Stags: Autumn sings coolness in Canyon, California. Stags along the road, A natural turn, Virtual ethnography of World Univ & Sch?, Flow

Autumn sings coolness in Canyon, California. This week: stags along the road, explorer ants in the house ... a natural turn



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A virtual ethnography of World Univ & Sch - http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/ - participant observation - cyber field work? Where to begin?



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A friend wonders:

wonders if it is a bad thing that both his children spent their last weekend of summer vacation making weapons.

(Other interesting replies in FB)


Scott:

Tool-making is 'thing' - a good thing, and old - how to move this along to MIT's drag-and-drop, free, fun, colorful Scratch programming language (http://scratch.mit.edu/) is one question I'll ask myself in the next years with kids. Is language-use an extension of tool / weapon making, and might it be substituted for 'weapon-making'? A friend visited recently, and his 7 year old son was making a weapon with stone and stick, but not his 5 year old daughter... All 7 billion-ish of us have language from age 2-ish



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A friend writes:

C'mon. Doesn't anyone want to debate? Who is your favorite Reductionist? heheh


Scott:

I'll see what I can find at MIT OCW, Berkeley Webcast, Yale OYC et al. ... looking first at philosophy of science (and the Oxford Companion to Philosophy :) ... invite friends to teach this, or add their blog posting to http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/ ... check out, too, the online, free Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reduction-biology/), if folks want to learn more immediately :)

World Univ & Sch's 'Religious Studies' subject has a evolutionary focus - http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/Religious_Studies :)

Click 'edit this page' at WUaS to add resources, teach and learn :) Please invite friends to do the same ...


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A Quaker friend in FB writes:


would happily borrow more books from the library (instead of buying them used online)...if the library actually had the books I want to read.


Another friend:

I have that same problem. Actually, university libraries are better, but getting access can be tricky.There's also inter-library loan.


Scott:

Here are the beginnings of World Univ & Sch's "Library Resources" wiki page - with a lot of books and resources - all of which are in the public domain: http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/Library_Resources . As a free, open, wiki this will grow with what we add to it. :)


Just added Read Print - http://www.readprint.com/ - recommended by Time Magazine (as one of 50 best web sites for the year - http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,2012721,00.htm) to WUaS's Library Resources: http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/Library_Resources.









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A friend posts a speech by Microsoft's Bill Gates:

Bill Gates speech: 11 rules your kids did not and will not learn in school


Rule 1: Life is not fair - get used to it!

Rule 2: The world doesn't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

Rule 3: You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.

Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.

Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity.

Rule 6: If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault, so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent's generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they'll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.

Rule 10: Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.


http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=131190066891088&id=513625075&ref=mf



Scott wonders in response:

:) Unspoken codes? Is Bill Gates becoming an anthropologist? Perhaps WUaS could invite him to join the anthropology conversation at http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/Anthropology :)






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A friend who is entering a Master's program at Columbia writes:

feeling like a kid who can't swim and suddenly got tossed into the deep end. will take a few weeks of kicking and struggling until i settle into all this learning.


Scott:

find the focus, read, write rhythm :) Self-motivation wins the day ... and can lead to rich 'flow: the psychology of optimal experience' experiences (Csikszentmihalyi)



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Napa Valley - Silverado Trail - sun going down - illuminated wonderland - Grateful Dead 1969 jam heaven - heading to Harbin's waters



















(http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2010/09/stags-autumn-sings-coolness-in-canyon.html - September 8, 2010)