I honestly don't understand the response article about webcomics can provoke. I can understand different people taking the opportunity to share comics they like -- indeed, it's kinda nice -- but why so many would want to talk down comics (without, evidently, producing anything better of their own) is lost on me. Maybe it's just trolling but so much effort seems to go into it. Kinda sad.
Here's something nice about most webcomics : they're free. Which means people can enjoy those they like and do not have to visit those they don't. It also means that a comic like XKCD can and does link to a comic like Perry Bible Fellowship. Even so, thanks for the recommendations.
For my part : I'm having other post grad friends over and we'll make a night watching the film. Congrats to PhD comics. Hope the film's as good as the comic.
Perhaps also known as the last presidential Blackberry. Of course, parts of the government still favor Blackberry, but then apparently parts still like floppy drives too. With the recent/. posts on DOD Androids (not the kind that lead to Skynet comments) and the like, one wonders how much longer even this will last.
[...] how it changed our culture giving B movies and films that didn't make the silver screen their own chance to shine.
The advance in technology has helped this more than harmed it. These days, put it up on Youtube to get known. Hell, put up a concept on a website just in hopes of funding. The passing of VHS and the arrival of streaming has been democratizing. If you're afraid of losing it, burn it onto a DVD. That DVD you burned will outlast any VHS tape and will do so through many, many plays. How many of us who grew up in the 80's didn't suffer the disappointment of losing our favorite film to a hungry VCR (I suspect my family, who were sick of rewatching the same movie rigged the thing to destroy the tape).
Police scanners (wait; you can still buy those retail???) Believe it or not, I saw one the other day at Radioshack. Apparently they've been inspired by the DIY/Make trend and are starting (and I do mean just starting) to get some cool stuff again. I think they might have figured out that doing the same thing BestBuy does, only doing it worse, is not a successful business model.
À propos your list, it makes me want to create one of those waiting-room-magazine style quizzes. Instead of figure out your neuroses, binge dieting, or co-dependency quotient, this one will be to calculate your chances for being detained indefinitely on suspicious activity.
But hey, if you've got nothing to hide like paying with cash, taking pictures, being critical of the government...
The very reason for the 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is that some privacy is necessary for freedom. If those in power can search, at a whim, all one's things (in the modern case, data), they can almost always assemble a case to eliminate people whom they dislike for their political, social, religious, or ethnic affiliations. When nothing is private, everything is subject to public approval or disapproval. When nothing is private, the individual conscience, however good or ill, will be judged according to popular opinion. When nothing is private, all law can become arbitrary. Cardinal Richelieu is reputed to have said, "Give me six lines written by the most honorable of me, and I will find an excuse in them to hang him." Schmidt and his ilk should understand that when tyrants arise, as they always do in a democracy, it is the wealthy like Schmidt that such people scapegoat to gain power. Then they will have longed for a time when privacy and due process of law was protected.
I second that. What is more, one can criticize large corporations on precisely the same grounds that libertarian (or at least Austrian) economists criticize centrally planned economies. One of the most salient points made by von Hayek and von Mises from the 1920s on was the impossibility central planners would face in calculating supply and demand without pricing signals. I think they were quite right on these points.
Yet this same argument could be applied to large corporations which act internally like the heavily bureaucratized and centrally planned states the Austrians despised. The Austrians had faith, however, that competition would be sufficient to control the size of firms. This has not proven to be the case--though, this has as much to do with our political system as anything else. Large corporations are protected from their peculiar drawbacks in our system. It is not a free market and competition in any positive sense cannot occur where, e.g., a few corporations have huge portfolios of so-called intellectual property which, while cross licencing among themselves, allow them to prevent the growth of smaller competitors.
The rendition of "Over the Misty Mountain Cold" in the trailer was very nice though. As ambivalent as I am about the movie (how can it have two parts?) that song excites me. I know you could never do this in cinema and have people actually buy tickets, but I would love it if they did the whole song in the DVD.
I think at least part of the reason is suggested by your post. Europe does not spend as much on the military as the U.S. (Part of the reason for this is NATO, but that is another conversation.) Yet our own tradition of space exploration has evolved out of our military industrial complex. The phrase "military industrial complex" is not intended as a cliche here. NASA and its early facilities were created under Eisenhower. The space race during the Cold War was not a mere national pep rally to see who could get to the moon first, as I think it is often portrayed in classrooms. The space race was about being able to gain an advantage in case of war. A consequence of this we may be thankful for was the establishment of institutions and budgets that can be devoted to scientific research. It is unlikely we would have seen any such thing otherwise.
