Thursday, June 11
When the Bat Signal calls :: The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It
When the Bat Signal calls :: The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It: "My view is that Wikipedia and projects like it belong at the heart of a high school and college education. Instead of turning to a handful of approved sources and paraphrasing them to write a ten-page U.S. History paper that will be viewed and graded only by the teacher – who looks at a stack of papers and anticipates the same bad movie, twenty times – you can be asked to demonstrate a sustained and original contribution to a Wikipedia article on an important topic, having to contend with conflicting sources and others’ arguments, learning to discern and then defend truth amidst chaos – and to refine your own view in light of what you discover. There are few things as devastatingly disarming to others as admitting when you’re wrong."
Friday, June 5
Teaching with Technology Idea Exchange Hunting, Gathering, and Growing Open Educational Resources: "A significant movement in education concerns the use of open educational resources. By “open” it is generally meant that the resource is available at no cost to others for adaptation and reuse in different contexts. These resources could include books, lesson plans, syllabi, slide shows, etc. There are several examples of individuals and institutions providing open educational resources. The open education movement is introduced, and we discuss how to find and organize open educational resources, specifically within the context of the Open High School of Utah."
Hunting/Gathering/Collecting
John Hilton is emphasizing the reusability component of open coursware, something I brought up during the roundtable discussion with instructure. I hadn't made the important reusability/open content connection before now.
Reusable content needs to be modified for particular contexts, rather than phoning it in. Someone, maybe Gladwell, wrote about art that is created through gradual refinement rather than in a burst of genius (see Chris Lott post) and open courseware's reusability would tend to promote this sort of growth.
David Wiley's 4rs of Openness:
Reuse
Redistribute
Revise
Remix--take two or more existing resources and combine them to create a new resource (e.g. take audio lectures from a course and combine them with a slideshow from another course to create a new course).
** Creative Commons is a key enabler of open educational resources
-attribution
-share alike
-noncommercial
-no derivative works
Commercial schools, teaching for profit, can't use many Open resources.
Q: what's the relationship between fair use and open content?
A: (me) Fair use is being eaten alive by corporations
Hunting/Gathering/Collecting
John Hilton is emphasizing the reusability component of open coursware, something I brought up during the roundtable discussion with instructure. I hadn't made the important reusability/open content connection before now.
Reusable content needs to be modified for particular contexts, rather than phoning it in. Someone, maybe Gladwell, wrote about art that is created through gradual refinement rather than in a burst of genius (see Chris Lott post) and open courseware's reusability would tend to promote this sort of growth.
David Wiley's 4rs of Openness:
Reuse
Redistribute
Revise
Remix--take two or more existing resources and combine them to create a new resource (e.g. take audio lectures from a course and combine them with a slideshow from another course to create a new course).
** Creative Commons is a key enabler of open educational resources
-attribution
-share alike
-noncommercial
-no derivative works
Commercial schools, teaching for profit, can't use many Open resources.
Q: what's the relationship between fair use and open content?
A: (me) Fair use is being eaten alive by corporations
Teaching with Technology Idea Exchange Build your Audience like a Virus: "Learn how one small professional development program has taken advantage of free and low-cost Web 2.0 and text messaging technologies to keep in touch with our core participants, reach out to previously untapped audiences and expand our “viral marketing” efforts"
I'm attending this session at #ttix. Victoria Williams is moving through a list of technologies that she's used to promote UEN's offerings.
Blogs: kind of stagnant, and no dialogue ensued
Youtube: 250,000 hits, but few of them from the core audience
Text alert systems: 200 subscribers. Using http://www.txtwire.com Sent out text alerts to promote under-enrolled courses.
Facebook: haven't really exploited that much. 49 "fans."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJW0nWJaB4g
Chick-Fil-A asked the user who created their facebook page to administer the site, because the corporate approach doesn't always work. "They just come in with the MBA approach" Of course, education isn't chicken sandwiches.
A lot of corporate involvement in social media consists of barging in on other people's conversations. [yes].
**** Use facebook to LISTEN to what your audience is saying. Not as sold on FB as a dissemination tool.
Twitter: 26 followers. Ugh. "We haven't really got a huge strategy for using this."
"tech tips tuesday" and "websites wednesday"
Most hardcore twitter users are posting ten times a day. The weekly strategy seems anemic.
using http://twitterfeed.com
Is hoping to combine twitter and blogs. It strikes me that, after three years, there need to be cultural changes to encourage participation. Everyone wants to have fun.
"I can usually see a spike in registration within 24 hours of a newsletter going out" (magnet mail, a paid service)
I'm attending this session at #ttix. Victoria Williams is moving through a list of technologies that she's used to promote UEN's offerings.
Blogs: kind of stagnant, and no dialogue ensued
Youtube: 250,000 hits, but few of them from the core audience
Text alert systems: 200 subscribers. Using http://www.txtwire.com Sent out text alerts to promote under-enrolled courses.
Facebook: haven't really exploited that much. 49 "fans."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJW0nWJaB4g
Chick-Fil-A asked the user who created their facebook page to administer the site, because the corporate approach doesn't always work. "They just come in with the MBA approach" Of course, education isn't chicken sandwiches.
A lot of corporate involvement in social media consists of barging in on other people's conversations. [yes].
**** Use facebook to LISTEN to what your audience is saying. Not as sold on FB as a dissemination tool.
Twitter: 26 followers. Ugh. "We haven't really got a huge strategy for using this."
"tech tips tuesday" and "websites wednesday"
Most hardcore twitter users are posting ten times a day. The weekly strategy seems anemic.
using http://twitterfeed.com
Is hoping to combine twitter and blogs. It strikes me that, after three years, there need to be cultural changes to encourage participation. Everyone wants to have fun.
"I can usually see a spike in registration within 24 hours of a newsletter going out" (magnet mail, a paid service)
Thursday, May 28
Dual Perspectives Article
Dual Perspectives Article: "Everyone complains about 'e-mail overload' — getting so much stupid corporate e-mail that you miss out on important messages. But Byron Reeves has figured out a way to solve the problem.
How? By turning corporate e-mail into a game.
Reeves, a communications professor at Stanford, had studied the spectacularly popular online game World of Warcraft, and he knew that people inside the game place enormous value on the game's artificial currency of gold pieces. They'll go on quests and spend hours doing boring tasks just to earn it. That gave him an idea: Why not create a system where users earn virtual currency by intelligently using e-mail?"
How? By turning corporate e-mail into a game.
Reeves, a communications professor at Stanford, had studied the spectacularly popular online game World of Warcraft, and he knew that people inside the game place enormous value on the game's artificial currency of gold pieces. They'll go on quests and spend hours doing boring tasks just to earn it. That gave him an idea: Why not create a system where users earn virtual currency by intelligently using e-mail?"
Games Without Frontiers: The Game of Politics Is Ready for Its Upgrade
Games Without Frontiers: The Game of Politics Is Ready for Its Upgrade: "But let me suggest another way to look at it. Maybe American democracy really is a game -- and maybe that's the best thing about it.
What, after all, is a game? A game is a set of rules that gives players a set of goals but also constrains their behavior in striving for those goals; it architects their behavior in an interesting and hopefully enjoyable way. A really well-designed game is 'balanced' and self-correcting. In a game of pool, for example, if you take an early lead by sinking a ton of balls, you quickly discover that -- whoops -- the game gets harder because your opponents' balls block all your shots. In MMOs like World of Warcraft, different classes of players do different things; as a result, no one class can run roughshod over all others."
What, after all, is a game? A game is a set of rules that gives players a set of goals but also constrains their behavior in striving for those goals; it architects their behavior in an interesting and hopefully enjoyable way. A really well-designed game is 'balanced' and self-correcting. In a game of pool, for example, if you take an early lead by sinking a ton of balls, you quickly discover that -- whoops -- the game gets harder because your opponents' balls block all your shots. In MMOs like World of Warcraft, different classes of players do different things; as a result, no one class can run roughshod over all others."
Wednesday, May 27
The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online
The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online:
"Instead of gathering on collective farms, we gather in collective worlds. Instead of state factories, we have desktop factories connected to virtual co-ops. Instead of sharing drill bits, picks, and shovels, we share apps, scripts, and APIs. Instead of faceless politburos, we have faceless meritocracies, where the only thing that matters is getting things done. Instead of national production, we have peer production. Instead of government rations and subsidies, we have a bounty of free goods."
"Instead of gathering on collective farms, we gather in collective worlds. Instead of state factories, we have desktop factories connected to virtual co-ops. Instead of sharing drill bits, picks, and shovels, we share apps, scripts, and APIs. Instead of faceless politburos, we have faceless meritocracies, where the only thing that matters is getting things done. Instead of national production, we have peer production. Instead of government rations and subsidies, we have a bounty of free goods."
Saturday, April 4
two items I stumbled across are both interesting and troubling. First, the University of Virginia, citing 99% laptop ownership among its students, is closing down their computer labs over three years to cut costs:
http://www.metafilter.com/80409/Rethinking-the-higher-education-computer-lab-at-U-of-VA
And in other news, the venerable Networked Writing Environment closed down last summer. I never used it, but over the years I've kept stumbling across it and reading references to it. It seems like a lot of good scholars worked in that lab and now it is gone as well:
http://www.nwe.ufl.edu/writing/closing/
I feel really fortunate that our two labs are student-funded, but I also have noted that increasingly more laptops are showing up in class. These issues have cropped up on Techrhet repeatedly over the years, of course. Perhaps the economic climate is accelerating certain changes to the technological context of writing instruction.
http://www.metafilter.com/
And in other news, the venerable Networked Writing Environment closed down last summer. I never used it, but over the years I've kept stumbling across it and reading references to it. It seems like a lot of good scholars worked in that lab and now it is gone as well:
http://www.nwe.ufl.edu/
I feel really fortunate that our two labs are student-funded, but I also have noted that increasingly more laptops are showing up in class. These issues have cropped up on Techrhet repeatedly over the years, of course. Perhaps the economic climate is accelerating certain changes to the technological context of writing instruction.
Thursday, April 2
Wednesday, February 18
Sunday, November 23
On 10/24/2000 I wrote: "There are a lot of really smart geek conservatives voting for Bush, and I just can't figure it out. Are they voting for the platform? Because the man himself just comes across as a real clueless gomer. Not that Gore has a personality."
Thursday, November 13
The great thing about Ping.Fm is that you can update all of your social networking sites at once, leading to a barrage of trojan friend spam.
Tuesday, November 11
Working in the noisy section of the library, by an outlet. Earplug in one ear, candy wrapper jammed in the other.
If I was Bill and Ted and brought Lincoln to the mall, I'd totally keep him out of the bookstore, especially the biography section.
Tuesday, May 13
The New York Times > Business > What Corporate America Can't Build: A Sentence
The New York Times > Business > What Corporate America Can't Build: A Sentence: "'E-mail is a party to which English teachers have not been invited,' Dr. Hogan said. 'It has companies tearing their hair out.'"
Saturday, May 10
Thursday, May 1
Theory of Margin
Theory of Margin: "A new area of study that has emerged from McClusky's Power-Load-Margin theory is the degree to which instructors of adults contribute to the depletion or reduction of discretionary energy (margin) in adult students. This work has been pioneered by Day and James (1984) at the University of Wyoming. In a series of interviews with adult students, they found numerous examples of instructor-generated load that they clustered into four areas: attitude, behavior, task, and environment. Examples of each are as follows:"
Tuesday, April 22
Tuesday, April 8, 2008: Monthly Program (BayCHI)
Tuesday, April 8, 2008: Monthly Program (BayCHI): "aking Amy Jo Kim�s principles to heart, it�s possible to make even the most productive social interactivities 'fun.' We already knew we could lose track of time and become immersed in our work but now we know how to help others fall into 'flow'. Kim reviews three case studies of social media � YouTube, Twitter and FaceBook -- implementing specific qualities of game mechanics."
Wednesday, April 16
Flexknowlogy � Defining “Creepy Treehouse”
Flexknowlogy � Defining “Creepy Treehouse”: "creepy treehouse
n. A place, physical or virtual (e.g. online), built by adults with the intention of luring in kids.
Example: “Kids … can see a [creepy treehouse] a mile away and generally do a good job in avoiding them.” John Krutsch in Are You Building a Creepy Treehouse?”"
n. A place, physical or virtual (e.g. online), built by adults with the intention of luring in kids.
Example: “Kids … can see a [creepy treehouse] a mile away and generally do a good job in avoiding them.” John Krutsch in Are You Building a Creepy Treehouse?”"
Ruminate � Blog Archive � I’m Not Interested in “the PLE”
Ruminate � Blog Archive � I’m Not Interested in “the PLE”
Chris Lott, who I discovered through John Krutsch.
Chris Lott, who I discovered through John Krutsch.
Wednesday, April 9
Self-employed technorati find places to network | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle
Self-employed technorati find places to network | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle: "'Rather than spending an extended period of time banging your head, the ability to shoot the question out to a room to get a response is really great,'' said Alex Hillman, who was an increasingly claustrophobic self-employed Web developer before founding IndependentsHall, a shared office space for his peers in Philadelphia."
Tuesday, April 1
Sunday, March 30
E L S U A ~ A KM Blog by Luis Suarez � Blog Archive � Giving up on Work e-mail - Status Report on Week 7
Friday, March 28
PmWiki | PmWiki / InitialSetupTasks
PmWiki | PmWiki / InitialSetupTasks: "Don't modify or rename pmwiki.php
PmWiki has been designed so that all customizations can be made without changing the distribution files -- one of its design goals is to provide seamless upgrades. PmWiki never writes to files in the local/ or cookbook/ directories, so placing your customizations here makes it easier to track the changes and upgrade PmWiki without losing the changes.
