Unless you live in a retro-futuristic curvaceous bubble home, your house is probably filled with corners full of dust and debris and your boxy or round robotic vacuum can’t quite reach them. It makes you wonder why all robot vacuums aren’t designed like Panasonic’s new MC-RS1 Rulo with its triangular-shaped form factor that allow its spinning bristles to reach and clean deep into corners.
Microsoft promised Windows Phone users a free upgrade to Windows 10 at its event earlier this week, but it turns out not all phones will be getting the update. Through its Lumia Conversations blog, the company clarifies “not every phone will upgrade …
The Federal Aviation Administration vs. Raphael Pirker legal roller coaster has finally come to an end, years after the latter allegedly flew a drone for commercial purposes in a reckless manner. Pirker, who has reached a deal with the FAA to settle …
Continuing on their quest to keep you organized everywhere you go, Any.Do has released an app for OS X. The app is their first for the desktop operating system from Apple, and closely mimics their mobile apps available on iOS and Android. With the app, you can create task lists for whatever you need to get done, and even share … Continue reading
The philosophy of the school room in one generation will become the philosophy of the government in the next. ―Abraham Lincoln
Our forefathers established a nation devoted to liberty and equality, symbolized by a commitment of “their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor” in signing the Declaration of Independence, while making it clear that character development is essential for self-governing people.
They fought a revolutionary war to secure it. Lincoln later reminded us in the bloodshed at Gettysburg that “we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
Americans went on to fight two world wars to reaffirm our founding principles of liberty and equality, not just for ourselves, but to model them for the world. And as President Theodore Roosevelt reaffirmed, “To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.”
But for three generations now, we have shifted the prime value of education from character development to academic achievement, and as Lincoln predicted, achievement, not character is now primarily valued in our government, institutions and culture. This has had a damaging effect on our founding principles; liberty is perceived as a personal right instead of a pass-it-on responsibility, and the primary value of academic achievement is discriminatory, particularly against those of African or Hispanic heritage.
For a nation that is increasingly becoming a majority of minorities, this system will not unite it or allow it to become one nation experiencing the power of its founding principles. A recent Washington Post headline: Majority of U.S. students are in poverty.
After establishing a network of Hyde private and public schools over a 49-year period, and watching Hyde graduates (from wealthy to very disadvantaged areas) succeed in college and life, here is what I learned our forefathers — all highly literate individuals — expected of education:
The primary value of American education is the student’s character development.
Character not only levels the educational playing field for all students, but enables schools to effectively challenge and support each student in a way that inspires trust, motivation and confidence, qualities that not only empower the student, but unify the student body as a team.
This rigorous program emphasizing attitude and effort instills qualities like courage, integrity, concern, curiosity, leadership, respect and responsibility, with assessments based on one’s best. The expectation is self-discovery, citizenship and a desire to learn.
All this creates a far better learning culture and community. The community will collectively do its best academic work, reaffirming the wisdom of Horace Mann — considered the founder of our public school system — who said, given a year to teach spelling, he’d spend the first nine months on motivation.
Deep in their hearts, character is the value Americans most respect. A Harvard study of 10,000 students found roughly 80 percent felt their parent’s primary concern was their achievement and happiness, but 96 percent of their parents said their primary concern was their children’s caring for others and character. This supports my own experience with parents over my 63-year teaching career; their deepest belief is in character, but they focus on their children’s achievement for fear they will lose out in the competition.
If we as a nation make character the primary value of our schools, then following Lincoln’s wisdom, imagine the next generation.
Character gives American children a new stature and unity that would end such things as achievement gaps, cheating, bullying and even school shootings. Schools would become true learning centers, because students would trust and experience schools as sanctuaries devoted primarily to their growth, not factories churning out academically proficient workers.
Americans’ confidence in their institutions and leaders, with some exceptions, is presently at low levels; for example, a Gallup Poll reported only 7 percent of Americans trust Congress “quite a bit” or more. We know in our hearts if we had a generation devoted to character, our leadership, institutions and our confidence in them would be transformed.
Perhaps the biggest change would be in our society. We would revitalize our founding principles. Liberty would move from “me” centered to more of a pass-it-on responsibility. Equality would respect the “give me your tired, your poor” attitude within America, and thus simply accept and honor any individual who meets the challenge of developing the American character.
Lincoln clearly gave us the choice: do we want a nation built on academic achievement or character? I have no doubt what he and our founding fathers would choose.
NEXT: How to have the best of both worlds.
