Papert suggested, amongst other things, that many children are bored with school and bored with being talked down to by educators. Since this had been my experience through much of school up until university, the book struck a chord with me. It came out at a time when I was at a cross-roads in my life. I wasn’t very pleased with the formal education I had received and I spent a lot of time thinking about how we educate our children. Papert held out some hope that we might break a couple of important ruts I felt our education system had gotten into.

Papert also suggested that personal computers would become so inexpensive and ubuiquitous that little children would have them, and spend some time suggesting how we might best accomplish that. Personal computers were, at the time, only for geeks like me (I built one myself, from components) and were unknown by (and unusable for) the non-geek.

And then I heard nothing more about Papert, his LOGO turtles or any of that.  For years.

Until 2 Christmases ago … when I stumbled across a WiFi robotic toy with vision, touch and sound sensors. Made by Lego, it’s their “Mindstorms” line. It’s amazing (and quite expensive for a child, which kind of misses the point). You can see it here: http://www.legomindstorms.com/ I nearly bought myself one, until my wife pointed out that the dog would probably pick a fight with it, and the dog would likely win.

It turns out, Papert hasn’t been idle all this time, just moving in circles that don’t touch me. He wrote a book called The Connected Family: Bridging the Digital Generation Gap. You can read about it here:  http://worldwideworkshop.org/programs/past-programs/connected-family/connected-family

When I went to kindergarden, I was 5. I could already read. My teachers were upset because they felt it was their place to teach me to read and my parents, not being trained educators, couldn’t do as good a job as they could. I can still read now, so my parents can’t have done all that bad a job.

My grandson is now 3 1/2. He uses a computer regularly to play various kinds of eye-hand co-ordination games. He can type on a special kids keyboard.He’s way more advanced than I was at 5 when I got to kindergarten and my parents received their reprimand.

My grandson will be 4 around next Christmas. Maybe he’ll be getting one of these under the tree. Or should I say “we”?

Some early clippings and pictures of the original LOGO turtles can be found here: http://cyberneticzoo.com/?p=1711

It’s a nice feature, except for the small problem that pages it was offering to translate were already in English.

It seems Google had decided, somehow, that my native language was Spanish. I’m not sure where it got this from, but it’s wrong.

So I told it my native language was English, and it went away.

Until the next time I restarted the browser. At which point it started doing it again.

Once again my native language was Spanish. So I changed it back to English and, for good measure, told it never to translate pages that are already in English.

So we co-existed peacefully for an hour or so, until I closed my browser and reopened it. It again started offering to translate English pages for me. Sure enough, it thought I was a Spanish speaker again. I turned that back to English, told it never to translate from English again, and for good measure, turned the entire feature off.

Would you care to guess what happened next?

The next time I started my browser, it gratuitously offered to translate from English again. No amount of turning this feature off worked.

So I uninstalled it instead!

Google has more than 10,000 employees worldwide. A significant number of them are programmers and IT support staff. Impressive, isn’t it?

If the world were a village of 1000 people:

584 would be Asians

123 would be Africans

95 would be East and West Europeans

84 Latin Americans

55 Soviets (still including for the moment Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, etc.)

52 North Americans

6 Australians and New Zealanders

The people of the village would have considerable difficulty communicating:

165 people would speak Mandarin

86 would speak English

83 Hindi/Urdu

64 Spanish

58 Russian

37 Arabic

That list accounts for the mother-tongues of only half the villagers. The other half speak (in descending order of frequency) Bengali, Portuguese, Indonesian, Japanese, German, French, and 200 other languages.

In the village there would be:

300 Christians (183 Catholics, 84 Protestants, 33 Orthodox)

175 Moslems

128 Hindus

55 Buddhists

47 Animists

210 all other religons (including atheists)

via State of the Village Report.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates pitched a new form of capitalism on Thursday that would help better serve the neglected poor  in a speech to company bosses assembled in Davos.

He posited that capitalism worked because people were motivated by self-interest to create wealth, but the system did not reflect the other key driver of human behaviour: the desire to help others.

This could be overcome if companies made more philanthropic gestures and gained recognition from the public for doing so. They could also work at stretching their activities to serve neglected and seemingly unattractive markets.

“The challenge here is to design a system including profit and recognition to do more for the poor,” he said, calling for a new form of “creative capitalism.”

via Harness capitalism to help the poor, urges Bill Gates – Yahoo! Canada Finance.

(I must admit to being a bit confused by the timing of this item. It came out in January but it only being reported on now by Yahoo)

I think he makes a point that has been made, from time to time, by others, including Bill Clinton and Jean Cretien.

There is a widening gap between rich and poor, in North America and around the world. Oh, and the middle class is being gutted. Historically, a large gap has led to global unrest, often global violence. World wars, civil wars. This time we’re seeing terrorism on a level that was never seen previously, but it’s still violent unrest.

Mostly the decisions that contribute to this gap, this disparity, are made by nations, but with the increasing power of corporations, especially multi-nationals, there are decisions that can be made by non-elected individuals that might contribute, at least somewhat, to a solution.

Television news is another area that used to be roped off from the profit motive. When Walter Cronkite died last week, it was odd to see news anchor after news anchor talking about how much better the news coverage was back in Cronkite’s day. I thought, “Gee, if only you were in a position to do something about it.”