When changing the configuration of your site, always change the local/config.php file or add files to the cookbook/ or pub directories. Do not change pmwiki.php or the files in the scripts/ directory because the files are supposed to be overwritten upon upgrading.
You shouldn't rename pmwiki.php either. If you rename the file it will not be overwritten during an upgrade of the software and there will be a version mismatch. Many administrators add an index.php 'wrapper script' in the pmwiki directory that contains the following single line:
<?php include('pmwiki.php');"
Failure to heed this advice cost me a month or two of broken wiki when I upgraded and got too busy to troubleshoot.
PmWiki has been designed so that all customizations can be made without changing the distribution files -- one of its design goals is to provide seamless upgrades. PmWiki never writes to files in the local/ or cookbook/ directories, so placing your customizations here makes it easier to track the changes and upgrade PmWiki without losing the changes.
When changing the configuration of your site, always change the local/config.php file or add files to the cookbook/ or pub directories. Do not change pmwiki.php or the files in the scripts/ directory because the files are supposed to be overwritten upon upgrading.
You shouldn't rename pmwiki.php either. If you rename the file it will not be overwritten during an upgrade of the software and there will be a version mismatch. Many administrators add an index.php 'wrapper script' in the pmwiki directory that contains the following single line:
<?php include('pmwiki.php');"
Failure to heed this advice cost me a month or two of broken wiki when I upgraded and got too busy to troubleshoot.
Dual Monitors on OS X Leopard
Dual Monitors on OS X Leopard
Use when giving presentations to keep your annotations on the laptop and the slides on the public screen. I think.
Use when giving presentations to keep your annotations on the laptop and the slides on the public screen. I think.
Are You Taking Advantage of Web 2.0? - New York Times
Are You Taking Advantage of Web 2.0? - New York Times: "But you'll gain trust, goodwill and positive attention. You'll put a human face on your company. And you'll learn stuff about your customers that you wouldn't have discovered any other way."
Are You Taking Advantage of Web 2.0? - New York Times
Are You Taking Advantage of Web 2.0? - New York Times: "The audience loved that one; within seconds, there were 132 responses on the screen in a huge, scrolling list. 'Not enough money.' 'Don't understand it.' 'No technical resources.' 'Not enough manpower.' 'No visible return on investment.' 'Fear of ridicule.' 'Fear of slander.' 'Fear of permanence.' 'Fear of the public running amok.'
The fears are rational enough: over and over again, we've all seen blog comments devolve into juvenile, offensive bickering, backstabbing and grandstanding.
Even during my early blogging days, The Times's blogs didn't have comments. And yet, as several of my own readers wrote: Without comments, a blog is not a blog at all. It's just a Web page—Web 1.0.
The solution, of course, was moderation."
The fears are rational enough: over and over again, we've all seen blog comments devolve into juvenile, offensive bickering, backstabbing and grandstanding.
Even during my early blogging days, The Times's blogs didn't have comments. And yet, as several of my own readers wrote: Without comments, a blog is not a blog at all. It's just a Web page—Web 1.0.
The solution, of course, was moderation."
Web 2.0 and New Media Definitions - New Comm Biz - New media strategies for business
Web 2.0 and New Media Definitions - New Comm Biz - New media strategies for business: "Web 2.0 seems to be kind of an amorphous, nebulous entity. Everyone seems to have a different definition and no two are the same. Some even go as far to say that it doesn’t exist. VCs seem to be convinced of web 2.0’s existence however, and have proven so with their wallets."
Friday, March 21
Thursday, March 20
Friday, March 7
Monday, March 3
Friday, February 22
Tuesday, February 19
Tuesday, January 29
Tool Use Is Just a Trick of the Mind -- Balter 2008 (128): 2 -- ScienceNOW
Tool Use Is Just a Trick of the Mind -- Balter 2008 (128): 2 -- ScienceNOW: "Don't take that hammer for granted. Using tools may seem like second nature, but only a few animals can master the coordination and mental sophistication required. So how did primates learn to use tools in the first place? A new study in monkeys suggests that the brain's trick is to treat tools as just another body part."
Oooh, this is so activity theory!
Oooh, this is so activity theory!
Monday, January 28
Monday, January 14
With friends like these ... Tom Hodgkinson on the politics of the people behind Facebook | Technology | The Guardian
With friends like these ... Tom Hodgkinson on the politics of the people behind Facebook | Technology | The Guardian: "And does Facebook really connect people? Doesn't it rather disconnect us, since instead of doing something enjoyable such as talking and eating and dancing and drinking with my friends, I am merely sending them little ungrammatical notes and amusing photos in cyberspace, while chained to my desk? A friend of mine recently told me that he had spent a Saturday night at home alone on Facebook, drinking at his desk. What a gloomy image. Far from connecting us, Facebook actually isolates us at our workstations."
Wednesday, January 9
How Hot Did The Jet Fuel Heat The World Trade Center?
How Hot Did The Jet Fuel Heat The World Trade Center?: "'In the mid-1990s British Steel and the Building Research Establishment performed a series of six experiments at Cardington to investigate the behavior of steel frame buildings. These experiments were conducted in a simulated, eight-story building. Secondary steel beams were not protected. Despite the temperature of the steel beams reaching 800-900� C (1,500-1,700� F) in three of the tests (well above the traditionally assumed critical temperature of 600� C (1,100� F), no collapse was observed in any of the six experiments.'"
Tuesday, January 8
Monday, January 7
Gates bids farewell to tech gathering - MarketWatch
Gates bids farewell to tech gathering - MarketWatch: "In particular, he predicted that a key element in the next decade will be 'natural-user interface,' in which consumers interface with their devices in more natural ways. He even mentioned the iPhone - the iconic touch-screen wireless phone introduced last year by longtime Microsoft rival Apple Inc. (AAPL:
Apple Inc
News, chart, profile, more
Last: 177.64-2.41-1.34%
4:00pm 01/07/2008
Delayed quote data
Add to portfolio
Analyst
Create alert
Insider
Discuss
Financials
Sponsored by:
AAPL 177.64, -2.41, -1.3%) - as a key development in that area, and predicted that touch-screen and voice commands will play a much larger role in future electronics devices."
Apple Inc
News, chart, profile, more
Last: 177.64-2.41-1.34%
4:00pm 01/07/2008
Delayed quote data
Add to portfolio
Analyst
Create alert
Insider
Discuss
Financials
Sponsored by:
AAPL 177.64, -2.41, -1.3%) - as a key development in that area, and predicted that touch-screen and voice commands will play a much larger role in future electronics devices."
Sunday, December 30
Saturday, December 29
Wednesday, December 26
Saturday, December 22
Friday, December 21
Saturday, December 8
[my lawyer] asked me yesterday why it was that I never swore. He found me washing windows in this library, although nobody had ordered me to do that.
So I told my my maternal grandfather's idea that obscenity and blasphemy gave most people permission not to listen respectfully to whatever was being said.
I repeated an old story Grandfather Wills had taught me, which was about a town where a cannon was fired at noon every day. One day the cannoneer was sick at the last minute and was too incapacitated to fire the cannon.
So at high noon there was silence.
All the peole in the town jumped out of their skins when the sun reached its zenith. They asked each other in astonishment, "Good gravy! What was that?"
My lawyer wanted to know what that had to do with my not swearing.
I replied that in an era as foul mouthed as this one, "Good gravy" had the same power to startle as a cannon shot.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus
So I told my my maternal grandfather's idea that obscenity and blasphemy gave most people permission not to listen respectfully to whatever was being said.
I repeated an old story Grandfather Wills had taught me, which was about a town where a cannon was fired at noon every day. One day the cannoneer was sick at the last minute and was too incapacitated to fire the cannon.
So at high noon there was silence.
All the peole in the town jumped out of their skins when the sun reached its zenith. They asked each other in astonishment, "Good gravy! What was that?"
My lawyer wanted to know what that had to do with my not swearing.
I replied that in an era as foul mouthed as this one, "Good gravy" had the same power to startle as a cannon shot.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus
Friday, December 7
Thursday, December 6
Wednesday, December 5
Sunday, December 2
Friday, November 30
Wednesday, November 28
Tuesday, November 27
Monday, November 26
Wednesday, November 21
Tuesday, November 20
Monday, November 19
Friday, November 16
Thursday, November 15
Wednesday, November 14
Saturday, November 10
Tuesday, November 6
Wednesday, October 31
Saturday, October 20
Tuesday, October 16
Monday, October 15
Sunday, October 14
Saturday, October 13
Wednesday, September 5
Kevin Kelly -- The Technium: "As we refined this stuff, it lost some of its mass. We began to see through technology’s disguise as hard and cold and began to see it primarily as action. Today technology suggests software, genetic engineering, virtual realities, bandwidth, surveillance agents, and artificial intelligence. You wouldn’t hurt your toe if you dropped any of this. Technology became a force. A verb not a noun. A vital something that throws us forward, or pushes against us. Not just against us, but also against the biological world we perceive as our natural mode. It proved so strong in its action, so animal like in its presence that we now perceive technology as a super alien power, the thing to blame when things go wrong."
Thursday, August 23
Twiiter is IRC turned inside out | Kinkless: "Twitter is just IRC turned inside out. It’s a giant IRC channel for the whole twitterverse, but everyone is by default set to ignore. Reminds me of (which?) William Gibson story where they talk about turning a kill file inside out."
Wednesday, August 15
Wednesday, June 6
Thursday, May 24
I just took apart our dishwasher, cleaned out the clogged food chopper, and reassembled it. Last time we paid a guy $80 to do it, but I watched and learned his secrets. I also have another secret weapon that I should use more often, even for mundane stuff like this. It involves invoking a higher power before beginning. This generally calms me down before attempting a stressful task. Finding a manual at http://applianceblog.com was also very helpful. I think that's a good formula for a lot of problems:
1. Pray for help
2. Read the manual
3. Send the kids out to eat at Wendy's so you can work in peace.
4. Learn from a pro.
1. Pray for help
2. Read the manual
3. Send the kids out to eat at Wendy's so you can work in peace.
4. Learn from a pro.
Thursday, December 14
Thursday, October 12
With YouTube, Grad Student Hits Jackpot Again - New York Times: "“I wish we could have kept him as part of the company,” Mr. Botha said. “He was very, very creative. We were doing everything we could to convince him to defer.”"
Monday, September 4
BGG Thread: Making a copy of FMP from the files...: "Use a roller cutter or a chopping cutter to get the counters to be the exact same size. Clip the corners for a neater look. Then, once cut, spray a coat of Krylon Matte varnish--a couple light coats won't run the inks at all, even with ink jet printing. I prefer to use a matte photo paper for really sharp, nice-looking images on the counters. You'll end up with a very professional looking game."
Sunday, September 3
Saturday, September 2
Comments on 5352 | Ask MetaFilter: "A man was driving down the road with twenty penguins in the backseat. A cop stopped him and said that he couldn't drive around with the penguins in the car and told him he should take them to the zoo. The man agreed and drove off.
The next day the same man is driving down the road with twenty penguins in the back again. He is stopped by the same cop who says, 'Hey! I thought I told you to take those penguins to the zoo.'
The man replies 'I did. Today I'm taking them to the movies.'"
The next day the same man is driving down the road with twenty penguins in the back again. He is stopped by the same cop who says, 'Hey! I thought I told you to take those penguins to the zoo.'
The man replies 'I did. Today I'm taking them to the movies.'"
Monday, August 7
Saturday, August 5
Internet Truthiness | MetaFilter: "I've always been a big fan of Al Gore's, and after years of observation, I get the impression that in a place deep down and well-insulated inside Al Gore is a man who wouldn't do a thing to oppose a violent, bloody and comprehensive revolution, if one were to start.
And I like that.
I can't wait to see if he makes an appearance in the upcoming Futurama episodes."
And I like that.
I can't wait to see if he makes an appearance in the upcoming Futurama episodes."
Wednesday, August 2
Christine with some of the kids in our raft (which has a slow leak now) at Mirror lake last weekend.
Wednesday, July 19
I just bought four new Yokohama tires for our minivan online, after our "Big O" tires wore out after less than two years and 15k miles.
Monday, July 10
CultureCat | Rhetoric and Feminism: "Like medical doctors who learn from nutritionists, shamans, and artists without compromising their professional status, we can benefit from examining how the extracurriculum confers authority for representation and how we might extend that authority in our classes. Our students would benefit if we learned to see them as individuals who seek to write, not be written about, who seek to publish, not be published about, who seek to theorize, not be theorized about. (p. 89)"
CultureCat | Rhetoric and Feminism: "The extracurriculum I examine is constructed by desire, by the aspirations and imaginations of its participants. It posits writing as an action undertaken by motivated individuals who frequently see it as having social and economic consequences, including transformations in personal relationships and farming practices. (p. 80)"
I am Dan: "I wouldn’t say this was the buzz theme of the conference, but I did get a sense that the recent heavy focus on visual rhetoric was now being supplemented by aural concerns as well. I have to wonder about the perennial question about the purview of writing—what gets (de)emphasized when we move into writing programs film, images, sounds, etc?"
I am Dan: "A major focus of the conference for me and my colleagues from UNC, Erin Branch and Stephanie Morgan, was the podcast workshop we ran on Thursday. We got lots of positive feedback from participants and will likely try to develop the Web site for the workshop into something more substantial. I think it is fair to say that parts of the computers and writing community are beginning to emphasize and study the uses of sound in composition. I wouldn’t say this was the buzz theme of the conference, but I did get a sense that the recent heavy focus on visual rhetoric was now being supplemented by aural concerns as well. I have to wonder about the perennial question about the purview of writing—what gets (de)emphasized when we move into writing programs film, images, sounds, etc?"
