Boing Boing » education

Petition to "Christian" college that won't provide transcripts to student expelled for being gay

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 01:07:20 +0000

Danielle Powell had nearly finished her Bachelor's Degree at Omaha's Grace University when the school administration found out that she was a lesbian. They outed her to her family and fellow students and suspended her (Grace is a religious school, which requires that its students abstain from "sexually immoral behavior, including premarital sex, adultery, and homosexual acts"). During her suspension, they made extensive queries to discover if she was still involved in same-sex relationships, and on discovering that she was, they did.

Powell has attempted to finish her degree at another university, but Grace refuses to provide her transcripts unless she pays back about $6,000 in merit scholarships that she received from the institution. Powell's wife has started a petition to get the university to provide Powell's transcripts and forgive the "debt."

"They were doing a witch hunt," Powell said, "calling around to see if I was in a same-sex relationship."
James told Powell in a letter, a copy of which was provided to HuffPost, that she was being "deceitful" and said it would be "unethical" for the university to readmit her since it "would be impossible for the faculty of Grace University to affirm your Christian character, a requirement for degree conferral."
By October 2012, as Powell was looking into attending another college, she said she was told that Grace would only transfer the credits from her three and a half years if she paid a $6,300 tuition bill from the semester during which she was suspended for being gay. The university denies they have withheld her transcripts, but Powell said she's only been offered a student copy she cannot use to transfer.

Danielle Powell, Grace University Student Kicked Out For Being Lesbian, Must Repay Thousands: [Tyler Kingkade/HuffPo] (via Reddit)

Little Brother remixes

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 15:46:54 +0000

Boys from Brett Wierzbicki's Sophmore Honors English class at Cathedral Preparatory Seminary in Queens, NY have been reading my novel Little Brother and Brett gave them the option of doing a book-remix instead of a traditional book-report. All told, they produced seven absolutely terrific remixes of the book, and they were good enough to send them all along for me to share.

Help send 15 kids from the Bronx to writing camp

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 16:29:05 +0000

Brad sez, "Fifteen high school students from the Bronx. Five dedicated teachers. A summer of learning that could change their lives -- and change the way kids learn all across America. This summer Paul Allison, (English teacher in the Bronx and co-founder of Youth Voices. the New York City Writing Project (NYCWP) at Lehman College, CUNY plan to host a free Youth Voices Summer Program. We need help to make this happen. We are nearly half way to a goal of $15K."

Beast Academy: grade three math textbooks in monster comics form

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 12:56:32 +0000

Beast Academy is a set of grade three math textbooks and practice books structured as comic books about monsters. The books are "aligned to the common core state standards for grade three," if that matters to you. What's more significant is that they're actually really good math textbooks that introduce their subjects in a clear and easy-to-follow fashion, carefully linking each concept to the last; and the exercises are lively, fun, and built around stories that dovetail smoothly into puzzles, games, and other ways of putting the knowledge into practice. The monsters are great, too -- wonderful illustrations from Erich Owen, whose work you may recognize from the graphic novel adaptation of my story I, Robot.

Beast Academy 8-book set

Linda Stone on attention, computers, and education

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 31 May 2013 01:12:10 +0000

Linda Stone, who coined the terms "continuous partial attention" and "email apnea" to describe some of the ways we unconsciously interact with our computers, discusses attention, education and computers with The Atlantic's James Fallows:

LS: Let's talk about reading or building things. When you did those things, nobody was giving you an assignment, nobody was telling you what to do--there wasn't any stress around it. You did these things for your own pleasure and joy. As you played, you developed a capacity for attention and for a type of curiosity and experimentation that can happen when you play. You were in the moment, and the moment was unfolding in a natural way.
You were in a state of relaxed presence as you explored your world. At one point, I interviewed a handful of Nobel laureates about their childhood play patterns. They talked about how they expressed their curiosity through experimentation. They enthusiastically described things they built, and how one play experience naturally led into another. In most cases, by the end of the interview, the scientist would say, "This is exactly what I do in my lab today! I'm still playing!"
An unintended and tragic consequence of our metrics for schools is that what we measure causes us to remove self-directed play from the school day. Children's lives are completely programmed, filled with homework, lessons, and other activities.. There is less and less space for the kind of self-directed play that can be a fantastically fertile way for us to develop resilience and a broad set of attention strategies, not to mention a sense of who we are, and what questions captivate us. We have narrowed ourselves in service to the gods of productivity, a type of productivity that is about output and not about results.

