The Society Pages has an interesting point about using Facebook in class, and how the professors are more than aware that this sort of slacking is going on:

To return to the classroom example, the power of disclosure and connection to a network of intimates is difficult for a professor to compete with. I am a stranger to most of my students. They don’t know me. They have no way of knowing whether what I’m saying in the classroom will be useful, or uncomfortable by making them think about things they have little control over. Read on!

Normally I find myself in total agreement with whatever Marco Arment says–after all, the guy came up with Instapaper–so I was surprised to find myself really irritated by his piece a couple of weeks ago on the Proper Way to use RSS feeds. His post came in response to an article by Jacqui Cheng in Ars Technica, on the dangers of becoming addicted to RSS:

The first time I went without RSS in August, I simply went around to three or so of what I consider to be the best sites to get the latest news from. I combined that with my usual e-mail communications (tips from readers, conversations with PR folks from different companies, interviews already in progress, etc.) and my regular scans of Twitter in order to figure out what was going on during the day. It was stress-free, and I never felt like I was missing anything—I knew that if something truly important or controversial blew up, I’d hear about it instantly via Twitter and our loyal readers.

The next day when I loaded up my feeds, there were literally thousands of items piled up from the day before. (“Wow, I really comb through this much crap in a day? It looks so different when it’s all smashed together like this,” was the first thought that went through my head.) And when I ended up sifting through them all, I realized that I hadn’t missed a single story doing things the “old fashioned” way—rather, by following all these feeds, I was instead seeing hundreds of iterations on the same handful of stories. And I was wasting time going through them all day long. Read on!

Great analysis in Paid Content about the forthcoming Amazon Kindle Tablet and why it could succeed where other Android apps have failed:

Amazon is a conduit to lots of content; and, just as importantly, it already has a way for you to buy content from it. Like Apple, it is one of the 10 biggest merchant holders of credit card numbers in the world (along with companies such as eBay, PayPal, Sony through the PlayStation Network and Microsoft through its Xbox Live system).

Notice the company missing from that list? Google. It has almost no relationship in financial terms with the average person. Read on!

Back before Don’t Ask Don’t Tell had been repealed, noted video blogger and NYC radio DJ Jay Smooth had this to say about the perversity of a society terrified by homosexuality:

Because when we find ourselves believing that killing a man makes us more of a man, but loving a man makes us less of a man, it’s probably time to re-examine our criteria for manhood.

This quote has been on my mind a lot lately.

Read on!

I want to talk about advertising to children. More specifically, gendered advertising.

I’ve had most of these links saved up for at least 4-5 months, wanting to pull some sort of cohesive post from them, but I’ve never been able to come up with a theme that satisfied me. With the newfound freedom of my updated format, I figured I’d just toss them all up here and let the links stand for themselves.

I’ve always admired Quebec’s laws about advertising to children, which basically says: if your ad targets someone under the age of 13, we will lay the smackdown. That doesn’t mean that children won’t be affected by ads meant for someone older–that my 11-year-old sister won’t be swayed by that ad for a Miley Cyrus CD, for example–but at least it makes an effort to save children from the pernicious effects of perpetual consumerism. Read on!

There’s a book called  “Future Stuff” that was written in 1989 that tried to make predictions about what gadgets in the year 2000 would be like, based on interviews with people who were actively working on the predecessors of those gadgets. Blogger and writer Leonard Richardson from Crummy.com read the book in 2008 and wrote up a blow-by-blow report on exactly how wrong these predictions were.

The authors Abrams and Bernstein thought that the future would be filled with single-purpose gadgets like the GPS that would be very good at doing one specific thing. If you needed to know what the weather was, you’d pick up your weather cube and it would give you amazing meteorological predictions and forecasts pulled from the most advanced institutes. Instead, of course, we now know that the future–our present–is populated with all-purpose devices that are practically schizophrenic in the variety of functions that they offer. You can use your computer or phone for virtually anything you want it to: from tracking expenses to watching movies to creating art.

Read on!

I’m a bit late on this, but this is important: When FaceTime for OS X was officially released, out of beta, it cost 99 cents in the Mac App Store. Users were outraged. A common explanation of charging users for a program that comes free with all iOS devices is this:

Apple told me that the FaceTime $1 charge for existing Mac users is regulatory related (remember the $2 802.11n patch circa 2007?).

I never thought accounting knowledge would come into play in my gadget-lust hobby, but this didn’t make any sense to me, so I went digging a little further to find out what the 802.11n patch deal was about. 802.11, by the way, is a wireless protocol. The most common versions currently in use are b, g, and the most powerful one, n.

Turns out, back in 2007, Apple shipped a bunch of computers that were capable of accessing b, g, and n before the n protocol was widely used. However, in order to activate support for the 802.11n protocol, users had to buy a patch for it. Understandably, they weren’t too pleased about paying to access a feature in a computer they had already paid for. Apple claimed it was because the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, passed following a wave of accounting scandals at the turn of the century, “prohibits Apple from giving away an unadvertised new feature of an already sold product without enduring some onerous accounting measures.”

Read on!

Andrew Bird is a pretty well known American musician, and last year he gave a TED talk in which he performed as a “one-man orchestra”. It sounds less corny than it is:

Read on!

In 1969, President Nixon proposed cutting the budget of PBS and the US Public Broadcasting Corporation by 20 million dollars. Fred Rogers, of Mr. Rogers’ Neighbourhood fame, went before the Senate to defend the necessity of public programming on the airwaves.

(Direct YouTube link)

Read on!

I know I haven’t been around, but… I am now! And that’s all that matters, right? Just a quick reminder that if you miss my sweet, sweet online presence, I can also occasionally be found writing vignettes, updating a style blog, and tweeting a hell of a lot.

Onto the post.

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You may have read this article in the New York Times back in May about classrooms in which teachers are now allowing students to post their opinions online through Twitter-like tools instead of raising their hands in the actual classroom. The educators at the vanguard of this movement say that the use of these tools “can entice students who rarely raise a hand to express themselves via a medium they find as natural as breathing.”

I find it intriguing that the detractors of this movement, according to the NYT at least, have mostly focused on the potential for distraction in class if these backchannel discussion systems are implemented. This seems like such a minor issue it shouldn’t even be worth mentioning. As the article itself says, students are going to be distracted by Facebook or online shopping anyway; why not at least give them something productive to focus on?

Read on!