Of course, the dependence of scientific institutions upon the military priorities of governments is nothing new. The creation of the land-grant universities in the U.S. began in 1862. Any familiarity with U.S. history will indicate the significance of this date. The administration at the time was more than happy to create institutions which, in addition to the agricultural, mechanical, and even classical arts, would see to it that students in northern states would be taught military tactics.
Re:next we'll hear that Dell is in trouble...
on
Dell Ditches Netbooks
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Spot on. I bought my Dell Mini back when they first came out. I was thrilled with its combination attributes. It was a cheap and small computer that I could easily stash in my satchel when I was in the library or going to teach knowing that it would still be running when I pulled it out later. I hate having to lug a full laptop about campus but I don't want to do without a keyboard. I was also very pleased that I wouldn't have to remove Windows from it. While its battery life isn't quite what it was, it is still running well and I am still happy with it.
When the Mini finally kicks the bucket, I'm going to have a hard time finding something that fills its niche so well. The combination of attributes that made the netbook so useful to me is, for the most part, no longer readily available on the market.
Passenger rail doesn't make much money, but there is an unhappy reason for this. Folks on the political right often like to point to rail as one of the grand failures of government. What they do not recognize is that one of the reasons passenger rail doesn't make money in this country is because the highway system is so heavily subsidized. The failure of rail isn't an example of fair competition, it is an example of a heavily lobbied government choosing one form of transportation at the cost of either choice or market requirements. Consider this:
The director of the American Conservative Center for Public Transportation, William S. Lind, agrees that America’s love affair with subsidized interstates made private passenger rail unviable. Lind points out that even in 1921 the federal government spent $1.4 billion on highways, and by 1960 the outlay was $11.5 billion. By 2006, 47,000 miles of interstates had been built at a cost of $425 billion.
When critics of passenger-rail subsidies, such as Randal O’Toole of the Cato Institute, suggest that the highway costs are mostly covered by the gas tax, Lind counters with figures from a 2008 Federal Highway Administration paper: the FHA reports that highway user fees, including gas taxes, only cover 51 percent of costs. By contrast, Amtrak in 2010 covered 67 percent of its operating costs from ticket fares and other revenue.
The above quote was written by a conservative arguing for rail. Your "Damn those liberals and their lying propaganda!" line is, I'm afraid, very often accurate. It is sad that so many on the right are so ready to defend the federal highway systems and automobiles against all other alternatives. Certainly, there are many things to recommend cars and good highways, but currently the funding of these systems is a subsidy for corporations who rely on externalizing the cost (on taxpayers) of long distance transportation, e.g. Wal-Mart, to the detriment of local businesses and small competitors. I call this sad because conservatives, and on this account I will accept the appellation myself, claim to favor traditional patterns of life and to be skeptical of the kind of federal subsidies which support business models which might otherwise fail. The loss of rail and the rise of cars was a blow to small town civic life. Thereafter, the bypass ("It's a bypass. You've got to build bypasses!") and the big box stores, always by externalizing their costs and frequently with the help of imminent domain laws, further eroded civic life and economy.
'I'd like to make an important announcement: Henceforth, the TSA, as part of VIPR, will be examining vehicles crossing state lines to intercept the unauthorized transportation of all hammers. The Department of Homeland Security reports that a tip came in at 3:43 today that chatter on underground internet discussion boards indicate the possible use of sledge hammers to damage the interests of the agenc... er... American people. To reassure the American people, the TSA will also be targeting claw, ball-been, and framing hammers as well. Further, the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission will be issuing a recall of the Fisher-Price Tap 'N Turn Bench which may be used as an anti-social or terrorist recruitment tool. Freedom does not come for free and the public can be assured that the TSA is doing everything, whether or not it is in its power, to protect freedom by ensuring the proper payments are made.'
I'm confused. One guy makes this exaggerated and inaccurate statement:
No more energy research, no more parks, no more public education, no more low income housing, no more roads & bridges. What a grand utopia he has planned for us.
As of the moment, he gets ranked Score:4, Insightful.
On the other hand, some other guys makes the exaggerated and sarcastic statement:
Yes...because only the almighty government can do these things...
But this guy gets ranked Score:2, Troll.
Neither statement is doing anything more than attacking a straw man. On the one hand, ditching the Federal Department of Education is hardly going to lead to no more public education. You'd almost think that people didn't realize that public schooling was around long before the Federal Department of Education started up in 1980.
