Is still on the march. Only the US is falling behind. Kevin Drum, previously of Mother Jones, a liberal magazine, has taken to data analysis and reporting after his retirement while he battles cancer. His blog is a treasure trove of data showing how little things are changing, even as the rhetoric around change is going haywire. In any case, those afraid of a decline in globalization should not be worried, unless you are in the US.
Category: Opinion
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Dron on AI for Learning
This interview of Jon Dron on using AI for education is not typical. His stance is clear. It makes sense. It doesn’t go overboard. He admits when he is not sure of something.
He is against LMSs, even though he developed some big ones for the Canadian educational system.
(Via Stephen Downes, of course)
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First Taxi Drivers, Now Nurses. Teachers next?
Take nurses: increasingly, American hospitals are firing their waged nurses and replacing them with gig nurses who are booked in via an app. There’s plenty of ways that these apps abuse nurses, but the most ghastly is in how they price nurses’ wages. These apps buy nurses’ financial data from data-brokers so they can offer lower wages to nurses with lots of credit card debt, on the grounds that crushing debt makes nurses desperate enough to accept a lower wage:
Pluralistic: Nurses whose shitty boss is a shitty app (17 Dec 2024)
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Player drain for Japan Soccer
NYTimes article about the economics of football and how the exchange rate matters.
The third factor is that they are relatively affordable. The transfer fees asked for Japanese players are usually in the hundreds of thousands rather than in the multiple millions. The ones who sign straight from Japan are usually cheaper than those from other European or South American countries.
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Changing Hosts
After 20 years with Webhostinghub, who have overall done very well, I am moving to a more bare-bones (cheaper) option at hostinger.com (referral 20%off/$4/month). This reflects less of a need to put stuff out there as I move away from producing stuff in English and toward integrating into the culture here in Japan, which is requiring a lot of time for language learning.
I feel good about this change. But it means my personal email address at ryan@kevinryan.com no longer works. It was flooded with too many ads and I had moved most of my important account maintenance to another address.
Kevinryan.com will continue here, with my personal thoughts and ideas. I’ve decided to follow Cory Doctorow’s idea of posting in one place and then sending out links on social media to that one place. WordPress makes that easy, except for Facebook, where it only posts to my page, and not my timeline. That may change as Zuck keeps loosening restrictions and allowing more “free speech” on the site, but I am less and less engaged there.
I’ll post once a week in Facebook to point to my blog. Hope to see you sometimes. Comments available but I have to approve your first one. Going old school. You can email me at my gmail address too.