Linda Stone on Maintaining Focus in a Maddeningly Distractive World (via O'Reilly Radar)

Schools and the cloud: will schools allow students to be profiled and advertised to in the course of their school-day?

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 30 May 2013 13:52:37 +0000

Kate sez, "Technology companies are moving rapidly to get tools like email and document creation services into schools. This link to a recent survey of schools in the UK shows that use of such technology is expected to bring significant educational and social benefits. However, it also reveals that schools have deep concerns that providers of these services will mine student emails, documents or web browsing behaviour to build profiles for commercial purposes, such as serving advertisements. When data mining is done for profit, the relationship between the data miner and the consumer is simply a market transaction. As long as both parties are free to choose whether and when they wish to engage in such transactions, there is no reason to forbid them or place undue obstacles in their path. However, when children are using certain services at school and can neither consent to, control or even properly understand the data mining that is taking place, a clear line against such practices must be drawn, particularly when their data will be used by businesses to make a profit."

UK School Opinions of Cloud Services and Student Privacy [PDF]

(Thanks, Kate!)

Update on small children being mercilessly punished for, e.g., gnawing a pastry into a gun shape at school

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 29 May 2013 19:51:04 +0000

Kevin at Lowering the Bar updates us on the Lego Gun Incident, wherein a six-year-old boy was punished for bringing a tiny, Lego-sized gun onto his Springfield, MA school-bus. The school initially demanded that the boy write a letter of apology and serve detention because the gun "caused quite a disturbance on the bus and that the children were traumatized." However, the same zero-tolerance-obssessed nutjobs at the school board also put CCTVs on their buses, and a review of the footage therefrom reveals that nothing bad actually happened. This has occasioned a small miracle in the form of the school board simply dropping the matter, rather than doubling down and, say, accusing the six-year-old of using a tiny, Lego-sized computer to hack into the CCTV and swap out the footage or similar.

However, Kevin goes on to note that a child in Baltimore continues to struggle with the permanent stain on his record caused by his taking bites out of a pastry until it was vaguely gun-shaped, thereby traumatising all the other students by exposing them to an approximate right-angle. This kid is having the book thrown at him:

"This is a student-specific matter," the spokesman said, in case anyone thought they had suspended every student in the district, "and our school system is not going to have any comment on it, except for this: This is a matter between the school, a student and his parents. It's not, and it should not be, fodder for a publicity stunt by an attorney who seems to believe that his young client's best interests are somehow served by trying this case in the media." News flash: this has been in the media since long before they ever had an attorney, and that is not their fault.
The next step was said to be an appeal to the superintendent of schools, so the battle continues.

Lego Gun Incident Ends Better Than Pastry Gun Incident

Impossible Programs: a great lecture on some of computer science's most important subjects

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 28 May 2013 19:56:30 +0000

Here's a 40-minute video in which Tom Stuart gives a talk summarizing one of the chapters from him new book Understanding Computation, describing the halting state problem and how it relates to bugs, Turing machines, Turing completeness, computability, malware checking for various mobile app stores, and related subjects. The Halting State problem -- which relates to the impossibility of knowing what a program will do with all possible inputs -- is one of the most important and hardest-to-understand ideas in computer science, and Stuart does a fantastic job with it here. You don't need to be a master programmer or a computer science buff to get it, and even if you only absorb 50 percent of it, it's so engagingly presented, and so blazingly relevant to life in the 21st century, that you won't regret it.

