americans
25 People identifywith this • show voxes
approved 65
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"Flipped learning" is an interesting teaching idea that warrants more attention. Making videos available for home study will help in situations where the textbook is too dry or doesn't provide the broader context the teacher desires. This can also justify the tablet investment that administrators seem obsessed with making (mentioned recently by the >parents). While we don't think it can replace in-person lessons, we applaud creative experimentation like this.
Reference'Flipped Learning' Lets Kids Do Homework at School and See Lessons at Home - Hudson Square -... Students watch video lessons at home and get more individual instruction in class, teachers say.
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We're disturbed by the weekend's violence in Egypt, as documented by many reports of military and mob violence targeted at >egyptians protesting the government, as well as at foreign reporters. It seems to us like the pro-military camp prefers absolute social order to a democratic republic, and we can't help but feel that's a short-term solution with severe long-term costs. We hope trust can be rebuilt so a new democratic attempt can be undertaken.
ReferenceClashes Kill 49 Egyptians on Uprising’s Anniversary At least 49 people died in clashes with security forces at rival antigovernment protests organized by Islamists and left-leaning activists.
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Good job, U.N. That wasn't awkward at all.
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We're absolutely disgusted by Ohio's execution experiment that led to what can only be described as cruel and unusual punishment. "According to a pool report from journalists who witnessed the execution at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville, McGuire took more than 15 minutes to die and made 'several loud snorting or snoring sounds.”
ReferenceOhio execution: New drug protocol, but 15 minutes to die Convicted murderer and rapist Dennis McGuire took more than 15 minutes to die, appearing to gasp during his execution Thursday by Ohio using a combination of drugs never tried before in the United States.
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We >americans all must be tired of hearing revelations about the N.S.A. spying tactics. But, what will it take for us as americans to deny these shadow powers unfettered access with virtual impunity from the public, and the world at large? "The technology, which the agency has used since at least 2008, relies on a covert channel of radio waves that can be transmitted from tiny circuit boards and USB cards inserted surreptitiously into the computers. In some cases, they are sent to a briefcase-size relay station that intelligence agencies can set up miles away from the target."
ReferenceN.S.A. Devises Radio Pathway Into Computers The agency has put software in thousands of computers that allows for surveillance and can also create a path for launching cyberattacks, according to documents, experts and officials.
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How many more senseless shootings must occur before we come together to bring responsible measures to gun ownership? http://nyti.ms/1
almPEt ReferenceDad's texting to daughter sparks argument, fatal shooting in movie theater One man was shot dead after an argument over a cell phone conversation at a movie theater Monday afternoon in Wesley Chapel, Florida, authorities say.
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Senators, you need-a calm down. We all remain skeptical of Iran, particularly because it's not clear why, after 30 years of provocation and sanctions, they suddenly want to negotiate. (We'd love from the >iranians about this.) How could things have changed so significantly in the last six months? Their election of a new president would not seem to account for this, since he's still subject to the same Supreme Leader who's been in power for the last 25 years. That said, the diplomatic path is far better than the military path. The threat by most Senators right now to increase sanctions portends violent repercussions. It amounts to spanking a child right after he cleaned up his room. We do not want to see what a nuclear-armed temper tantrum looks like. So, Senators, we appreciate the skepticism but cool your jets. And, President, you must convince us (during your State of the Union?) that you and Kerry understand our deep skepticism and are negotiating with vigilance.
ReferenceObama Fights a Push to Add Iran Sanctions With the United States and Iran set to embark on a critical phase of nuclear talks, President Obama is struggling to prevent Senate Democrats from backing a bill that could thwart his diplomatic efforts.
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Classroom iPads will do more harm than good. While we think that it's important to keep pace with technology and to provide a "test bed" for educational software developers, large-scale iPad rollouts are bound to carry impossible expectations and create headaches for educators and students. As a "magical" piece of technology, it would seem the iPad could be the panacea that cures all educational ills. This naive impression can justify enormous capital outlay. But the fact is, they are simply electrified books and pencils. It's on teachers to creatively weave them into lessons, which seems problematic since many teachers barely understand tablets or computers themselves. Students, on the other hand, will never cease to devise ways to break any restrictions on the devices. This will lead to lackluster results and mobs of taxpayers with pitchforks roaming the streets. Physical books and pencils will likely be displaced by electronic devices in the future, so it's important that we consider them in education today. But the magic is in careful, even restrained, integration of their capabilities into the classroom. And much more research into this needs to be done before much can be expected from them. Small experimental classroom rollouts, overseen very closely by teams of educational technology specialists, seem to us to be the appropriate next step.
