Category: Weekly Update

Friday I met Bill and we went to a steak place in Roppongi. Nice, not so much for the steak, but for the salad bar, and dessert bar. Then we went to see Mimi Wada at the National Art Center. She was part of an exhibit of sumi-e, or painting with India ink. We got to meet her sensei, and caught up on her travels around the world. She and I have an affinity for Myanmar, and for trying out new things. Altogether a very very pleasant afternoon.

I saw that my credit card was charged for my donation to The Correspondent, who aim to purvey Unbreaking News as they start to use their $2.5 million to get set up and turn their Dutch agency international.

Facebook earns more than ever as fact-checkers leave. Kind of like Mitch McConnel, who made his bones blocking campaign finance reform and supreme court appointments. Both he and Zuckerberg figure that the public cares, but not enough. Sadly, both are right. Zuck knows that with 2 billion daily users, even if leaving Facebook makes you happier, he’s got the lock in.

Here in Japan, my students (I teach at a women’s university) move out into a very tough environment when they graduate. Japan is rated as one of the worst in the world for workplace equality, and that has not been fixed for a long time, even though it gets lip service. But even after they get married, it gets worse.

There is such a thing as too clean. We need lots of bacteria to help us avoid allergies. We are an ecosystem.

My kind of linguist. A traveler and scholar, he even got a new name on his quest to link his native Transylvanian to the Mongol Magyars. He spent his life trying to prove the theory but it was the journey that lead to a Tibetan dictionary and then on to India. He picked up his new name Sikander Beg in Iran.

Required reading for waiting in line. Cueing theory parses what is the best way to organize to shorten lines. Ignored around the world.

Scary stuff. Prisons in the US are assembling a database of voice prints (like fingerprints, but with the voice) from inmate calls. Those voice samples can be compared to live or recorded voices to match them up. Some prisons only give permission for outgoing calls if the inmate consents to be recorded and added to the database.

More scary stuff. The Trump administration is moving plutonium around the US without telling anyone.

If you ever need to teach a course on how to facilitate online learning, get this manual. It is really helpful. It includes specifics on the content for 4 different courses. Great for teacher-trainers, or anybody interested in teaching online. The FLO Facilitation Guide.

My mother, then my wife, picked out my ties. I did pick out one, but you can tell immediately. That is why this color-picker helps to choose which colors go with which. Good for web developers or if you are going to paint the room again. Really simple to use.

Cool video of people talking about their scars. 4 minutes and they come at you quickly. Maybe something to base an English lesson around?

Cheers until next weekend.

And here we are, nearing the end of the month, the end of the semester here in Japan, and a time when things get creative for me. Materials development, preceded by syllabus writing, along with a research article or two. This week I posted about Noom, a lifestyle app that uses psychology to gradually change habits to the healthier, mostly about eating, but a lot of other aspects come into play as well. A very good program (digital program as well as the way it is managed, with groups and a coach). It could be a model for language education. Working on making something similar using PocketPassport because it works so well on mobile. That is my tech goal this year…go mobile for most of my content. A big project to port and reformulate that stuff from years on Moodle. I will go to the Moodle conference end of February to see if there are any options there.

Reads: Poverty can change your life, down to your genes. We need to look at it like a disease. From a guy that made it, by his account, through luck (Nautilus).

MOOCs: ” The thing is, moving a university is a little bit like moving a cemetery. You can’t expect any help from the inhabitants.” Barbara Oakley. (HigherEd).

Short Story: Language and tech, in dystopia Sort by Controversy by Scott Alexander. Similar to Lexicon, a book I finally recovered from Amazon and am about to read.

More on Amazon and its rapacious capitalism. This time on the other end of the food chain. What do you call those fish that hang onto sharks near their mouths waiting for scraps? Liquidation Pallets. (Atlantic)

Retirement planning, still years down the road, but jockeying for a supplement to get some money to have fun (a nice position to be in). Should I teach online? Somebody wants me to, so they can make my life easier and make money off me too.

Poetry. I don’t read much, but this resonated earlier this week when I got my schedule for next year (I know, first world problems), but I am no longer Too Blue (Langston Hughes). This poster took me out of the funk.

Politics: Matt Taibi writes the best article of the week on why Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rocks. (Rolling Stone).

Gender and pay gaps. A simple solution: make everyone’s pay public. Sounds counterintuitive, but it works. Really.

Tech: Tim O’Reilly on 10 transitions moving Gradually, then Suddenly into the future. A great introduction to my IT class in April, I think.

Surgery. On yourself. Could you do it? This guy did. I get light headed even thinking about it.

NFL: (That’s US football). Good news about possible demise. Nobody wants to insure them anymore. Capitalism in action, or like convicting Al Capone for tax fraud?

Psychology: Are psychopaths attracted to each other? Curiously applicable to many situations. (Scientific American)

Health: A follow-up from Noom. It uses lots of different #psychTricks, and one of them is to listen to your body (duh). But it turns out there is a whole field out there about Intuitive Eating.