At Scottish Ruby Conference 2013 I gave a talk called Impossible Programs, adapted from chapter 8 of Understanding Computation. It’s a talk about programs that are impossible to write in Ruby — it covers undecidability, the halting problem and Rice’s theorem, explained in plain English and illustrated with Ruby code. The slides are available

Impossible Programs

Viable Paradise sf writing workshop deadline

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 27 May 2013 13:54:17 +0000

A reminder that you've got 3 weeks left to apply for the excellent Viable Paradise science fiction writing workshop on Martha's Vineyard -- a week-long, very intensive course taught by Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Debra Doyle, James D McDonald, Steven Brust, Sherwood Smith, Steven Gould, Elizabeth Bear and Scott Lynch. I've taught it several times and recommend it unconditionally.

Girl who was arrested for making a tin-foil volcano tells her story

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 26 May 2013 01:00:25 +0000

On May 1, Kiera Wilmot, a Florida high school student, was arrested for mixing toilet bowl cleaner with tin foil, causing a small, harmless explosion. Though she had a spotless school record, she was expelled and charged with a felony as an adult -- a harsh penalty widely ascribed to institutional racism (Wilmot is black). On May 16, thanks to Wilmot's bravery, a crowdfunded project by former NASA engineer Homer Hickam, and the ACLU, the charges against Wilmot were dropped and Wilmot and her twin sister were awarded a full bursary to the Advanced Space Academy program at the U.S. Space Camp in Huntsville, Ala..

Now, Wilmot has written a must-read editorial for the ACLU on her experience with zero-tolerance, detailing the awful treatment she received and the thoughtless way in which the gears of the a discipline-obsessed educational system grind up its own students:

The principal and dean of discipline came over and asked me to tell them what happened. I was kind of scared, but I thought they'd understand it was an accident. Before that, I've never gotten in trouble this year other than a dress code violation because my skirt was two inches too short. I told him it was my science experiment. In my third period class I was called up to discipline. I wrote a statement to the dean of discipline explaining what had happened. Afterward I was told to sit on the resource officer's office. They told me I made a bomb on school property, and police possibly have the right to arrest me. I didn't know what they classified as a bomb. I was worried I accidently made a bomb. I was really hurt and scared. I was crying.
They didn't read me any rights. They arrested me after sitting in the office for a couple minutes. They handcuffed me. It cut my wrist, and really hurt sitting on my hands behind my back.
They took me to a juvenile assessment center. I was sitting in this room with no clock so it felt like years of me sitting there. When my mom came, she didn't say anything. She just had this really disappointed look, and told me I lost privileges. But she's really been supportive of me. I don't know what would have happened if I didn't have my mom. I would have dug a hole and sat there for the rest of my life.
I don't think police should have been involved because I'm a good student for one. And two, it was a big deal, but it wasn't like people were hurt and the school was in shatters. I maybe should have gotten 10 days suspension or a work detail where on Saturday you wake up early and pick up trash around the school.

An Unexpected Reaction: Why a Science Experiment Gone Bad Doesn't Make Me a Criminal (via The Mary Sue)

UK film student seeks steampunk props

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 25 May 2013 18:00:48 +0000

Ranjana sez, "I'm a Bournemouth University postgraduate student and I'm producing a short but ambitious steampunk drama for my Masters project and I'm looking for a few props for our film: steampunk radio; wrist communicator device; steampunk guns; other general props. Could you please ask your steampunk readers in the UK if they have any of the props, I could perhaps borrow for a small deposit along with an invite for the owner(s) of the prop to feature in our film."

Prosthetic tentacle

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 23 May 2013 21:37:23 +0000

Taiwanese design student Kaylene Kau created this motorized prosthetic tentacle for a class project: "For this project we were pushed by our Professor to push the boundaries of current upper-limb prosthetic design. Through extensive research I found that the prosthetic functioned as an assistant to the dominant functioning hand. The prosthetic needed to be both flexible and adjustable in order to accommodate a variety of different grips."

