Hasta La Gadget!

When it comes to Ultrabook models, there are more than just a couple of companies that roll out these highly portable computing devices. Of course, on the Apple front, we have the MacBook Air that is insanely slim and is able to boot up in a matter of seconds right from sleep, while computer manufacturers like Lenovo and Dell too, have jumped aboard the Ultrabook bandwagon with their own offerings. ASUS of Taiwan has not skipped the Ultrabook train either, as we have seen how they introduced the Zenbook UX303 model last year, and this year, follow it up with the ZenBook UX305 Crystal White Limited Edition over in the US.

The announcement of the ZenBook UX305 Crystal White Limited Edition as well as a new champagne gold ZenBook UX305 is more than welcome, as the Crystal White Limited Edition will take the award-winning ZenBook UX305 and up the ante when it comes to both performance and features, resulting in a powerhouse Ultrabook which delivers not only form but function as well.

Underneath the hood lies a high-performance and energy-efficient Intel Core M 5Y71 processor that turbos up to 2.9GHz, a lovely 13.3” QHD+ (3200 x 1800) IPS display that ensures images and text are crystal clear, a high-speed 512GB solid-state storage, lightning-fast 802.11ac Wi-Fi for wireless networking performance that rivals wired Ethernet, all crammed in a chassis that boasts of an exclusive matte white finish.

As for the champagne gold ZenBook UX305, it will run on an Intel Core M 5Y10 processor, sport a 13.3” 1080p matte IPS display, 8GB RAM and a 256GB SSD. Expect the ZenBook UX305 Crystal White Limited Edition to cost $999, and you would need to move fast since only 200 units will be made available over in the US, while the standard ZenBook UX305 in champagne gold will cost $699 a pop.

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[ ASUS makes ZenBook UX305 Crystal White Limited Edition announcement copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

The Soundfreaq Sound Kick speaker is a great little Bluetooth sound system, packing a big punch in a slim package that measures just 10.5″ wide and 1.6″ deep. Now it can be yours for just $50.

Originally priced at twice that, this award-winning speaker sounds great, thanks to a pair of 2.3″ custom drivers, and a specially engineered acoustic chamber for optimal sound. As an added bonus, you can use the speaker’s USB port and battery pack to recharge your mobile gadgets in a pinch.

You can grab the Sound Kick Bluetooth speaker over at the Technabob Shop for a limited time, so be sure to order before this deal sells out.

The biggest day on Los Angeles’ child welfare calendar shows what foster care is really about.

When many people think about foster care, their thoughts immediately go to the heart wrenching headlines they read in the newspaper.

The system is broken, we are taught to believe. Child protection’s primary goal is to rip families apart, we think. When children enter foster care, they are doomed to fates much worse than those they would have faced at home, we assume.

But the loudest headlines tell only a fraction of the real story of foster care.

And this past Sunday, Mother’s Day, the true foster care narrative was on full display.

The setting was Willows Community School in Culver City, California, in the heart of L.A. The school’s indoor auditorium was lined with rack upon rack of clothes, free for the taking for the scores of boisterous children and their parents perusing the aisles. The outdoor basketball court had been converted into a stage, the asphalt making a dance floor flanked by banks of round tables where families — foster families — sat and enjoyed lunch. In every nook and cranny of the city-block-sized campus, you saw children playing amusement park style games, getting their faces painted and dressing in costumes for fun family photos.

This was the seventh edition of Foster Mother’s Day, an idea thought up by Jeanne Pritzker whose Foster Care Counts has become a force for good in Los Angeles County, supporting dozens of programs and non-profits that serve foster youth.

All told, this year’s event welcomed 2,000 children and their families, an enormous feat that involved coordinating hundreds of busses bringing guests in from all corners of vast L.A. County.

This was my fourth year attending the event, which has since grown so popular that it can’t be contained at the Pritzker family home anymore.

Next to the area where families were choosing costumes, I found myself talking with Philip Browning, the director of the county’s Department of Children and Family Services, the biggest child welfare system in the country, as well as Mayor Eric Garcetti’s wife Amy Wakeland, and David Ambroz, a former foster youth and the executive director of corporate citizenship and social responsibility for Disney’s ABC Television Group.

Wakeland, who alongside Garcetti, has fostered a number of children, talked about what it means to be a foster parent. She spoke of how, long after the fostering is done, the commitment remains, and said that she is working to draft a “foster parent bill of rights” to help guide prospective and current caregivers through the inevitable questions that come up when taking on such a great and important challenge.

Ambroz, busy at Disney and running a massive public awareness campaign called FosterMore, which is helping change the negative perceptions of foster care I referenced above, offered to help Wakeland with her foster parent bill of rights. And Browning, who has been buffeted by headlines decrying the dearth of available foster homes, shared his thoughts on the unique challenges and opportunities that come with being a foster parent.

A few feet away, I ran into Zaid Gayle, the executive director of Compton-based Peace4Kids, who is working feverishly to finish building a “Mobile Village” that will bring healthy cooking opportunities to underserved communities. While speaking with him, Jennifer Perry, the executive director of the Children’s Action Network walked up. Perry is the force behind CBS’ annual “A Home for the Holidays” celebration, which has helped get hundreds of children adopted out of foster care. Perry has also has adopted two children from foster care herself.

