Richard's Notes

LOOSEWORLD x Waverly Films: Reggie Watts in F_CK SH_T STACK from LOOSEWORLD on Vimeo.

Holy shit, Reggie Watts is a genius, no two ways about it. Wow. Blow this up full screen with HD on for the full “stack.”

[via Boing Boing]

The Big Picture: Shanghai prepares for Expo 2010

Spectacular architecture under construction, beautifully documented.

An Orange breasted Sunbird feeds on Cape Honeysuckle at the top of Table Mountain. The bright colours in the distance is the sun on the roof tops of Cape Town.

My long time flickr contact Michael Greenwood hit the jackpot with this one.

Building a Better Teacher

But what makes a good teacher? There have been many quests for the one essential trait, and they have all come up empty-handed. Among the factors that do not predict whether a teacher will succeed: a graduate-school degree, a high score on the SAT, an extroverted personality, politeness, confidence, warmth, enthusiasm and having passed the teacher-certification exam on the first try. When Bill Gates announced recently that his foundation was investing millions in a project to improve teaching quality in the United States, he added a rueful caveat. “Unfortunately, it seems the field doesn’t have a clear view of what characterizes good teaching,” Gates said. “I’m personally very curious.”

When Doug Lemov conducted his own search for those magical ingredients, he noticed something about most successful teachers that he hadn’t expected to find: what looked like natural-born genius was often deliberate technique in disguise. “Stand still when you’re giving directions,” a teacher at a Boston school told him. In other words, don’t do two things at once. Lemov tried it, and suddenly, he had to ask students to take out their homework only once.

Fascinating article. Watch the video too.

[via Sanford Shapiro]

The iPad is a natural for these kinds of books and activities. This is a mock up of some ideas for interactive books and learning tools for the iPad. Great stuff.

[via Sanford Shapiro]

Annie Leibovitz To Keep Iconic Portfolio

A private equity firm took over the debt Leibovitz owed the loan organization that fronted her $24 million in exchange for signing over the rights to all her past, current, and future work.

So, she’s still under the thumbs of money men but these money men are helping her market her work and no doubt have a piece of the action as well as the debt.

This is no doubt a common story in the art, music, and performance world, it’s just that the scale is bigger here.

My flickr contact roddh got a shot of a fisher in a tree in his backyard. They can be pretty fierce little animals.

Your Micro 4/3’s camera + your existing lenses = limitless fun

Tyson Robichaud goes wild with a Panasonic GF1 and a load of Canon lenses. Fantastic post.

Microsoft’s Courier ‘digital journal’

Fantastic, and if they can build it, people will come.

This mock up reminds me of Apple’s concept movie of a future Knowledge Navigator done in 1987. More on the history of Apple’s project here.

[via Daring Fireball]

NYC and Las Vegas from above, at night

Jason Hawkes shows images of New York City and Las Vegas at night shot with a Nikon D3S from a helicopter. Fantastic.

My friend Mamen documents the Holi (festival of colors) last year at Stanford.

NY Times Lens: Syria Changes, to a Point

Ed Kashi’s images of daily life in modern Syria are incredible.

Do you like going to Syria?

It’s a funny thing. I do like the idea of going there. There are moments where I actually like being there. But in general, I find it to be a bit of a frustrating and almost depressing place because you’re so close to having it be a cool place. It’s interesting. It’s colorful. People are lovely. There’s so many interesting things. But ultimately, that heavy arm of security apparatus, that paranoia, that mistrust – it sort of hangs in the air. If it doesn’t poison, it really detracts from the experience there.

Warren, Connecticut. My friend Zarinna had a bowl full of these flowers floating in water. What a great idea and the water made for a great "armature" to hold the flowers upright for shooting.

Hellebore on wikipedia.

ND Filters, Top to Bottom

Aaron Bieber explains neutral density filters: what they are, how they work, and why one might want to use them. Clear and excellent.

ClickToFlash

Steve Jobs hates Adobe Flash and doesn’t want it on the iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad but that’s besides the point. I’ve been noticing that my computer has gotten increasingly unstable as my workday goes on. Later in the day (like now) typically the computer was running hot, fan on, Safari running slow and hanging at times (MacBook Pro 2.5GHz, 4 gigs RAM, System 10.6.2, Safari 4.0.4).

