Coffee haiku: Untitled #3, in an occasional series

Caffeinated joe;
Java gift effulgent;
Regnant moka heart.

Diaspora

Maintain control of your web info. Communicate directly, not through a corporate server like Facebook where your data security is vulnerable, but instead, use encrypted messages. Pledge to support Diaspora; I did.  You can get a cool shirt . . .

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/196017994/diaspora-the-personally-controlled-do-it-all-distr#

or

http://www.joindiaspora.com

and, check out MetaFilter.  I just discovered it and plan to join.

Financial crisis: Where's our Greek riot?

Financial crisis: Where's our Greek riot?

Posted using ShareThis

Eco-sustainability

Straw Bale Houses Built in England Withstand Hurricanes
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/05/straw-house-built.php

Urban Farms Take to the Roofs
http://www.salon.com/food/feature/2010/05/17/community_gardens_slide_show  (requires subscription possibly)

Vertical Farms in Cities
http://www.verticalfarm.com/

In the last class discussion we had Wednesday, over an article entitled: "Medical Anthropology:  Malnutrition in Malawi" a student seriously proposed that food aid should not be provided to poor people in 3rd world countries because A.  their population would grow because the children wouldn't die, and B.  the country wouldn't be able to continue feeding a growing population.

I can understand but not agree with the perspective.  It's a perspective born out of privilege, relative wealth, and inexperience.  While she didn't seem like a rich student, she had clothes and looked clean and well fed.  Her family life may be horrible, but I doubt if she's watched while her siblings starved to death at home.

I wish I knew how to break through.  I'll look for more ideas.  We couldn't watch "Healers of Ghana" this semester because I was sick and cancelled that class, but most students like it for the perspective it provides.

When?

http://todayspictures.slate.com/20100512/   Photo #15

We kill young men, don't we?

The following is taken from a longer piece on NPR's Homepage.  The link is at the end of the excerpt.

'The Truth About Homicide'

Now a senior reporter at the L.A. Times, Jill Leovy started The Homicide Report in 2007 after noticing the huge disparity in the way murders were covered by the news media. The sensational stories, mostly the outliers and anomalies, got the most attention. But the majority of homicides were largely ignored.

"The first year I was in the Watts homicide unit, that unit had 60 murders that year," she tells NPR's Guy Raz. "I was shadowing the detectives, and we were running on murders every other day. Every morning they had CNN on, or something on, and it would have the latest installment of the Laci Peterson murder." The sensational case of a pregnant wife murdered by her husband enthralled the nation for months.

"The detectives in that unit were fascinated with it. Every day, we would have a moment of discussing the newest development in that case, and then they'd go on to do the 60 other murders that year — and that is homicide in America.

"The truth about homicide," she says, "is that it is black men in their 20s, in their 30s, in their 40s. The way we guide money and policy in this country, we do not care about those people. It's not described as what's central to our homicide problem, and I wanted people to see that. I wanted people to see those lives and to see that that's our real homicide problem in America.

"The money needs to go to black male argument violence," she continues. "Anything else … you're dealing with the margins of the problem, statistically, and it's not right."

Nobody Deserves To Be Murdered

Leovy wants to give a name, an identity and a story to every person who was murdered in L.A. County. She wants society to get away from "medieval notions" of deserving or not deserving to be killed.

"I don't care if they're the worst thug in the world," she says, adding, "some of these guys are really, really deeply, criminally involved characters. Many of them have killed people."

"You don't have it coming in a gang shooting," she says, "you need to be arrested and prosecuted.

"A lot of the money we spend is based on the presumption that the victims are guilty in some ways," Leovy explains. She hears all the time how terrible it is that young men are killing each other, how they need to shape up. She argues the discussion needs to be reframed.

"When we talked about domestic violence, we never talked about how these women were so delinquent and terrible and they needed to get their heads together and be taught right. We talked about protecting them from people who are trying to hurt them. We don't talk about men that way."

I've thought about this problem frequently.  People love the sensational, the cultural violations - young pretty pregnant women, the Madonna and child figure - are not the sacrifice and when they are, the sacrifice is horrific.  Young men of color are the cannon fodder of our society.

from http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126853039

A Teacher's Nightmare

SO: the other night I had the weirdest dream. Yes, boring, but still, it reflects the situations teachers encounter and the often humorous situations that result.

At any rate, I dreamed that my class in Physical Anthro was supposed to learn about population genetics. In the dream, I turned the page in the book, even though I don't lecture from the book, and saw that the topic was population genetics. I said 'just a minute' and began scanning the section. I became engrossed (entranced!) by Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium and as I was looking through the material, I realized that the class had gone eerily silent. I looked up to find that the classroom was empty! During my reading, the students had quietly packed up their things and left. I looked at the clock, and realized I had spent 15-20 minutes standing at the front of the room, thinking and reading about Hardy-Weinberg.

The fact that this nearly happened to me in lab (minus the students exiting the classroom) is the probable impetus for the dream, but it also speaks to the larger issues I think about: the complexity of material covered in two or three paragraphs of an introductory textbook; the need for students to understand basic mathematic and statistical principles in order to understand a complex world; and, how teachers can most effectively present material that is complex and mathematically based. I'm still working on the last one.

I intend to dramatically revamp the physical course, giving much more weight to homework assignments, making the tests easier, and perhaps developing small, problem-based group exercises for each unit. I tried the last, a bit, when I assigned articles to discuss in that class, but I found that too many students were unprepared to understand half of the articles.

Two related articles that illustrate my point:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627603.600-neanderthals-not-the-only-apes-humans-bred-with.html

and

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/05/13/seth-roberts-on-orwe.html