An Open Letter to the ISTE Interim CEO and Board — re: Seymour Papert – Medium I am grateful to David for bringing attention to ISTE’s non-existent response to the life and death of Seymour Papert. It is worth noting that the father of our field, Dr. Papert, was never invited to keynote ISTE or NECC; not after the publication of his three seminal books, not after the invention of robotics construction kits for children, not after 1:1 computing was borne in his image in Australia, not after Maine provided laptops statewide, not when One Laptop Per Child changed the world. This lack of grace implies a rejection of the ideas Papert advocated and the educators who had to fight even harder to bring them to life against the tacit hostility of our premiere membership organization. Polar Bears’ Path to Decline Runs Through Alaskan Village – The New York Times “When you’re using it as a marketing tool and to bring in donations, there can be a tendency to lose the nuance in the message,” said Todd Atwood, a research wildlife biologist at the United States Geological Survey’s Alaska Science Center. “And with polar bears in particular, I think the nuances are important.”

Notes of Cabinet Meeting on Edmond Charles Genet, 2 August 1793. The Presidt. was much inflamed, got into one of those passions when he cannot command himself. Run on much on the personal abuse which had been bestowed on him. Defied any man on earth to produce one single act of his since he had been in the government which was not done on the purest motives. That he had never repented but once the having slipped the moment of resigning his office, and that was every moment since. That by god he had rather be in his grave than in his present situation. The Story Behind the Mysterious Guillotine on a Brooklyn Roof – VICE “So, yeah, this is kind of the idea behind that—just like, here’s your free healthcare. It’ll solve your problems.” Georgetown Law Students Object to Exam SoftwareMore than 500 law students at Georgetown University have signed a petition asking the law school to scrap its new exam software. In a letter to administrators, students raised privacy and security concerns about the Exam4 platform and objected to the requirement to install it on their personal laptops in order to take their finals. Changes to Twitter’s rules may kill off its most entertaining bots — Quartz. “But I am beginning to suspect that once we all leave […]

Why you might be counting in the wrong language – BBC FutureFor example, in French, 92 is quatre-vingt douze or “four twenties and twelve”. And in Danish, the word for 92 is tooghalvfems, where halvfems, meaning 90,is an abbreviation of the Old Norse word halvfemsindstyve, or “four and a half times twenty”. — thinking the USA isn’t likely to change based on the whole decimal system thing . . .