My friend Steve Splonskowski, a Macintosh developer and someone I trust was visiting and he had ClickToFlash running and claimed it helped by enabling the loading of Flash selectively. ClickToFlash is a Safari extension that creates both a ClickToFlash menu item in Safari and pull down menus on flash movies that allows selective loading of them. It’s clean, simple, and it works.

ClickToFlash has completely solved my computer’s overheating problem by keeping Flash at bay. I still watch movies with Flash but it doesn’t load automatically anymore, I have to load it where I want it. Loading it is simple and one can build a whitelist of sites where one wants it to load automatically, like Vimeo and sites like that.

Flash may or may not be evil but I now know how unstable it made my computer. Thanks Steve, and thanks ClickToFlash developers.

Ways into Shakespeare’s Othello

English teacher Sabrina Broadbent leads a masterclass on Shakespeare, using her expertise to engage a group of Year 10 students.

Let me state up front, I’m a poor reader, was a poor student, hated Shakespeare, and at this point in my life I’m as cynical as ever about education.

But, I have to say, Sabrina Broadbent knows how to engage students and make Shakespeare come alive and if you watch this video my guess is you’ll agree. It takes some time but it’s well worth it.

This is one more example of the old adage: a good teacher can make any subject come alive. Sabrina Broadbent is a great teacher.

Granted, her students are more than educable, they are excellent students with excellent memories but my guess is a teacher like Sabrina could and would find ways to make Shakespeare accessible and exciting to people like me with language disabilities.

Teachers like Sabrina give me hope.

Insight

I first learned about Insight through this post at Signal to Noise: “Smart” pasting at The New Yorker site.

If you copy text from a site that has Insight installed, when you paste it the paste will include a link back to the original post. That link is easily deleted if you don’t want it but if you do nothing, will be included.

The comment thread at Signal to Noise which is now closed is fascinating: many people think it’s invasive to modify what a user copies. Only in the end does someone come up with the idea that these users who are copying are copying content that is not theirs. The least they can do is allow a link back to the original content. But, of course that link can easily be deleted so no one is forced to accept links back to the original text.

This seems like a great idea to me and as someone who has found entire essays of mine lifted and reposted elsewhere, not to mention having my photographs stolen from flickr and reposted with some else’s copyright, I’m all for at least nudging people who take other people’s original content toward acknowledging the content’s author.

Oh, and I don’t have Insight installed here.

Playing musical instruments may improve reading

Learning to play a musical instrument could help to improve children’s reading and their ability to listen in noisy classrooms, according to new research.

“Our eyes and ears take in millions of bits of information every second and it is not possible for the brain to process all of that, so the sensory systems in our brains are primed to tune into regularities or patterns in the signals it receives.

“People who are musically trained are better at picking up these patterns because they learn to recognise notes and pitches within melodies and harmonies.

“The better you are at picking up these patterns in music, the better reader you are. This makes sense as letters and words on a page are really just patterns.”

‘Family Guy,’ Palin and the Limits of Laughter

This is an excellent piece by New York Times writer Dave Itzkoff.

Andrea Fay Friedman has her act together as does Gail Williamson, executive director of the Down Syndrome Association of Los Angeles:

“Within ‘Family Guy,’ the character was fully included, well-rounded, dynamic, not dealing with stereotypical Down syndrome issues,” Ms. Williamson said. She added: “Am I a fan of that kind of humor? Eh. It’s beside the point.”

“If we’re asking for full inclusion in the schools and full inclusion in the world,” she said, “ we should appreciate full inclusion with other genres. Even if those genres are not what we appreciate.”

The unfortunate part of this situation is that most people are not clued in to the more nuanced issues here which Gail Williamson speak to. The way Palin speaks of her son Trig and has complained that Family Guy crossed a line isn’t really “PC” (politically correct), it’s knee jerk professional victim/sympathy vote stuff. Friedman speak to this:

“My mother did not carry me around under her arm like a loaf of French bread the way former Governor Palin carries her son Trig around looking for sympathy and votes.”

In the same sense that many thought the country was “post racial” with Obama’s election, it seems that some might think the country is “post disability” as more people with disabilities are fully included. Like the race issue, this issue is complex and has high profile people like Palin who are skilled at playing the victim card for her son and for herself.

Markus Schwarze has some incredible images both on flickr and on his own photo site which is excellent: Markus Schwarze – Picture of the Day.

Not only is his photography first rate but his presentation with text and graphical elements is excellent.