Monthly Archives: June 2005

Concept Maps

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Wired:

A research institute here is taking software designed in part to preserve scientists’ knowledge and giving it to schools around the world as a tool to help children learn.

The software was designed to literally map out what scientists know in diagram form. The Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition is providing the concept mapping software to individual schools as well as training teachers in Panama, the first country adopting Cmaps nationwide.

Too Much Choice?

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Virginia Postrel, writing in Reason:

When customers enter the Ralphs supermarket near UCLA, they see a sign announcing how many different fruits and vegetables the produce department has on hand: “724 produce varieties available today,” it says, including 93 organic selections.
Sixty dozen varieties is a mind-boggling number. And that’s just in the produce department. Over in the cheese section, this pretty run-of-the-mill supermarket offers 14 types of feta alone. Not so long ago, finding feta of any type required a trip to a specialty shop.
During the last couple of decades, the American economy has undergone a variety revolution. Instead of simply offering mass-market goods, businesses of all sorts increasingly compete to give consumers more personalized products, more varied experiences, and more choice.
Average Americans order nonfat decaf iced vanilla lattes at Starbucks and choose from 1,500 drawer pulls at The Great Indoors. Amazon gives every town a bookstore with 2 million titles, while Netflix promises 35,000 different movies on DVD. Choice is everywhere, liberating to some but to others a new source of stress. “Stand in the corner of the toothpaste aisle with your eyes wide open and–I swear–it will make you dizzy,” writes design critic Karrie Jacobs. Maybe the sign in Ralphs is not an enticement but a warning.

Parales: The Case Against Coldplay

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Jon Pareles takes it to Coldplay:

HERE’S nothing wrong with self-pity. As a spur to songwriting, it’s right up there with lust, anger and greed, and probably better than the remaining deadly sins. There’s nothing wrong, either, with striving for musical grandeur, using every bit of skill and studio illusion to create a sound large enough to get lost in. Male sensitivity, a quality that’s under siege in a pop culture full of unrepentant bullying and machismo, shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand, no matter how risible it can be in practice. And building a sound on the lessons of past bands is virtually unavoidable.

GM Janesville?

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GM Chairman Rick Wagner mentioned additional plant closings & layoffs during today’s shareholder’s meeting in Wilmington, DE:

Going forward, in order to achieve full capacity utilization based on conservative volume planning scenarios, we expect to close additional assembly and component plants over the next few years, and to reduce our manufacturing employment levels in the U.S. by 25,000 or more people in the 2005 to 2008 period. We project that these capacity and employment actions will generate annual savings of approximately $2.5 billion.