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Gov Christie's seflishness shocks and angers us! It's unbelievable that he would resort to retaliatory behavior that is so childish, unprofessional, and disrespectful (to say the least!) to the public. And we think anyone who thinks this hyper-controlling figure was not privy to the actions of his staff is fooling themselves. Along with the NSA and the recent federal shutdown, this is yet another sign of a political class that believes it's above public service, and that is consumed with promoting and protecting itself above all else. http://www.nytim
es.com/2014/01/0 9/nyregion/chri... Reference
Top Christie Staff Sought to Disrupt Traffic as Revenge Gov. Chris Christie, in response to the release on Wednesday of emails showing that his office was involved with lane closings on the George Washington Bridge, said in a statement that he had no prior knowledge of the events.
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Coldest temp and wind chill "in decades"?! Yikes! We hope all affected make it through this ordeal safe and sound!
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Patient dumping is disgusting. We believe few actions are more despicable than a hospital discharging indigent and/or mentally ill patients by dumping them on city streets; usually skid row. If this is how hospitals treat the helpless what can we expect from Wall Street, banks and other institutions? History shows that corporate corruption goes on for years before the justice system takes action. And what are the penalties? A financial fine, i.e. a slap on the wrist. We want these criminals brought to trial, the way the rest of us are. And the guilty should be imprisoned, the way the rest of us are. Financial fines are no deterrent for the wealthy, perhaps the prospect of ten years hard-time would nudge them towards decency.
ReferenceL.A. City Atty. Mike Feuer vows to crack down on 'patient dumping' Nearly a decade after local hospitals were exposed abandoning homeless patients on downtown's skid row, Los Angeles City Atty. Mike Feuer on Friday vowed to crack down on the illegal practice that still continues.
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Corporations are not people.
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We're surprised the >british accept net censorship. It's certainly necessary to take action to reduce child sex abuse and pornography, but the mandatory internet obscenity filter they're implementing seems to vastly overreach. First, it is managed by private corporations without clear transparency controls. Corporate partnerships with government are ominous to begin with, but are much more so when they're charged with enforcing "acceptable behavior standards" (as Commons Home Affairs Select Committee chairman Keith Vaz put it). Second, the content filter is installed at ISPs and enabled by default, requiring customers to opt-out of it to access content that is legal but deemed "obscene and tasteless". In a post-Snowden world, divulging anything to government should spark skepticism, but having to identify yourself as interested in obscene material in order to remove a corporate-managed filter seems to ask for trouble. Third, although supporters have referred to a slippery slope from consuming tasteless material to consuming illegal material, there is also concern for the slippery slope from filtration to protect children to filtration to protect against dissenting views of politicians or the government. In light of recent surveillance abuses, how can one expect anything less than a voracious appropriation of authority from government agencies. The filter's technical infrastructure expands the nanny state, but can be repurposed for a police state. It is easy enough for parents to install (or have installed) content filtering software on their computing devices. And the UK already has the Cleanfeed system for filtering child pornography. So this new content filter, originally sprung from the government's desire to address rising "commercialization and sexualization of childhood" and then expanded in the response to two highly-publicized child murders, is an overreaction that will have harmful consequences. We'd be content to silently observe all of this from a distance. But the American and British governments seem to be of the same mind lately when it comes to digital privacy. And, while more can and should be done to address child sex abuse, we are scared by the basic notion of empowering corporate and political entities to judge for us what information is and is not "acceptable".
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Happy New Year, world! May tolerance and understanding of others allow us to leverage our differences to make the most of 2014 and the challenges it holds!
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"The ideal citizen of a politically corrupt state, such as the one we now have, is a gullible dolt unable to tell truth from bullshit." I came across this 2012 article today and thought still apropos to the state that we are in. We need to educate ourselves past what politicians and popular news media are telling us to believe.