BBC World Home Page: "What is the best way to teach someone about computers who has never seen one before? What about simply providing children with a PC and seeing what happens? Dan Simmons reports on just such a project taking place across India.
"
"
betwixt & between: decade - something from trAce: "I am writing to invite you to make a contribution to ‘decade’ (); an online writing project being launched this week to celebrate ten years of innovative digital activity at trAce Online Writing Centre, NTU. The completed project will take the shape of a writing 'quilt' of what I hope will be many different responses to technology and change."
Friday, April 21
I will be in my office (or down in the classroom) until 10 a.m. today collecting portfolios. If you can't make that deadline, there will be a box outside my door. If that seems sketchy, there is a large wooden pillar/drop box outside the English department office. Make sure that my name is on the portfolio so it can be directed to me. I would not be too late, as grades are due soon. I plan on finishing my grading by Monday at 5pm.
As we stated in class, (so both of you that attended may remember this), the portfolio should include the following:
1. significant event paper
2. summary strong strong response
3. bibliography
4. research paper
You can also include any work you did for Paul Nodal prior to my arrival.
In your cover letter, as we discussed IN CLASS, you should include the following:
1. An explanation of how you revised your work, and why.
2. Tell me what you've learned during the semester
3. Tell me what grade you feel you actually deserve given the work that you did for the course.
Thank you.
As we stated in class, (so both of you that attended may remember this), the portfolio should include the following:
1. significant event paper
2. summary strong strong response
3. bibliography
4. research paper
You can also include any work you did for Paul Nodal prior to my arrival.
In your cover letter, as we discussed IN CLASS, you should include the following:
1. An explanation of how you revised your work, and why.
2. Tell me what you've learned during the semester
3. Tell me what grade you feel you actually deserve given the work that you did for the course.
Thank you.
Friday, April 14
Thursday, April 6
Wednesday, April 5
Today: discuss chapter 22
April 7th, Friday: Annotated Bibliography due
April 14th, Friday: exploratory research paper due
April 7th, Friday: Annotated Bibliography due
April 14th, Friday: exploratory research paper due
UCSC Library - How To Write an Annotated Bibliography: "3. PURPOSE
Not to be confused with the abstract%u2014which merely gives a
summary of the main points of a work%u2014the annotated bibliography both
describes and evaluates those points. Whether an annotated bibliography
concludes an article or book%u2014or is even itself a comprehensive, book-length
listing of sources%u2014its purposes are the same:
To
illustrate the scope and quality of one's own research
To review the
literature published on a particular topic
To provide the reader/researcher
with supplementary, illustrative or alternative sources
To allow the
reader to see if a particular source was consulted
To provide examples
of the type of resources available on a given topic
To place original
research in a historical context"
Not to be confused with the abstract%u2014which merely gives a
summary of the main points of a work%u2014the annotated bibliography both
describes and evaluates those points. Whether an annotated bibliography
concludes an article or book%u2014or is even itself a comprehensive, book-length
listing of sources%u2014its purposes are the same:
To
illustrate the scope and quality of one's own research
To review the
literature published on a particular topic
To provide the reader/researcher
with supplementary, illustrative or alternative sources
To allow the
reader to see if a particular source was consulted
To provide examples
of the type of resources available on a given topic
To place original
research in a historical context"
Monday, April 3
April 5th: Please bring one bibliography entry to class.
April 7th: Annotated bibliography due. Eight sources, two paragraphs (minimum) per source.
April 14th: Rough draft of exploratory paper.
April 7th: Annotated bibliography due. Eight sources, two paragraphs (minimum) per source.
April 14th: Rough draft of exploratory paper.
Friday, March 31
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts: Home
Some free and legal David Byrne/Brian Eno. They are encouraging people to remix this. When I was a youth, "remix culture" didn't exist.
Tip: think of your research paper as a remixing of existing knowledge, combined with your own insights.
Some free and legal David Byrne/Brian Eno. They are encouraging people to remix this. When I was a youth, "remix culture" didn't exist.
Tip: think of your research paper as a remixing of existing knowledge, combined with your own insights.
Feminist Pedagogy in Composition
A sample annotated bibliography. You will only need to write a couple of paragraphs for each entry.
A sample annotated bibliography. You will only need to write a couple of paragraphs for each entry.
Monday, March 27
Monday, March 20
For those of you that have been missing lately:
For class on Monday, I'd like everyone to visit the actual physical library and find two *good* sources related to their research question and post them to your weblog, along with a summary of each source and how it relates to your project.
For class on Monday, I'd like everyone to visit the actual physical library and find two *good* sources related to their research question and post them to your weblog, along with a summary of each source and how it relates to your project.
Friday, March 17
Blogger Help : What is BlogThis! ?: "What is BlogThis! ?
BlogThis! is an easy way to make a blog post without visiting blogger.com. Once you add the BlogThis! link to your browser's toolbar, blogging will be a snap. Or rather, a click. Clicking BlogThis! creates a mini-interface to Blogger prepopulated with a link to the web page you are visiting, as well as any text you have highlighted on that page. Add additional text if you wish and then publish or post from within BlogThis!
There are two ways to use BlogThis!: if you use Windows and Internet Explorer, you can use BlogThis! straight from the Google Toolbar. If you're on another browser, just drag the link below to your browser's Link bar."
BlogThis! is an easy way to make a blog post without visiting blogger.com. Once you add the BlogThis! link to your browser's toolbar, blogging will be a snap. Or rather, a click. Clicking BlogThis! creates a mini-interface to Blogger prepopulated with a link to the web page you are visiting, as well as any text you have highlighted on that page. Add additional text if you wish and then publish or post from within BlogThis!
There are two ways to use BlogThis!: if you use Windows and Internet Explorer, you can use BlogThis! straight from the Google Toolbar. If you're on another browser, just drag the link below to your browser's Link bar."
dailypennsylvanian.com - Penn prof: Point shaving possibly a factor in tourney: "Wolfers observed that in games with double-digit favorites, those teams tend to barely miss covering the spread. For example, in games with 14-point spreads, the favorite often tends to win by 12 or 13, winning by 15 or 16 far less often. In addition, while small favorites cover the spread about 50 percent of the time, large favorites only cover in 47 percent of the games."
I read the Wharton piece, and it sounds very plausible that he has detected, on a massive scale
I read the Wharton piece, and it sounds very plausible that he has detected, on a massive scale
NPR : Economist Claims to Have Evidence of Point Shaving: "Justin Wolfers, an economist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, has analyzed 44,000 college basketball games and says he has found statistical evidence of point shaving among teams which are prohibitively favored by Las Vegas bookmakers."
Wednesday, March 15
ABC News: 'Freakonomics': What Makes a Perfect Parent?: "Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, co-authors of the best-selling 'Freakonomics,' pored through a massive government database called the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study. Starting in the late 1990s, it followed 20,000 American children, collecting information on many aspects of their lives. Levitt and Dubner used the ECLS to see what helps young children do well on tests.
'Not only does it measure their scores,' said Dubner. 'It also conducts extensive interviews with the families of the kids, so we know a lot about each family and what they do in the family.'"
'Not only does it measure their scores,' said Dubner. 'It also conducts extensive interviews with the families of the kids, so we know a lot about each family and what they do in the family.'"
Monday, March 13
1. reread chapter six and ask yourself honestly, "did I actually do a summary/strong response?"
2. post to your blog the following: a) your research question, b) What you currently know, think and feel about your topic, and c) who are you? How does your identity and experiences affect what you know or think about this topic?
3. Read chapter 21 for class and prepare for a "surprise" quiz. Read it carefully, don't just skim along.
2. post to your blog the following: a) your research question, b) What you currently know, think and feel about your topic, and c) who are you? How does your identity and experiences affect what you know or think about this topic?
3. Read chapter 21 for class and prepare for a "surprise" quiz. Read it carefully, don't just skim along.
Tuesday, March 7
How-to: Working wonders with OpenOffice 2.0's Web Wizard
How-to: Working wonders with OpenOffice 2.0's Web Wizard: "I can't believe nobody told me about the Web Wizard in OpenOffice.org 2.0. Why haven't I been reading about it on all the blogs? It's one of the coolest new features in 2.0."
Scobleizer - Microsoft Geek Blogger
Scobleizer - Microsoft Geek Blogger: "Ray’s speech spreading
I watch how fast news spreads and the words that bloggers use to describe things. Ray’s speech has been spreading slowly in this week of Origami interest. But, look at the language:"
I watch how fast news spreads and the words that bloggers use to describe things. Ray’s speech has been spreading slowly in this week of Origami interest. But, look at the language:"
Scobleizer - Microsoft Geek Blogger
Scobleizer - Microsoft Geek Blogger: "Ray’s speech spreading
I watch how fast news spreads and the words that bloggers use to describe things. Ray’s speech has been spreading slowly in this week of Origami interest. But, look at the language:"
I watch how fast news spreads and the words that bloggers use to describe things. Ray’s speech has been spreading slowly in this week of Origami interest. But, look at the language:"
Monday, March 6
class research work
Matthew A. Mason
6 Feb 2006
English 1010
Research Stategies
Research Strategies
Dose the predominate coulter in Utah
Dose the predominate religion support over indulgence
Do Utah
1) Pick key words to your Question
A) Family size
B) School debt
C) Consumption
D) Bankruptcy rate
E) Materialism
F) Utah
G )LDS population
H) Credit card use and Bankruptcy
2) Wed search hits for key words / URLS:
A) Scholar.google .com
B) Gov.com
3) Once you find good or interesting facts:
A) Cut in past
B) Blog This
Yahoo! Mail
Use Photomail to share photos without annoying attachments.
Tamie Broderick
March 6, 2006
English 1010
Cranes Research Strategies
1- Get a question
2- Think of keywords associated with the question
3- Start searching the keywords (google, and internet
sites)
4- Blog some good sites that would be interesting for the
paper.
Cranes research strategies
Geoff Stanley
ENGL 1010
March 6, 2006
- Get your questions
- Start thinking of keywords associated with the question.
- Start googling the keywords.
- Narrow down your search by keeping an electronic journal of your keywords
Yahoo! Mail
Bring photos to life! New PhotoMail makes sharing a breeze.
list
Marcus Jessop
English 1010
Materialism
Bankruptcy
Marriage Rates
School debt
Family Size
Business
Consumption
Household Incomes
Credit Card Debt
Missions
Yahoo! Mail
Bring photos to life! New PhotoMail makes sharing a breeze.
Crane's guide to research.
Jared Crockett
ENGL 1010
3/6/2006
Mark’s Guide to Research
1) Come up with a question.
2) List keywords
3) Find non-biased sources that answer questions
4) Save good source information
5) Summarize thoroughly
eresearch methods
Scott Armstrong
Research Methods-online, dwah hah hah!
.Does the “dominant culture” encourage materialism”?
Utah, Bankruptcy, Bankruptcy Rates, Consumption, Marriage Rates, Family Size, (http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,595072079,00.html) Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard Law School professor and expert in bankruptcy issues, recently told the Deseret Morning News that a family with children is nearly three times more likely to file for bankruptcy than a family with no children.
.Are there things that the LDS church encourage things that aren’t strictly doctrinal?
.What’s the correlation between family size and bankruptcy?
. Where does debt come from in lds church?
.Credit Card debt?
www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/credit/interviews/warren.htm www.irs.gov/efile/article/0,,id=101316,00.html
.Medical debt?
LN DiPadova - cppa.utah.edu
Yahoo! Acesso Grátis
Internet rápida e grátis. Instale o discador agora!
Saturday, March 4
Friday, March 3
E330 Information Architecture
Peg Syverson's 1997 Information Architecture syllabus. I took a short course on this in 1992. I think Information Architecture still exists, but has been renamed and narrowed in its scope.
Peg Syverson's 1997 Information Architecture syllabus. I took a short course on this in 1992. I think Information Architecture still exists, but has been renamed and narrowed in its scope.
Daily Herald - BYU study: Perceived racism leads to depression among Hispanics: "BYU study: Perceived racism leads to depression among Hispanics PDF | Print | E-mail
Daily Herald
PROVO -- Perceived racism may lead to depression and sleep problems in Utah's Hispanic community, according to a new study by a Brigham Young University researcher.
Previous studies have linked depression and sleep disorders, said BYU clinical psychologist Patrick Steffen, but his new study looks at racism, sleep disorders and depression together.
'We found that perceived racism impacts the quality of their sleep and that disturbed sleep is related to depression,' Steffen told the Deseret Morning News in a copyright story.
The perceived racism causes depression because those affected have difficulty determining where they fit in with other people, said Monroe White, a clinical psychologist at the Mountainlands Community Health Clinic in Provo."
Daily Herald
PROVO -- Perceived racism may lead to depression and sleep problems in Utah's Hispanic community, according to a new study by a Brigham Young University researcher.
Previous studies have linked depression and sleep disorders, said BYU clinical psychologist Patrick Steffen, but his new study looks at racism, sleep disorders and depression together.
'We found that perceived racism impacts the quality of their sleep and that disturbed sleep is related to depression,' Steffen told the Deseret Morning News in a copyright story.
The perceived racism causes depression because those affected have difficulty determining where they fit in with other people, said Monroe White, a clinical psychologist at the Mountainlands Community Health Clinic in Provo."
Wednesday, March 1
Monday, February 27
Please read chapters 6 and 21 for Wednesday, and bring some possible topics for your third paper to class.
There will be a quiz.
There will be a quiz.
Friday, February 24
In Focus | December 2005 | Fun With Dick and Jane and Judd Uncut: "THE POWER
of the ‘VOMIT PASS’
You told the WGA about writing what you call a “vomit pass” on your scripts. Could you explain this for the aspiring scenarists in our audience?
