yes, HTML5 is essentially a diluted buzzword for “something shiny on the web that doesn’t use flash” - BUT - by using standards, you get to have content used in ways you haven’t predicted. For instance, Grant Hutchinson has been playing with a Newton-powered webserver (not linking directly to the server to spare it from the network) for years.
Today, he fired up the web browser on one of his Newtons, and pointed it at the Apple HTML5 showcase site. What happened? Fireworks? Crashes? Missing content? Plugin Required error messages?
I’ve been playing with settings and techniques for minimizing the amount of data gathered about me online. DoubleClick is probably the most invasive, as it silently tracks you as you wander the web, quietly recording what you do, and how you got there, as part of Google’s advertising distribution network.
It has an opt-out policy, and they provide a page with a link that is supposed to set a cookie to flag you as opted out - verboten for tracking - but it doesn’t seem to work. I’ve got the opt-out cookie set, but every day, I have fresh cookies from DoubleClick, waiting to be deleted.
I urge you to support endorsing a comprehensive bicycle transportation strategy, aimed at making Calgary a bike-friendly city. It is currently extremely unfriendly, even dangerous, to those of us who ride bicycles.
I’d maintained a personal home page with handy links and utilities for years, but gave it up when iGoogle etc… came along. In my current attempts to withdraw as much as possible from The Allseeing Eye of Google, I’ve resurrected a personal homepage. I found a copy of my old one from 2003 on a backup CD. Oh, the ugly. It burns. So, I created a new one from scratch.
Not sure if it’s actual “truth” (or is it just truthiness?) but this is a pretty interesting animation/presentation by TheRSA.org and Cognitive Media on motivation in the workplace, and what drives innovation. It probably won’t display in the RSS feed, so here’s a direct link.
I’ve been trying to extricate myself from Google’s All Seeing Gaze. (for more info on why, see this article linked by @brlamb).
There are plugins and opt-out cookies etc… but all of those work only in the browser. Often, in just a specific browser. I think I’ve found a better way. No opt-out. Works for any app that touches The Tubes.
Just modify your /etc/hosts file to include the contents of this great shared .hosts file. All requests for nefarious tracking servers will be dumped to 127.0.0.1 (your own computer) rather than routed out to The Big Snoops In The Ether. Some semblance of privacy, without having to opt out in every browser you use.
As I was reading the chapter, the phrase “correlation does not equal causation” kept popping into my head.
There was much focus on how higher education is correlated with higher earning potential, and even higher education correlated with even higher earning. BUT, what if higher education was simple a tribal marker, a product of the real causes of higher earning? Things like family wealth, support, intelligence, personal motivation, social success, or any other factors that make individuals generally more successful - and also possibly more likely to seek and attain higher education.
I’m putting together the research proposal for my MSc thesis project, so am eyeball-deep in journal articles while reading up on methodology and background theories. I could have killed a small forest to do this - I’ve built up a stack of 440 papers that are related to different parts of my project. But, I think I may have only printed one article out of that. I’m using Papers to find and manage them all, and it keeps blowing me away how powerful it is at smoothing the process.
Google has been powering almost all search queries for an eternity in internet years. It knows an awful lot about what we all search for. And they keep pushing into new ways to index data and mine the activity of people.
It started out pretty simple:
Public content on the web (web page)
Search queries
Websites viewed as a result of search queries
And they kept adding individually trackable data on:
If we all want something better than what we have/had for our children, this is akin to unrestricted growth. At some point, we need to plateau (or descend again, as population continues to increase…) - 1% higher ed enrolment in the US in the 1800s, up to nearly everyone attending some form of higher ed now…
“Professionalization” of occupations - formation of boards and bureaucracies to determine who is “qualified” to practice an occupation - may be a nice segue from straight institution-granted accreditation. Guilds? Apprenticeships? How do these concepts adapt from the trades to more “white collar” academic subjects?
Quick notes on the introduction to Anya Kamenetz’s DIY-U. I’ll post more as I work through it.
I met Anya at Open Education 2009, while she was researching the book, and I’m curious to see where she took the stuff she was asking attendees about.
I’m reading the book through Kindle for iPhone, so I have no idea what page these notes apply to. YMMV. Also, the Kindle for Mac app is a steaming pile of donkey turd. I’ll be holding off buying any more ebooks until I see what the iBooks thing looks like. I’m guessing it will suck much, much less than what I’ve seen of Kindle so far…