ReferenceAge of Ignorance by Charles Simic Widespread ignorance bordering on idiocy is our new national goal. It’s no use pretending otherwise and telling us, as Thomas Friedman did in the *Times* a few days ago, that educated people are the nation’s most valuable resources. Sure, they are, but do we still want them? It doesn’t look to me as if we do.
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We're glad the Pussy Riot members were released, despite the political circumstances leading up to the Sochi Olympics. But we continue to remain baffled about why the >russians don't do more to demand greater democratic controls. Is it pride? Fear? Skepticism of democracy? American democracy is admitedly imperfect, but that doesn't mean they should not strive for something better than the stifling, dehumanizing, de facto authoritarianism of Putin.
Reference2 Members of Pussy Riot Freed Under Amnesty Law One of the musicians, who had been jailed over a performance protesting President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, called the amnesty “a lie” and said she didn’t want it.
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Now's the time to reform gun laws. This text message exchange between a father and his son during the Arapahoe High shooting is terrifying and heart-rending. There must be a better way forward, because the status quo is needlessly endangering our children. Regardless of what our politicians would have us believe, we believe it's possible both to respect the 2nd Ammendment and to bring sensible controls to gun ownership. (Even 69% of NRA members believe that gun show sales should be subject to criminal background checks.) We have to press our elected leaders about this, because our children should never have to text us about how well they're hiding from a school shooter.
ReferenceTexts from my son during the Arapahoe shooting I'll have much, much more to say on this as I become cognizant of just what this has done to me, but I thought some people might be interested in the string of texts my son Ian and I sent back and ...
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So Target disclosed that criminals somehow accessed credit/debit card information for as many as 40 million of its Black Friday retail customers. Alright, it's settled. We gotta go back to a cash-only society. But seriously, if you shopped in a brick-and-mortar Target store in between November 27 and December 1, double-check your transaction history. This is the the kind of thing that justifies having a positive brand image. The press coverage of it has been relatively light, but we wonder how such a breach would be reported if it were to happen to more divisive brands like Walmart.
ReferenceTarget Confirms Unauthorized Access to Payment Card Data in U.S. Stores Target today confirmed it is aware of unauthorized access to payment card data that may have impacted certain guests making credit and debit card purchases in its U.S. stores. Target is working closely with law enforcement and financial institutions, ...
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Congratulations to everyone involved with P4A (Project for Awesome) the annual YouTube tradition in which individuals upload fundraising videos to raise awareness of their favorite charities. It's supported by ProjectForAwesom
e.com, which hosts a voting contest to determine the 10 best videos. The winners get to split the proceeds from donations collected by the site, which has already surpassed its fundraising goal by 200% with $750,000 and counting! This kind of grassroots activism is what makes the Internet great! ReferenceProject For Awesome 2013 During Project for Awesome, thousands of people post videos about and advocating for charities that decrease the overall level of world suck...
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The sky is falling!! Congress is actually gonna pass a budget without delay or chest-beating brinkmanship! And all it took was Boehner having a spine, and a couple experiments by the to prove the obvious. So kudos to Boehner's nascent spine, and a hearty, forceful pat on the back of the 113th Congress for meeting our minimum expectations. For once.
ReferenceSenate Ends Budget Debate, Clearing Way for Passage A bipartisan tax-and-spending plan cleared its final hurdle on Tuesday, with 67 senators voting to end debate on the measure and bring it to a final vote.
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We believe that the NSA mass data collection program is unconstitutional.
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We're excited to see more attention given to diversity in holiday representation.
ReferenceAt South L.A. mall, a Claus with quite an effect Dressed in a red Santa suit, white beard and rimless glasses balanced on his nose, Langston Patterson sits on a velvet couch and waits for his adoring fans.
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Congrats to the >chinese for their lunar landing! They join only us and the former Soviet Union in accomplishing a soft-landing on the moon. May humans continue to explore space in peaceful cooperation.
Reference
China Lands On The Moon: Historic Robotic Lunar Landing Includes 1st Chinese Rover China's Chang'e 3 spacecraft landed on the moon on Dec. 14, marking a historic lunar arrival for China's space agency. The Chang'e 3 lander is carrying China's Yutu moon rover. See how they will explore the lunar surface here.