I read a book by Ann Lamott called “Bird by Bird,” and in the book she talks about the “Down-Up Theory” — “Get it down, then fix it up” — and how you shouldn’t judge yourself when you’re writing your first draft. That should be a moment for pure creativity, and being too hard on yourself prevents you from finishing.
So I’ve taken that advice. I call it a “vomit draft,” which means I try to write a first draft really fast and not judge myself — and then I look at it and see what the hell happened, then deal with it in a more critical way.
Other people I worked with when I was a show-runner on TV shows could literally sit in a room and obsess for hours and hours over whether or not to put a comma somewhere. And you could see how much pain they were in as they were writing, because they were judging the work as they were writing it — and that’s impossible. I guess it’s possible — some people do it — but those are the people that take a long time to write, or suffer through it.
Do they tend to burn out earlier?
I don’t know. I just think it makes you write less. I read a lot about writing and how the brain works, and it’s true that your brain is cut in half, and one half judges and one half is really creative — and you shouldn’t have ’em working together.
"
of the ‘VOMIT PASS’
You told the WGA about writing what you call a “vomit pass” on your scripts. Could you explain this for the aspiring scenarists in our audience?
I read a book by Ann Lamott called “Bird by Bird,” and in the book she talks about the “Down-Up Theory” — “Get it down, then fix it up” — and how you shouldn’t judge yourself when you’re writing your first draft. That should be a moment for pure creativity, and being too hard on yourself prevents you from finishing.
So I’ve taken that advice. I call it a “vomit draft,” which means I try to write a first draft really fast and not judge myself — and then I look at it and see what the hell happened, then deal with it in a more critical way.
Other people I worked with when I was a show-runner on TV shows could literally sit in a room and obsess for hours and hours over whether or not to put a comma somewhere. And you could see how much pain they were in as they were writing, because they were judging the work as they were writing it — and that’s impossible. I guess it’s possible — some people do it — but those are the people that take a long time to write, or suffer through it.
Do they tend to burn out earlier?
I don’t know. I just think it makes you write less. I read a lot about writing and how the brain works, and it’s true that your brain is cut in half, and one half judges and one half is really creative — and you shouldn’t have ’em working together.
"
Wednesday, February 22
**** If you received this email, please reply to me with the words "I got it" ****
Our English 1010 class home page is:
http://tenmoreminutes.blogspot.com
today in class we submitted drafts, wrote a reflective memo, and signed up for http://prenhall.com/harris and took a grammar quiz.
For next class period: Read the article I have linked to and included below. Please read it closely, and be prepared to answer this question, and many others:
How does Gladwell try to persuade us?
What are some examples of good description in this essay?
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/050829fa_fact
THE MORAL-HAZARD MYTH
by MALCOLM GLADWELL
The bad idea behind our failed health-care system.
Issue of 2005-08-29
Posted 2005-08-22
Tooth decay begins, typically, when debris becomes trapped between the teeth and along the ridges and in the grooves of the molars. The food rots. It becomes colonized with bacteria. The bacteria feeds off sugars in the mouth and forms an acid that begins to eat away at the enamel of the teeth. Slowly, the bacteria works its way through to the dentin, the inner structure, and from there the cavity begins to blossom three-dimensionally, spreading inward and sideways. When the decay reaches the pulp tissue, the blood vessels, and the nerves that serve the tooth, the pain starts—an insistent throbbing. The tooth turns brown. It begins to lose its hard structure, to the point where a dentist can reach into a cavity with a hand instrument and scoop out the decay. At the base of the tooth, the bacteria mineralizes into tartar, which begins to irritate the gums. They become puffy and bright red and start to recede, leaving more and more of the tooth's root exposed. When the infection works its way down to the bone, the structure holding the tooth in begins to collapse altogether.
Several years ago, two Harvard researchers, Susan Starr Sered and Rushika Fernandopulle, set out to interview people without health-care coverage for a book they were writing, "Uninsured in America." They talked to as many kinds of people as they could find, collecting stories of untreated depression and struggling single mothers and chronically injured laborers—and the most common complaint they heard was about teeth. Gina, a hairdresser in Idaho, whose husband worked as a freight manager at a chain store, had "a peculiar mannerism of keeping her mouth closed even when speaking." It turned out that she hadn't been able to afford dental care for three years, and one of her front teeth was rotting. Daniel, a construction worker, pulled out his bad teeth with pliers. Then, there was Loretta, who worked nights at a university research center in Mississippi, and was missing most of her teeth. "They'll break off after a while, and then you just grab a hold of them, and they work their way out," she explained to Sered and Fernandopulle. "It hurts so bad, because the tooth aches. Then it's a relief just to get it out of there. The hole closes up itself anyway. So it's so much better."
People without health insurance have bad teeth because, if you're paying for everything out of your own pocket, going to the dentist for a checkup seems like a luxury. It isn't, of course. The loss of teeth makes eating fresh fruits and vegetables difficult, and a diet heavy in soft, processed foods exacerbates more serious health problems, like diabetes. The pain of tooth decay leads many people to use alcohol as a salve. And those struggling to get ahead in the job market quickly find that the unsightliness of bad teeth, and the self-consciousness that results, can become a major barrier. If your teeth are bad, you're not going to get a job as a receptionist, say, or a cashier. You're going to be put in the back somewhere, far from the public eye. What Loretta, Gina, and Daniel understand, the two authors tell us, is that bad teeth have come to be seen as a marker of "poor parenting, low educational achievement and slow or faulty intellectual development." They are an outward marker of caste. "Almost every time we asked interviewees what their first priority would be if the president established universal health coverage tomorrow," Sered and Fernandopulle write, "the immediate answer was 'my teeth.' "
The U. S. health-care system, according to "Uninsured in America," has created a group of people who increasingly look different from others and suffer in ways that others do not. The leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the United States is unpaid medical bills. Half of the uninsured owe money to hospitals, and a third are being pursued by collection agencies. Children without health insurance are less likely to receive medical attention for serious injuries, for recurrent ear infections, or for asthma. Lung-cancer patients without insurance are less likely to receive surgery, chemotherapy, or radiation treatment. Heart-attack victims without health insurance are less likely to receive angioplasty. People with pneumonia who don't have health insurance are less likely to receive X rays or consultations. The death rate in any given year for someone without health insurance is twenty-five per cent higher than for someone with insur-ance. Because the uninsured are sicker than the rest of us, they can't get better jobs, and because they can't get better jobs they can't afford health insurance, and because they can't afford health insurance they get even sicker. John, the manager of a bar in Idaho, tells Sered and Fernandopulle that as a result of various workplace injuries over the years he takes eight ibuprofen, waits two hours, then takes eight more—and tries to cadge as much prescription pain medication as he can from friends. "There are times when I should've gone to the doctor, but I couldn't afford to go because I don't have insurance," he says. "Like when my back messed up, I should've gone. If I had insurance, I would've went, because I know I could get treatment, but when you can't afford it you don't go. Because the harder the hole you get into in terms of bills, then you'll never get out. So you just say, 'I can deal with the pain.' "
One of the great mysteries of political life in the United States is why Americans are so devoted to their health-care system. Six times in the past century—during the First World War, during the Depression, during the Truman and Johnson Administrations, in the Senate in the nineteen-seventies, and during the Clinton years—efforts have been made to introduce some kind of universal health insurance, and each time the efforts have been rejected. Instead, the United States has opted for a makeshift system of increasing complexity and dysfunction. Americans spend $5,267 per capita on health care every year, almost two and half times the industrialized world's median of $2,193; the extra spending comes to hundreds of billions of dollars a year. What does that extra spending buy us? Americans have fewer doctors per capita than most Western countries. We go to the doctor less than people in other Western countries. We get admitted to the hospital less frequently than people in other Western countries. We are less satisfied with our health care than our counterparts in other countries. American life expectancy is lower than the Western average. Childhood-immunization rates in the United States are lower than average. Infant-mortality rates are in the nineteenth percentile of industrialized nations. Doctors here perform more high-end medical procedures, such as coronary angioplasties, than in other countries, but most of the wealthier Western countries have more CT scanners than the United States does, and Switzerland, Japan, Austria, and Finland all have more MRI machines per capita. Nor is our system more efficient. The United States spends more than a thousand dollars per capita per year—or close to four hundred billion dollars—on health-care-related paperwork and administration, whereas Canada, for example, spends only about three hundred dollars per capita. And, of course, every other country in the industrialized world insures all its citizens; despite those extra hundreds of billions of dollars we spend each year, we leave forty-five million people without any insurance. A country that displays an almost ruthless commitment to efficiency and performance in every aspect of its economy—a country that switched to Japanese cars the moment they were more reliable, and to Chinese T-shirts the moment they were five cents cheaper—has loyally stuck with a health-care system that leaves its citizenry pulling out their teeth with pliers.
America's health-care mess is, in part, simply an accident of history. The fact that there have been six attempts at universal health coverage in the last century suggests that there has long been support for the idea. But politics has always got in the way. In both Europe and the United States, for example, the push for health insurance was led, in large part, by organized labor. But in Europe the unions worked through the political system, fighting for coverage for all citizens. From the start, health insurance in Europe was public and universal, and that created powerful political support for any attempt to expand benefits. In the United States, by contrast, the unions worked through the collective-bargaining system and, as a result, could win health benefits only for their own members. Health insurance here has always been private and selective, and every attempt to expand benefits has resulted in a paralyzing political battle over who would be added to insurance rolls and who ought to pay for those additions.
Policy is driven by more than politics, however. It is equally driven by ideas, and in the past few decades a particular idea has taken hold among prominent American economists which has also been a powerful impediment to the expansion of health insurance. The idea is known as "moral hazard." Health economists in other Western nations do not share this obsession. Nor do most Americans. But moral hazard has profoundly shaped the way think tanks formulate policy and the way experts argue and the way health insurers structure their plans and the way legislation and regulations have been written. The health-care mess isn't merely the unintentional result of political dysfunction, in other words. It is also the deliberate consequence of the way in which American policymakers have come to think about insurance.
"Moral hazard" is the term economists use to describe the fact that insurance can change the behavior of the person being insured. If your office gives you and your co-workers all the free Pepsi you want—if your employer, in effect, offers universal Pepsi insurance—you'll drink more Pepsi than you would have otherwise. If you have a no-deductible fire-insurance policy, you may be a little less diligent in clearing the brush away from your house. The savings-and-loan crisis of the nineteen-eighties was created, in large part, by the fact that the federal government insured savings deposits of up to a hundred thousand dollars, and so the newly deregulated S. & L.s made far riskier investments than they would have otherwise. Insurance can have the paradoxical effect of producing risky and wasteful behavior. Economists spend a great deal of time thinking about such moral hazard for good reason. Insurance is an attempt to make human life safer and more secure. But, if those efforts can backfire and produce riskier behavior, providing insurance becomes a much more complicated and problematic endeavor.
In 1968, the economist Mark Pauly argued that moral hazard played an enormous role in medicine, and, as John Nyman writes in his book "The Theory of the Demand for Health Insurance," Pauly's paper has become the "single most influential article in the health economics literature." Nyman, an economist at the University of Minnesota, says that the fear of moral hazard lies behind the thicket of co-payments and deductibles and utilization reviews which characterizes the American health-insurance system. Fear of moral hazard, Nyman writes, also explains "the general lack of enthusiasm by U.S. health economists for the expansion of health insurance coverage (for example, national health insurance or expanded Medicare benefits) in the U.S."
What Nyman is saying is that when your insurance company requires that you make a twenty-dollar co-payment for a visit to the doctor, or when your plan includes an annual five-hundred-dollar or thousand-dollar deductible, it's not simply an attempt to get you to pick up a larger share of your health costs. It is an attempt to make your use of the health-care system more efficient. Making you responsible for a share of the costs, the argument runs, will reduce moral hazard: you'll no longer grab one of those free Pepsis when you aren't really thirsty. That's also why Nyman says that the notion of moral hazard is behind the "lack of enthusiasm" for expansion of health insurance. If you think of insurance as producing wasteful consumption of medical services, then the fact that there are forty-five million Americans without health insurance is no longer an immediate cause for alarm. After all, it's not as if the uninsured never go to the doctor. They spend, on average, $934 a year on medical care. A moral-hazard theorist would say that they go to the doctor when they really have to. Those of us with private insurance, by contrast, consume $2,347 worth of health care a year. If a lot of that extra $1,413 is waste, then maybe the uninsured person is the truly efficient consumer of health care.
The moral-hazard argument makes sense, however, only if we consume health care in the same way that we consume other consumer goods, and to economists like Nyman this assumption is plainly absurd. We go to the doctor grudgingly, only because we're sick. "Moral hazard is overblown," the Princeton economist Uwe Reinhardt says. "You always hear that the demand for health care is unlimited. This is just not true. People who are very well insured, who are very rich, do you see them check into the hospital because it's free? Do people really like to go to the doctor? Do they check into the hospital instead of playing golf?"
For that matter, when you have to pay for your own health care, does your consumption really become more efficient? In the late nineteen-seventies, the rand Corporation did an extensive study on the question, randomly assigning families to health plans with co-payment levels at zero per cent, twenty-five per cent, fifty per cent, or ninety-five per cent, up to six thousand dollars. As you might expect, the more that people were asked to chip in for their health care the less care they used. The problem was that they cut back equally on both frivolous care and useful care. Poor people in the high-deductible group with hypertension, for instance, didn't do nearly as good a job of controlling their blood pressure as those in other groups, resulting in a ten-per-cent increase in the likelihood of death. As a recent Commonwealth Fund study concluded, cost sharing is "a blunt instrument." Of course it is: how should the average consumer be expected to know beforehand what care is frivolous and what care is useful? I just went to the dermatologist to get moles checked for skin cancer. If I had had to pay a hundred per cent, or even fifty per cent, of the cost of the visit, I might not have gone. Would that have been a wise decision? I have no idea. But if one of those moles really is cancerous, that simple, inexpensive visit could save the health-care system tens of thousands of dollars (not to mention saving me a great deal of heartbreak). The focus on moral hazard suggests that the changes we make in our behavior when we have insurance are nearly always wasteful. Yet, when it comes to health care, many of the things we do only because we have insurance—like getting our moles checked, or getting our teeth cleaned regularly, or getting a mammogram or engaging in other routine preventive care—are anything but wasteful and inefficient. In fact, they are behaviors that could end up saving the health-care system a good deal of money.