On the other hand, the other statement is just as guilty (but no more guilty, and this is my point) of attacking a straw man. It is certainly true that many of these functions can be performed by means other than the Federal government. But reducing to a simple government vs. market dichotomy creates its own problems. Some things could be done well by government on the state level with local knowledge of local conditions (low income housing, for example). Some things are best pursued within a free market system (energy research, for example, might benefit a great deal if we had a free market, i.e. if we didn't subsidize oil corporations and corn based ethanol). Some things, for example interstate highways (roads & bridges) are of common benefit to the States and are best coordinated on the Federal level.
It's a puzzling question to begin with. It's not as though many kids do not have means available to them to make toys. Having the materials to make toys never stopped kids from wanting more. The author needs to read some Augustine, or even Freud, and understand that enough is never enough for human beings. Otherwise, communism would work. Otherwise, I would stop at one good beer. The suggestion that the shiny gloss wouldn't quickly wear off of this too is shortsighted.
In my day, we would play with several artistic media, clay, and even wood (using my dad's tools). Sometimes, we even enjoyed Lego or homemade Play-Doh. I would build catapults out of trees in the woods and devise other ways to cause myself potentially severe trauma. If a kid can't be satisfied to use his or her imagination (though most can to some extent, given the chance), then a new piece of technology isn't going to make a difference./nowgetoffmylawn
Re:College is more than listening to a lecture.
on
Should College Go Online?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I couldn't agree more--and one of the courses I teach is online so I'm not speaking in the abstract here. You can take something as simple as helping a student learn to write a better argument during office hours. Such a thing cannot occur online and online chat is no substitute. I can tell so much more about where and how students needs help when I talk with them in person. Most importantly, I am a human being to them and they are human beings to me. I am someone who cares about them, inspires them, pisses them off, or bores them. They encourage me, irritate me, depress me, or make me more optimistic about the future. Human contact is a prerequisite to the very human growth that accompanies these experiences.
(This link goes to a good museum presentation of the Gutenberg, but don't bother unless you read Latin written in fancy script; the graphics in it contribute nothing.)
No modern has tried to suppress the Dead Sea Scrolls, as the summary might have one believe. Hell, many of these and like texts have been on Ph.D. comprehensive or qualifying exams for years (my own exam had the Nag Hammadi corpus on it which, far from being subject on modern day oppression, is available in multiple translations).
It is certainly true that for part of the past few decades, the scrolls have been in the hands of a few specialists. This is not for the purposes of power in some grand sense, however, but for the sake of publications for those who have control over them. The information wasn't being hoarded so much as disseminated slowly for the benefit of those scholars who work on them. On this note, I might be tempted to join in the rant of the article but that points to a deeper lack of open culture in higher education. Even so, the fact remains that they have been published.
Indeed, they have been subject of more than normal publication (see postscript). The gentleman who wrote this article complains, "why has it taken nearly 50 years for the contents of this material to be made fully public?" He fails to understand the simplest reason: the public doesn't really care enough. That is to say, some members of the public might care enough to read parts of a translation. A few might even now some languages from the period. But how many of the public are going to read it in the original in scanned versions rather than critical editions when even academics like myself only undertake paleography when we are trying to produce something for publication? I cannot therefore fathom a man who is daunted by a little Latin (see quote above) in type complaining that he cannot have the opportunity to practice his Aramaic paleography skills. Yet, in spite of the fact that the general public will not make much use of it, and the fellow who wrote this article certainly won't, Google and the Israel Museum have made high quality scans of them public. I, for one, and more inspired to speak of how great a thing this is; how much the internet has changed things (it takes decades in my field for a scholar to produce a critical edition of a text); and finally how the optimism and kindness (and probably interest in good publicity) of the people involved in this project have made this possible.
p.s.--I say "more than normal publication" because in most pre-modern fields it is extremely rare to find copies of relevant manuscripts online. The only hope typically is a) to use critical editions, b) to order microfilm, though many places will not provide this, or c) to go to the archives which, for an American, generally means thousands of dollars in travel costs. There have, however, been some efforts to make more manuscripts available online and they deserve some praise. The British Library should have a special note in this regard. Quite a few others may be found here. Mr. Fogarty need not visit these sites however. The open access of many of them will spoil his fun and, besides, he shouldn't bother unless he can read Latin and Greek written in a fancy script.
I saw that very line and thought, "That says it all." Apparently iPads pass the Turing test for teaching, as far as this school system is concerned. At what point did we start conflating a shiny screen's instant and rigid response with the understanding and human care implied by a teacher's attention?
