.
Q: No running at all?
Joe: No, none at all. And don’t forget the 10 pints of beer the night before. But make sure you put a warning in this article, “Do not try this at home.” I mean, it works for me and Hunter Thompson but it might not work for others. I can only tell you what I do.
It's understandable that appearance is a sticking point for feminists. So much of our work is about challenging traditionally defined notions or racist ideals of beauty that the last thing we want to do is privilege appearance over substance. But we also have to be real about the ways in which people get brought into political movements. It's rarely because we read up on legislation or resolve to be more active citizens. It's more often because we find a person or group of people who we really like and identify with their politics, too.
One of the oldest human images known, the so-called Venus of Willendorf, created about 25,000 years ago, features a bosom of Dolly Parton-esque dimensions. Two hundred fifty centuries later, the power of the exaggerated breast shows little sign of getting old. According to the American Society of Plastic Surgery, 347,254 breast augmentation procedures were performed in the United States in 2007, making it the nation's most commonly performed surgical procedure. What gives the female breast such transcendent influence over heterosexual male consciousness?
Both E coli and the Linux networks are arranged in hierarchies, but with some notable differences in how they achieve operational efficiencies. The molecular networks in the bacteria are arranged in a pyramid, with a limited number of master regulatory genes at the top that control a broad base of specialized functions, which act independently.
In contrast, the Linux operating system is organized more like an inverted pyramid, with many different top-level routines controlling few generic functions at the bottom of the network. Gerstein said that this organization arises because software engineers tend to save money and time by building upon existing routines rather than starting systems from scratch.