Sered and Fernandopulle tell the story of Steve, a factory worker from northern Idaho, with a "grotesquelooking left hand—what looks like a bone sticks out the side." When he was younger, he broke his hand. "The doctor wanted to operate on it," he recalls. "And because I didn't have insurance, well, I was like 'I ain't gonna have it operated on.' The doctor said, 'Well, I can wrap it for you with an Ace bandage.' I said, 'Ahh, let's do that, then.' " Steve uses less health care than he would if he had insurance, but that's not because he has defeated the scourge of moral hazard. It's because instead of getting a broken bone fixed he put a bandage on it.
At the center of the Bush Administration's plan to address the health-insurance mess are Health Savings Accounts, and Health Savings Accounts are exactly what you would come up with if you were concerned, above all else, with minimizing moral hazard. The logic behind them was laid out in the 2004 Economic Report of the President. Americans, the report argues, have too much health insurance: typical plans cover things that they shouldn't, creating the problem of overconsumption. Several paragraphs are then devoted to explaining the theory of moral hazard. The report turns to the subject of the uninsured, concluding that they fall into several groups. Some are foreigners who may be covered by their countries of origin. Some are people who could be covered by Medicaid but aren't or aren't admitting that they are. Finally, a large number "remain uninsured as a matter of choice." The report continues, "Researchers believe that as many as one-quarter of those without health insurance had coverage available through an employer but declined the coverage. . . . Still others may remain uninsured because they are young and healthy and do not see the need for insurance." In other words, those with health insurance are overinsured and their behavior is distorted by moral hazard. Those without health insurance use their own money to make decisions about insurance based on an assessment of their needs. The insured are wasteful. The uninsured are prudent. So what's the solution? Make the insured a little bit more like the uninsured.
Under the Health Savings Accounts system, consumers are asked to pay for routine health care with their own money—several thousand dollars of which can be put into a tax-free account. To handle their catastrophic expenses, they then purchase a basic health-insurance package with, say, a thousand-dollar annual deductible. As President Bush explained recently, "Health Savings Accounts all aim at empowering people to make decisions for themselves, owning their own health-care plan, and at the same time bringing some demand control into the cost of health care."
The country described in the President's report is a very different place from the country described in "Uninsured in America." Sered and Fernandopulle look at the billions we spend on medical care and wonder why Americans have so little insurance. The President's report considers the same situation and worries that we have too much. Sered and Fernandopulle see the lack of insurance as a problem of poverty; a third of the uninsured, after all, have incomes below the federal poverty line. In the section on the uninsured in the President's report, the word "poverty" is never used. In the Administration's view, people are offered insurance but "decline the coverage" as "a matter of choice." The uninsured in Sered and Fernandopulle's book decline coverage, but only because they can't afford it. Gina, for instance, works for a beauty salon that offers her a bare-bones health-insurance plan with a thousand-dollar deductible for two hundred dollars a month. What's her total income? Nine hundred dollars a month. She could "choose" to accept health insurance, but only if she chose to stop buying food or paying the rent.
The biggest difference between the two accounts, though, has to do with how each views the function of insurance. Gina, Steve, and Loretta are ill, and need insurance to cover the costs of getting better. In their eyes, insurance is meant to help equalize financial risk between the healthy and the sick. In the insurance business, this model of coverage is known as "social insurance," and historically it was the way health coverage was conceived. If you were sixty and had heart disease and diabetes, you didn't pay substantially more for coverage than a perfectly healthy twenty-five-year-old. Under social insurance, the twenty-five-year-old agrees to pay thousands of dollars in premiums even though he didn't go to the doctor at all in the previous year, because he wants to make sure that someone else will subsidize his health care if he ever comes down with heart disease or diabetes. Canada and Germany and Japan and all the other industrialized nations with universal health care follow the social-insurance model. Medicare, too, is based on the social-insurance model, and, when Americans with Medicare report themselves to be happier with virtually every aspect of their insurance coverage than people with private insurance (as they do, repeatedly and overwhelmingly), they are referring to the social aspect of their insurance. They aren't getting better care. But they are getting something just as valuable: the security of being insulated against the financial shock of serious illness.
There is another way to organize insurance, however, and that is to make it actuarial. Car insurance, for instance, is actuarial. How much you pay is in large part a function of your individual situation and history: someone who drives a sports car and has received twenty speeding tickets in the past two years pays a much higher annual premium than a soccer mom with a minivan. In recent years, the private insurance industry in the United States has been moving toward the actuarial model, with profound consequences. The triumph of the actuarial model over the social-insurance model is the reason that companies unlucky enough to employ older, high-cost employees—like United Airlines—have run into such financial difficulty. It's the reason that automakers are increasingly moving their operations to Canada. It's the reason that small businesses that have one or two employees with serious illnesses suddenly face unmanageably high health-insurance premiums, and it's the reason that, in many states, people suffering from a potentially high-cost medical condition can't get anyone to insure them at all.
Health Savings Accounts represent the final, irrevocable step in the actuarial direction. If you are preoccupied with moral hazard, then you want people to pay for care with their own money, and, when you do that, the sick inevitably end up paying more than the healthy. And when you make people choose an insurance plan that fits their individual needs, those with significant medical problems will choose expensive health plans that cover lots of things, while those with few health problems will choose cheaper, bare-bones plans. The more expensive the comprehensive plans become, and the less expensive the bare-bones plans become, the more the very sick will cluster together at one end of the insurance spectrum, and the more the well will cluster together at the low-cost end. The days when the healthy twenty-five-year-old subsidizes the sixty-year-old with heart disease or diabetes are coming to an end. "The main effect of putting more of it on the consumer is to reduce the social redistributive element of insurance," the Stanford economist Victor Fuchs says. Health Savings Accounts are not a variant of universal health care. In their governing assumptions, they are the antithesis of universal health care.
The issue about what to do with the health-care system is sometimes presented as a technical argument about the merits of one kind of coverage over another or as an ideological argument about socialized versus private medicine. It is, instead, about a few very simple questions. Do you think that this kind of redistribution of risk is a good idea? Do you think that people whose genes predispose them to depression or cancer, or whose poverty complicates asthma or diabetes, or who get hit by a drunk driver, or who have to keep their mouths closed because their teeth are rotting ought to bear a greater share of the costs of their health care than those of us who are lucky enough to escape such misfortunes? In the rest of the industrialized world, it is assumed that the more equally and widely the burdens of illness are shared, the better off the population as a whole is likely to be. The reason the United States has forty-five million people without coverage is that its health-care policy is in the hands of people who disagree, and who regard health insurance not as the solution but as the problem.
Our English 1010 class home page is:
http://tenmoreminutes.blogspot.com
today in class we submitted drafts, wrote a reflective memo, and signed up for http://prenhall.com/harris and took a grammar quiz.
For next class period: Read the article I have linked to and included below. Please read it closely, and be prepared to answer this question, and many others:
How does Gladwell try to persuade us?
What are some examples of good description in this essay?
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/050829fa_fact
THE MORAL-HAZARD MYTH
by MALCOLM GLADWELL
The bad idea behind our failed health-care system.
Issue of 2005-08-29
Posted 2005-08-22
Tooth decay begins, typically, when debris becomes trapped between the teeth and along the ridges and in the grooves of the molars. The food rots. It becomes colonized with bacteria. The bacteria feeds off sugars in the mouth and forms an acid that begins to eat away at the enamel of the teeth. Slowly, the bacteria works its way through to the dentin, the inner structure, and from there the cavity begins to blossom three-dimensionally, spreading inward and sideways. When the decay reaches the pulp tissue, the blood vessels, and the nerves that serve the tooth, the pain starts—an insistent throbbing. The tooth turns brown. It begins to lose its hard structure, to the point where a dentist can reach into a cavity with a hand instrument and scoop out the decay. At the base of the tooth, the bacteria mineralizes into tartar, which begins to irritate the gums. They become puffy and bright red and start to recede, leaving more and more of the tooth's root exposed. When the infection works its way down to the bone, the structure holding the tooth in begins to collapse altogether.
Several years ago, two Harvard researchers, Susan Starr Sered and Rushika Fernandopulle, set out to interview people without health-care coverage for a book they were writing, "Uninsured in America." They talked to as many kinds of people as they could find, collecting stories of untreated depression and struggling single mothers and chronically injured laborers—and the most common complaint they heard was about teeth. Gina, a hairdresser in Idaho, whose husband worked as a freight manager at a chain store, had "a peculiar mannerism of keeping her mouth closed even when speaking." It turned out that she hadn't been able to afford dental care for three years, and one of her front teeth was rotting. Daniel, a construction worker, pulled out his bad teeth with pliers. Then, there was Loretta, who worked nights at a university research center in Mississippi, and was missing most of her teeth. "They'll break off after a while, and then you just grab a hold of them, and they work their way out," she explained to Sered and Fernandopulle. "It hurts so bad, because the tooth aches. Then it's a relief just to get it out of there. The hole closes up itself anyway. So it's so much better."
People without health insurance have bad teeth because, if you're paying for everything out of your own pocket, going to the dentist for a checkup seems like a luxury. It isn't, of course. The loss of teeth makes eating fresh fruits and vegetables difficult, and a diet heavy in soft, processed foods exacerbates more serious health problems, like diabetes. The pain of tooth decay leads many people to use alcohol as a salve. And those struggling to get ahead in the job market quickly find that the unsightliness of bad teeth, and the self-consciousness that results, can become a major barrier. If your teeth are bad, you're not going to get a job as a receptionist, say, or a cashier. You're going to be put in the back somewhere, far from the public eye. What Loretta, Gina, and Daniel understand, the two authors tell us, is that bad teeth have come to be seen as a marker of "poor parenting, low educational achievement and slow or faulty intellectual development." They are an outward marker of caste. "Almost every time we asked interviewees what their first priority would be if the president established universal health coverage tomorrow," Sered and Fernandopulle write, "the immediate answer was 'my teeth.' "
The U. S. health-care system, according to "Uninsured in America," has created a group of people who increasingly look different from others and suffer in ways that others do not. The leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the United States is unpaid medical bills. Half of the uninsured owe money to hospitals, and a third are being pursued by collection agencies. Children without health insurance are less likely to receive medical attention for serious injuries, for recurrent ear infections, or for asthma. Lung-cancer patients without insurance are less likely to receive surgery, chemotherapy, or radiation treatment. Heart-attack victims without health insurance are less likely to receive angioplasty. People with pneumonia who don't have health insurance are less likely to receive X rays or consultations. The death rate in any given year for someone without health insurance is twenty-five per cent higher than for someone with insur-ance. Because the uninsured are sicker than the rest of us, they can't get better jobs, and because they can't get better jobs they can't afford health insurance, and because they can't afford health insurance they get even sicker. John, the manager of a bar in Idaho, tells Sered and Fernandopulle that as a result of various workplace injuries over the years he takes eight ibuprofen, waits two hours, then takes eight more—and tries to cadge as much prescription pain medication as he can from friends. "There are times when I should've gone to the doctor, but I couldn't afford to go because I don't have insurance," he says. "Like when my back messed up, I should've gone. If I had insurance, I would've went, because I know I could get treatment, but when you can't afford it you don't go. Because the harder the hole you get into in terms of bills, then you'll never get out. So you just say, 'I can deal with the pain.' "
One of the great mysteries of political life in the United States is why Americans are so devoted to their health-care system. Six times in the past century—during the First World War, during the Depression, during the Truman and Johnson Administrations, in the Senate in the nineteen-seventies, and during the Clinton years—efforts have been made to introduce some kind of universal health insurance, and each time the efforts have been rejected. Instead, the United States has opted for a makeshift system of increasing complexity and dysfunction. Americans spend $5,267 per capita on health care every year, almost two and half times the industrialized world's median of $2,193; the extra spending comes to hundreds of billions of dollars a year. What does that extra spending buy us? Americans have fewer doctors per capita than most Western countries. We go to the doctor less than people in other Western countries. We get admitted to the hospital less frequently than people in other Western countries. We are less satisfied with our health care than our counterparts in other countries. American life expectancy is lower than the Western average. Childhood-immunization rates in the United States are lower than average. Infant-mortality rates are in the nineteenth percentile of industrialized nations. Doctors here perform more high-end medical procedures, such as coronary angioplasties, than in other countries, but most of the wealthier Western countries have more CT scanners than the United States does, and Switzerland, Japan, Austria, and Finland all have more MRI machines per capita. Nor is our system more efficient. The United States spends more than a thousand dollars per capita per year—or close to four hundred billion dollars—on health-care-related paperwork and administration, whereas Canada, for example, spends only about three hundred dollars per capita. And, of course, every other country in the industrialized world insures all its citizens; despite those extra hundreds of billions of dollars we spend each year, we leave forty-five million people without any insurance. A country that displays an almost ruthless commitment to efficiency and performance in every aspect of its economy—a country that switched to Japanese cars the moment they were more reliable, and to Chinese T-shirts the moment they were five cents cheaper—has loyally stuck with a health-care system that leaves its citizenry pulling out their teeth with pliers.
