Dear Commons Community,
Elaine and I are doing the tours of London (Westminster Abbey, Changing of the Guards, Tower of London, etc. ) Upon leaving Westminster Abbey Elaine asked one of the guides for directions. He said you must be American. Elaine said how did you guess thinking it was her accent. He said: “Because Americans always smile.”
Tony
London
Dear Commons Community,
This piece, “Who is struggling the most with student loans?” from CBS Money Watch was passed onto me by a colleague, Frank McCluskey. It references a report (Degreeless in Debt) from the Education Sector published earlier this year that documents several trends regarding student borrowing:
The conclusion of the article is:
“Ironically, the strategies that dropouts use to get a better handle on college costs are actually increasing their chances of leaving school and ultimately defaulting on their debt. According to the study, here are the risk factors:
If college prices continue to rise (pretty much a sure thing) and family income remains stagnant, there is little doubt that the dropout problem will grow, along with untenable default levels.”
The above is also being exacerbated by the decrease in funding in public higher education that is forcing many state colleges to be more selective in their admissions thereby directing many students who would be considered at risk (part-time, need remediation, etc.) into the private, for-profit sector.
Tony
London
Dear Commons Community,
Today is the anniversary of D-Day, June 6, 1944, and the invasion of Normandy. For our relatives and friends of the World War II generation, it was a most important day fraught with concern for loved ones and elation as Allied forces began the invasion of northern Europe that would eventually end in Berlin and the end of World War II.
Elaine and I spent part of our morning at the Winston Churchill War Rooms Museum here beneath the streets of London. Quite impressive with lots of exhibits to ponder. Above is a note about Churchill on the evening of D-Day.
Below is a comment from a newspaper reporter in the midst of several devastating military losses acknowledging the importance of Churchill’s rhetoric and rallying calls during the War.
It was a good way to spend June 6, 2012.
Tony
London
Dear Commons Community,
Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walker will become the first governor in U.S. history to survive a recall election, media outlets projected on Tuesday, a setback for labor unions and a boost to Republican hopes in November’s presidential election. Major networks projected Walker would be the winner about an hour after the polls closed in Wisconsin in the divisive election that left families at odds and neighbors not speaking to each over Walker’s push to curtail collective bargaining by public sector workers. Republicans were also leading in the four state senator elections being contested as part of the recall election. The BBC reported:
“With 87% of votes counted in a rare recall election, Walker had 54% compared to 45% for Democratic challenger Tom Barrett, who admitted defeat.”
A BBC reporter made the following observations:
“The lopsided campaign spending – 7-to-1 in favour of the Republicans – was peculiar to this race. The passion was peculiar to the politics that Scott Walker introduced in 2010.
But Republicans will be delighted by the result and Democrats will be downcast.
Wisconsin has been Democratic territory since Ronald Reagan left office. Now it cannot be taken for granted by the Obama campaign.
Momentum is important in politics, and Wisconsin’s Republican have the wind in their sails.
The recall election was a shot not just across Scott Walker’s bows but also those of like-minded Republican governors. It missed, and the US labor movement must wonder what comes next.”
Tony
London, England
Dear Commons Community,
Elaine and I had a good day here in London and mingled with the revelers for Queen Elizabeth’s Jubilee. It was touching to hear and see the crowd supporting their queen. Prince William and his wife are surely the couple of great interest.
I hope you enjoy the photos!
Tony
Dear Commons Community,
I have just arrived in London for vacation. I will have my laptop, Verizon wireless connection and cell phone so I hope to stay in touch. It is the 60th Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth’s reign in the United Kingdom. London is little bit like New York City today on St. Patrick’s Day. Wall to wall people celebrating. There is a parade with carriages and horses honoring the Queen. The Union Jack is being prominently displayed on all of the buildings, on cars, children’s strollers, and on people’s hats. World War II planes are doing fly-overs. Quite a party going on.
Cheerio!
Tony
Dear Commons Community,
Keith A. Williams, an assistant professor of physics at the University of Virginia, has a commentary in the Chronicle of Higher Education on instructional technology. While acknowledging many of the benefits that technology has brought to teaching and learning, he also laments that we are losing something. His observation:
“It is virtually miraculous how much information the laptops, tablets, and phones can bring into the classroom, almost free of cost. A steady torrent of fresh information has transformed the classroom. Gone or concealed in dust are most periodic tables, encyclopedias, and globes. All of that can now be called up on a screen.