It was, in a 20-minute span, a large part of what Foster Mother’s Day is all about. Pritzker’s idea of a day to celebrate foster mothers has also become a venue for a lively exchange of ideas between people who come at this issue with a sincere desire to make the system better.

All around you could hear the peal of children’s laughter, and see smiling families- far from the first thought that is typically conjured up when thinking about foster care.

And it was this picture of foster care that dominated the headlines of Los Angeles media on this Mother’s Day. All the local television stations, including the Spanish speaking newscasts, aired stories about Foster Mother’s Day.

And for one day, foster care was more than the worst the system has to offer. It was the best.

Daniel Heimpel is the founder of Fostering Media Connections and the publisher of The Chronicle of Social Change.

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Why don’t women watch more porn?

The numbers are unsurprisingly hard to pin down, but a 2013 Pew Research Center survey found that just 8% of female online video viewers watch adult content. According to PornHub’s 2014 Year in Review report, just 23% of its porn viewers worldwide were women.

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Measure the wrong things and you’ll get the wrong behaviors.

This simple statement succinctly characterizes why the American education system continues beating its head against the wall.

Education reformers and so-called policy “experts” are constantly collecting and analyzing data. Many of these experts are, not surprisingly, economists. It’s not for nothing that economics is sometimes called “the dismal science.” The hostile takeover of education by non-educators is filled with intelligent sounding phrases: “evidence-based,” “data driven,” “metrics and accountability.” At every level of schooling, mountains of data are collected to inform “best practices” based on the alleged cause and effect implications of data-based instruction and the feedback gleaned from tests.

It is not coincidental that the education policy and reform business is highly profitable. Public education is estimated to be a $600-700 billion market. Those who drive the measuring and testing industry are first in line at the trough. Pearson Publishing, for example, has its greedy tentacles in nearly every school district in America. All the iterations of reform — No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top and, more recently, the Common Core — are driven by (and driving) the collection and interpretation of data.

Throughout education, an increasingly rigid, closed loop of assessment is systematically making schools worse: Define things children should know or be able to do at a certain age; design a curriculum to instruct them in what you’ve decided they should know; set benchmarks; develop tests to see if they have learned what you initially defined; rinse and repeat.

This narrow, mechanistic approach to education does not correspond to the reality of child development and brain science, but the metrics and assessment train charges down the track nevertheless. So what’s wrong with that, you might ask? Isn’t school about teaching kids stuff and then testing them to see what they’ve learned? In a word, “No.” It simply doesn’t work, especially with young children.

As Boston College Professor Peter Gray wrote in a recent Psychology Today article:

Perhaps more tragic than the lack of long-term academic advantage of early academic instruction is evidence that such instruction can produce long-term harm, especially in the realms of social and emotional development.

“Direct instruction” does increase scores on the tests the instruction is aimed toward, even with very young children. This self-fulfilling prophecy is not surprising. But multiple studies also show that the gains in performance are fleeting — they completely wash out after 1-3 years when compared to children who had no such early direct instruction.

“Wash out” is too kind.

A comprehensive study of kindergartens in Germany revealed, as Gray writes:

Despite the initial academic gains of direct instruction, by grade four the children from the direct-instruction kindergartens performed significantly worse than those from the play-based kindergartens on every measure that was used. In particular, they were less advanced in reading and mathematics and less well adjusted socially and emotionally.

In another extensive study of poor children in Ypsilanti, MI, young boys and girls who were in academic, instruction-based early education programs were, by age 23, more than twice as likely to have arrest records, less likely to be married and suffering from various types of emotional impairment compared to their peers who attended play-based preschool.

These behaviors (pressing academic work on young children) are a direct result of measuring the wrong thing (test scores). If we measured the right things (social development, curiosity, empathy, imagination and confidence), we would engage in a whole different set of education behaviors (play, socialization, arts programs, open-ended discovery).

After nearly 20 years of reading, observing, teaching and presiding over a school, I’m convinced that this simple statement — “Measure the wrong things and you’ll get the wrong behaviors” — is at the root of what ails education, from cradle to grave. Measuring the wrong thing (standardized scores of 4th graders) drives the wrong behaviors (lots of test prep and dull direct instruction). In later school years, measuring the wrong thing (SAT and other standardized test scores, grade point averages, class rank) continues to invite the wrong behaviors (gaming the system, too much unnecessary homework, suppression of curiosity, risk-aversion, high stress).

Measuring the right things is more complicated and less profitable. But if we measured, even if only in our hearts, the things that we should truly value (creativity, joy, physical and emotional health, self-confidence, humor, compassion, integrity, originality, skepticism, critical capacities), we would engage in a very different set of behaviors (reading for pleasure, boisterous discussions, group projects, painting, discovery, daydreaming, recess, music, cooperation rather than competition).

And, as the research in early childhood education makes clear, our children would be better at reading and math too.

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