America's health-care mess is, in part, simply an accident of history. The fact that there have been six attempts at universal health coverage in the last century suggests that there has long been support for the idea. But politics has always got in the way. In both Europe and the United States, for example, the push for health insurance was led, in large part, by organized labor. But in Europe the unions worked through the political system, fighting for coverage for all citizens. From the start, health insurance in Europe was public and universal, and that created powerful political support for any attempt to expand benefits. In the United States, by contrast, the unions worked through the collective-bargaining system and, as a result, could win health benefits only for their own members. Health insurance here has always been private and selective, and every attempt to expand benefits has resulted in a paralyzing political battle over who would be added to insurance rolls and who ought to pay for those additions.
Policy is driven by more than politics, however. It is equally driven by ideas, and in the past few decades a particular idea has taken hold among prominent American economists which has also been a powerful impediment to the expansion of health insurance. The idea is known as "moral hazard." Health economists in other Western nations do not share this obsession. Nor do most Americans. But moral hazard has profoundly shaped the way think tanks formulate policy and the way experts argue and the way health insurers structure their plans and the way legislation and regulations have been written. The health-care mess isn't merely the unintentional result of political dysfunction, in other words. It is also the deliberate consequence of the way in which American policymakers have come to think about insurance.
"Moral hazard" is the term economists use to describe the fact that insurance can change the behavior of the person being insured. If your office gives you and your co-workers all the free Pepsi you want—if your employer, in effect, offers universal Pepsi insurance—you'll drink more Pepsi than you would have otherwise. If you have a no-deductible fire-insurance policy, you may be a little less diligent in clearing the brush away from your house. The savings-and-loan crisis of the nineteen-eighties was created, in large part, by the fact that the federal government insured savings deposits of up to a hundred thousand dollars, and so the newly deregulated S. & L.s made far riskier investments than they would have otherwise. Insurance can have the paradoxical effect of producing risky and wasteful behavior. Economists spend a great deal of time thinking about such moral hazard for good reason. Insurance is an attempt to make human life safer and more secure. But, if those efforts can backfire and produce riskier behavior, providing insurance becomes a much more complicated and problematic endeavor.
In 1968, the economist Mark Pauly argued that moral hazard played an enormous role in medicine, and, as John Nyman writes in his book "The Theory of the Demand for Health Insurance," Pauly's paper has become the "single most influential article in the health economics literature." Nyman, an economist at the University of Minnesota, says that the fear of moral hazard lies behind the thicket of co-payments and deductibles and utilization reviews which characterizes the American health-insurance system. Fear of moral hazard, Nyman writes, also explains "the general lack of enthusiasm by U.S. health economists for the expansion of health insurance coverage (for example, national health insurance or expanded Medicare benefits) in the U.S."
What Nyman is saying is that when your insurance company requires that you make a twenty-dollar co-payment for a visit to the doctor, or when your plan includes an annual five-hundred-dollar or thousand-dollar deductible, it's not simply an attempt to get you to pick up a larger share of your health costs. It is an attempt to make your use of the health-care system more efficient. Making you responsible for a share of the costs, the argument runs, will reduce moral hazard: you'll no longer grab one of those free Pepsis when you aren't really thirsty. That's also why Nyman says that the notion of moral hazard is behind the "lack of enthusiasm" for expansion of health insurance. If you think of insurance as producing wasteful consumption of medical services, then the fact that there are forty-five million Americans without health insurance is no longer an immediate cause for alarm. After all, it's not as if the uninsured never go to the doctor. They spend, on average, $934 a year on medical care. A moral-hazard theorist would say that they go to the doctor when they really have to. Those of us with private insurance, by contrast, consume $2,347 worth of health care a year. If a lot of that extra $1,413 is waste, then maybe the uninsured person is the truly efficient consumer of health care.
The moral-hazard argument makes sense, however, only if we consume health care in the same way that we consume other consumer goods, and to economists like Nyman this assumption is plainly absurd. We go to the doctor grudgingly, only because we're sick. "Moral hazard is overblown," the Princeton economist Uwe Reinhardt says. "You always hear that the demand for health care is unlimited. This is just not true. People who are very well insured, who are very rich, do you see them check into the hospital because it's free? Do people really like to go to the doctor? Do they check into the hospital instead of playing golf?"
For that matter, when you have to pay for your own health care, does your consumption really become more efficient? In the late nineteen-seventies, the rand Corporation did an extensive study on the question, randomly assigning families to health plans with co-payment levels at zero per cent, twenty-five per cent, fifty per cent, or ninety-five per cent, up to six thousand dollars. As you might expect, the more that people were asked to chip in for their health care the less care they used. The problem was that they cut back equally on both frivolous care and useful care. Poor people in the high-deductible group with hypertension, for instance, didn't do nearly as good a job of controlling their blood pressure as those in other groups, resulting in a ten-per-cent increase in the likelihood of death. As a recent Commonwealth Fund study concluded, cost sharing is "a blunt instrument." Of course it is: how should the average consumer be expected to know beforehand what care is frivolous and what care is useful? I just went to the dermatologist to get moles checked for skin cancer. If I had had to pay a hundred per cent, or even fifty per cent, of the cost of the visit, I might not have gone. Would that have been a wise decision? I have no idea. But if one of those moles really is cancerous, that simple, inexpensive visit could save the health-care system tens of thousands of dollars (not to mention saving me a great deal of heartbreak). The focus on moral hazard suggests that the changes we make in our behavior when we have insurance are nearly always wasteful. Yet, when it comes to health care, many of the things we do only because we have insurance—like getting our moles checked, or getting our teeth cleaned regularly, or getting a mammogram or engaging in other routine preventive care—are anything but wasteful and inefficient. In fact, they are behaviors that could end up saving the health-care system a good deal of money.
Sered and Fernandopulle tell the story of Steve, a factory worker from northern Idaho, with a "grotesquelooking left hand—what looks like a bone sticks out the side." When he was younger, he broke his hand. "The doctor wanted to operate on it," he recalls. "And because I didn't have insurance, well, I was like 'I ain't gonna have it operated on.' The doctor said, 'Well, I can wrap it for you with an Ace bandage.' I said, 'Ahh, let's do that, then.' " Steve uses less health care than he would if he had insurance, but that's not because he has defeated the scourge of moral hazard. It's because instead of getting a broken bone fixed he put a bandage on it.
At the center of the Bush Administration's plan to address the health-insurance mess are Health Savings Accounts, and Health Savings Accounts are exactly what you would come up with if you were concerned, above all else, with minimizing moral hazard. The logic behind them was laid out in the 2004 Economic Report of the President. Americans, the report argues, have too much health insurance: typical plans cover things that they shouldn't, creating the problem of overconsumption. Several paragraphs are then devoted to explaining the theory of moral hazard. The report turns to the subject of the uninsured, concluding that they fall into several groups. Some are foreigners who may be covered by their countries of origin. Some are people who could be covered by Medicaid but aren't or aren't admitting that they are. Finally, a large number "remain uninsured as a matter of choice." The report continues, "Researchers believe that as many as one-quarter of those without health insurance had coverage available through an employer but declined the coverage. . . . Still others may remain uninsured because they are young and healthy and do not see the need for insurance." In other words, those with health insurance are overinsured and their behavior is distorted by moral hazard. Those without health insurance use their own money to make decisions about insurance based on an assessment of their needs. The insured are wasteful. The uninsured are prudent. So what's the solution? Make the insured a little bit more like the uninsured.
Under the Health Savings Accounts system, consumers are asked to pay for routine health care with their own money—several thousand dollars of which can be put into a tax-free account. To handle their catastrophic expenses, they then purchase a basic health-insurance package with, say, a thousand-dollar annual deductible. As President Bush explained recently, "Health Savings Accounts all aim at empowering people to make decisions for themselves, owning their own health-care plan, and at the same time bringing some demand control into the cost of health care."
The country described in the President's report is a very different place from the country described in "Uninsured in America." Sered and Fernandopulle look at the billions we spend on medical care and wonder why Americans have so little insurance. The President's report considers the same situation and worries that we have too much. Sered and Fernandopulle see the lack of insurance as a problem of poverty; a third of the uninsured, after all, have incomes below the federal poverty line. In the section on the uninsured in the President's report, the word "poverty" is never used. In the Administration's view, people are offered insurance but "decline the coverage" as "a matter of choice." The uninsured in Sered and Fernandopulle's book decline coverage, but only because they can't afford it. Gina, for instance, works for a beauty salon that offers her a bare-bones health-insurance plan with a thousand-dollar deductible for two hundred dollars a month. What's her total income? Nine hundred dollars a month. She could "choose" to accept health insurance, but only if she chose to stop buying food or paying the rent.
The biggest difference between the two accounts, though, has to do with how each views the function of insurance. Gina, Steve, and Loretta are ill, and need insurance to cover the costs of getting better. In their eyes, insurance is meant to help equalize financial risk between the healthy and the sick. In the insurance business, this model of coverage is known as "social insurance," and historically it was the way health coverage was conceived. If you were sixty and had heart disease and diabetes, you didn't pay substantially more for coverage than a perfectly healthy twenty-five-year-old. Under social insurance, the twenty-five-year-old agrees to pay thousands of dollars in premiums even though he didn't go to the doctor at all in the previous year, because he wants to make sure that someone else will subsidize his health care if he ever comes down with heart disease or diabetes. Canada and Germany and Japan and all the other industrialized nations with universal health care follow the social-insurance model. Medicare, too, is based on the social-insurance model, and, when Americans with Medicare report themselves to be happier with virtually every aspect of their insurance coverage than people with private insurance (as they do, repeatedly and overwhelmingly), they are referring to the social aspect of their insurance. They aren't getting better care. But they are getting something just as valuable: the security of being insulated against the financial shock of serious illness.
There is another way to organize insurance, however, and that is to make it actuarial. Car insurance, for instance, is actuarial. How much you pay is in large part a function of your individual situation and history: someone who drives a sports car and has received twenty speeding tickets in the past two years pays a much higher annual premium than a soccer mom with a minivan. In recent years, the private insurance industry in the United States has been moving toward the actuarial model, with profound consequences. The triumph of the actuarial model over the social-insurance model is the reason that companies unlucky enough to employ older, high-cost employees—like United Airlines—have run into such financial difficulty. It's the reason that automakers are increasingly moving their operations to Canada. It's the reason that small businesses that have one or two employees with serious illnesses suddenly face unmanageably high health-insurance premiums, and it's the reason that, in many states, people suffering from a potentially high-cost medical condition can't get anyone to insure them at all.
Health Savings Accounts represent the final, irrevocable step in the actuarial direction. If you are preoccupied with moral hazard, then you want people to pay for care with their own money, and, when you do that, the sick inevitably end up paying more than the healthy. And when you make people choose an insurance plan that fits their individual needs, those with significant medical problems will choose expensive health plans that cover lots of things, while those with few health problems will choose cheaper, bare-bones plans. The more expensive the comprehensive plans become, and the less expensive the bare-bones plans become, the more the very sick will cluster together at one end of the insurance spectrum, and the more the well will cluster together at the low-cost end. The days when the healthy twenty-five-year-old subsidizes the sixty-year-old with heart disease or diabetes are coming to an end. "The main effect of putting more of it on the consumer is to reduce the social redistributive element of insurance," the Stanford economist Victor Fuchs says. Health Savings Accounts are not a variant of universal health care. In their governing assumptions, they are the antithesis of universal health care.
The issue about what to do with the health-care system is sometimes presented as a technical argument about the merits of one kind of coverage over another or as an ideological argument about socialized versus private medicine. It is, instead, about a few very simple questions. Do you think that this kind of redistribution of risk is a good idea? Do you think that people whose genes predispose them to depression or cancer, or whose poverty complicates asthma or diabetes, or who get hit by a drunk driver, or who have to keep their mouths closed because their teeth are rotting ought to bear a greater share of the costs of their health care than those of us who are lucky enough to escape such misfortunes? In the rest of the industrialized world, it is assumed that the more equally and widely the burdens of illness are shared, the better off the population as a whole is likely to be. The reason the United States has forty-five million people without coverage is that its health-care policy is in the hands of people who disagree, and who regard health insurance not as the solution but as the problem.
Sunday, February 19
Thursday, February 16
Here are some particulars about assignment #2:
Length of rough draft: 3-6 pages, double spaced
topic: a significant event in your life.
Please combine your freewrites if that works for you, or write fresh material. The catch with this assignment is that you need to write a second conclusion or analysis of your event that draws different conclusions.
Please bring in a paper copy and upload an electronic version, in class Friday, to webct (I am creating the space to do that right now).
email me if you have any questions: Misterlanguage@gmail.com
Length of rough draft: 3-6 pages, double spaced
topic: a significant event in your life.
Please combine your freewrites if that works for you, or write fresh material. The catch with this assignment is that you need to write a second conclusion or analysis of your event that draws different conclusions.
Please bring in a paper copy and upload an electronic version, in class Friday, to webct (I am creating the space to do that right now).
email me if you have any questions: Misterlanguage@gmail.com
2 e-mailers get testy, and hundreds readevery word - The Boston Globe
2 e-mailers get testy, and hundreds readevery word - The Boston Globe: "Korman was miffed that Abdala notified him by e-mail this month that, after tentatively agreeing to work at his law firm, she changed her mind. Her reason: ''The pay you are offering would neither fulfill me nor support the lifestyle I am living.'"
THE LOTTERY IS RIGGED:
"We spoke with an
employee at a state lottery agency. We can not reveal his name or even which state, as some of the same gangsters who ran the numbers racket now run the lottery, and they would kill him.
