April 2008 Archives

Community College Open Textbook Project Gets Under Way - Chronicle.com

The Community College Open Textbook Project begins this week with a member meeting in California.

At the meeting, representatives of institutions around the country will start reviewing open-textbook models for "quality, usability, accessibility, and sustainability," according to a news release. They will initially review four providers of free online educational resources: Connexions, run by Rice University; Flat World Knowledge, a commercial digital-textbook publisher that will begin offering free textbooks online next year; the University of California's UC College Prep Online, which offers Advanced Placement and other courses online; and the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources, which was founded by the Foothill-De Anza Community College District and the League for Innovation in the Community College.

ABC News: Religion: A Figment of the Imagination?

"As soon as you have theory of mind, you have the possibility of deceiving others, or being deceived," he says. This, in turn, generates a sense of fairness and unfairness, which could lead to moral codes and the possibility of an unseen "enforcer" - God - who can see and punish all wrong-doers.

"Once you have these additions of the imagination, maybe theories of God are inevitable," he says.

Art and (Wo)man at Yale By Michael J. Lewis -Wall Street Journal

It is often said that great achievement requires in one's formative years two teachers: a stern taskmaster who teaches the rules and an inspirational guru who teaches one to break the rules. But they must come in that order. Childhood training in Bach can prepare one to play free jazz and ballet instruction can prepare one to be a modern dancer, but it does not work the other way around. One cannot be liberated from fetters one has never worn; all one can do is to make pastiches of the liberations of others. And such seems to be the case with Ms. Shvarts.

Mr. Lewis is Faison-Pierson-Stoddard Professor of Art at Williams College. His latest book is "American Art and Architecture" (Thames & Hudson).

The Art of Folly at Yale By Charles Lane -Washington Post

Four years at Yale costs $180,000. Here is how senior Aliza Shvarts planned to conclude hers: The art major would repeatedly artificially inseminate herself, then induce miscarriages, which she would record on video. She would build a four-foot-wide plastic cube and wrap it in layers of plastic. Between the layers would be Vaseline mixed with blood from the miscarriages. She would hang the cube at an exhibition and project video of the miscarriages onto four of its sides.

How do you like your eggs? By Martin Hickman -The Independent.UK

The birds that spend their lives standing on wire mesh without enough space to turn around. Yet three out of five eggs we eat come from farms like these.

Undercover investigators have filmed the ugly reality of egg production at a battery chicken farm supplying the biggest egg producer in the UK.

What is the Monkeysphere? By David Wong -Cracked.com

What do monkeys have to do with war, oppression, crime, racism and even e-mail spam? You'll see that all of the random ass-headed cruelty of the world will suddenly make perfect sense once we go Inside the Monkeysphere.
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"So I'm supposed to suddenly start worrying about six billion strangers? That's not even possible!"

That's right, it isn't possible. That's the point.

What is hard to understand is that it's also impossible for them to care about you.

That's why they don't mind stealing your stereo or vandalizing your house or cutting your wages or raising your taxes or bombing your office building or choking your computer with spam advertising diet and penis drugs they know don't work. You're outside their Monkeysphere. In their mind, you're just a vague shape with a pocket full of money for the taking.

If God Is Dead, Who Gets His House?

The fastest-growing faith in the country is no faith at all. The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life released the results of its "Religious Landscape" survey in February and found that 16 percent of Americans have no religious affiliation. The number is even greater among young people: 25 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds now identify with no religion, up from 11 percent in a similar survey in 1986. For most of its modern history, atheism has existed as a kind of civil-rights movement. Groups like American Atheists have functioned primarily as litigants in the fight for church-state separation, not as atheist social clubs. "Atheists are self-reliant, self-sufficient, independent people who don't feel like they need an organization," says Ellen Johnson, president of American Atheists for the past thirteen years. "They're so independent that if they want to get involved, they usually don't join an organization--they start their own."

Life Counts! | Colorado for Equal Rights- Personhood Initiative 2008

Colorado for Equal Rights is sponsoring a ballot initiative for Colorado's 2008 election. This proposed constitutional amendment will define a person in Colorado as a human being from the moment of fertilization, the moment when life begins. This amendment will establish a cornerstone for protecting human life in our society... and we all know this is the right thing to do. This campaign is not about the power of money... it is about the power of truth. We are giving Colorado voters an opportunity to vote their conscience and protect the most innocent and helpless ones among us. If life is protected from the very beginning, Colorado for Equal Rights believes that we can transform our nation from a culture of death into a culture of life. Therefore, we are taking the necessary action to allow Coloradoans to guarantee every person equal rights under our laws.

ABC News: Human Brains: Hard-Wired for Hierarchy

Monkeys and other animals have rules about who does what, too. It's called the social hierarchy. And it has a huge influence on us -- on how we act, whom we spend time with, even where we go and what we buy.

Now, researchers have found evidence that our brains may actually be hard-wired for hierarchy. And in fact, we may be wired to value the "top dog" over the people who rank below us.

Plan Targets Anti-Western Lessons

Pearce, a Mesa Republican, said his target isn't diversity instruction, but schools that use taxpayer dollars to indoctrinate students in what he characterized as anti-American or seditious thinking. The measure is at least partially a response to a controversy surrounding an ethnic-studies program in the Tucson Unified School District, which critics have said is unpatriotic and teaches revolution.

SB 1108 states, "A primary purpose of public education is to inculcate values of American citizenship. Public tax dollars used in public schools should not be used to denigrate American values and the teachings of Western civilization."

For schools that violate the anti-Western-teachings provision, the bill provides the state superintendent of public instruction with the authority to withhold a portion of state funding.

Idea Lab - Memory - New York Times

How much would you pay to have a small memory chip implanted in your brain if that chip would double the capacity of your short-term memory? Or guarantee that you would never again forget a face or a name?

A man is walking past a hospital when he sees a physician in a white coat and a little girl coming toward him. As they come closer, he realizes the physician is an old friend whom he has not seen since their college days. They greet each other warmly and the friend says, "Since we last saw each other in college, I went on to medical school and I am now a surgeon at this hospital. I also married someone whom you don't know and have never met, and this is our daughter, Nancy." The man says to the little girl, "Nancy, you not only have your mother's name but you also have her brown eyes."