Weekly Web Harvest for 2016-09-11

  • Teen Sues Parents for Posting Childhood Photos on Facebook | Mental Floss

    But it led to legal trouble for one Austrian couple when their 18-year-old daughter slapped them with a lawsuit for refusing to remove hundreds of embarrassing baby photos, The Local reports.

    The teen, whose name has not been released to the public, claims the over 500 childhood pictures posted to the social networking site without her consent violate her privacy. “They knew no shame and no limit—and didn’t care whether it was a picture of me sitting on the toilet or lying naked in my cot—every stage was photographed and then made public” she told The Local. “I’m tired of not being taken seriously by my parents.”

  • dy/dan » Blog Archive » The Desmos Guide to Building Great (Digital) Math Activities

    Create an intellectual need for new mathematical skills. Ask yourself, “Why did a mathematician invent the skill I’m trying to help students learn? What problem were they trying to solve? How did this skill make their intellectual life easier?” Then ask yourself, “How can I help students experience that need?” We calculate because calculations offer more certainty than estimations. We use variables so we don’t have to run the same calculation over and over again. We prove because we want to settle some doubt. Before we offer the aspirin, we need to make sure students are experiencing a headache.

    Create problematic activities. A problematic activity feels focused while a problem-free activity meanders. A problem-free activity picks at a piece of mathematics and asks lots of small questions about it, but the larger frame for those smaller questions isn’t apparent. A problem-free task gives students a parabola and then asks questions about its vertex, about its line of symmetry, about its intercepts, simply because it can ask those questions, not because it must. Don’t create an activity with lots of small pieces of analysis at the start that are only clarified by some larger problem later. Help us understand why we’re here. Give us the larger problem now.

    Give students opportunities to be right and wrong in different, interesting ways. Ask students to sketch the graph of a linear equation, but also ask them to sketch any linear equation that has a positive slope and a negative y-intercept. Thirty correct answers to that second question will illuminate mathematical ideas that thirty correct answers to the first question will not. Likewise, the number of interesting ways a student can answer a question incorrectly signals the value of the question as formative assessment.

  • Knowledge Debt

    Being a programmer is about being in a continuous state of learning. Letting knowledge debt accumulate can slowly bring your career and productivity to a halt. If you have a knowledge debt in an area that is essential to your work, you will find that it takes more time and effort to write new features and much, much more time and effort to fixing bugs. The longer you take in returning the debt, the more “time interest” it will cost you.

  • With Wearable Tech Deals, New Player Data Is Up for Grabs – The New York Times

    Although other universities have deals with technology companies governing health- and fitness-monitoring devices, Michigan’s contract drew notice not only because of the Wolverines’ high profile but also because the contract appears to allow for more comprehensive data collection than is typical and grants Nike, the world’s biggest sportswear company, broad rights “to utilize” that information.

  • How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat – The New York Times

    The documents show that a trade group called the Sugar Research Foundation, known today as the Sugar Association, paid three Harvard scientists the equivalent of about $50,000 in today’s dollars to publish a 1967 review of research on sugar, fat and heart disease. The studies used in the review were handpicked by the sugar group, and the article, which was published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, minimized the link between sugar and heart health and cast aspersions on the role of saturated fat.

  • The Drug of Choice for the Age of Kale – The New Yorker

    “We manifest abundance wherever we go,” she told me. Her boyfriend added, “Consciousness is its own economy.”

  • Fortress of Tedium: What I Learned as a Substitute Teacher. – The New York Times

    in “Nature,” Emerson writes: “Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball.”

    In the textbook, next to this passage, there was a brief assignment printed in the margin. It said: “Review the elements of transcendentalism listed on Page 369. Which aspect of transcendentalist thought is reflected in Lines 12-19? Explain your answer.”

    Isn’t that just about the most paralyzingly unrapturous question you’ve encountered in any textbook? “Explain your answer.” No, thank you. I will not explain my answer. My answer is my answer. I am a transparent eyeball. I am a huge, receptive visual instrument with a flexible lens, and I’m taking in the infinitude of all space and time and dragonflies and owls and life and roadkill and hydrogen gas.

  • The Myth of the Millennial as Cultural Rebel | New Republic

    Fusion’s Patrick Hogan counted 47 institutions and industries that millennials have been accused of destroying so far, including credit, car culture, the American Dream, relationships, and golf. Of course, in each of these cases, there is a real story to be told: Yes, young people are buying less on credit; yes, car sales are down; and, not surprisingly, 48 percent of economically squeezed under-30s don’t buy into the uplift of the American Dream, according to one poll.

  • Benefits | NASA GRC WordPress

    The following are the main benefits we’ve found in using our implementation of WordPress as a content management system for the NASA Glenn Research Center web sites we maintain.

  • THIEF! | People’s History Archive

    “The Worst Thief Is He Who Steals The Playtime of Children” — W.D. Haywood — Join The I.W.W. And Help Put The Thieves To Work.