Yes, I personally am involved in it. Lottery ping-pong balls have a small valve, like a basketball or soccer ball, only it's very tiny, and nearly invisible. We use a hypodermic needle to inject heavier-than-air gasses such as radon into the balls we don't want to come up. At first, we tried helium in the ones we did want to rise, but they jumped up so quickly that it was obvious. Lotteries are raking in much more than if the games were honest, and people don't know they have literally no chance! If you think about it logically, you certainly don't play anyway. You are betting that you can predict which six of 45 or more balls are going to come out of the hopper. In some games, the order even matters! It's a sucker's bet, and that's when it's honest! Most drawings are rigged, making the odds zero in infinity! The lottery is not only a tax on people who don't understand math; it is an unfair and unjust tax. Didn't we have the American Revolution over taxes like that?"
"We spoke with an
employee at a state lottery agency. We can not reveal his name or even which state, as some of the same gangsters who ran the numbers racket now run the lottery, and they would kill him.
Yes, I personally am involved in it. Lottery ping-pong balls have a small valve, like a basketball or soccer ball, only it's very tiny, and nearly invisible. We use a hypodermic needle to inject heavier-than-air gasses such as radon into the balls we don't want to come up. At first, we tried helium in the ones we did want to rise, but they jumped up so quickly that it was obvious. Lotteries are raking in much more than if the games were honest, and people don't know they have literally no chance! If you think about it logically, you certainly don't play anyway. You are betting that you can predict which six of 45 or more balls are going to come out of the hopper. In some games, the order even matters! It's a sucker's bet, and that's when it's honest! Most drawings are rigged, making the odds zero in infinity! The lottery is not only a tax on people who don't understand math; it is an unfair and unjust tax. Didn't we have the American Revolution over taxes like that?"
Tuesday, February 14
QDB: Top 100 Quotes: "<[SA]HatfulOfHollow> i'm going to become rich and famous after i invent a device that allows you to stab people in the face over the internet"
Author Applies Tools of Linguistics to Mend Mother-Daughter Divide - New York Times: "By the early 1990's, Dr. Tannen was taking her ideas to a wider audience. Her overwhelmingly successful book 'You Just Don't Understand' focused on communication (or lack of it) between men and women. It was on best-seller lists from 1990 through 1994. Now, Dr. Tannen, a professor at Georgetown University, is back on the list with her just-released 'You're Wearing That? Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation.' It appeared at No. 9 on the New York Times best-seller list on Sunday, within days of its publication."
Monday, February 13
Charles C. Mann, 1491 : "Guided by the pristine myth, mainstream environmentalists want to preserve
as much of the world's land as possible in a putatively intact state. But
'intact,' if the new research is correct, means 'run by human beings for
human purposes.' Environmentalists dislike this, because it seems to mean
that anything goes. In a sense they are correct. Native Americans managed
the continent as they saw fit. Modern nations must do the same. If they
want to return as much of the landscape as possible to its 1491 state, they
will have to find it within themselves to create the world's largest garden. "
as much of the world's land as possible in a putatively intact state. But
'intact,' if the new research is correct, means 'run by human beings for
human purposes.' Environmentalists dislike this, because it seems to mean
that anything goes. In a sense they are correct. Native Americans managed
the continent as they saw fit. Modern nations must do the same. If they
want to return as much of the landscape as possible to its 1491 state, they
will have to find it within themselves to create the world's largest garden. "
Sunday. | Ask MetaFilter: "Me and my friends growing up used to have 'Sunday feeling'. It happens most often during the summer, but the winter has it too. It happens around sunset, this feeling of lethargy and melencholy would hover over us. It was like the ending of Stand By Me. We could have done something super important and accomplished so much in the morning, but by the end of the day...ugh.
I have never really been able to get rid of that feeling."
I have never really been able to get rid of that feeling."
Your #2 assignment, "A Significant Event that I'm Probably Making Up" is due on Friday--the rough draft that is. Bring an electronic and paper copy, 3-5 pages. The final draft will be due on Feb. 24th, a week later, and should be 5 pages long.
This is a blank post whose sole purpose is to drive the other irrelevant posts off the bottom of the screen.
Thursday, February 2
TechCommWiki | Main / Grammar Diagnostics
TechCommWiki | Main / Grammar Diagnostics: "For the second half of class, I want you to work on your drafts and upload them to the prenhall site. To do so, login, and then click on"
adbusters
adbusters
Monday, January 16
news @ nature.com?-?Web users judge sites in the blink of an eye?-?Potential readers can make snap decisions in just 50 milliseconds.
news @ nature.com?-?Web users judge sites in the blink of an eye?-?Potential readers can make snap decisions in just 50 milliseconds.: "Like the look of our website? Whatever the answer (and hopefully it was yes), the chances are you made your mind up within the first twentieth of a second. A study by researchers in Canada has shown that the snap decisions Internet users make about the quality of a web page have a lasting impact on their opinions."
Wednesday, January 4
Tuesday, January 3
RESUME WRITING | How to write a masterpiece of a resume
RESUME WRITING | How to write a masterpiece of a resume: "Writing a great resume does not necessarily mean you should follow the rules you hear through the grapevine. It does not have to be one page or follow a specific resume format. Every resume is a one-of-a-kind marketing communication. It should be appropriate to your situation and do exactly what you want it to do. Instead of a bunch of rules and tips, we are going to cut to the chase in this brief guide and offer you the most basic principles of writing a highly effective guide to overthrowing south american governments."
Monday, January 2
GeekList: Your Favorite Rule
GeekList: Your Favorite Rule: "2.2401 GUN DUELS: Vs a non-concealed, non-Aerial DEFENDER's declared Defensive First Fire attack on it, a vehicle may attempt to Bounding First Fire (D3.3) its MA (/other-FP, including Passenger FP/SW) at that DEFENDER first, provided the vehicle need not change CA, is not conducting OVR (D7.1), its total Gun Duel DRM (i.e., its total Firer-Based [5.] and Acquisition [6.5] TH DRM for its potential shot) is < that of the DEFENDER, and the DEFENDER's attack is not Reaction Fire (D7.2). Neither the 1 DRM for a Gyrostabilizer nor the doubling of the lower dr for other ordnance in TH Case C4 (5.35) is included in the Gun Duel DRM calculation. The order of fire for non-ordnance/SW is determined as if it were ordnance [EXC: TH Case A can apply only if this unit/weapon is mounted-on/aboard a vehicle that is changing CA; all such non-turret-mounted fire is considered NT for purposes of TH Case C, and; A.5 applies to any type of FG]. If the ATTACKER's and DEFENDER's total Gun Duel DRM are equal, the lower Final TH (or non-ordnance IFT) DR fires first - and voids the opponent's return shot by eliminating, breaking, stunning, or shocking it. If those two Final DR are equal, both shots are resolved simultaneously. Any CA change the DEFENDER requires in order to shoot (5.11) is made before the ATTACKER's shot if the DEFENDER's total Gun Duel DRM <= the ATTACKER's; otherwise its CA changes (if still able to) after the ATTACKER's shot. After the initial Gun Duel had been fully resolved, and if otherwise able and allowed to, that DEFENDER may announce another attack vs that ATTACKER who in turn may declare another Gun Duel; this time the printed ROF of one firing weapon on each side may be included as a -DRM in that side's Gun Duel DRM calculation. Only the ATTACKER may declare a Gun Duel [EXC: not if the DEFENDER has done so per 5.33].
"
"
Thursday, December 29
Technical Writing | Syllabus
Technical Writing | Syllabus: "'... I worked for three years in an environmental engineering firm. When I joined the firm (part-time) I was changing careers, and working in an office environment for a large company was totally different than working in a small service-oriented business - the environment in which I had worked for the previous 20 years. I vividly remember the first time that I was assigned to write a brief technical report (about two pages). My exposure to technical writing, prior to that assignment, was to proof read documents before they were delivered to the client. I had begun to feel some level of comfort about how a technical document should be constructed. However, reading a document and writing a document are two very different processes, as I soon found out. After diligently working on the report for at least three hours, I turned it in to the project manager. About an hour later, he returned the document to me, and I honestly thought he had used it as a bandage to stop someone from bleeding. There was so much red ink from his corrections, the paper was literally red ... I have heard you comment during your lectures that many students do not consider technical writing to be an important course, or that it is perceived as a 'secondary course' to the main body of their educational experience ... I agree with you that some students have this attitude ... However, I would like to stress the following to some of the younger students who have no experience in a professional work environment. A significant amount of how an employee is evaluated by an employer is based on how well they can write. This is particularly true with a consulting firm or any scientific company that has to provide technical reports and other technical deliverables to their clients, regulatory agencies, or to the general public. If you cannot write clearly, concisely and in a manner that is understandable to the client and other lay-readers, you will not be successful in your professional career.'
-R. Michael Lowe (December 1995)"
-R. Michael Lowe (December 1995)"
Thursday, December 8
Tuesday, December 6
CIA training manual
Here's some technical writing produced by the CIA:
Of course, don't ever try this at home.
Of course, don't ever try this at home.
Friday, December 2
Grade Survey
Please fill out this grade self-survey before the end of the semester, thanks.
http://complicity.uvsc.edu/clipboard/survey.php?surveyid=10
http://complicity.uvsc.edu/clipboard/survey.php?surveyid=10
Tuesday, November 29
Do It Now by Steve Pavlina: "During one of these sacred time blocks, do nothing but the activity that's right in front of you. Don't check email or online forums or do web surfing. If you have this temptation, then unplug your Internet connection while you work. Turn off your phone, or simply refuse to answer it. Go to the bathroom before you start, and make sure you won't get hungry for a while. Don't get out of your chair at all. Don't talk to anyone during this time."
Do It Now by Steve Pavlina: "Trying to cut out time-wasting habits is a common starting point for people who desire to become more efficient, but I think this is a mistake. Optimizing your personal habits should only come later. Clarity of purpose must come first. If you don't have clarity, then your attempts to install more efficient habits and to break inefficient habits will only fizzle. You won't have a strong enough reason to put your time to good use, so it will be easy to quit when things get tough. You need a big, attractive goal to stay motivated. The reason to shave 15 minutes off a task is that you're overflowing with motivation to put that 15 minutes to better use."
Do It Now by Steve Pavlina: "Triage ruthlessly.
Get rid of everything that wastes your time. Use the trash can liberally. Apply the rule, 'When in doubt, throw it out.' Cancel useless magazine subscriptions. If you have a magazine that is more than two months old and you still haven't read it, throw it away; it's probably not worth reading. Realize that nothing is free if it costs you time. Before you sign up for any new free service or subscription, ask how much it will cost you in terms of time. Every activity has an opportunity cost. Ask, 'Is this activity worth what I am sacrificing for it?'"
Get rid of everything that wastes your time. Use the trash can liberally. Apply the rule, 'When in doubt, throw it out.' Cancel useless magazine subscriptions. If you have a magazine that is more than two months old and you still haven't read it, throw it away; it's probably not worth reading. Realize that nothing is free if it costs you time. Before you sign up for any new free service or subscription, ask how much it will cost you in terms of time. Every activity has an opportunity cost. Ask, 'Is this activity worth what I am sacrificing for it?'"
Do It Now by Steve Pavlina: "In college I was downright brutal when it came to triage. I once told one on my professors that I decided not to do one of his assigned computer science projects because I felt it wasn't a good use of my time. The project required about 10-20 hours of work, and it involved some tedious gruntwork that wasn't going to teach me anything I didn't already know. Also, this project was only worth 10% of my grade in that class, and since I was previously acing the class anyway, the only real negative consequence would be that I'd end up with an A- in the course instead of an A. I told the professor I felt that was a fair trade-off and that I would accept the A-. I didn't try to negotiate with him for special treatment. So my official grade in the class was an A-, but I personally gave myself an A for putting those 10-20 hours to much better use."
Do It Now by Steve Pavlina: "Use single handling.
Instead of using some elaborate organizing system, I stuck with very basic a pen-and-paper to do list. My only organizing tool was a notepad where I wrote down all my assignments and their deadlines. I didn't worry about doing any advance scheduling or prioritizing. I would simply scan the list to select the most pressing item which fit the time I had available. Then I'd complete it, and cross it off the list.
If I had a 10-hour term paper to write, I would do the whole thing at once instead of breaking it into smaller tasks. I'd usually do large projects on weekends. I'd go to the library in the morning, do the necessary research, and then go back to my dorm room and continue working until the final text was rolling off my printer. If I needed to take a break, I would take a break. It didn't matter how big the project was supposed to be or how many weeks the professor allowed for it. Once I began an assignment, I would stay with it until it was 100% complete and ready to be turned in.
This simple practice saved me a significant amount of time. First, it allowed me to concentrate deeply on each assignment and to work very efficiently while I worked. A lot of time is lost in task switching because you have to re-load the context for each new task. Single handling minimizes time lost in task switching. In fact, when possible I would batch up my assignments within a certain subject area and then do them all at once before switching subjects. So I'd do all my math homework in a row until it was all done. Then I'd do all my programming assignments. Then I'd do my general education homework. In this manner I would put my brain into math-mode, programming-mode, writing-mode, or art-mode and remain in that single mode for as long as possible. Secondly, I believe this habit helped me remain relaxed and unstressed because my mind wasn't cluttered with so many to-do items. It was always just one thing at a time. I could forget about anything that was outside the current context.
Failure is your friend.