Tools: ClassHook is a selection of short videos curated by topic and difficulty, but designed for US K-12 students. Link

Time Magazine best 100 photos. A great classroom resource. Can be used with or without planning.

Feel free to make a comment. The first one I have to approve, then you are cleared for others. Below are links of stuff I found interesting this week.

After my two posts about my problems with Amazon, I am looking into ways to save my content locally. My faith in “the cloud” has been seriously shaken. The EFF and Cory Doctorow are right. Once it happens to you (losing access to YOUR information), it changes how you think and feel. Take precautions out there. The best one so far is how to back up your Kindle books. Once you get your Kindle books on your computer, you need to strip out the DRM (Digital Rights Management). I am looking into that now, and it will probably involve Calibre software. More on that later.

If you are soured on the news from last year, read 99 Good News Stories (FutureCrunch), a list about our world, our climate, our people and our economy. What is a computer? This will stretch your concept. And I am not embroidering the truth here. Space-based entertainment, a way to impress your partner. A company in Japan rocketed up a satellite full of metal balls. They can release it so it makes meteors, on cue. Stories. We think in stories. We tell stories to remember, but they control our conception. See how stories work. Roma, the greatest movie of the year, maybe of the decade. Watch it, read my post, then read Guillermo de Toro’s 10 thoughts on Twitter about his compatriot’s work (Careful. Spoilers). David Brooks is a columnist but did some teaching a while ago. He writes about emotion and learning. Facebook has a thing where you post your own picture from 10 years ago and from now. There is no ulterior motive, right? (Wired). Nicolas Carr (famous for the book about how Google is making us stupid) reviews Shoshana Zuboff’S book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, which looks like a better read. He makes it frightening, but this time it should be (Los Angeles Review of Books). Amy Brooks has no arms or legs. But she has a website and YouTube channel and shows us what persistence is like. Learning styles have been pretty well debunked by psychologists, but teachers haven’t listened and continue to hang on to the theory. Is this a Neuromyth? New learning and teaching for 2019 includes a report by Open University on 10 new ideas. I like the ones about Place-based learning, roots of empathy, action (not active) learning, and am curious about drone-based learning and virtual studios. 45-page pdf. Retirement communities on campus is an idea that could revolutionize Japan. It is already being done in the US, but it ain’t cheap (Bryan Alexander). Good listeners (and voice analyzers) get information from more than just words. See how much you can and can’t hide about your feelings (BBC). Are you on task? Are your students? The problem is that sometimes being on task is not such a good thing.

Tools: Brainstorming at tricider recommended to me by a friend. Group decision-making with Loomio, it works. Free for groups of 5 or less. Spoken word LP albums which you can listen to online. Examples: Voices of History, with leaders speaking in crisis, Martin Luther King, Ronald Reagan. Not just English, either. (BoingBoing). Studs Terkel is the best interviewer of the 20th century (Terry Gross can have the 21st century). The archives have 1,200 interviews. Studs lived in Chicago, my home town and the most American city in the US.

Coming: A post on Bandersnatch and Interactive Fiction. Soon, I swear!

From Wired, you can get a Harley….electric! Wow. Want.

Here are some links to my posts this week. How to Pay Attention. The Pilot V Fountain Pen rocks. Best movie of the decade: Roma.

Other links I have found worthy of reading (I don’t recommend unless I’ve read it). Causes of Death in the US: #1: Cancer. #2: Heart disease. #3: Stupidity. How to Avoid Stupidity. (Thanks Bill Snyder). I love science. Especially when it debunks hysteria (a word originally applied only to women, but now to people like Marco Rubio and the DT. The Havana Embassy Mystery (Vanity Fair; long, but worth it.). Tim Herrera at the NYTimes shows us that one way to remember something is to draw it. Don’t write the word. Draw it. History will show that Nancy Pelosi is one of the most important politicians the US has ever had. During the Lehman shock, the 2008 debacle, she stood up for the people. The most adult in the room. We see why John McCain lost a few weeks later. (The Atlantic). Books have been changed, not so much themselves (they are the container) but everything around books has. An author from Japan tells of how production is different now. (Wired) What is the difference between a language and a dialect? A Swedish researcher has assembled some impressive data and come to a conclusion. How to murder somebody. The best way, according to the CIA, is by pushing them off a ledge. No guns, no explosions, no fuss. And it looks like an accident. Does the culture remember John Lennon? Looks like there is a halflife of about 15 years on verbal cultural memories. Written lasts longer. The other media are different (Nautilus). Busy streets make for a less engaged community. Fewer friends and acquaintences (Kottke). Here’s one to get mad about. Small towns in the US make money by fining poor people. It has become a business model. Weird time fold with a 50’s TV show. Texas western where a snake oil salesman comes to town and says the world is ending, and the only way to save yourself is paying him to build a wall. The huckster is named Trump. Really.