Category: rePosts

So my actual feelings about the ’60s are that, yes, of course we had limitations. We talked a lot of shit, and we didn’t have the muscle to back it up. For the most part, we had good intentions. However, we were not able to implement those intentions. And when the state started to take us seriously and initiated countermeasures, the majority of us folded like bitches. Not all of us, but a good number. We weren’t up for the struggle that had sounded so great in our manifestos.
via Alan Moore Takes League of Extraordinary Gentlemen to the ’60s | Underwire | Wired.com.

well said!

I asked him what he would tell other travelers who may be about to head out on their own and he said:
Your experiences are your own, and no one will ever fully relate to them. You are out on this amazing journey, expereincing and seeing things that are life changing, however everyone back home is still living their lives. People write home, or return home, and feel a depression because they want people to be as excited as they are, and are often let down by the response. The lesson, and a hard one, is to learn to validate your journey to yourself and not look outside to others. Once you are able to do that, I find the depression and loneliness disappears. Life is a collection of stories and expereinces, and if you embrace each day and live in the moment recognizing the story is being written you more easily accept all that comes… And I got some pretty good stories 🙂
via Greg to Differ – Greg to Differ – Listening to the Universe When Travel Goes Bad.

For the past decade, 15-year-old Finnish students have consistently been at or near the top of all the nations tested in reading, mathematics, and science. And just as consistently, the variance in quality among Finnish schools is the least of all nations tested, meaning that Finnish students can get a good education in virtually any school in the nation. That’s equality of educational opportunity, a good public school in every neighborhood.
What makes the Finnish school system so amazing is that Finnish students never take a standardized test until their last year of high school, when they take a matriculation examination for college admission.
Their own teachers design their tests, so teachers know how their students are doing and what they need. There is a national curriculum — broad guidelines to assure that all students have a full education — but it is not prescriptive. Teachers have extensive responsibility for designing curriculum and pedagogy in their school. They have a large degree of autonomy, because they are professionals.
Admission to teacher education programs at the end of high school is highly competitive; only one in 10 — or even fewer — qualify for teacher preparation programs. All Finnish teachers spend five years in a rigorous program of study, research, and practice, and all of them finish with a masters’ degree. Teachers are prepared for all eventualities, including students with disabilities, students with language difficulties, and students with other kinds of learning issues.
via Ravitch: Why Finland’s schools are great (by doing what we don’t) – The Answer Sheet – The Washington Post.

Of course, “camped out” doesn’t quite catch the spirit of the moment, because those campsites are the way people have come together to bear witness to their hopes and fears, to begin to gather their power and discuss what is possible in our disturbingly unhinged world, to make clear how wrong our economic system is, how corrupt the powers that support it are, and to begin the search for a better way. Consider it an irony that the campsites are partly for sleeping, but symbols of the way we have awoken.
via How OWS woke up our civil society – Occupy Wall Street – Salon.com.

This is fucking cool!!!

Is that a USB key in your pocket or a dual-core computer? Today, Norwegian company FXI technologies showed off a USB stick-sized portable computer prototype, complete with a dual-core 1.2-GHz Samsung Exynos ARM CPU same as in the Galaxy S II, 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, HDMI-out and a microSD card slot for memory. Codenamed Cotton Candy because its 21 gram weight is the same as a bag of the confection, the tiny PC enables what its inventor calls “Any Screen Computing,” the ability to turn any TV, laptop, phone, tablet, or set-top box into a dumb terminal for its Android operating system.The Cotton Candy has a USB 2.0 connector on one end and an HDMI jack on the other. When connected to an HDTV, it uses the HDMI port for video, the USB for power, and Bluetooth to connect to a keyboard, mouse, or tablet for controlling the operating system. The device can output up to 1080p so even a full HD screen can display the Candy’s preloaded Android 2.3 operating system at its native resolution. The dual core CPU is powerful enough to play local 1080p video or stream HD clips from the Web. Learn more and see our hands on video below.
via USB Stick Contains Dual-Core Computer, Turns Any Screen Into an Android Station.

Likewise, the freedom to travel is not absolute. It is limited by the right of the government and the people to seek justice. Of all the rights, I think the right to justice is the most important. Why should a person’s right to travel be more important than a whole nation’s right to justice? Travel is supposed to be taken at one’s leisure. Are a person’s leisure and pleasure more important than justice?
Once the cases against GMA are finished and she is acquitted, she can travel all over the whole world for all she wants and nobody will stop her.
via Leila de Lima is only using her common sense | Inquirer Opinion.

Lending without limits
As I write this, I see that the Occupy Wall Street library has over 3500 books cataloged at LibraryThing. It also has policies and procedures, as libraries do. These include how to close the library when it rains (put lids on the boxes and tuck the tarps around them in a manner that won’t aggravate the police) and it has circulation policies, including how to check books out forever: “these books belong to everyone, so we trust everyone to do what they think is most effective with them. If you think you could put a book to good use long-term, by all means keep it. If you think others might benefit from it more after you’ve finished, we strongly encourage returns.” I love that.
These books belong to everyone. There’s enormous trust embodied in that statement, and it’s the kind of trust that at times is betrayed by rules designed around the assumption that people will act selfishly if allowed to govern themselves. As David Carnevale wrote in his article on “organizational trust” in the Encyclopedia of Public Policy and Administration, “bureaucracy is a monument to mistrust.” Luckily, it’s not the only option: he points out that “governance systems can be crafted that take advantage of people’s best, not their worst, tendencies.”
via Why the Occupy Wall Street Movement Has Libraries | Peer to Peer Review.

I came here to Vietnam to see John Wood hand out his 10 millionth book at a library that his team founded in this village in the Mekong Delta — as hundreds of local children cheered and embraced the books he brought as if they were the rarest of treasures. Wood’s charity, Room to Read, has opened 12,000 of these libraries around the world, along with 1,500 schools.
Yes, you read that right. He has opened nearly five times as many libraries as Carnegie, even if his are mostly single-room affairs that look nothing like the grand Carnegie libraries. Room to Read is one of America’s fastest-growing charities and is now opening new libraries at an astonishing clip of six a day. In contrast, McDonald’s opens one new outlet every 1.08 days.
It all began in 1998 when Wood, then a Microsoft marketing director, chanced upon a remote school in Nepal serving 450 children. Only one problem: It had no books to speak of.
Wood blithely offered to help and eventually delivered a mountain of books by a caravan of donkeys. The local children were deliriously happy, and Wood said he felt such exhilaration that he quit Microsoft, left his live-in girlfriend (who pretty much thought he had gone insane), and founded Room to Read in 2000.
He faced one challenge after another, not only in opening libraries but also in filling them with books that kids would want to read.
“There are no books for kids in some languages, so we had to become a self-publisher,” Wood explains. “We’re trying to find the Dr. Seuss of Cambodia.” Room to Read has, so far, published 591 titles in languages including Khmer, Nepalese, Zulu, Lao, Xhosa, Chhattisgarhi, Tharu, Tsonga, Garhwali and Bundeli.
via His Libraries, 12,000 So Far, Change Lives – NYTimes.com.