notes.husk.org

"A group of pupils at a middle school in Alaska took control of their classroom computers after..."

Mon, 06 May 2013 19:46:30 +0100

“

A group of pupils at a middle school in Alaska took control of their classroom computers after phishing for administrator privileges. They asked teachers at Schoenbar Middle School, for 12 to 13-year-olds, to enter admin names and passwords to accept a false software update, according to reports.

…

Associated Press said that at least 18 pupils were involved in the phishing, which gave them control over 300 computers allocated for student use at the school in the Alaskan town of Ketchikan.

Those computers have now been seized.

”

- Alaskan phishing pupils take over classroom computers at BBC News (via iamdanw)

"In August 2012 two schools in San Antonio, Texas, embedded RFID tags in identity badges belonging to..."

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 23:27:46 +0000

“In August 2012 two schools in San Antonio, Texas, embedded RFID tags in identity badges belonging to their 4,200 students. These help administrators to count students who turn up to class but miss the morning register. Because funding is linked to daily attendance, the system enables schools to claim more taxpayer cash. On January 8th a court lifted an earlier injunction halting the expulsion of a child who refused to wear the badge on religious grounds (some Christians liken the devices to the Mark of the Beast, foreseen in the Bible). The family intends to appeal.”

- Modern families: Chips off the old block, in The Economist.

"You can’t be forcing a 1960s curriculum and exam structure on schools. These children are..."

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 22:07:59 +0000

“You can’t be forcing a 1960s curriculum and exam structure on schools. These children are going to be going out into the world of the 2020s and 2030s. It is going to be very different from Michael Gove’s dream of what it should be.”

- Louise Robinson, president of the Girls’ School Association, quoted in an interview with the Independent, under the headline Gove’s obsession with bygone era will fail pupils, says schools’ chief.

‘Pleading for an emphasis on developing skills needed for the future, she added: “The Star Trek society is already here. We need to look at the way the world of the future is going. At present the way we run our schools is based on the 19th century.”’

"San Francisco Is America's Best City in 2012"

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 19:16:01 +0100

Bloomberg Businessweek:

As long as chilly weather, walking uphill, and really expensive real estate don’t turn you off, San Francisco has no shortage of positive qualities. Though numbering fewer than a million people, this coastal city packs in so much—from world-class restaurants and museums to community fairs and music festivals, a large educated class, and an improving economy—that many proud San Franciscans will tell you that its finish at the top of Businessweek.com’s 2012 best cities ranking is well-earned.

“World class restaurants and museums?” [Citation needed]

Well, ok, I’m not really qualified to judge restaurants (although I will note I’ve started caring more about food since I moved here), but world class museums? No. SFMOMA’s not bad, and it may have a great collection, but its current home is relatively tiny and it can’t host the sort of exhibitions that MOMA or Tate Modern can. The de Young is a baffling grab-bag of western hemisphere cultural artefacts, American painting, and some modern art (with an annoying habit of concentrating on cash-cow impressionist exhibitions), while the Museum of the Legion of Honor is also tiny. The Exploratorium isn’t a bad hands-on museum, and the California Academy of Sciences is an adequate natural history museum, but I wouldn’t describe either as world class.

I will grant that the two Golden Gate Park museums do have wonderful buildings.

We looked at … educational attributes (public school performance, the number of colleges, and rate of graduate-degree holders)

Ah, so the fact that the state schools suck in the city can be outweighed by all those Google and Facebook PhD holders who commute down to the Valley and the fact that there’s a couple of universities here. Right.

Major professional league and minor league teams, as well as U.S.-based teams belonging to international leagues in each city were included.

What.

There’s no agreeing on which is the “best” city for you to live in. For that, family connections, occupation, lifestyle, and perhaps a lifelong devotion to a doomed sports team all come into play.

That sentence was going so well, until the final stanza. What.

There’s also the question that if there’s no agreeing, what are you doing publishing such a list? Oh, except for the pageviews from commentary such as this. Oops.

That, along with sheer breathtaking views, attracts about 129,000 tourists every day, according to the San Francisco Travel Association.

Given that London attracts about a third of a million, I’ll grant that that’s an impressive per capita ratio of tourists to locals. Let’s just hope they keep to Union Square and Fisherman’s Wharf, eh?

While cultural institutions such as the de Young Museum may house famous works

[Citation needed].

When I went looking for a list of famous works, I found a site that listed five paintings by American artists. Would it be unfair to use the word “parochial”?

As the city has grown wealthier, it has lost some of its legendary grit. Yet it has one of the largest U.S. populations of homeless people.

At least that factoid’s true.

Endpages “Real Book of Stars” by Calsidyrose on...

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 02:36:25 +0100

Endpages “Real Book of Stars” by Calsidyrose on Flickr.

Elliott 803 computer launched, The National Museum Of...

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 02:46:16 +0100

Elliott 803 computer launched, The National Museum Of Computing:

The Elliott 803 was a small computer manufactured by the British company Elliott Brothers in the 1960s. About 250 were built and most British universities and colleges bought one.

The 800 series started with the 801, a one-off test machine built in 1957. The 802 was a production model but only seven were sold between 1958 and 1961. The short-lived 803A was built in 1959 and first delivered in 1960; the 803B was built in 1960 and first delivered in 1961. Elliott subsequently developed the much faster Elliott 503 computer to be software compatible.

Fast Co Design: What If We Put A School Atop Every Building In...

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 21:27:06 +0000

Fast Co Design: What If We Put A School Atop Every Building In Manhattan?

Maybe the educational movement just needs to reignited with a big, brash idea. And Schools in the Sky, a project by Ana Luisa Soares, Filipe Magalhães, and André Vergueiro as part of a competition to repurpose roofs, is just that. It asks, what if we put a school on top of every (non-pointy) building in NYC and then we painted them bright, eye-melting yellow?

The team calls the plan “a provocation.” By giving schools the most valuable and visible space in the city, education becomes something we’ll need to intrinsically value more, or, at minimum, something that we can’t possibly ignore.

“The yellow comes from the buses and taxis (if you say that you saw them everywhere, we wanted that you saw the schools everywhere, too),” writes student and project co-designer Ana Luisa Soares. “The shapes of the windows came from basic shapes games for kids.”

(via notational)

"In Britain, the Blair government’s policy of getting half of all school-leavers into higher..."

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 21:54:05 +0000

“In Britain, the Blair government’s policy of getting half of all school-leavers into higher education meant that, when it broke out, student discontent would penetrate into hundreds of thousands of family homes.”

- Paul Mason, in an extract from his new book, Global unrest: how the revolution went viral in The Guardian.

"Tseëlon, a social psychologist specialising in visual appearance, says the British devotion to..."

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 19:16:08 +0100

“Tseëlon, a social psychologist specialising in visual appearance, says the British devotion to uniform reflects “a general etiquette towards children” defined by power, control and a lack of trust.”

- Patrick Barkham: School skirt ban is just the latest battle in the uniform wars, at the Guardian.

know the weather by maraid on Flickr.Nice cover. I’ll even...

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 18:13:38 +0100

know the weather by maraid on Flickr.

Nice cover. I’ll even forgive the non-straight terminator on the letter t.

The other covers in the set are well worth a look too.