Teaching students applications like Excel or Word is not just boring, it is a waste of a student's time. Such applications change regularly and thus students might be better served if they become comfortable with figuring out how to operate them on their own--just as, I imagine, most who comment here learned. Computer programming, however, offers a superior curriculum since students will find that while computer languages may change many of the key concepts and skills they learn by programming will still be relevant.
Teaching skills is for this reason superior to teaching mere content. I teach in a field, history, which can sometimes tempt teachers to focus on content. Because I know that students will forget most of the historical narrative I might teach (and most care little for people who died seventeen centuries ago anyway), I focus instead on teaching the skills a historian needs. Thus, a student leaving with a shiny new B.A. might also hope to leave with the ability to interpret documents, to undermine some of the shallow historical narratives by which public opinion is manipulated, and above all to think, speak, and write more clearly.
Slashdot Mirror
I now want to know more about the Nokia Lumia 900.
I honestly don't understand the response article about webcomics can provoke. I can understand different people taking the opportunity to share comics they like -- indeed, it's kinda nice -- but why so many would want to talk down comics (without, evidently, producing anything better of their own) is lost on me. Maybe it's just trolling but so much effort seems to go into it. Kinda sad. Here's something nice about most webcomics : they're free. Which means people can enjoy those they like and do not have to visit those they don't. It also means that a comic like XKCD can and does link to a comic like Perry Bible Fellowship. Even so, thanks for the recommendations. For my part : I'm having other post grad friends over and we'll make a night watching the film. Congrats to PhD comics. Hope the film's as good as the comic.
He had to say "come to an understanding." He was unwilling to pay the licensing costs 'to make them an offer they can't refuse.'
Now the challenge is to go back and recreate Minecraft for your TI 82. Then try creating a graphing calculator within that.
Perhaps also known as the last presidential Blackberry. Of course, parts of the government still favor Blackberry, but then apparently parts still like floppy drives too. With the recent /. posts on DOD Androids (not the kind that lead to Skynet comments) and the like, one wonders how much longer even this will last.
The advance in technology has helped this more than harmed it. These days, put it up on Youtube to get known. Hell, put up a concept on a website just in hopes of funding. The passing of VHS and the arrival of streaming has been democratizing. If you're afraid of losing it, burn it onto a DVD. That DVD you burned will outlast any VHS tape and will do so through many, many plays. How many of us who grew up in the 80's didn't suffer the disappointment of losing our favorite film to a hungry VCR (I suspect my family, who were sick of rewatching the same movie rigged the thing to destroy the tape).
Police scanners (wait; you can still buy those retail???) Believe it or not, I saw one the other day at Radioshack. Apparently they've been inspired by the DIY/Make trend and are starting (and I do mean just starting) to get some cool stuff again. I think they might have figured out that doing the same thing BestBuy does, only doing it worse, is not a successful business model. À propos your list, it makes me want to create one of those waiting-room-magazine style quizzes. Instead of figure out your neuroses, binge dieting, or co-dependency quotient, this one will be to calculate your chances for being detained indefinitely on suspicious activity. But hey, if you've got nothing to hide like paying with cash, taking pictures, being critical of the government...
The very reason for the 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is that some privacy is necessary for freedom. If those in power can search, at a whim, all one's things (in the modern case, data), they can almost always assemble a case to eliminate people whom they dislike for their political, social, religious, or ethnic affiliations. When nothing is private, everything is subject to public approval or disapproval. When nothing is private, the individual conscience, however good or ill, will be judged according to popular opinion. When nothing is private, all law can become arbitrary. Cardinal Richelieu is reputed to have said, "Give me six lines written by the most honorable of me, and I will find an excuse in them to hang him." Schmidt and his ilk should understand that when tyrants arise, as they always do in a democracy, it is the wealthy like Schmidt that such people scapegoat to gain power. Then they will have longed for a time when privacy and due process of law was protected.
Yet this same argument could be applied to large corporations which act internally like the heavily bureaucratized and centrally planned states the Austrians despised. The Austrians had faith, however, that competition would be sufficient to control the size of firms. This has not proven to be the case--though, this has as much to do with our political system as anything else. Large corporations are protected from their peculiar drawbacks in our system. It is not a free market and competition in any positive sense cannot occur where, e.g., a few corporations have huge portfolios of so-called intellectual property which, while cross licencing among themselves, allow them to prevent the growth of smaller competitors.
