Obesity in the US

One cure to rising obesity rates is simple. Turn off the electricity. Knowing that it'd work leads to many thoughts about our society. Convenience is a double edged sword.

Delicious Stinks

I much prefer diigo for "social tagging." It also adds social annotating (shared post-its on the www), which could be an awesome tool.

My #1 problem with delicious was this, right out of their FAQ page which explains that I cannot import and share my current bookmarks:

How do I share all my imported bookmarks?
To make a bookmark public, click the "share" link located on the right of its description. We don't have a "share all" button right now for a few reasons...

So right out of the gate, they are making excuses for why I can't continue to make my bookmarks public via their system. Customer service is not their strong point.

I've been saving my bookmarks online since Netscape was the world's web browser. I'll not waste my time moving thousands of bookmarks one at a time.

If you watch the RSS feed from my delicious account, you will see added bookmarks. That's because I've set diigo to automatically update delicious for me, rather than force others to use the information system I've chosen. The *only* advantage I can find with delicious is its large user base. Thank goodness diigo offers a bridge between systems that lets me do what I want...with the potential for other more exciting features as well.

There's a growing trend to evaluate our educational system based on test scores. Undoubtedly, our test scores will improve, but at what price? Are those tests designed to help students who will never attend college? It might surprise some people to realize that half of our students are below average! As important as education is, Academia will not save the world by raising test scores. It is a worthy goal to bring a college education within reach of all children, but not realistic. Luckily, there will always be a need for manual labor.

There is a solution which helps everyone. The solution is to teach all students a variety of skills, and not just academic skills. Among those skills is the ability to do things with your hands. John Ratzenberger created http://www.nutsandboltsfoundation.org/ because of what he sees as a crisis in America. You probably remember him as the actor who portrayed "Cliff" on "Cheers." He is also the host of a TV series called "Made in America" and the author of a book called "We've Got It Made In America," which I own and would be glad to share. His message is that kids love to tinker, and we need to foster that inquisitiveness. It is the curiosity of how stuff works which makes for better engineers, inventors, and even art museum archivists(1). What he does not say, but bears pointing out, is that a manual skill can be applied even if one does not pursue higher education.

Ratzenberger's position is that promoting manual skills prepares kids to be the inventors of tomorrow. This past summer my 9 year old son attended a week long summer camp called "Camp Invention." It would come as no surprise to Ratzenberger or myself that the kids' favorite part of the week was the "Take Apart" activity during the "I Can Invent" module. They had a blast learning to use hand tools and examing the gears and pulleys inside discarded appliances.

While the idea behind No Child Left Behind is an honorable one, it will do us more harm than good if it serves to distract our efforts from those things which have historically been our strengths. The teaching of technical or manual skills is just as imperitive as the teaching of the 3 Rs or digital skills if we are to prosper in a future of unknown problems solved by unknown tools.

(1) an Aug 19, 2007 article in our local paper depicts art museum archivist using an open end wrench to tighten a nut on the tail of a 1930 Savoia Marchetti flying boat. My initial response to seeing the image was "Why on earth would he be ruining that nut with an open end wrench? A six point box end wrench should minimize the marring of a museum piece!"

Wikipedia's Weasel Words

There are apparently a growing number of useful wikis available on the 'net. Wikipedia has a Manual of Style that aims to make the site read more like an encyclopedia. It is interesting reading if you've ever wondered what makes wikipedia a civil place for contributors and credible resource for researchers, while maintaining the feel of an encyclopedia. The term weasel words is among my favorites taken from that manual. The full weasel words page is a quick read, but just in case you're a strict RSS type reader I'll include the following excerpt:

Wikipedia, as an encyclopedia, aspires to be authoritative by definition. Including the opinions of "some people" in an encyclopedia article implicitly gives credibility to their opinion and vouches for its relevance, because if it weren't important or relevant, it wouldn't have been included. Given the unique nature and status of Wikipedia, this makes its articles troublingly easy to exploit in this way in order to spread hearsay, personal opinion and even propaganda. The first line of defense against this is verifiability policy, which provides specific criteria for the sort of support a claim must have to survive a challenge in article space.

As you read the core content policies you see how ironic it is that Wikipedia in one way doesn't contain any data. It is a collection of metadata with references to published data--effectively a huge database of links maintained by the public. How backward is that?