I’ve framed this as “in the future your children will be servants and nannies,” a provocation that gets to a deeper truth: the most problematic geographical mismatch we face in the U.S. is that large numbers of relatively poor, less-skilled individuals live in rural areas and urban and suburban areas that don’t have good transportation links to affluent, high-skilled households that spend much of their income on high-touch services. Despite, or perhaps reflecting, the popularity of Downton Abbey, many of us are fundamentally scandalized by the idea of serving others, despite the fact that most of us make a living by serving others, whether directly or indirectly. And so we fetishize manufacturing jobs in which the fact that we are serving others is mediated by the fact that we are assembling physical objects designed to serve others.
Disney was selling a Joy Division Mickey Mouse shirt until some folks got wind of it and it got pulled off the shelf.
(via R.I.P. Joy Divison Mickey Mouse Shirt | News | Pitchfork)
Colin Marshall, beloved host of The Marketplace of Ideas, has a Kickstarter campaign for his new project. Support Notebook on Cities and Culture.
The home schooling movement, by contrast, has no access to funding nor any decision-making structure – but it has the advantage of having a much larger network of individuals potentially capable of committing resources to the project. One could imagine a Wikipedia-style process of textbook creation, where hundreds of thousands of home-schooling moms and dads donate a small portion of the time they already spend on teaching their kids to producing or editing material for the virtual textbooks they all use. You would, of course, need some kind of central structure to handle the programming – but even much of this could be relatively decentralized once the essential framework was in place.
Working either through the charter movement or the home schooling movement would enable a tablet textbook project to start small, yield immediate returns to participants, and scale easily, while largely ignoring the interests of incumbent institutions. And it wouldn’t require the sponsorship of an Apple or a Gates Foundation. Working through the regular public school system, which would certainly require some kind of megadollar sponsorship, would start big, would have to coopt the interests of incumbent institutions, and would make it difficult to impossible to actually yield quick returns to the most important participants: the teachers and students in the classroom. Which, unfortunately, has been the fate of all too many big-think reform proposals for the regular public schools. Much more sensible to build something in more natural laboratories for innovation, and then figure out how to “port” an already proven solution to the regular system.Working either through the charter movement or the home schooling movement would enable a tablet textbook project to start small, yield immediate returns to participants, and scale easily, while largely ignoring the interests of incumbent institutions. And it wouldn’t require the sponsorship of an Apple or a Gates Foundation. Working through the regular public school system, which would certainly require some kind of megadollar sponsorship, would start big, would have to coopt the interests of incumbent institutions, and would make it difficult to impossible to actually yield quick returns to the most important participants: the teachers and students in the classroom. Which, unfortunately, has been the fate of all too many big-think reform proposals for the regular public schools. Much more sensible to build something in more natural laboratories for innovation, and then figure out how to “port” an already proven solution to the regular system.
I feel like there’s a red pill and a blue pill, and you can take the blue pill and go back to your classroom and lecture your 20 students. But I’ve taken the red pill, and I’ve seen Wonderland.
Sound Romance:
Any past or DISAPPEARING SOUND remembered nostalgically, particularly when idealized or otherwise given special importance. Whereas new sounds are often experienced as SOUND PHOBIAs, old or past sounds are often elevated to the category of sound romances in memory. Many such sounds were often regarded as unimportant when actually current; yet later, hearing them may trigger strong memories. Sounds experienced during childhood, for instance, often become romances for the adult. After moving away from a given area, particularly one strongly linked with sound, such as a community by the ocean, to a place lacking those familiar sounds, these may also acquire a romantic or nostalgic quality. Other sounds go beyond having only personal romance qualities and are valued and preserved by a society as SOUNDMARKs. The whistle of the steam train, for instance, has now come to symbolize the era when such trains were common. Many have now been restored and are regarded as having historical importance. In Canada, their replacements, the newer air horns, had to be designed to resemble their predecessors in order to be recognized as train whistles.
World’s languages traced back to single African mother tongue: scientists.
New Zealand researchers have traced every human language — from English to Mandarin — back to an ancestral language spoken in Africa 50,000 to 70,000 years ago.
Scientists say they have traced the world’s 6,000 modern languages — from English to Mandarin — back to a single “mother tongue,” an ancestral language spoken in Africa 50,000 to 70,000 years ago.
New research, published in the journal Science, suggests this single ancient language resulted in human civilization — a Diaspora — as well as advances in art and hunting tool technology, and laid the groundwork for all the world’s cultures.
The research, by Quentin Atkinson from the University of Auckland in New Zealand, also found that speech evolved far earlier than previously thought. And the findings implied, though did not prove, that modern language originated only once, an issue of controversy among linguists, according to the New York Times.
Before Atkinson came up with the evidence for a single African origin of language, some scientists had argued that language evolved independently in different parts of the world.
Atkinson found that the first populations migrating from Africa laid the groundwork for all the world’s cultures by taking their single language with them. “It was the catalyst that spurred the human expansion that we all are a product of,” Atkinson said, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Atkinson traced the number distinct sounds, or phonemes — consonants, vowels and tones — in 504 world languages, finding compelling evidence that they can be traced back to a long-forgotten dialect spoken by our Stone Age ancestors, according to the Daily Mail.
Atkinson also hypothesized that languages with the most sounds would be the oldest, while those spoken by smaller breakaway groups would utilize fewer sounds as variation and complexity diminished.
The study found that some of the click-using languages of Africa have more than 100 phonemes, or sounds, whereas Hawaiian, toward the far end of the human migration route out of Africa, has only 13, the Times reported. English has about 45 phonemes.
The phoneme pattern mirrors the pattern of human genetic diversity as humans spread across the globe from sub-Saharan Africa around 70,000 years ago.
Source: http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/business-tech/science/110415/language-science-linguistics-mother-tongue-english-chinese-mandarin-africa
(via pegobry)
Trailer for Here Comes The Neighborhood, a microdocumentary series exploring the power of public art and innovation in revitalizing local communities.
This looks great and it’s one of the most important health issues in our country. Glad to see there is more attention being given to why our cities and economy were designed to make health so hard.
A provocative new 4-hour series soon to air on public television, Designing Healthy Communities, examines the impact of our built environment on key public health indices, including obesity, diabetes, heart disease, asthma, cancer and depression. The series documents the connection between bad community design and burgeoning health consequences, and discusses the remedies available to fix what has become an urgent crisis.
Retrofitting Suburbia (by MPC)
The Byrds & Flying Burrito Brothers - 1970-09-19, Whisky A Go Go, Los Angeles, CA
Recently surfaced soundboard recording, via BB Chron, who reports: “Here is a rare gem of a recording that superbly documents a unique live event, the merging of the Byrds and Flying Burrito Brothers into a one big jam session at the Whisky A Go Go in fall 1970, and with very good sound quality, too.” Should be noted that this is the post-Gram Parsons Burrito Brothers — but don’t let that stop you. The Burritos without Gram were actually the superior live act.
ooooooooh
This is awesome. I listen to Sweetheart of the Rodeo & The Gilded Palace of Sin twice a week.
(via musichistory)