The rendition of "Over the Misty Mountain Cold" in the trailer was very nice though. As ambivalent as I am about the movie (how can it have two parts?) that song excites me. I know you could never do this in cinema and have people actually buy tickets, but I would love it if they did the whole song in the DVD.
Of course, the dependence of scientific institutions upon the military priorities of governments is nothing new. The creation of the land-grant universities in the U.S. began in 1862. Any familiarity with U.S. history will indicate the significance of this date. The administration at the time was more than happy to create institutions which, in addition to the agricultural, mechanical, and even classical arts, would see to it that students in northern states would be taught military tactics.
Spot on. I bought my Dell Mini back when they first came out. I was thrilled with its combination attributes. It was a cheap and small computer that I could easily stash in my satchel when I was in the library or going to teach knowing that it would still be running when I pulled it out later. I hate having to lug a full laptop about campus but I don't want to do without a keyboard. I was also very pleased that I wouldn't have to remove Windows from it. While its battery life isn't quite what it was, it is still running well and I am still happy with it. When the Mini finally kicks the bucket, I'm going to have a hard time finding something that fills its niche so well. The combination of attributes that made the netbook so useful to me is, for the most part, no longer readily available on the market.
"A Nation Derailed", Lewis McCrary
The above quote was written by a conservative arguing for rail. Your "Damn those liberals and their lying propaganda!" line is, I'm afraid, very often accurate. It is sad that so many on the right are so ready to defend the federal highway systems and automobiles against all other alternatives. Certainly, there are many things to recommend cars and good highways, but currently the funding of these systems is a subsidy for corporations who rely on externalizing the cost (on taxpayers) of long distance transportation, e.g. Wal-Mart, to the detriment of local businesses and small competitors. I call this sad because conservatives, and on this account I will accept the appellation myself, claim to favor traditional patterns of life and to be skeptical of the kind of federal subsidies which support business models which might otherwise fail. The loss of rail and the rise of cars was a blow to small town civic life. Thereafter, the bypass ("It's a bypass. You've got to build bypasses!") and the big box stores, always by externalizing their costs and frequently with the help of imminent domain laws, further eroded civic life and economy.
Wow. As it turns out, /. doesn't do unicode Greek characters. So much for my dreams of publishing my dissertation here.
Engineer: "We've invented an antythera watch."
Marketer: "It could be a big hit for history and engineering geeks alike."
Manager: "But what's this nonsense scribbling all over it? MOYNIXIN, APEIN, KIPOPIN? I don't understand that. It has to go."
Marketer: "Yes sir. You're right. No one will like that."
Engineer: "But you just said--"
Manager: "What else do you have?"
Marketer: "What about PRL, M, JV?"
Manager: "Hey, I like it. It looks like GRK. Reminds me of my fraternity days. What are you still doing here?"
Engineer: "I keep looking at the unemployment rate to remind myself."
For this, Heisenberg compensators work just fine, thank you.
'I'd like to make an important announcement: Henceforth, the TSA, as part of VIPR, will be examining vehicles crossing state lines to intercept the unauthorized transportation of all hammers. The Department of Homeland Security reports that a tip came in at 3:43 today that chatter on underground internet discussion boards indicate the possible use of sledge hammers to damage the interests of the agenc... er... American people. To reassure the American people, the TSA will also be targeting claw, ball-been, and framing hammers as well. Further, the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission will be issuing a recall of the Fisher-Price Tap 'N Turn Bench which may be used as an anti-social or terrorist recruitment tool. Freedom does not come for free and the public can be assured that the TSA is doing everything, whether or not it is in its power, to protect freedom by ensuring the proper payments are made.'
As of the moment, he gets ranked Score:4, Insightful.
On the other hand, some other guys makes the exaggerated and sarcastic statement:
But this guy gets ranked Score:2, Troll.
Neither statement is doing anything more than attacking a straw man. On the one hand, ditching the Federal Department of Education is hardly going to lead to no more public education. You'd almost think that people didn't realize that public schooling was around long before the Federal Department of Education started up in 1980.
On the other hand, the other statement is just as guilty (but no more guilty, and this is my point) of attacking a straw man. It is certainly true that many of these functions can be performed by means other than the Federal government. But reducing to a simple government vs. market dichotomy creates its own problems. Some things could be done well by government on the state level with local knowledge of local conditions (low income housing, for example). Some things are best pursued within a free market system (energy research, for example, might benefit a great deal if we had a free market, i.e. if we didn't subsidize oil corporations and corn based ethanol). Some things, for example interstate highways (roads & bridges) are of common benefit to the States and are best coordinated on the Federal level.
