Safety Concerns Eclipse Civic Lessons as Schools Cancel Classes on Election Day - NYTimes.com

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Safety Concerns Eclipse Civic Lessons as Schools Cancel Classes on Election Day - NYTimes.com"

Shared by timlauer
I find this kind of sad. I remember working at my old school on election day with the community coming in. Was a great learning opportunity for my students. Of course then Oregon went to vote by mail... I hate vote by mail... I always liked going to the polling place. Now I fill it out my ballot at my kitchen table... not the same...

“In a post-Columbine, post-9/11 world, we shouldn’t be opening the doors at our schools on Election Day, and just hoping everything will be O.K.”

State of the Art - A Look at Google’s First Phone - NYTimes.com

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State of the Art - A Look at Google’s First Phone - NYTimes.com"

Shared by timlauer
David Pogue looks at the G1 phone from Google and T-Mobile. I was in a T-Mobile shop last week and the sales guy pulled one out from the back room and was showing it to customers. I didn't get to hold it, but it looked pretty nice...

A rival to the iPhone is about to debut, with software by Google, body by HTC and network by T-Mobile.

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How I use Quicksilver II: Scripts | jwdunn

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How I use Quicksilver II: Scripts | jwdunn"

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Joseph Dunn explains how he uses Quicksilver. In this second part he talks about scripts and how he uses Quicksilver to do all kinds of useful things on his Mac. The one that caught my eye is the script that strips out formating from copied text...

How I use Quicksilver II: Scripts

Quicksilver is the first program any self-respecting Mac user should install on their box. Instead of giving a general overview of its features (there are already plenty of those), I’m going to prove Quicksilver’s worth by going over exactly how I use it.

This is part two, on scripts.

As I mentioned in the first installment of this bit, I’m going to devote this entire post to explaining how I use scripts with QS. I want to go over some general tricks for employing Quicksilver to run Applescripts and commands as well as discuss some useful QS actions, which are just more complicated scripts that accept inputs from the QS interface.

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What we can learn from the president: Doris Kearns Goodwin on TED.com

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What we can learn from the president: Doris Kearns Goodwin on TED.com"

Looking at vast political trends through the lens of a single story, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin talks about what we can learn from American presidents, including Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon Johnson. Listen for stories of decision, doubt and resolve, from people of great power and great character. To sum up, she shares a moving memory of her own father, and of their shared love of baseball. (Recorded February 2008 in Monterey, California. Duration: 18:48.)

CQ Politics | Fact-Checking the Ayers Allegations: So Wrong, It’s “Pants on Fire” Wrong

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CQ Politics | Fact-Checking the Ayers Allegations: So Wrong, It’s “Pants on Fire” Wrong

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A look at the Annenberg Foundation that seems to have everyone all upset...

The McCain campaign said the “radical education foundation” to which they were referring is the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a charity endowed by publishing magnate Walter Annenberg that funded public-school programs in Chicago from 1995 to 2001...

Go to Source

The Food Issue - An Open Letter to the Next Farmer in Chief - Michael Pollan - NYTimes.com

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Michael Pollan in today's NYTimes magazine on why the next President will need to make food policy a high priority...

Which brings me to the deeper reason you will need not simply to address food prices but to make the reform of the entire food system one of the highest priorities of your administration: unless you do, you will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change. Unlike food, these are issues you did campaign on — but as you try to address them you will quickly discover that the way we currently grow, process and eat food in America goes to the heart of all three problems and will have to change if we hope to solve them. Let me explain.

Why is this "Plan B?"

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Shared by timlauer
Tom Hoffman points to a Washington Post article about DC contract provisions for firing and transferring teachers... provision that have been part of their contract for years...

So Michelle Rhee is going to start enforcing the existing D.C. teacher's union contract's provisions on firing and transferring teachers, in part with administrative support from her foundation friends. Fair enough. What took so long? I mean, what's the point in making big noise about changing the contract if you don't take advantage of the power you've got in the current one?

Stan's Cafe Theatre Company: Of All The People In All The World

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I stumbled on to this via an item in Tom Hoffman's Google Reader Shared Items list. I'm finding Shared Items to be one of my best sources of interesting items found on the web.

Of All The People In All The World (UK) uses grains of rice to bring formally abstract statisitcs to startling and powerful life.

Each grain of rice = one person and you are invited to compare the one grain that is you to the millions that are not. Over a period of days a team of performers carefully weigh out quantities of rice to represent a host of human statistics

- the populations of towns and cities - the number of doctors, the number of soldiers - the number of people born each day, the number who die - all the people who have walked on the moon - deaths in the holocaust.

The statistics are arranged in labelled piles creating an ever changing landscape of rice. The statistics and their juxtapositions can be moving, shocking, celebratory, witty and thought provoking. [From Stan's Cafe Theatre Company: Of All The People In All The World]