From the article: "It’s time to embrace digital natives and give them something cool, that doesn’t try to imitate existing concepts." Maybe. There's still a huge, wealthy immigrant population that has lots more dough than the natives. Before I set about catering to either group, I need a business model. "Something cool" may be part of it - I won't ignore native sensibilities about "coolness." Something saleable will be a larger part, whether conceptually imitative or not.
Good
Punch the idiot in charge in the face every time you get stuck with junk technology.
Effective
This one's trickier. It sounds as though your system's policy structure is ill-understood by your "asst. superintendent of curriculum and instruction." On what basis just he justify overriding the placement of responsibility for purchases from IT to your budget controllers? Take the issue to your school board with clear explanations of the wasted monies that result from buying unusable computers. Explain to the board the failure to provide required educational materials. Convince them to clarify and set up or reaffirm the needed policies and establish or approve procedures to maintain oversight and enforcement of the correct practices. If your board seems recalcitrant, take your arguments upstream to the commissioners (or other public officials) who control the board. Finally, the court of last resort is public opinion; get media coverage to expose the waste and failure of the current practices.
If it's too risky to your employment to attempt these things directly, recruit parents to be your public interface and feed them the needed facts.
Let's try to temper this discovery (not so much new as newly re-emphasized by this work) with the understanding that, it is only one of many contributing factors. Surviving longer allows us to encounter a plethora of new-&-improved woes for old folks. Sure, getting out and soaking up more rays is a good thing when properly managed, but let's not go overboard and attribute to one cause that which is complexly determined.
Memory's the first thing to go. I forget what the second is.
"I can live without rayon (products manufactured from non-petroleum based bio-sources), but, dang, I'm gonna miss polyvinyl chloride (long-chain, synthetic polymer products that are tremendously more difficult and expensive to produce, when one has to start with relatively simple hydrocarbons derived from bio-sources instead of cracked and fractionated petroleum)!"
Once it's in round three or four of evolution and the price drops through the floor for the entire process, expect an invitation to trot down to your friendly, neighborhood, federal building, county courthouse, city police precinct, etc. to give a blood sample for, um, voter registration purposes.
Reminds me of those very same days and renews my joy that we now have the freedom to use "inefficient," mnemonically useful names for variables and functions along with coding conventions that give the next programmer at least a remote chance to understand and support the code without great genius.
[rhetorical]Is the shredding/compaction process along with the delivery by trucks and collection by individual citizens truly superior to simply sending the unprocessed notes off to be burned in great, big boilers to generate steam-powered electricity for wider, cheaper distribution of power?[/rhetorical]
I kind of like the idea of toasting my toes to the crackly warmth of tens of thousands of ex-bank-notes, but I already don't respect the notion of "money" as anything other than a abstract place-holder for the work of myself and my fellow man. This seems a bit more like "spectacularism" on the Hungarian government's part.
"It's not the Earth the meek inherit, it's the dirt."
"The mistake this article makes from that perspective is that he tries to give *the* definition of Life." Indeed.
The map is not the territory. The word is not the thing.
In an extensional definition (exemplar listing) of the "over-definition" flaws inherent in intensional definition (attribute listing), one might cite this..
Slashdot Mirror
...we have such a selfless paragon of virtue to set us straight.
From the article: "It’s time to embrace digital natives and give them something cool, that doesn’t try to imitate existing concepts." Maybe. There's still a huge, wealthy immigrant population that has lots more dough than the natives. Before I set about catering to either group, I need a business model. "Something cool" may be part of it - I won't ignore native sensibilities about "coolness." Something saleable will be a larger part, whether conceptually imitative or not.
Good Punch the idiot in charge in the face every time you get stuck with junk technology. Effective This one's trickier. It sounds as though your system's policy structure is ill-understood by your "asst. superintendent of curriculum and instruction." On what basis just he justify overriding the placement of responsibility for purchases from IT to your budget controllers? Take the issue to your school board with clear explanations of the wasted monies that result from buying unusable computers. Explain to the board the failure to provide required educational materials. Convince them to clarify and set up or reaffirm the needed policies and establish or approve procedures to maintain oversight and enforcement of the correct practices. If your board seems recalcitrant, take your arguments upstream to the commissioners (or other public officials) who control the board. Finally, the court of last resort is public opinion; get media coverage to expose the waste and failure of the current practices. If it's too risky to your employment to attempt these things directly, recruit parents to be your public interface and feed them the needed facts.
Frothy. Need I say more?
Let's try to temper this discovery (not so much new as newly re-emphasized by this work) with the understanding that, it is only one of many contributing factors. Surviving longer allows us to encounter a plethora of new-&-improved woes for old folks. Sure, getting out and soaking up more rays is a good thing when properly managed, but let's not go overboard and attribute to one cause that which is complexly determined.
Memory's the first thing to go. I forget what the second is.
"I can live without rayon (products manufactured from non-petroleum based bio-sources), but, dang, I'm gonna miss polyvinyl chloride (long-chain, synthetic polymer products that are tremendously more difficult and expensive to produce, when one has to start with relatively simple hydrocarbons derived from bio-sources instead of cracked and fractionated petroleum)!"
Once it's in round three or four of evolution and the price drops through the floor for the entire process, expect an invitation to trot down to your friendly, neighborhood, federal building, county courthouse, city police precinct, etc. to give a blood sample for, um, voter registration purposes.
"Trouble? I call it sport."
Reminds me of those very same days and renews my joy that we now have the freedom to use "inefficient," mnemonically useful names for variables and functions along with coding conventions that give the next programmer at least a remote chance to understand and support the code without great genius.
No doubt that explains why those old-style pull-tabs are no longer available.
"We got plenty of youth. What we need is a 'Fountain of Smart.'"
[rhetorical]Is the shredding/compaction process along with the delivery by trucks and collection by individual citizens truly superior to simply sending the unprocessed notes off to be burned in great, big boilers to generate steam-powered electricity for wider, cheaper distribution of power?[/rhetorical]
I kind of like the idea of toasting my toes to the crackly warmth of tens of thousands of ex-bank-notes, but I already don't respect the notion of "money" as anything other than a abstract place-holder for the work of myself and my fellow man. This seems a bit more like "spectacularism" on the Hungarian government's part.
"It's not the Earth the meek inherit, it's the dirt."
"The mistake this article makes from that perspective is that he tries to give *the* definition of Life." Indeed. The map is not the territory. The word is not the thing.
In an extensional definition (exemplar listing) of the "over-definition" flaws inherent in intensional definition (attribute listing), one might cite this..