The Rosetta comet probe mission may not have gone entirely to plan, but the science is still pouring out – not to mention water from the comet itself – as the ESA considers hunting down the stalled lander. Triumph at getting the Philae lander to the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in November 2014 turned to frustration when a less-than-perfect touchdown … Continue reading
I work on the inside of the entertainment business, and I can tell you first hand we are in the midst of experiencing some very exciting changes. Over the past decade, consumers have been armed with technology that allows us to do great things in our everyday life, but entertainment brands have been extremely late to the game in keeping up with these changes.
That lag is about to shift, as much of the infrastructure – on-air, in-venue, in-platform – is finally catching up with what consumers want – to seamlessly consume great stories!
Here are the three core trend lines that are primed for movement in 2015. These aren’t necessarily new topics, but they’re topics that until now have been stuck in the mud. And the result of their movement is that we’re going to be far better connected with the stories we care about. And I for one am excited about that.
Great Stories – Not Great Tag Lines – Will Prevail
Studios, networks and producers of the shows we follow and love know now, more than ever, that it’s no longer about “selling the sizzle.” It’s all about making a better steak. The power of critics in film and theater, for example, have become less and less relevant at the box office. The effectiveness of the “quote” ad – we’ve all seen them, the ones that say “best movie of the year” from twenty unrecognizable sources – is rapidly becoming meaningless without the bite of the consumer endorsement. While consumer review websites have been around for quite some time, it’s until only recently that producers and the entertainment industry have come to understand that great storytelling actually matters in winning the heart and minds of consumers. You can’t simply spend your way to success or latch on to a high-profile brand and expect success – just look at the Hollywood bomb rate if you need any evidence. In 2015, look for less “selling” and more “telling” in trailers along with a focus on extended content. Look for more campaigns like Netflix’s House of Cards‘ season announcement that used a branded style of originality in what, for most shows, has been a historically mundane event. Great advertising can no longer simply sell consumers a story – it must be an active part in telling the story.
Great Stories Will Live Beyond the Experience Itself
Great advertising is great storytelling. Digital platforms – and the continued fragmentation of devices we use – mean huge opportunities for us to engage in the stories we love on the channels we use the most. Expect to see tons of additional custom content created around the characters we follow in fun ways that keep us engaged between episodes. Expect more ways to engage with audiences like the work from Masterpiece Theatre and PBS with Downton Abbey‘s holiday special, which brought fans into life at Downton in an unexpected way using guest star George Clooney. Expect more fun campaigns like Netflix and DreamWorks Animation’s “King Julien New Year’s Eve Countdown”–a three minute video for parents to trick entertain their kids with a pre-midnight New Year’s celebration. It worked like a charm in my house! Expect more participation with the creative team in developing characters on new platforms. With Amazon and other digitally-minded players getting into the content development business, expect big changes in where and how content lives at all touch points.
Great Stories Will Invite Us to Engage
There is a major movement developing around big infrastructure enhancements invites communal fan feedback with greater impact. Yes, there have been a range of on-screen campaigns to get viewers engaged, from live social reads to online voting. But in venues, where audiences come together in-person – particularly in film and live theater – engagement has been sorely lacking. 2015 is the year in-venue connectivity becomes substantially more prevalent and a true enhancement to the experience of getting off your couch and into a live space. You will see more enhancements like the move by Cineplex Entertainment to offer reserved seating for a surcharge at their theaters. You will see more audience experiences like the work Selma did by inviting hundreds of thousands of middle school students to see the film for free on MLK Day – score one for “audience engagement”! Read the buzz around #SelmaforStudents if you need any evidence. There is value in watching entertainment in communal settings, and technology will begin to play a role in enhancing this.
Exciting stuff indeed.
Co-authored by Lakshmi, a Mobicip blogger who is just as passionately opinionated about the juxtaposition of technology, parenting and education.
When we were growing up, we were told that stealing was unethical. Lying was a sin. Smoking and drugs could kill. So could alcohol. More so, alcohol and driving. These were black-and-white behaviors that were never virtuous and so although children rebelled, there was no counter argument that could negate the adult warnings. Cancer was real. OD was real. Alcohol-induced brain fuzz was a measurable metric.
The area of technology use is, however, hardly black and white. It is not even gray, but carries with it the splendor of the rainbow. For example, while that ubiquitous little piece of technology, the mobile phone, could potentially save lives, sometimes even literally, such as in the case of the store clerk whose phone absorbed a bullet aimed at his abdomen, and figuratively, like helping the adult keep track of the child’s whereabouts and activities, the danger associated with misuse or use of the gadget at an inappropriate time is very real. Topping the list of cell-phone induced dangers is texting while driving.
