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Next time someone commits you to making balloon animals, head on over to How to Twist a Balloon Dog for awesome step-by-step instructions and a cute little animated gif of the process in action. Then go twack the person who committed you to making balloon animals over the head with a blunt instrument.
For T, some Friday fun, because he's never seen it, and because I made a promise: How To Dance Properly, the silly videos that eventually led to the show with zefrank. Read the blurbs under the video - they make it funnier.
Bonus dance video: Evolution of Dance
I usually prefer a bland-looking plate of chocolate chip cookies to most crafty no-bake treats, but these Halloween "crawly cakes" over at Not Martha, based on snack cakes and pocky, are really adorable. You could clearly do this with homemade cupcakes, but I think the snack-cake look is a big part of their charm.
I love it - it's movie seating charts as a variation on traveling salesman. xkcd has become my favorite comic on the web.
If I could afford to add any more books to my to-read list, I would pick up a copy of Clark's Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University, reviewed here by The New Yorker [via Arts & Letters Daily] Tracing the history of modern academia and its traditions forward from their roots in 18th century Germany (including the ancient roots of faculty balking at oversight and bureaucratic instrusion, such as early requirements that faculty publically list what courses they are taking in a course catalog), Clark uses the idea of charisma to talk about the sources of authority and tradition in the classroom:
The organizations that became the first Western universities, schools that sprang up in Paris and Bologna, were in part an outgrowth of ecclesiastical institutions, and their teachers asserted their authority by sitting, like bishops, in thrones—which is why we still refer to professorships as chairs—and speaking in a prescribed way, about approved texts. “The lecture, like the sermon, had a liturgical cast and aura,” Clark writes. “One must be authorized to perform the rite, and must do it in an authorized manner. Only then does the chair convey genuine charisma to the lecturer.”
I think we all know how religion has played a role in granting academics authority - you don't have to go back to the German Middle Ages but can look at the history of America's oldest colleges as well. I find it intriguing to look at the specific impact this has had on how modern education works, though. For example, the review mentions an old alternative to the lecture - the disputation, "in which a respondent affirmed the thesis under discussion and an opponent attempted to refute it". As the review notes, this is now seen in dissertation and thesis defenses. As a student, I think it would be interesting to understand the roots of this seemingly adversarial structure; in the course of the many reports and defenses I have given, I've never seen a faculty member verbalize that the antagonist role they adopt is part of a different type of pedagogical tool. I, in fact, hope that students do read this book. It sounds like it could do them as well as faculty some good in thinking about why we do things the way we do.
Clarke's main thesis is about how the shift towards researched-focused universities occured, and he seems in the end to have come up with a fairly insipring description of academic revolution. At the very least read the review - and make sure you get far enough through to encounter some of the great anecdotes about how academia used to be and probably my favorite quote from the whole review:
In an even more radical break with the past, professors began to be appointed on the basis of merit.
The newly popular Warning Signs for Tomorrow are half hilarious and half thought provoking. On the one hand, there are signs I'm tempted to hang on my office door, and on the other hand there are warning signs that, ethically speaking, we ought to have right now. I think, given the point in the semester we're at right now, that Cognitive Hazard is resonating with me the most closely.
After the rash of articles about how "young people" don't use e-mail anymore (and, by the way, how in the world does that work??? IM is a nice tool and I use it too, but it can't seriously be an e-mail replacement, can it?) it is now being reporrted that the majority of MySpace visitors and a significant portion of visitors to other social networking sites are over 35 [via Clicked].
First, I spent some time poking around the comScore website trying to figure out exactly how they determine the demograpics they claim to be measuring with their Mdia Metrix but have not found anything. So, I'm maintaining reservations about the reliability of the data, though they are taking a good sized sample.
But if one takes the results as accurate, a couple of other interesting facts fall out. For example, the press release says that MySpace and Friendster are skewing older, but that Facebook attracts a college-aged demographic and Xanga a teen to pre-teen demographic. This is true in one view of the data - of the 18-24 year olds viewing a social networking site, the largest percentage, 34%, are visiting Facebook. But, and this is of particular relevance to all of those students who say that Facebook is a closed setting, 41% of the visitors to Facebook are 35 or older. The niche theory seems flawed. In particular, it seems that younger users are more likly to flock to the newest systems, whereas older users, often with less free time on their hands, will stick with something that is working for them. Hardly a shock - isn't this why so much advertising targets the teen and young adult markets?
