Auren Hoffman:

Education and parenting should aim to provide the conventional skills (math, problem solving, and test taking skills) while also encouraging creative, out-of-the-box type thinking. Computers are no match for the average fourth-grader when it comes to creativity.

2
Instead of making a resolution to learn how to code in 2013, you might make a resolution to learn how to draw. After a few months of lessons you might begin to observe the world differently seeing details, light and shadows, shapes, proportions, perspective and negative space.

3
Instead of encouraging your child to major in engineering, you might encourage her to study philosophy, ask smart unsettling questions and practice making unusual and unexpected mental associations.

Bradford Evans:

I did a show in New Jersey in the auditorium of a technical high school … Technical high school, that’s where dreams are narrowed down. We tell our children, “You can do anything you want.” Their whole lives. “You can do anything!” But this place, we take kids – they’re 15, they’re young – and we tell them, “You can do eight things. We got it down to eight for you.” [Louis C.K.: Hilarious, 2011]

The earliest stand-up comedy I was aware of was Bill Cosby … I watched Saturday Night Live as soon as I was aware of it, and Monty Python used to be on PBS at weird hours, so I used to try to watch that. And I loved George Carlin on SNL, that was the first stand-up I ever really remember seeing on TV. And then Steve Martin. I guess I was in fifth or sixth grade when Steve Martin showed up, and he was instantly my idol. And Richard Pryor around the same time too, I sort of became aware of him, though I don’t remember the first time I saw him. [AST, 2006]

Jobs

The last jobs i had were fixing cars and covering football games for a local access TV station. as in driving the mobile van to the field, setting up 3 cameras, teaching depressed grownups and interns how to use them and directing the game from the van and then wanting to kill myself. [Reddit, 2011]

BBC:

A walking stick with built-in sat-nav has been developed by Japanese technology giant Fujitsu.

The Next Generation Cane is designed to help elderly people find their way, as well as monitor things such as heart rate and temperature.

Its location can also be followed online – and can be set up to send email alerts if it thinks the user may have fallen over.

Technology for the elderly is a key concern for Japan’s ageing population.

Tap or click on the image to view the panoramic scene. Then pan in any direction.

Wikipedia and Turkey Travel Planner.

Pamukkale was a beautiful and relaxing stop on our recent trip through southwest and central Turkey along with Istanbul.

Malia Wollen:

In 1861, the photographer Carleton E. Watkins hauled hundreds of pounds of camera equipment, sheets of glass and chemicals into Yosemite Valley in a darkroom wagon. For the first time, Mr. Watkins captured photographic images of these granite cliffs and waterfalls.

After seeing Mr. Watkins’s photographs, President Abraham Lincoln signed legislation in 1864 preserving the valley for the public and leading the way toward what would become the National Park Service.

In a strange coincidence, the molten effect of the sun on Horsetail Fall resembles another famous and highly photographed firefall here, one involving actual fire. Beginning around 1900, park workers collected Red Fir bark and built a large bonfire atop Glacier Point. After dark they pushed the red embers off the cliff in a cascade of glowing red coals, a must-see spectacle for the summer tourist set.

But in 1968, park officials ended the Yosemite Firefall, citing its man-made unnaturalness (the park banned feeding bears for the same reason). Five years later, the photographer and mountain climber Galen Rowell was driving through the park after a winter climb when he spotted the light catching in Horsetail Fall. He rushed across the valley and took what is believed to be the first image of the illuminated waterfall.

Mr. Rowell died in a plane crash in 2002, but his “Last Light on Horsetail Fall” remains the most well-known photograph of the apparition.

Douglas Rushkoff:

Facebook is just such a technology. It does things on our behalf when we’re not even there. It actively misrepresents us to our friends, and worse misrepresents those who have befriended us to still others. To enable this dysfunctional situation — I call it “digiphrenia” — would be at the very least hypocritical. But to participate on Facebook as an author, in a way specifically intended to draw out the “likes” and resulting vulnerability of others, is untenable.

Facebook has never been merely a social platform. Rather, it exploits our social interactions the way a Tupperware party does.

Facebook does not exist to help us make friends, but to turn our network of connections, brand preferences and activities over time — our “social graphs” — into money for others.

We Facebook users have been building a treasure lode of big data that government and corporate researchers have been mining to predict and influence what we buy and for whom we vote. We have been handing over to them vast quantities of information about ourselves and our friends, loved ones and acquaintances. With this information, Facebook and the “big data” research firms purchasing their data predict still more things about us — from our future product purchases or sexual orientation to our likelihood for civil disobedience or even terrorism.

The true end users of Facebook are the marketers who want to reach and influence us. They are Facebook’s paying customers; we are the product. And we are its workers. The countless hours that we — and the young, particularly — spend on our profiles are the unpaid labor on which Facebook justifies its stock valuation.

Peter DeLorenzo:

Why? Because auto manufacturers are confusing vehicle architecture symmetries – the use of fewer, common platforms for global manufacturing efficiency – with a delusional push for the commonality of brand image wrangling. They think a common message will save money. And, guess what? It rarely, if ever, works. Instead they spend more money unwinding campaigns that fall flat in regions around the world because they didn’t translate with the needed impact.

Now we have BMW marketers in Germany deciding that “Designed For Driving Pleasure” will be the new global ad theme for the brand, completely ignoring markets around the rest of the world, especially here in the USA where “The Ultimate Driving Machine” resonates with authority still. (I fully expect the powers that be at BMW to say that this new ad campaign will not replace “The Ultimate Driving Machine” in this country. But their credibility is more than a little suspect when it comes to such things.)

I was recently asked by a graduate student/author about this quote: “Some technologies surely have an education role, but they are often, in my view, an answer in search of a question.” (Jim Zellmer). I used this sentence in a weekly newsletter from my schoolinfosystem.org blog.

Pondering this question, I thought it might be useful to revisit the history of these words, at least in my experience.

I have used variants of this statement since co-founding an internet software firm in 1995. I referred to certain technologies, particularly during the dot-com era as “answers in search of questions”.

It is certainly possible that I heard this statement somewhere along the way. Perhaps others have used different words.

I attended a conference in the late 1990’s which featured entrepreneur Sam Zell.

Zell took questions after his talk.

A dot.com founder chastised him and firms like his “Equity Group” for not adopting their “innovative services”. Zell quickly shut them up by referring to most such products as “intellectual masturbation“.

I continue to believe that variations around “answers in search of a question” is a far better choice than Zell’s limited audience, but effective version.