Present Tensed

Found on Web Between December 13th and December 20th, 2009

Here are some links that I’ve tagged recently. This set is from Decem­ber 13th through Decem­ber 20th:

• Peace Corps Dig­i­tal Library — | peacecorps digital-library
• America’s for­eign pol­icy: Is there an Obama doc­trine? | The Econ­o­mist — By def­i­n­i­tion, a super­power has to sally forth into the world. Arguably, Mr Obama’s main new idea, much eas­ier to say than to achieve, is that it should also live within its means. | pol­i­tics
• Direct democ­racy: The tyranny of the major­ity | The Econ­o­mist — Put dif­fer­ently, it is the “tyranny of the major­ity” that James Madi­son, a Found­ing Father, warned about. His read­ing of ancient his­tory was that the direct democ­racy of Athens was erratic and short-lived, whereas repub­li­can Rome remained sta­ble for much longer. He even wor­ried about using the word “democ­racy” at all, lest cit­i­zens con­fuse its rep­re­sen­ta­tive (ie, repub­li­can) form with its direct one. “Democ­racy never lasts long,” wrote John Adams, another Found­ing Father. Asked what gov­ern­ment the fed­eral con­sti­tu­tion of 1787 had estab­lished, Ben­jamin Franklin responded: “A repub­lic, if you can keep it.” | usa gov­ern­ment pol­i­tics
• Ezra Klein — Barack Obama on Health-Care Reform: Trust Us. — After that quote, it seems almost redun­dant to say that this is the clear­est indi­ca­tion we’ve got­ten that the White House sees con­fer­ence com­mit­tee as the focal point for its efforts. | pol­i­tics health gov­ern­ment
• United States con­gres­sional con­fer­ence com­mit­tee — Wikipedia — | pol­i­tics gov­ern­ment
• When Will White Peo­ple Stop Mak­ing Movies Like “Avatar”? — Avatar — io9 — “Crit­ics have called alien epic Avatar a ver­sion of Dances With Wolves because it’s about a white guy going native and becom­ing a great leader. But Avatar is just the lat­est scifi rehash of an old white guilt fan­tasy.” | films sci-fi race.relations cul­ture soci­ety
• Every­thing You Need to Know About Edu­ca­tion Reform (By Rona Wilen­sky) « Larry Cuban on School Reform and Class­room Prac­tice — Accord­ing to The New York Times, a new fed­eral study shows that nearly a third of the states low­ered their aca­d­e­mic pro­fi­ciency stan­dards in recent years to stay ahead of sanc­tions under NCLB. And this, in a nut­shell, tells you every­thing you need to know about con­ven­tional school reform. | edu­ca­tion education_reform nclb
• Tech­nol­ogy and edu­ca­tion: Where the light is — The prob­lem with stan­dard­ized test­ing is that it avoids any such rig­or­ous assess­ment. It is a hope­lessly crude tool, a means of stud­ied igno­rance rather than deep under­stand­ing. And, as a side effect, it removes all flex­i­bil­ity, the liv­ing qual­i­ties, from class­room engage­ment. When you know in advance exactly what knowl­edge the student-container is sup­posed to hold, there’s not much incen­tive to attend to the par­tic­u­lar gifts and devel­op­men­tal needs, or the con­sum­ing inter­ests, of the indi­vid­ual learner. | standardized_testing blog
• BBC News — South Africa ‘rugby unity’: Fact and fic­tion — | southafrica films man­dela sports
• Social Enter­pris­ing: One Lap­top Per Child in Rwanda; 50,000 Pro­gram­mers To Be? — Time will tell if this effort leads to the kinds of out­comes (tal­ented com­puter pro­gram­mers) that the gov­ern­ment desires. Mean­while, as the story in The Econ­o­mist points out, small busi­nesses will spring up around the coun­try to repair the machines, and pro­vide other related ser­vices. The chil­dren who have access to the com­putes will have the won­der­ful expe­ri­ence of active learn­ing as a sup­ple­ment to their tra­di­tional edu­ca­tion. Who knows what cool ideas and busi­nesses this will spark. | olpc rwanda africa
• Books of The Times — Chinua Achebe Reflects on Life and Pol­i­tics in ‘Edu­ca­tion’ — Review — NYTimes.com — His new vol­ume of essays, “The Edu­ca­tion of a British-Protected Child,” is his first book since he was par­a­lyzed from the waist down, in 1990, in a car acci­dent in Nige­ria. | lit­er­a­ture africa nige­ria
• Pre­to­ria Jour­nal — Afrikaner Hol­i­day, and South Africa’s Racial Chasm, Per­sist — NYTimes.com — Accord­ing to a poll released last week by the highly regarded Insti­tute for Jus­tice and Rec­on­cil­i­a­tion, 31 per­cent of South Africans believe that race rela­tions have not improved since the end of apartheid, and 16 per­cent actu­ally think they have got­ten worse. (About 50 per­cent said rela­tions had improved.) | race.relations southafrica
• Op-Ed Colum­nist — Tiger Woods, Per­son of the Year — NYTimes.com — We’ve rarely ques­tioned our assump­tion that 9/11, “the day that changed every­thing,” was the decade’s defin­ing event. But in ret­ro­spect it may not have been. A con like Tiger’s may be more typ­i­cal of our time than a one-off domes­tic ter­ror­ist attack, how­ever dev­as­tat­ing. | cul­ture soci­ety