The whole apparatus of instruction has moved into the cloud…Whether we need the YouTube video of the astronaut dropping a hammer and feather on the moon or Newton’s Principia translated, narrated, or lectured, we delight in using Google to retrieve it quickly from the cloud.
And so the instructor is the multimedia rainmaker who summons from the cloud everything that the modern American scholar must learn. The student is spared the necessity of a library; the library is in the cloud. Lecture demonstrations are also in the cloud, in the form of flashlets and applets sanitized of any complicating realities, non-idealities, and inefficiencies. And if a student should miss a lecture, the cloud will oblige: The student need no longer request notes from an instructor or colleague. Everything is in the cloud—even some of the most popular instructors. And that cloud hangs over all of America’s institutions of higher education.”
Food for thought!
Tony
Dear Commons Community,
The Wisconsin recall election of Governor Scott Walker (Rep.) and challenger Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett (Dem.) will be the political story today and tomorrow. Various polls show Walker edging out Barrett by a few percentage points. In addition to the governorship, there are four state senate seats also being contested. While substantively important in Wisconsin, this election also carries a lot of symbolic importance nationally as a referendum on state and local social programs, fiscal austerity and the influence of public employee collective bargaining.
Tony
Dear Commons Community,
Maureen Dowd in her New York Times column today expresses concern about the way President Obama is running his campaign. This is not the first time that she has suggested that he might be a one-term president. She focused on what appeared to be a particularly bad week for Obama:
“As the president was being slapped by Mitt Romney for being too weak on national security, he was being rapped by a Times editorial for being too aggressive on national security.
A Times article by Jo Becker and Scott Shane revealed that the liberal law professor who campaigned against torture and the Iraq war now personally makes the final decisions on the “kill list,” targets for drone strikes. “A unilateral campaign of death is untenable,” the editorial asserted.
On Thursday, Bill Clinton once more telegraphed that he considers Obama a lightweight who should not have bested his wife. Bluntly contradicting the Obama campaign theme that Romney is a heartless corporate raider, Clinton told CNN that the Republican’s record at Bain was “sterling.”
On Friday, an ugly job market report led to the stock market’s worst day of the year. As the recovery flat-lined, the president conceded to a crowd at a Honeywell factory in Golden Valley, Minn., that “our economy is still facing some serious headwinds” and getting sucked further into Europe’s sinkhole. In depressing imagery for the start of the summer campaign, cable channels carried the red Dow arrow pointing down while Obama spoke; the Dow wiped out all of its 2012 gains.
The president who started off with such dazzle now seems incapable of stimulating either the economy or the voters.“
Dowd attributes these problems to Obama’s personality and dreams of being a superhero combined with an innate cautiousness.
“Obama’s caution — ingrained from a life of being deserted by his father and sometimes his mother, and of being, as he wrote to another girlfriend, “caught without a class, a structure, or tradition to support me” — has restrained him at times.
In some ways, he’s still finding himself, too absorbed to see what’s not working. But the White House is a very hard place to go on a vision quest, especially with a storm brewing.”
Great insight!!
Tony
Dear Commons Community,
John Pavley has a short nostalgic blog posting on Apple’s HyperCard, the original stack-based software that provided the model for PowerPoint and the other presentation programs that blossomed in the 1990s and continue today. Pavley comments that if Apple’s HyperCard was alive this year it would be 25-years-old. Ars Technica has a retrospective on HyperCard, that reminds us what it was all about and it’s critical place in Internet history. He reminisces that it was:
“Multimedia hyperlinking bundled with a programming environment that a grade schooler could master was the pinnacle of human technological progress! Even though I was a professional programmer (I knew how to code in C and had read all 3 volumes of Inside Macintosh) I created hundreds of HyperCard stacks, mostly for fun and some for profit. It was a black day in 2004 when HyperCard went the way of Dodo and the rotary phone.
Various development tools and programming environments have tried to provide HyperCard like “software construction kits” over the years: Adobe’s Flash, open source HTML & JavaScript, Google’s Blocky are just three that come to mind. All of these tools start out simple but eventually grow into digital jungles of complexity that lock out amateurs and grade school kids alike. You don’t find many 10-year-olds or school teachers writing W3C compliant HTML5 web applications.
But the original motivations that inspired Bill Atkinson to create HyperCard are more relevant than ever: In the future there will be two kinds of people: Those who use computers and those who are used by computers. I do not need to remind you that The Future is already here.”
My first HyperCard application was a statistics tutorial that I developed circa 1990 when teaching research methods at Hunter College. That Hypercard tutorial evolved into a website and later a series of youtube videos.
Thanks for the memories!
Tony