Most people seem to have an innate fear of failure, but failure is really your best friend. People who succeed also fail a great deal because they make a lot of attempts. The great baseball player Babe Ruth held the homerun record and the strikeout record at the same time. Those who have the most successes also have the most failures. There is nothing wrong or shameful in failing. The only regret lies in never making the attempt. So don't be afraid to experiment in your attempts to increase productivity. Sometimes the quickest way to find out if something will work is to jump right in and do it. You can always make adjustments along the way. It's the ready-fire-aim approach, and surprisingly, it works a lot better that the more common ready-aim-fire approach. The reason is that after you've 'fired' once, you have some actual data with which to adjust your aim. Too many people get bogged down in planning and thinking and never get to the point of action. How many potentially great ideas have you passed up because you got stuck in the state of analysis paralysis (i.e. ready-aim-aim-aim-aim-aim...)?"
Instead of using some elaborate organizing system, I stuck with very basic a pen-and-paper to do list. My only organizing tool was a notepad where I wrote down all my assignments and their deadlines. I didn't worry about doing any advance scheduling or prioritizing. I would simply scan the list to select the most pressing item which fit the time I had available. Then I'd complete it, and cross it off the list.
If I had a 10-hour term paper to write, I would do the whole thing at once instead of breaking it into smaller tasks. I'd usually do large projects on weekends. I'd go to the library in the morning, do the necessary research, and then go back to my dorm room and continue working until the final text was rolling off my printer. If I needed to take a break, I would take a break. It didn't matter how big the project was supposed to be or how many weeks the professor allowed for it. Once I began an assignment, I would stay with it until it was 100% complete and ready to be turned in.
This simple practice saved me a significant amount of time. First, it allowed me to concentrate deeply on each assignment and to work very efficiently while I worked. A lot of time is lost in task switching because you have to re-load the context for each new task. Single handling minimizes time lost in task switching. In fact, when possible I would batch up my assignments within a certain subject area and then do them all at once before switching subjects. So I'd do all my math homework in a row until it was all done. Then I'd do all my programming assignments. Then I'd do my general education homework. In this manner I would put my brain into math-mode, programming-mode, writing-mode, or art-mode and remain in that single mode for as long as possible. Secondly, I believe this habit helped me remain relaxed and unstressed because my mind wasn't cluttered with so many to-do items. It was always just one thing at a time. I could forget about anything that was outside the current context.
Failure is your friend.
Most people seem to have an innate fear of failure, but failure is really your best friend. People who succeed also fail a great deal because they make a lot of attempts. The great baseball player Babe Ruth held the homerun record and the strikeout record at the same time. Those who have the most successes also have the most failures. There is nothing wrong or shameful in failing. The only regret lies in never making the attempt. So don't be afraid to experiment in your attempts to increase productivity. Sometimes the quickest way to find out if something will work is to jump right in and do it. You can always make adjustments along the way. It's the ready-fire-aim approach, and surprisingly, it works a lot better that the more common ready-aim-fire approach. The reason is that after you've 'fired' once, you have some actual data with which to adjust your aim. Too many people get bogged down in planning and thinking and never get to the point of action. How many potentially great ideas have you passed up because you got stuck in the state of analysis paralysis (i.e. ready-aim-aim-aim-aim-aim...)?"
Friday, November 25
The spoils (kottke.org): "On our first night in Saigon, we ran across a little shop that offered for sale, among other things, lots of 60s/70s-era Zippo lighters.
Me: How do you suppose they came to have those?
Meg: I don't want to know."
Me: How do you suppose they came to have those?
Meg: I don't want to know."
Monday, November 21
Friday, November 18
David G. Willey: Physics Behind Four Amazing Demonstrations (Skeptical Inquirer November 1999)
David G. Willey: Physics Behind Four Amazing Demonstrations (Skeptical Inquirer November 1999): "How to Dip Your Fingers in Molten Lead"
complete, rough draft due on Nov. 21
A rough draft of your entire project is due on Nov. 21, Monday at the beginning of class.
Also, please remember to annotate each section in some way, preferably with a header or footer, so I know who the author is.
frontmatter/endmatter requirements
Here are the frontmatter/endmatter requirements for your draft which is due on Monday, November 21st. See chapter 12, page 268 for descriptions of each:
Backmatter:
- Letter of transmittal: Not needed
- Cover: not needed until the final draft
- Title page: yes
- 200 word abstract: Yes, make it a descriptive abstract. It can be shorter than 200 words, actually.
- Table of Contents: Yes.
- List of Illustrations: save it for the final draft, you don't have time
Executive summary: Not needed.
Backmatter:
- Glossary (list of definitions): include if needed
- References/documentation: You'll need this in the final draft
- Appendices (page 281): yes, if needed.
See the revision checklist on page 282
Thursday, November 17
kottke.org :: home of fine hypertext products: "This is the big sticking point for most people, I think. If you choose to have a family or focus on your career or pursue a costly photography hobby, you might not have the money or flexibility to travel this way. But that's a choice you've made (on some level)...and I would argue that if you're 30 years old, you can arrange to make an overseas trip once every 3-5 years, and that's about 7-8 trips by the time you're 60."
Nothing like having some childless, single jackass with no commitments or job telling you how free you should be.
Nothing like having some childless, single jackass with no commitments or job telling you how free you should be.
Wednesday, November 16
Notes On The PhD Degree: "A Doctor of Philosophy degree, abbreviated Ph.D., is the highest academic degree anyone can earn. Because earning a Ph.D. requires extended study and intense intellectual effort, less than one percent of the population attains the degree. Society shows respect for a person who holds a Ph.D. by addressing them with the title ``Doctor''.
To earn a Ph.D., one must accomplish two things. First, one must master a specific subject completely. Second, one must extend the body of knowledge about that subject."
To earn a Ph.D., one must accomplish two things. First, one must master a specific subject completely. Second, one must extend the body of knowledge about that subject."
today in class
Today in class we'll be talking about using templates to standardize styles across documents. *Everyone* will have to create a template, email it to someone else in the room not on your team, and have them duplicate your style, print it out, and submit it.
Wednesday, November 2
For class on Friday, November 4th:
1. Bring your 75% draft and have it submitted to webct.
2. in class we will assemble these disparate sections into single manuals, which you will submit to me, and we will do some peer feedback! Come to class!
1. Bring your 75% draft and have it submitted to webct.
2. in class we will assemble these disparate sections into single manuals, which you will submit to me, and we will do some peer feedback! Come to class!
Friday, October 28
: "4310: schedule for remainder of semester.
Week of:
October 31: Chapter 4 (writing collaboratively), Chapter 14 (graphics, revisited), lecture on document management.
November 2: 75% due, with layout. Chapter 11 (revisited) Chapter 6 (communicating persuasively), Chapter 7 (researching your subject)
November:
7: Chapter 8 (organizing your information), Chapter 9 (definitions and descriptions), Chapter 10 (revising for coherence),
14: Templates and style guides revisited. Chapter 11 (sentence style, revisited)
21: Full draft due.
28: Peer feedback workshops. Intensive editing workshop this week.
December:
5: Catchup week. Topics vary depending upon current state of projects.
7: Final draft due."
Week of:
October 31: Chapter 4 (writing collaboratively), Chapter 14 (graphics, revisited), lecture on document management.
November 2: 75% due, with layout. Chapter 11 (revisited) Chapter 6 (communicating persuasively), Chapter 7 (researching your subject)
November:
7: Chapter 8 (organizing your information), Chapter 9 (definitions and descriptions), Chapter 10 (revising for coherence),
14: Templates and style guides revisited. Chapter 11 (sentence style, revisited)
21: Full draft due.
28: Peer feedback workshops. Intensive editing workshop this week.
December:
5: Catchup week. Topics vary depending upon current state of projects.
7: Final draft due."
Thursday, October 27
Wednesday, October 26
Monday, October 24
Sunday, October 23
BGG Thread: Dungeoneer Sets, HeroScape & Expansions Up For Trade: "Dungeoneer Sets, HeroScape & Expansions Up For Trade"
Oregon Camping YURTS: "JESSIE M. HONEYMAN
Location: Adjacent to north boundary of Oregon dunes National Recreation Area.
On U.S. 101, 3 miles south of Florence.
Attractions/Services: Campground near freshwater Cleawox Lake sheltered by towering sand dunes, some reaching 500 feet high; hiker-biker, group camps; boat ramps on Cleawox Lake and at Woahink Lake; this park has 10 yurts.
Off-season events: Fall Festival, September; Holiday Festival of Lights, mid-November-December 31 and rhododendron Festival, mid-May; Florence.
For more information: 541.997.3641 or 800.551.6949."
Location: Adjacent to north boundary of Oregon dunes National Recreation Area.
On U.S. 101, 3 miles south of Florence.
Attractions/Services: Campground near freshwater Cleawox Lake sheltered by towering sand dunes, some reaching 500 feet high; hiker-biker, group camps; boat ramps on Cleawox Lake and at Woahink Lake; this park has 10 yurts.
Off-season events: Fall Festival, September; Holiday Festival of Lights, mid-November-December 31 and rhododendron Festival, mid-May; Florence.
For more information: 541.997.3641 or 800.551.6949."
What Matters Most Is What Lasts Longest: "Our family-centered perspective should make Latter-day Saints strive to be the best parents in the world. It should give us enormous respect for our children, who truly are our spiritual siblings, and it should cause us to devote whatever time is necessary to strengthen our families. Indeed, nothing is more critically connected to happiness—both our own and that of our children—than how well we love and support one another within the family.
"
"
What Matters Most Is What Lasts Longest: "Rampant materialism and selfishness delude many into thinking that families, and especially children, are a burden and a financial millstone that will hold them back rather than a sacred privilege that will teach them to become more like God."
Wednesday, October 19
Monday, October 17
Word Templates -- Introduction to Word Templates
Word Templates -- Introduction to Word Templates: "If you frequently create documents that contain a lot of specialized formatting but don't always contain the same text, you can save yourself a considerable amount of time if you create Word templates to use as the basis of future documents. By using Word’s template feature, you can focus your concentration on the content of the document and leave the formatting up to the template."
upcoming assignments:
For today, Monday: Just come to class.
For Wednesday and Friday: Chapter 13: Designing the document.
due on Friday: A style guide for your document. 2-4 pages, details in class.
For Wednesday and Friday: Chapter 13: Designing the document.
due on Friday: A style guide for your document. 2-4 pages, details in class.
Monday, October 10
00010
resources for chapter 11
We'll be working out of chapter 11 every day this week, so please read it closely
Sunday, October 9
SinceSlicedBread.com: "We're looking for fresh, new ideas for a better America. Do you have a common-sense idea that will improve the day-to-day lives of everyday Americans? Or an opinion on how working families can succeed in the new global economy?
You have until December 5, 2005, to submit your idea and to weigh in. A panel of judges will select the top 21 ideas. All of America will be able to vote on the finalists, and on February 1, one person will win $100,000—runners up receive $50,000 each."
You have until December 5, 2005, to submit your idea and to weigh in. A panel of judges will select the top 21 ideas. All of America will be able to vote on the finalists, and on February 1, one person will win $100,000—runners up receive $50,000 each."
Friday, October 7
Wednesday, October 5
Emerging Technology - Discover Magazine - science news articles online technology magazine articles Emerging Technology: "The difference between this Web 2.0 model and the previous one is directly equivalent to the difference between a rain forest and a desert. One of the primary reasons we value tropical rain forests is because they waste so little of the energy supplied by the sun while running massive nutrient cycles. Most of the solar energy that saturates desert environments gets lost, assimilated by the few plants that can survive in such a hostile climate. Those plants pass on enough energy to sustain a limited number of insects, which in turn supply food for the occasional reptile or bird, all of which ultimately feed the bacteria. But most of the energy is lost.
A rain forest, on the other hand, is such an efficient system for using energy because there are so many organisms exploiting every tiny niche of the nutrient cycle. We value the diversity of the ecosystem not just as a quaint case of biological multiculturalism but because the system itself does a brilliant job of capturing the energy that flows through it. Efficiency is one of the reasons that clearing rain forests is shortsighted: The nutrient cycles in rain forest ecosystems are so tight that the soil is usually very poor for farming. All the available energy has been captured on the way down to the earth.
Think of information as the energy of the Web’s ecosystem. Those Web 1.0 pages with their crude hyperlinks are like the sun’s rays falling on a desert. A few stragglers are lucky enough to stumble across them, and thus some of that information might get reused if one then decides to e-mail the URL to a friend or to quote from it on another page. But most of the information goes to waste. In the Web 2.0 model, we have thousands of services scrutinizing each new piece of information online, grabbing interesting bits, remixing them in new ways, and passing them along to other services. Each new addition to the mix can be exploited in countless new ways, both by human bloggers and by the software programs that track changes in the overall state of the Web. Information in this new model is analyzed, repackaged, digested, and passed on down to the next link in the chain. It flows.
"
A rain forest, on the other hand, is such an efficient system for using energy because there are so many organisms exploiting every tiny niche of the nutrient cycle. We value the diversity of the ecosystem not just as a quaint case of biological multiculturalism but because the system itself does a brilliant job of capturing the energy that flows through it. Efficiency is one of the reasons that clearing rain forests is shortsighted: The nutrient cycles in rain forest ecosystems are so tight that the soil is usually very poor for farming. All the available energy has been captured on the way down to the earth.
Think of information as the energy of the Web’s ecosystem. Those Web 1.0 pages with their crude hyperlinks are like the sun’s rays falling on a desert. A few stragglers are lucky enough to stumble across them, and thus some of that information might get reused if one then decides to e-mail the URL to a friend or to quote from it on another page. But most of the information goes to waste. In the Web 2.0 model, we have thousands of services scrutinizing each new piece of information online, grabbing interesting bits, remixing them in new ways, and passing them along to other services. Each new addition to the mix can be exploited in countless new ways, both by human bloggers and by the software programs that track changes in the overall state of the Web. Information in this new model is analyzed, repackaged, digested, and passed on down to the next link in the chain. It flows.
"