• Usury — The piv­otal change in the English-speaking world seems to have come with the per­mis­sion to charge inter­est on lent money: par­tic­u­larly the 1545 Act ‘An Acte Agaynst Usurie’ (37 H.viii 9) of Henry VIII in Eng­land | his­tory wikipedia finance
• Hin­den­burg dis­as­ter — | his­tory
• Why Don’t We Value Teach­ers? — GOOD Blog — GOOD — He also says that a big part of the prob­lem is the way we churn out teach­ers the way McDonald’s churns out burg­ers. Instead of encour­ag­ing excel­lence and cre­ativ­ity and inno­va­tion, teach­ers are run through a factory-like train­ing, then spit out the other side with­out the pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment, men­tor­ing, a sense of pre­pared­ness, fair and hon­est eval­u­a­tions of their work, and so on. | edu­ca­tion education_reform teach­ing
• Fed­eral Researchers Find Lower Stan­dards in Schools — NYTimes.com — A new fed­eral study shows that nearly a third of the states low­ered their aca­d­e­mic pro­fi­ciency stan­dards in recent years, a step that helps schools stay ahead of sanc­tions under the No Child Left Behind law. | edu­ca­tion education_reform nclb
• The Asso­ci­ated Press: Laredo could be largest US city with­out book­store — | lit­er­a­ture books cul­ture texas
• Pres­i­dent Obama Largely Inher­ited Today’s Huge Deficits — Cen­ter on Bud­get and Pol­icy Pri­or­i­ties — | eco­nom­ics obama his­tory pol­i­tics
• 500 Inter­nal Server Error — 500 Inter­nal Server Error | none
• Dis­cus­sion: The Year In Music, 2009 : NPR — | music lists 2009
• Top News — FTC: Vir­tual worlds pose real risks to minors — FTC: Vir­tual worlds pose real risks to minors
  FTC report exam­in­ing 27 vir­tual worlds reveals that minors are able to access sex­ual and vio­lent con­tent | virtual_worlds
• Top 100 Tools for Learn­ing 2009 — SR: An inter­est­ing list of tools | online tools web­sites lists edu­ca­tion
• Walk in My Shoes: Why teens fight – amFIX — CNN.com Blogs — What these teens tell us is not unusual. In fact, nearly 40 per­cent of Chicago pub­lic school stu­dents were involved in a phys­i­cal fight, accord­ing to a 2007 Chicago youth risk behav­ior sur­vey. | chicago cps vio­lence high_school youth teens
• The Way We Live Now — Mam­mo­gram Math — NYTimes.com — Much of our dis­com­fort with the panel’s find­ings stems from a basic intu­ition: since ear­lier and more fre­quent screen­ing increases the like­li­hood of detect­ing a pos­si­bly fatal can­cer, it is always desir­able. But is this really so? Con­sider the tech­nique math­e­mati­cians call a reduc­tio ad absur­dum, tak­ing a state­ment to an extreme in order to refute it. Apply­ing it to the con­tention that more screen­ing is always bet­ter leads us to note that if screen­ing catches the breast can­cers of some asymp­to­matic women in their 40s, then it would also catch those of some asymp­to­matic women in their 30s. But why stop there? Why not monthly mam­mo­grams begin­ning at age 15? | sci­ence health usa psy­chol­ogy med­i­cine math aca­d­e­mic health­care
• Con­trol­ling a class­room isn’t as easy as ABC — latimes.com — Among the top rea­sons why teach­ers are deemed unsuc­cess­ful or leave the pro­fes­sion is their inabil­ity to effec­tively man­age stu­dent behav­ior, experts say. | class­room man­age­ment teach­ing behav­ior
• Dig­i­tal Media and Learn­ing Com­pe­ti­tion — Updated 2010 Dig­i­tal Media and Learn­ing Com­pe­ti­tion Site / News / Rules | grants tech digital_media learn­ing
• Buy 200 GB of stor­age for $50 and get a free Eye-Fi card — SR: These Eye-Fi cards retail for more than $50 still… | online_storage pho­tog­ra­phy wifi eye-fi google picasa
• Dis­cov­er­ies in Plan­e­tary Sci­ence — DPS Edu­ca­tion — Plan­e­tary sci­ence is a field that is still evolv­ing rapidly, and it can take sev­eral years for new advances to work their way into col­lege text­books.
  These slide sets seek to bridge this gap by pro­vid­ing con­tent in the form of 3-slide pre­sen­ta­tions that can be incor­po­rated into col­lege lec­tures.
  The slide sets are tar­geted at the Intro­duc­tory Astron­omy under­grad­u­ate level.
  Each slide set con­sists of three slides:
  a descrip­tion of the dis­cov­ery
  a dis­cus­sion of the under­ly­ing sci­ence
  a pre­sen­ta­tion of the big pic­ture impli­ca­tions of the dis­cov­ery
  A fourth slide includes links to asso­ci­ated press releases, images, and pri­mary sources.
  Top­ics will span all sub­dis­ci­plines of plan­e­tary sci­ence. | edu­ca­tion astron­omy sci­ence
• Sound Opin­ions Foot­notes — | music lists 2009
• 20 Best Sci­ence Fic­tion Books Of The Decade — Books — io9 — | lit­er­a­ture sci-fi books lists

Pop­u­lar­ity: 3%