In my day, we would play with several artistic media, clay, and even wood (using my dad's tools). Sometimes, we even enjoyed Lego or homemade Play-Doh. I would build catapults out of trees in the woods and devise other ways to cause myself potentially severe trauma. If a kid can't be satisfied to use his or her imagination (though most can to some extent, given the chance), then a new piece of technology isn't going to make a difference. /nowgetoffmylawn
Or maybe he just recently read about predator drones being used to target U.S. citizens and considered how helpful the drones might find facial recognition technology.
Nonsense. It's made of the same stuff as the bluish Horsehead Nebula. I wonder why it sometimes turns pink.
I couldn't agree more--and one of the courses I teach is online so I'm not speaking in the abstract here. You can take something as simple as helping a student learn to write a better argument during office hours. Such a thing cannot occur online and online chat is no substitute. I can tell so much more about where and how students needs help when I talk with them in person. Most importantly, I am a human being to them and they are human beings to me. I am someone who cares about them, inspires them, pisses them off, or bores them. They encourage me, irritate me, depress me, or make me more optimistic about the future. Human contact is a prerequisite to the very human growth that accompanies these experiences.
No modern has tried to suppress the Dead Sea Scrolls, as the summary might have one believe. Hell, many of these and like texts have been on Ph.D. comprehensive or qualifying exams for years (my own exam had the Nag Hammadi corpus on it which, far from being subject on modern day oppression, is available in multiple translations).
It is certainly true that for part of the past few decades, the scrolls have been in the hands of a few specialists. This is not for the purposes of power in some grand sense, however, but for the sake of publications for those who have control over them. The information wasn't being hoarded so much as disseminated slowly for the benefit of those scholars who work on them. On this note, I might be tempted to join in the rant of the article but that points to a deeper lack of open culture in higher education. Even so, the fact remains that they have been published.
Indeed, they have been subject of more than normal publication (see postscript). The gentleman who wrote this article complains, "why has it taken nearly 50 years for the contents of this material to be made fully public?" He fails to understand the simplest reason: the public doesn't really care enough. That is to say, some members of the public might care enough to read parts of a translation. A few might even now some languages from the period. But how many of the public are going to read it in the original in scanned versions rather than critical editions when even academics like myself only undertake paleography when we are trying to produce something for publication? I cannot therefore fathom a man who is daunted by a little Latin (see quote above) in type complaining that he cannot have the opportunity to practice his Aramaic paleography skills. Yet, in spite of the fact that the general public will not make much use of it, and the fellow who wrote this article certainly won't, Google and the Israel Museum have made high quality scans of them public. I, for one, and more inspired to speak of how great a thing this is; how much the internet has changed things (it takes decades in my field for a scholar to produce a critical edition of a text); and finally how the optimism and kindness (and probably interest in good publicity) of the people involved in this project have made this possible.
p.s.--I say "more than normal publication" because in most pre-modern fields it is extremely rare to find copies of relevant manuscripts online. The only hope typically is a) to use critical editions, b) to order microfilm, though many places will not provide this, or c) to go to the archives which, for an American, generally means thousands of dollars in travel costs. There have, however, been some efforts to make more manuscripts available online and they deserve some praise. The British Library should have a special note in this regard. Quite a few others may be found here. Mr. Fogarty need not visit these sites however. The open access of many of them will spoil his fun and, besides, he shouldn't bother unless he can read Latin and Greek written in a fancy script.
I saw that very line and thought, "That says it all." Apparently iPads pass the Turing test for teaching, as far as this school system is concerned. At what point did we start conflating a shiny screen's instant and rigid response with the understanding and human care implied by a teacher's attention?
Teaching students applications like Excel or Word is not just boring, it is a waste of a student's time. Such applications change regularly and thus students might be better served if they become comfortable with figuring out how to operate them on their own--just as, I imagine, most who comment here learned. Computer programming, however, offers a superior curriculum since students will find that while computer languages may change many of the key concepts and skills they learn by programming will still be relevant. Teaching skills is for this reason superior to teaching mere content. I teach in a field, history, which can sometimes tempt teachers to focus on content. Because I know that students will forget most of the historical narrative I might teach (and most care little for people who died seventeen centuries ago anyway), I focus instead on teaching the skills a historian needs. Thus, a student leaving with a shiny new B.A. might also hope to leave with the ability to interpret documents, to undermine some of the shallow historical narratives by which public opinion is manipulated, and above all to think, speak, and write more clearly.