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Shutdown plurality voting! - Government shuts down, due to - Ideological fundamentalism in Congress, due to - Ideological fundamentalists voted into Congress by the American people, due to - Dysfunctional, big money, two-party political system generating few election options, due to - Widespread use of simplistic, poorly-representative, winner-takes-all, Plurality Voting system based on single-mark ballots, due to - It being used when the country was founded and now being ingrained in our culture, due to - Single-mark ballots being easy to tabulate by hand. Yes, in 2013, after landing rovers on Mars, sequencing the human genome, and creating a machine than can beat humans on Jeopardy!, Americans still use a simplistic system based on single-mark ballots and plurality voting because historically they were easier to count by hand! Fortunately the Constitution (and local and state law) can be changed. ;) That means it's actually on us. Do we want to move to more evolved, robust systems, such as Preferential Voting (ranked voting) or Proportional Representation (wherever possible), to create a more representative, satisfactory, efficient government? Or do we want to keep our 'merican gladiator system that produces ideological meatheads who'd rather fight on camera than solve problems? More info: - http://en.wikipe
dia.org/wiki/Pro portional_repres entation - http://en.wikipe dia.org/wiki/Sin gle_transferable _vote NGO worth checking out: http://www.fairv ote.org/ ReferenceFairVote.org | Home FairVote acts to transform our elections to achieve secure access to participation for all, a full spectrum of meaningful ballot choices and majority rule with fair representation. As a catalyst for change, we build support for innovative strategies to win a constitutionally protected right to vote, universal voter registration, a national popular vote for president, instant runoff voting and...
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How could you let this happen. Are you asking for a popular uprising? We are a bit late for an American Spring, let's hope the Empire Falls so we can quickly rebuild a true Democracy.
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Congress... You idiots.
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"To gain relief from sanctions aimed at Iran’s support of terrorism, its nuclear program, and its human rights violations, Iran would have to undertake enormous reforms across the board. The Iranian government would have to prove that it has not supported terrorism in the past six months; it would have to release unconditionally all political prisoners in the country, end its human rights violations, and establish an independent judiciary; and it would have to assure the world that its nuclear program is designed only to provide peaceful nuclear energy. These are not changes that anybody expects to see in the short term from the current Iranian government, if ever."
ReferenceUnwinding Sanctions on Iran Is Going to Be Really Hard - Kaveh Waddell - The Atlantic Even if Iran makes progress toward meeting Western demands, by now there are 16 executive orders, nine congressional acts, and multiple international bodies wrapped up in the sanctions.
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We believe >iranians want to peacefully coexist with us, despite the rhetoric and actions of their government in recent history. We only want the same, so we are cautiously optimistic about the recent developments. However, until we understand what has brought about this change, we will remain guarded and skeptical.
ReferenceObama Says He Spoke to Iran’s President by Phone The conversation on Friday afternoon was the first between the leaders of the United States and Iran in more than three decades.
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We support those who use their time and talents for the public good. Code for America is an excellent example as they use technology to make governments more responsive. As an example, San Mateo County in California has one of the lowest rates of food-stamp participation in the country, due to a difficult application process. Changes in the process would require 18 agencies to overhaul their data-processing software. The participants want to create a program that would ask simple questions to applicants and use the answers to populate the complicated government form.
ReferenceCommunity-minded hackers code well for the future The nonprofit Code for America, whose tech wizards call themselves the Peace Corps for Geeks, uses technology to make government work better.
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New or a rehash of the same old ? I'm hoping for something fresh and it just launched today. I will give it a week of steady watching, but some suspect it to be a more polished version of CNN... Al Jazeera English had an bias - but it's always nice to see an outside America or more critical perspective. This show will be funded by money from outside the US, but made by those who reside in the US. I hope a beneficial combination for those who are able to subscribe to this channel. They started off on a bad foot though, banning content basically from the other Al Jazeera networks around the world... america.aljazeer
a.com ReferenceAl Jazeera America | Al Jazeera America Al Jazeera America offers unbiased, fact-based, in-depth stories of U.S. and international news, including sports, business, lifestyle and investigative journalism
