Over and over again, I find that people’s mental model of who can see what doesn’t match up with reality. People think “everyone” includes everyone who searches for them on Facebook. They never imagine that “everyone” includes every third party sucking up data for goddess only knows what purpose. They think that if they lock down everything in the settings that they see, that they’re completely locked down. They don’t get that their friends lists, interests, likes, primary photo, affiliations, and other content is publicly accessible.

apophenia » Blog Archive » Facebook and “radical transparency” (a rant)


Exactly. 


Speaking to my students about privacy and 6 degrees never seems to hit home.


I should do more demonstrations of how Facebook’s default privacy settings really does expose them in ways they don’t immediately realize.

Find out what basic safety equipment is in the lab. This affects what kind of activities you can plan. Ask ahead of time if notebooks and other consumable materials have been ordered. Once the school year starts, it’s often hard to get things that are not in inventory. Ask what technology will available to you in the classroom, such as an interactive white board, “clickers,” probeware, cameras, or projection attachments for microscopes. If the school does not provide a laptop you can take home, invest in some USB flash drives you can use to take files to work on at home.

Question from a new teacher


Very relevant and timely info for those of our species lucky enough to be entering the teaching profession but that have no clue what they’re in for…

Ourlast big economic driver was engineering and the first stage of the digital age. At Institute for the Future, in our annual ten-year forecast program, we see an underlying shift to biology as a driver, and what I’m starting to think of as the “global well-being economy.” If biology and the global well-being economy will drive the future, what does that suggest for leaders? How can leaders grow their own empathy with nature and the global well-being economy?

Self-interest and competition will not be enough. Business leaders will still need to drive revenue, increase efficiency, and resolve conflicts, but financial mandates (I win/you lose) won’t be enough. Leaders must expand their view of self and embrace the shared assets and opportunities around them — not just the individual takeaways that will reward them alone. Leaders must learn to give ideas away, trusting that they will get even more back in return.

Leadership, Thinking Ten Years Ahead – Imagining the Future of Leadership – Harvard Business Review


Things to remind myself as I work with my 13 and 14 year old students everyday…

Don Chance, a finance professor at Louisiana State University, says it dawned on him last spring. The semester was ending, and as usual, students were making a pilgrimage to his office, asking for the extra points needed to lift their grades to A’s. “They felt so entitled,” he recalls, “and it just hit me. We can blame Mr. Rogers.

The question on researchers’ minds is whether all that texting, instant messaging and online social networking allows children to become more connected and supportive of their friends — or whether the quality of their interactions is being diminished without the intimacy and emotional give and take of regular, extended face-to-face time.


It is far too soon to know the answer.

An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the “hipster” – a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society.

O wretched minds of men! O blinded hearts!
In how great perils, in what darks of life
Are spent the human years, however brief!-
O not to see that Nature for herself
Barks after nothing, save that pain keep off,
Disjoined from the body, and that mind enjoy
Delightsome feeling, far from care and fear!
Therefore we see that our corporeal life
Needs little, altogether, and only such
As takes the pain away, and can besides
Strew underneath some number of delights.

Here it is: Google’s strategy to take over the world. Or at least, this is Google’s plan according to French consulting firm faberNovel, who summarize the Big G’s plot – from YouTube, to the Facebook threat, to competing with Microsoft, to Google’s iron grip on the online advertising market – and much more – in a mere 34 slides.

During night 2008.03.18/19 the “Pi of the Sky” apparatus located at Las Campanas Observatory was observing the Swift satellite field of view with 10s exposures from 5:49 UT. At 6:12 UT we observed exceptionally bright optical flash reaching 5.8 magnitudo. It was automatically detected by the flash recognition algorithm.

“It was from that planet [Nibiru], the Sumerian texts repeatedly and persistently stated, that the Anunnaki came to Earth. The term literally means ‘Those Who from Heaven to Earth Came.’ They are spoken of in the Bible as the Anakim, and in Chapter 6 of Genesis are also call Nefilim, which in Hebrew means the same thing: Those Who Have Come Down, from the Heavens to Earth.”

– Zecharia Sitchin, Genesis Revisited

“Throughout Mesopotamia, from the earliest times of Sumer and Akkad, all lands were owned by gods and men were their slaves. Of this, the cuneiform texts leave no doubt whatever. Each city-state had its own principal god, and the king was described in the very earliest written documents that we have as ‘the tenant farmer of the god’.”

– Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

n the night of 2008-03-20 (UT) we observed the optical afterglow of GRB 080319B (GCN 7427, Racusin et al.) with Gemini-South + GMOS in g, r, i, and z filters (4x180s in each filter). The source is well-detected in all bands. Magnitudes, calibrated to SDSS DR6, are: UTstart UTend t(hr) filt mag err 06:52:17 07:10:19 24.808 g 20.95 0.09 07:11:19 07:26:11 25.099 r 20.55 0.03 07:27..

Dunbar’s number has been popularized as the supposed cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable social relationships: the kind of relationships that go with knowing who each person is and how each person relates socially to every other person.[1] Proponents assert that group sizes larger than this generally require more restricted rules, laws, and enforced policies and regulations to maintain a stable cohesion.

Dunbar’s number was first proposed by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who theorized that “this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size … the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained.” On the periphery, the number 150 also includes past colleagues such as high school friends with whom a person would want to reacquaint themselves if they met again.[2]

Examples of the Nine Unknown Men making contact with the outer world are rare. There was, however, the extraordinary case of one of the most mysterious figures in Western history: the Pope Sylvester II, known also by the name of Gerbert d’Aurillac. Born in the Auvergne in 920 (d. 1003) Gerbert was a Benedictine monk, professor at the University of Rheims, Archbishop of Ravenna and Pope by the grace of Ortho III. He is supposed to have spent some time in Spain, after which a mysterious voyage brought him to India where he is reputed to have aquired various kinds of skills which stupified his entourage. For example, he possessed in his palace a bronze head which answered YES or NO to questions put to it on politics or the general position of Christianity. According to Sylvester II this was a perfectly simple operation corresponding to a two-figure calculation, and was performed by an automaton similar to our modern binary machines. This “magic” head was destroyed when Sylvester died, and all the information it imparted carefully concealed. No doubt an authorized research worker would come across some interesting things in the Vatican Library.