by cameron | Mar 25, 2009 | Uncategorized
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Children will no longer have to study the Victorians or the second world war under proposals to overhaul the primary school curriculum, the Guardian has learned.
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However, the draft plans will require children to master Twitter and Wikipedia and give teachers far more freedom to decide what youngsters should be concentrating on in classes.
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I hope this goes through in the UK and that it inspires the various state education departments in Australia lift their game. I’m still horrified at how little integration there is in my kids’ classroom with the net. At home they LIVE on the web, research on it, watching videos, play games, talk to their family and friends. At school, they get MINUTES on the web over the course of an entire week. It’s a joke.
by cameron | Mar 24, 2009 | GDay World Live
Details here, although tonight we’ll be starting half an hour late (8.30pm QLD time) to accommodate Mr Nick Hodge who is doing a special edition of HIS live show this evening.
by cameron | Mar 24, 2009 | Brisbane
My mate Ian Kath (
@iankath) who joined me on last week’s live podcast, does his own terrific podcast “Your Story”. I listened to his most recent episode where he interview Andrew Leavold, owner of Brisbane’s infamous “Trash Video”. It’s a terrific story about a guy with a passion for obscure films who realizes his dream to own a boutique video store but it’s more than that. Andrew also is making a documentary about forgotten Filipino “midget-xploitation” film star “Weng Weng”. You have to check out the clips on Ian’s site to realize how brilliant this guy was. An 84cm-tall action film star who made James Bond spoofs – as the James Bond character. And listen to Andrew’s story, it’s one of the most entertaining podcasts I’ve heard in ages.
by cameron | Mar 24, 2009 | free will
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The gist of it is this: They say they have proved that if humans have free will, then elementary particles — like atoms and electrons — possess free will as well.
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Princeton mathematician John Conway (best known in geek circles for his “
Game Of Life“) and his colleague Princeton mathematician Simon Kochen, are apparently about to give a series of lectures in which they intend to demonstrate that elementary particles have “free will”. However the advance press is quoting them as saying that these particles have free will “if humans have free will”, which, of course, I have demonstrated many times that we DO NOT.
I’ll have to invite Conway onto the show to debate this in more detail. He and Kochen are obviously super-smart guys, so I look forward to seeing what evidence they have that humans have free will, let alone elementary particles.
by cameron | Mar 23, 2009 | religion
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Oswald was the 17th priest in the Santa Rosa diocese to have been accused of sexual molestation, church officials have said. The church has acknowledged paying nearly $25 million to an undisclosed number of people who asserted they were molested by at least six priests. Most victims were preteen boys when the incidents were alleged to have occurred.
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The Roman Catholic Diocese in Santa Rosa, California, has agreed to pay out another $1.3 million to settle another two sexual abuse lawsuits. The most shocking paragraph in this story, however, is the one above. SEVENTEEN PRIESTS IN THE ONE DIOCESE HAVE BEEN ACCUSED OF SEXUAL MOLESTATION???!!
Tell me why the authorities haven’t stepped in and SHUT THE PLACE DOWN? That is what you call ENDEMIC. Something is broken. Of course, I argue that the Catholic Church is broken, full stop. It needs to be held to account for its crimes, just like an Enron or an AIG.
by cameron | Mar 23, 2009 | activism, US politics, Wikileaks
Watch this video from Australian journalist John Pilger if you’re at all interested in where our modern “news” organisations came from, why they can’t be trusted, and how they support the agenda of the elite, both Republican and Democrat, Liberal and Labor. This is one of the most inspiring speeches I have heard in a long, long time.
by cameron | Mar 23, 2009 | Uncategorized
Surely this will be the cartoon of the year?
by cameron | Mar 23, 2009 | Australian politics, censorship, freedom of speech, geopolitics
What the frak does online poker have to do with child pornography? Nothing. Nothing at all. This is just one example of how stupid, wrong and frakking disgraceful the whole blacklist exercise is.
As I told a couple of Labor Party stalwarts (including a former ALP MP) over lunch last week – Rudd was supposed to be the good guy. At least where the ACMA blacklist is concerned, he’s turning out to be more appalling than John Howard. I wouldn’t vote ALP in a pink fit after this experience (mind you, I’ve never voted ALP in my life) and I doubt many digital folks who voted for the ALP in 2007 will make the same mistake in the next Federal election.
| Less than a week after the federal government’s URL blacklist was leaked and caused a furore over the status of online betting company Betfair, Australia’s poker industry is now in the firing line over the number of legitimate poker sites that could be banned by the filter.. |
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by cameron | Mar 23, 2009 | Uncategorized
I’ve been receiving emails from people asking “what happened to your Twitterfast”? The posts that you’re seeing from me in Twitter are automated posts from Friendfeed which keeps an eye on my blogs, delicious bookmarks, Facebook posts, Flickr uploads, etc. I haven’t posted directly to Twitter (except asking for help on uStream last night) for 36 hours and it has been HARD. I have the impulse to post to or check Twitter every few minutes. Just nonsense stuff really… about thoughts I’m having, people I’m talking to, where to catch a bus, plugging sites I’ve discovered, etc. Nothing terribly important or special but it does really make me notice how much I rely on Twitter every day. As I was discussing with some folks in a meeting today, Twitter is really my primary search engine for so many things. I’m finding living without it pretty difficult.
Back in 2001, I gave a series of CIO breakfasts for Microsoft. One of the things I talked about was a rating system I had for evaluating new technologies and services in my life. It went something like this:
Rating 1: If it disappeared tomorrow, I would hardly notice.
Rating 2: If it disappeared tomorrow, I would notice but could happily live without it.
Rating 3: If it disappeared tomorrow, I would feel the absence but would cope.
Rating 4: If it disappeared tomorrow, I would feel the absence and proactively look for a replacement.
Rating 5: If it disappeared tomorrow, I would go to war to get it back.
Where is Twitter for me right now? Somewhere between 4 and 5 I think.
by cameron | Mar 23, 2009 | science
Interesting results from recent research done in Germany which seems to indicate that certain kinds of mental “states” assist us to remember data. For example, when asked to categorize words as pleasant or unpleasant, the test subjects had much better recall than when they were asked to categorize words as having two syllables or more than two. With words that were successfully recalled, researchers noticed “an increase in theta wave amplitude in the medial temporal lobe, beginning 250 ms before word presentation.”
BEFORE word presentation! So the brain was in a certain “state” before the word was presented. This reminds me a lot of Tony Robbins’ stuff. He talks about using NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) techniques when you are learning a new activity to put yourself into the right “state” for learning. I wonder how many educators consciously use techniques like this in schools?
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A team of researchers from Germany now show that the activity which immediately precedes an event is also important for memory formation. In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they report the identification of a signature brain state which occurs just before the appearance of a visual stimulus and predicts the successful encoding of it. The findings point to ways in which the process of memory formation could be enhanced.
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