“It is common sense,” one may exclaim in exasperation, “that reading and texting while driving is dangerous. Isn’t the warning superfluous?” The response to that rhetoric could lie in some mind boggling numbers. According to a 2014 Harrison Poll, more than a logical number of Americans admitted to reading (45%) and sending (37%) text messages while driving. This number is disturbingly more than drivers who drink and drive (37%). The US Department of Transportation reports that at any given moment across America, approximately 660,000 drivers are using cell phones or manipulating electronic devices while driving. Age appears to be no bar for distracted driving, as can be seen from the data by the US department of Transportation, reproduced below.
According to the US government’s distraction.gov site, eleven percent of drivers aged 18 to 20 who were involved in an automobile accident were sending or receiving texts when they crashed. In another survey by the Pew Research Center, 40% of American teens claim to have travelled in a vehicle where the driver used a cell phone while driving.
The danger of texting while driving is three-fold. The opposable thumbs of the Homo habilis may have been an evolutionary leap that enabled the use of tools, but the restriction on the number of hands to two poses a natural restriction on the number of tools that can be simultaneously operated. The first lesson in Driver’s Ed that goes “Both hands on wheel” precludes the availability of limbs to operate the cell phone while driving, and any cell phone operation would point to a risky compromise on the number of arms on the wheel.
Assuming for a moment that the shortage of limbs can be overcome, the more serious dangers come from the eye and the head. When traveling at a speed of 55 mph, taking the eye of the road for a mere five seconds to check an incoming SMS is the equivalent of driving blindfolded across the length of a football field filled with obstacles. The five seconds is literal eternity compared to the split second it takes to drive into one of the obstacles and at 55 mph, no impact could be trivial.
The 100 billion neurons that process information at the rate of 1000 times per second may make the human brain a marvel, but contrary to claims of being able to “multi task”, the brain merely switches linearly among tasks. Neurons that are firing instructions to the fingers to fly over the touch screen are incapable of simultaneously alerting the driver to a possible barrier ahead. Is it any wonder then that the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute reports that heavy-truck drivers who send and receive text messages while on the road face a 23 times greater risk of crashing than the non-texters? An alarming finding by UK’s Transport Research Laboratory (TRL) is that drivers who read or wrote texts while driving fare worse than drunken and even drugged drivers in terms of alertness – reaction times deteriorated by 37% due to mobile texting/reading as against the 13% induced by alcohol and 21% by cannabis.
Beyond the common sense dictate of not using cell phone when driving, governments around the world have imposed restrictions and bans on gadget use while driving. Many of these restrictions involve hefty fines and are directed at talking on the cell phone while driving, but the dangers of texting are being increasingly recognized, going by the quantum of fines imposed on texting violations. Within the U.S., less than half of the states have an organized rule in place on the use of cellphones while driving, but that clearly is not a license to kill. While simple self-control is sufficient, use of #X in social media profile updates and use of apps to automatically respond to texts can go a long way in reducing a life to a mere datapoint on a disturbing graph.
Conservative War Chest, a political action committee that aims to “thwart the smear tactics of liberals,” has released a new TV spot attacking leftwing media.
The ad targets everything from The New York Times’ reports on the IRS scandal to moderation of a 2012 Republican presidential debate by ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos to a perceived lack of Benghazi coverage in the news. But CWC takes special care to scold Comcast-owned NBC and its left-leaning cable news network, MSNBC, referred to as a “ratings disaster” and “full-time assault machine against conservatives and republicans,” complete with images of Chris Matthews, MSNBC President Phil Griffin and former host Martin Bashir.
“Let us be clear,” the PAC writes in a 66-page letter to NBC affiliates, urging the local broadcasters to help restore “journalism’s professional and ethical standards.” “We believe no contemporary organization has done more to institutionalize the political smear and destroy civil discourse than MSNBC.”
In the ad, CWC also takes specific issue with the network blending biased political commentary with traditional news.
“The result is a kind of leftist Super Pac sponsoring millions of dollars’ worth of attack ads disguised as ‘news’ that seek the political oblivion of conservatives and the Republican Party,” CWC spokesman Mike Flynn said in a statement. “Most people in the conservative movement are civil and incapable of the kind of attacks that Comcast/NBC/Universal routinely sponsor, somewhat disbelieving that any major organization would be capable of this sort of calculated malice.”
Disclosure: Jackson Connor is a former employee of MSNBC.
Legendary in-air catalog SkyMall has declared bankruptcy, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.
The catalog, once a favorite among bored airline travelers, said technology drove its demise. SkyMall’s parent company Xhibit Corp., will look to sell of the company’s assets at auction.
“With the increased use of electronic devices on planes, fewer people browsed the SkyMall in-flight catalog,” Chief Executive Scott Wiley said in court filings, according to WSJ.
SkyMall did not immediately return The Huffington Post’s request for comment.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
