Monday Afternoon Inspiration!

I love that iPods have given birth to a new sort of radio programming, especially storytelling. Storycorps is one of my favorites of these. Click through to listen to a variety of teacher related stories. These stories really got me misty.

Click through for a radio program talking about Hedy Lamar's life AND her contributions to technology during the war.

As she was inventing, Rhodes says, Lamarr was simultaneously glued to the events of World War II. When German submarines began targeting passenger cruise liners, he says, she felt compelled to invent something to help the Allied cause. She zeroed in on torpedoes, which were powerful weapons but hard to control. Rhodes says she thought that if they could be radio-guided, there was a better chance they would hit their target.

"She understood that the problem with radio signals was that they could be jammed. But if you could make the signal hop around more or less randomly from radio frequency to radio frequency, then the person at the other end trying to jam the signal won't know where it is," he says. "If they try to jam one particular frequency, it might hit that frequency on one of its hops, but it would only be there for a fraction of a second."

There's way more info here

I forgot to turn off my alarm last night, but luckily enough, when my alarm went off, the program on the radio was quite interesting. Follow this link to listen to a debate on the number of students who go to college (most of the them think too many, for too long). The debaters are Peter Thiel, Charles Murray, Vivek Wadhwa, and Henrey Bienen.

Click image for full article.

Specifically their File Analyzer/Metadata harvester and their Video Frame Analyzer.

Read more about the tools in the announcement here.

This article in Boing Boing talks about the importance of the variety of hand movements in the future of interaction design.

Here's the full rant.

Earlier this year, I took a course in PHP/MySQL offered by a fellow Pratt Alum. Not only was the class interesting, but I learned about this program, Girl Develop It. It's not restricted to women, however its mission is to encourage more women to learn programming languages and participate in the development field. As with many science and technical fields, women are thin on the ground and they are trying to make an accessible friendly environment for people to learn coding.

As someone who took a class there, I was impressed by how affordable it was, and how quickly I learned how to make stuff. In light of our newest Skill-Share initiative here at the EdLab, I thought some of you might enjoy taking a look at the course list to further your coding skills.

I don't even know how to write about this without bias, so I'm just going to lay it out there and provide some links. Michigan has passed some anti-bullying legislation, however they've also included an exception if the bullying is based on a strongly held religious or moral belief.

Many of you have already figured this out probably but I was just reading this article about Google Easter eggs.

Try:
Do a Barrel Roll
tilt
askew

Has anyone found any other whispers of personality in the Google interface?