PROSTHETIC ARM (via Kadrey)

Arthur C Clarke Center for Human Imagination at UC San Diego

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 23 May 2013 17:19:36 +0000

Mark writes,

The University of California, San Diego and the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation are launching a major center to better understand, enhance and enact the gift of human imagination. Sir Arthur C. Clarke created extraordinary visions of the future that continue to provide insight into the human condition. He transformed our lives by developing the ideas of GPS and satellite communication. We are inspired by this legacy and want to continue it by focusing on Sir Arthur's greatest gift: imagination.
We will bring together thinkers and doers in the arts and information technology, in neuroscience, cognitive science and the physical sciences to help us understand the nature of imagination and to build tools and develop methods that will extend imagination. We have developed our initial approach with a cross-disciplinary team of some of UCSD's world famous scientists, artists and scholars, linking them with a group of award-winning science fiction authors birthed at UCSD.

Uh, birthed? As in, born in the university hospital? I honestly have no idea what they mean here. Maybe "berthed" (sleeping on campus)? Or maybe metaphorically "birthed" by graduating from UCSD?

Center for Human Imagination

When America issued dogtags to kids to help identify their nuke-blasted corpses

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 21 May 2013 17:09:39 +0000

Matt Novak hits some highlights from Joanne Brown's 1988 Journal of American History paper A is for Atom, B is for Bomb (paywalled link), which discusses the weird, grim stuff that America contemplated at the height of the cold war, and worried about how it would identify the charred corpses of children after a nuclear blast:

In February of 1952 the city of New York bought 2.5 million dog tags. By April of that year, just about every kid in the city from kindergarten to fourth grade had a tag with their name on it. Kids in many other cities like San Francisco, Seattle, Las Veagas and Philadelphia also got dog tags, allowing for easy identification should the unthinkable occur.
But educators weren't considering just dog tags to identify the scores of dead and injured children that would result if the cold war suddenly turned hot. They also considered tattoos.

That Time American School Kids Were Given Dog Tags Because Nukes

What UK education czar Michael Gove doesn't understand about creativity

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 21 May 2013 01:06:24 +0000

Michael Gove is the UK Secretary of State for Education, the subject of a vote of no confidence from the nation's head teacher's conference that ran 99% opposed to his ideas for educational reform. The major motif of Gove's reforms is an emphasis on rote memorisation and linear learning. Gove insists that he loves creativity, but says that creativity is only possible once you've mastered the basics ("You cannot be creative unless you understand how sentences are constructed, what words mean and how to use grammar.")

Writing in the Guardian, Ken Robinson thoroughly and blazingly rebuts this proposition, and presents a stirring manifesto for embracing creativity in education:

First, creativity, like learning in general, is a highly personal process. We all have different talents and aptitudes and different ways of getting to understand things. Raising achievement in schools means leaving room for these differences and not prescribing a standard steeplechase for everyone to complete at the same time and in the same way.
Second, creativity is not a linear process, in which you have to learn all the necessary skills before you get started. It is true that creative work in any field involves a growing mastery of skills and concepts. It is not true that they have to be mastered before the creative work can begin. Focusing on skills in isolation can kill interest in any discipline. Many people have been put off mathematics for life by endless rote tasks that did nothing to inspire them with the beauty of numbers. Many have spent years grudgingly practicing scales for music examinations only to abandon the instrument altogether once they've made the grade.
The real driver of creativity is an appetite for discovery and a passion for the work itself. When students are motivated to learn, they naturally acquire the skills they need to get the work done. Their mastery of them grows as their creative ambitions expand. You'll find evidence of this process in great teaching in every discipline from football to chemistry.
Third, facilitating this process takes connoisseurship, judgment – and, yes, creativity, on the part of teachers. One concern about the revised national curriculum is that it will be too linear and prescriptive. For creativity to flourish, schools have to feel free to innovate without the constant fear of being penalised for not keeping with the programme. Too much prescription is a dead hand on the creative pulse of teachers and students alike.

To encourage creativity, Mr Gove, you must first understand what it is (via Dan Hon)

Yuck! NYC fourth grader sneaks camera into school, makes documentary about gross cafeteria food

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 18 May 2013 13:20:58 +0000

http://vimeo.com/64607150

Here's a clip from an upcoming documentary by a fourth grader who snuck a camera into school to document his horrible school lunches and the vast distance between the food that the school claims to serve and food he and his friends end up eating.