But maybe they aren’t. Because unlike in Cronkite’s day, today’s news has to make a profit like all the other divisions in a media conglomerate. That’s why it wasn’t surprising to see the CBS Evening News broadcast live from the Staples Center for two nights this month, just in case Michael Jackson came back to life and sold Iran nuclear weapons. In Uncle Walter’s time, the news division was a loss leader. Making money was the job of The Beverly Hillbillies. And now that we have reporters moving to Alaska to hang out with the Palin family, the news is The Beverly Hillbillies.

via Bill Maher: New Rule: Not Everything in America Has to Make a Profit.

There’s that old TAANSTAFL thing again. Now that news has to make a profit, and you can’t charge for the news itself, you get advertisers to pay for your news. What you get is the news slanted the way the advertisers want it.

Which is fine if it’s also the way you want it. But it seldom seems to be, at least not for me.

So what can we do about it? Byron Alley says that charging a premium for some parts of the news or other services might be a workable option. What do you think?

Given that we all want health and spend trillions to “care” for it, it’s sobering how little thought we give to its true meaning. When I ask, the response I receive is typically “the absence of disease.” Health is much more interesting and consequential than this. To define it in this negative sense is no more accurate than to define wealth as the absence of poverty.

via Dr. Andrew Weil: The Question No One Asks About Healthcare.

The Getty Images Settlement Demand Letter is a deliberate attempt by Getty Images to intimidate and bully recipients to pay an extravagant “settlement fee” in exchange for Getty Images agreement to NOT sue the recipient. Recipients of this letter have allegedly infringed on the alleged copyrights owned by Getty Images.

There are two sides to every story and disagreement. Recipients of the Letter know Getty Images side. This website will assemble the stories and legal arguments of “the other side”. We trust this website will be both helpful and beneficial to you.

The above is a quote (slightly edited) of the lead paragraphs on the following web page.

via The Getty Images Settlement Demand Letter: Reporting on the Extortion Letter Scheme.

Here’s another resource: http://www.zyra.info/getstu.htm

I found out about this scheme recently when someone I know got this letter. I had not heard of the scheme previously, and knew Getty to be (I thought) a reputable stock photography house. I was surprised what I found out when I googled various phrases in the letter.

Now, I’m no lawyer, so take what I have to say with a grain of salt. And do your own research.

But it seems odd to me that they are going so hard against people who, as far as they know, did nothing wrong, tried hard to obey the rules, obtained the pictures in what they thought was a legitimate manner, made essentially no money from the pictures, etc

This heavy-handed approach can only tarnish Getty’s reputation. Why would they want to do this?

The following excerpt is from my interview with Michigan’s 1993 Women’s Entrepreneur of the Year and a decades-long small business owner [...] Her name is Nina Sylvester and sadly her story is similar to many other past—and current—Michigan manufacturing shop owners:

“Bank of America called and told me that they ‘No longer find that Automotive and Manufacturing are lucrative to their business and therefore will not renew my loan and I have 90 days to find new financing.’ Keep in mind that I was never late on a payment, nor am I to this day, 10 months later. I am at the office everyday collecting what little money is left in receivables which is a job in itself. No one is paying their bills, and I hear the same story from everyone. I had in excess of $100,000.00 in bankruptcies alone since the end of last year. I called and had packages put together and interviewed with 20 different banks. They all said the same thing. One bank in particular, Huntington National Bank, I asked them what they were doing with the money that was given to them by the government and she told me that they had it in an account collecting interest and were going to acquire other banks with it.

I also contacted the SBA and was told that they have programs for new businesses but nothing for existing businesses. Meanwhile the bank is on me to pay off my loans in their entirety. They forced me to stop manufacturing and taking orders, forced me to sell off equipment that was appraised in 2006 for $683,000.00. A boring mill that I paid $210,000.00 for, sold at auction for $15,000.00, and that is just one. Tooling that cost in excess of $20,000.00 went for $25.00. Now, I have a building that I paid $470,000.00 for in 1991, they are telling me I will be lucky to get $375,000.00 for. I still owe the bank $650,000.00 and don’t have a clue as to how I’m going to pay that back.

I have been in business 24 years, and have nothing but debt to show for it now. I have worked in this industry for 35 years, and never in my wildest dreams did I ever think that this would be happening in this country. Our government is quick to help foreign countries and will not help their own people. They continue to send work overseas when large corporations here are closing left and right.”

via Testimony on behalf of Michigan’s tool and die industry | Tool & Dieing.

via Elizabeth Warren Talks Toxic Assets On MSNBC (VIDEO).

Really?

Who hands out $350 billion (that’s billion with a “B”) without usage and reporting requirements?

The population of the US is estimated to be 305 million. So that’s $1,150 per person being given to banks with no strings attached?

What am I missing? Surely governments don’t work that way. No government department I’ve ever worked with gave away money without usage and reporting requirements.

If I were Frank DiPascale, Jr., and I saw what was happening in the summer of 2008, I would have put aside perhaps ten or twenty million dollars very quietly and gotten the hell out of dodge. Same goes for Madoff, as far as I’m concerned. I mean, look at it this way: you’ve been a dirtbag for more than 25 years, a total, stone-cold crook taking the life savings from the wallets of the elderly, the charitable, your best friends and their families. Suddenly you don’t have the moxie to make a clean getaway? What gives? Why didn’t these guys run away? I sure would have. If I were Frank DiPascale, Jr., I’d be sunning myself someplace where the extradition laws were modulated by the friendly local constabulary, and all my new friends were calling me Pablo or Francois or Mr. Wemberly. But they all stuck around to face their victims and the wrath of a righteous public that now hates anybody that has money, even if it was legally obtained.

From the Huffington Post: Fortune’s Stanley Bing: One Big Question for the Madoff Gang.