Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Tag: application

  • TED Talk: Robert Full: Learning from the gecko’s tail

    I enjoyed the slow motion action shots of the geckos.

  • TED Talk: Liz Coleman’s call to reinvent liberal arts education

    About this talk from the TED site: Bennington president Liz Coleman delivers a call-to-arms for radical reform in higher education. Bucking the trend to push students toward increasingly narrow areas of study, she proposes a truly cross-disciplinary education — one that dynamically combines all areas of study to address the great problems of our day.…

  • Torchwood Returns

    This is a test of the George blog watching system. If George in facts reads my blog, then he will see this trailer for a show he likes. If George actually had read my blog, then he would have made comments on previous posts. Thank you.

  • TED Talk: Brewster Kahle builds a free digital library

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    I’ve heard the Library of Congress analogy previously. The question I had then was, “What about the diagrams and pictures which make the books useful. Books are not just letters, numbers, and symbols.”

  • The LMS is So Web 1.5

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    The claims Blackboard’s Learn 9 provides a Web 2.0 experience has bothered me for a while now. First, it was the drag-n-drop. While cool, that isn’t Web 2.0 in my opinion. A little more on track is the claim: The all-new Web 2.0 experience in Release 9 makes it easy to meaningfully combine information from…

  • Preserving CE/Vista Settings

    I’ve been asked for notes about this a few times. So here’s a blog post instead. 🙂 A coworker is working on scripting our updates. We lost the Luminis Message Adapter settings in applying the patch to the environment we provide to our clients. Fortunately, those settings are maintained by us not our clients. So…

  • The Twitter Timesink

    Glenn asked: “What is it about Twitter that makes it more of a time sink than Facebook?” I consider a time sink something where I invest a high value of time for boring and poor value. My contacts mostly duplicate in Twitter what they provide in Facebook. The time I spend reading Twitter posts I’ve…

  • TED Talk: Pandemics

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    TED Prize wish: Help stop the next pandemic by Larry Brilliant What can we learn from the 1918 flu? by Laurie Garrett My favorite part is that only 20% of Tamiflu is used by human bodies. The rest goes back into the ecosystem where waterfowl who can spread flu end up breeding resistant strains. Ouch.

  • TED Talk: Picking apart the puzzle of racism in elections

    By Nate Silver A less than convincing point… The list of states with voters reporting a racial bias only well matches the Obama-Clinton difference map because Nate draws the audience to the states he’s picking on: Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia (5 hits). He totally ignores the strong race bias in South Carolina,…