Zachary is a fourth grader at a large New York City public elementary school. Each day he reads the Department of Education lunch menu online to see what is being served. The menu describes delicious and nutritious cuisine that reads as if it came from the finest restaurants. However, when Zachary gets to school, he finds a very different reality. Armed with a concealed video camera and a healthy dose of rebellious courage, Zachary embarks on a six month covert mission to collect video footage of his lunch and expose the truth about the City's school food service program.

Yuck: A 4th Grader's Short Documentary About School Lunch (via Reddit)

Highest-paid state employees: usually a school sports coach, sometimes a med school dean

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 14 May 2013 13:42:54 +0000

Good to see America's educational priorities on such sound footing:

You may have heard that the highest-paid state employee in each state is usually the football coach at the largest state school. This is actually a gross mischaracterization: Sometimes it is the basketball coach.
Based on data drawn from media reports and state salary databases, the ranks of the highest-paid active public employees include 27 football coaches, 13 basketball coaches, one hockey coach, and 10 dorks who aren't even in charge of a team.
...Coaches don't generate revenue on their own; you could make the exact same case for the student-athletes who actually play the game and score the points and fracture their legs.
It can be tough to attribute this revenue directly to the performance of the head coach. In 2011-2012, Mack Brown was paid $5 million to lead a mediocre 8-5 Texas team to the Holiday Bowl. The team still generated $103.8 million in revenue, the most in college football. You don't have to pay someone $5 million to make college football profitable in Texas.

Infographic: Is Your State's Highest-Paid Employee A Coach? (Probably) [Reuben Fischer-Baum/Deadspin]

(via JWZ)

American private universities use poor kids' tuition to subsidize rich kids' degrees

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 14 May 2013 00:00:04 +0000

In The Atlantic, Jordan Weissmann does a very good job of summing up the New America Foundation's important new report, Undermining Pell: How Colleges Compete for Wealthy Students and Leave the Low-Income Behind [PDF], by Stephen Burd. The report documents how private universities in America have raised the cost of tuition to incredible heights, and reserve their "merit scholarships" (paid for with government grants) for wealthy students whose parents can pay the rest in cash, while poor students have to take out punishing loans, effectively subsidizing the rich students' education and career opportunities.

Sometimes, colleges (and states) really are just competing to outbid each other on star students. But there are also economic incentives at play, particularly for small, endowment-poor institutions. "After all," Burd writes, "it's more profitable for schools to provide four scholarships of $5,000 each to induce affluent students who will be able to pay the balance than it is to provide a single $20,000 grant to one low-income student." The study notes that, according to the Department of Education's most recent study, 19 percent of undergrads at four-year colleges received merit aid despite scoring under 700 on the SAT. Their only merit, in some cases, might well have been mom and dad's bank account.
There's nothing inherently wrong with handing out tuition breaks to the middle class, or even the rich. The problem is that it seems to be happening at the expense of the poor. At 89 percent of the 479 private colleges Burd examined, students from families earning less than $30,000 a year were charged an average "net price" of more than $10,000 annually -- "net price" being the full annual cost of attendance minus all institutional and government aid. Less technically, it's what students can actually expect to pay. At 60 percent of private colleges, that net price was more than $15,000.
In other words, low-income families are routinely being asked to fork over more than half of their annual income for the privilege of sending their child off to campus for a year.

How Colleges Are Selling Out the Poor to Court the Rich

Scratch 2.0: programming for kids, now in the browser

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 10 May 2013 12:41:56 +0000

The MIT Media Lab's Lifelong Kindergarten Group has shipped version 2.0 of Scratch, the justly famed and much-loved programming language for kids. Scratch makes it easy to create powerful simulations and games, even for small kids (basically, if you can read, you're ready for Scratch). The new version of Scratch runs right in a browser (no downloads or installs required), and is remarkable in its polish and power to excite. The programming environment is embedded in a sharing and shareable community, with millions of Scratch projects ready to be downloaded and remixed. It's just amazing.

With Scratch, you can program your own interactive stories, games, and animations — and share your creations with others in the online community.
Scratch helps young people learn to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively — essential skills for life in the 21st century.

Share with others around the world (via O'Reilly Radar)

NeoLucida: kickstarting a new version of the Old Masters' favorite drawing gadget

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 09 May 2013 14:13:55 +0000

Pablo Garcia and Golan Levin, two celebrated art profs and dead media specialists, have launched a fantastically successful kickstarter to recreate the Camera Lucida, a gadget much favored by the Old Masters. It uses an optical trick to superimpose the scene in front of you on a sheet of paper that you can trace in order to produce highly realistic drawings. They're producing a limited one-time run of them (a $35 pledge gets you one) (assuming, as with all Kickstarters, that this actually gets made -- caveat emptor!), and then the designs will be released as open source hardware for anyone to make.

The NeoLucida is designed to fit in a purse or bag, and the creators want to create a gallery of art made with it -- each one comes with a postage-paid card for you to send in one of your drawings

NeoLucida - A Portable Camera Lucida for the 21st Century (via Beyond the Beyond)

Zombie work safety PSA made by high school students

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 07 May 2013 16:42:44 +0000

Vincent sez, "Our high school film class from Oak Park High in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada made this zombie-themed PSA to spread the message about a worker's right to refuse unsafe work. It's a big issue. In Canada, in 2010, 1014 workplace deaths were recorded in Canada - that's almost three deaths every day! Between 1993 to 2010, 16,143 people lost their lives due to work-related causes in Canada. A 2003 survey showed that compared with other developed countries of the OECD, Canada isn't doing too well. Of the 29 developed nations 24 had significantly lower workplace death rates than Canada. Using the factor of deaths/100,000 workers, Canada was only safer on average than Korea (29 deaths), Turkey (20.6 deaths), Mexico (12.0 deaths), Portugal (8.7 deaths) and then Canada with 6.1 deaths per 100,000 workers.* Our class used humour because we thought it would be an effective way to create a memorable message. Our PSA won first place in the Manitoba Safe Work video contest, and it is now competing to be the top Canadian video. You may remember our school, which has made other popular videos that you have featured on Boing Boing, including 'Jedi High,' 'Anti-Racism Girl,' and 'The Pink Shirt.'"

Use_Your_Brains

Masterclass in making with Bunnie Huang at the Hardware Innovation Workshop

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 04 May 2013 03:21:40 +0000

On May 14-15, Make is hosting its second annual Hardware Innovation Workshop in San Mateo, CA. There's a pretty amazing speaker lineup, but perhaps most exciting is a "Maker Pro Master Class" with Andrew "bunnie" Huang, one of the great hardware hackers of our age.

Teaching TCP/IP headers with legos

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 19:16:09 +0000

A Hal Pomeranz from 2010 suggests a great way to teach TCP/IP header structure to students: he builds header diagrams out of legos, then mixes them up and has the students reconstruct them.

The use of color here really highlights certain portions of the packet header. For example, the source and destination addresses and ports really jump out. But there are some other, more subtle color patterns that I worked in here. For example, if you look closely you’ll see that I matched the color of the ACK bit with the blue in the ACK number field. Similarly the colors of the SYN bit and the sequence number match, as do the URG bit and urgent pointer field.
Actually I wish I had a couple of more colors available. Yes, Lego comes in dozens of colors these days, but they only make 2×8 blocks (aka one “Lego Byte”) in six colors: White, Black, Red, Yellow, Blue, and Beige.
So while I tried to use Beige exclusively for size fields, Red for reserved bits, Yellow for checksums, and so on, I ultimately ended up having to use these colors for other fields as well– for example, the yellow sequence number fields in the TCP header. Maybe I should have just bought a bunch of “nibbles” (2×4 blocks) in other colors and not been so choosy about using full “Lego Bytes”.

Since 2010, the lego patent has expired and cheapish wire-extrusion 3D printing has become a reality -- and there's cool procedural models for generating arbitrary-sized bricks and labelling them with arbitrary type. Someone needs to make a printable TCP diagramming set on Thingiverse!

Practical, Visual, Three-Dimensional Pedagogy for Internet Protocol Packet Header Control Fields (via Hacker News)

Wonderful reading of awful sorority letter sent by horrible sorority sister

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 00:14:14 +0000

If you haven't heard about the insane letter sent around to a sorority by its concerned and thoroughly awful social chairwoman, you're probably doing something right. Nevertheless, there is a gem of good in every wickedness, as Funny or Die demonstrates with this dramatic reading of the letter in question [NSFW]

Controlling a robot arm with an Android phone

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 20:33:33 +0000

Paul sez, "This past semester, three engineering grad students at the University of Toronto (myself and two others) created an Android app for a course project that allows for wireless and intuitive control of a robotic arm from an Android-powered smartphone. We're pretty proud of the results (the link is to a demo we put together) and have released the code open source."

Android Robotic Manipulator Demo (Thanks, Paul!)

Explain why Jews are evil

Rob Beschizza — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 16:22:32 +0000

Dan Amira writes,

An unnamed English teacher at Albany High School who wanted to "challenge" his/her students to "formulate a persuasive argument" tasked them with writing an essay about why "Jews are evil," as if they were trying to convince a Nazi official of their loyalty

Time for a teacher training day!

How to: Become a tenured professor at Harvard

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 15:55:12 +0000

You have, at some point, probably heard an academic wistfully daydream about what it would be like to have tenure, or (alternately) moan about the process that it takes to achieve that dream. Tenure is a promotion, but it's more than just a promotion. For instance, it's a lot harder to fire a tenured professor — something that is meant to make it easier for them to research and speak out on what they want without fear of administrative crackdowns. As a result, getting tenure can be a process that is nothing short of labyrinthian. This piece in the Harvard Crimson by Nicholas Fandos and Noah Pisner describes the phone-book-sized dossiers, decade-long preparations, and secret tribunals that are all a part of the standard Harvard tenure process.

5 steps to not being bamboozled by bad science reporting

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 15:34:12 +0000

Can you trust the headlines in your newspaper? What can you actually learn from reading message boards and random Facebook forwards? If you aren't sure what to believe, this guide by Gabrielle Rabinowitz and Emily Dennis can help. It describes how to track "digested" information back to an original, scientific source, the questions to ask, and the red flags to for — all of which will help you sort bunk from stuff that's actually worth talking to your friends about. The problem, of course, is that this can be a lot of work. Essentially, they're describing a lot of what journalists do when we're writing a story about a scientific topic.

Access Copyright Canada goes on anti-fair-dealing war-path

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 16:46:59 +0000

Michael Geist sez,

Months after the Supreme Court of Canada delivered a stinging defeat to Canadian copyright collective Access Copyright by ruling for an expansive approach to fair dealing and the government passed copyright reforms that further expanded the scope of fair dealing, Access Copyright responded yesterday with what amounts to a desperate declaration of war against fair dealing. Access Copyright has decided to fight the law - along with governments, educational institutions, teachers, librarians, and taxpayers - on several fronts. Most notably, it has filed a lawsuit against York University over its fair dealing guidelines, which are similar to those adopted by educational institutions across the country. While the lawsuit has yet to be posted online, the Access Copyright release suggests that the suit is not alleging specific instances of infringement, but rather takes issue with guidelines it says are "arbitrary and unsupported" and that "authorize and encourage copying that is not supported by the law."
Most of Access Copyright's longstanding arguments were dismissed by the Supreme Court this past summer. To suggest that a modest fair dealing policy based on Supreme Court jurisprudence and legislative reforms is "arbitrary and unsupported" is more than just rhetoric masquerading as legal argument. It is a declaration of war against fair dealing.

Access Copyright's Desperate Declaration of War Against Fair Dealing

Great "do not disturb" status message

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 03:40:23 +0000

An unidentified person -- possibly an art student, based on the title -- has come up with a pretty seriously worded note to other people in the computer lab in order to remain uninterrupted while working on a deadline.

Art School gets busy sometimes (via Geeks Are Sexy)