book.review

After trials, tribulations, false starts, wearing of sack cloth and much gnashing of teeth (and the blood of one dead chicken) I have successfully moved my weblog. For the past week I have been posting only at the new location. It works as expected. All is well.

New Home page.
New primary RSS.

Most of the archives will remain here in order to preserve as many links as possible, but I ran out of disk space and had to delete some of the early ones to keep the site under 40MB. All the archives are at the new site. Eventually I will come back here and put in re-direct meta-tags for both web browsers and RSS aggregators to automagically load the new location. In the meantime, if you have subscribed to a particular Category -- i.e. Patento.absurdium -- you can re-link to it via the Category links on the left.

Many thanks to:

Mark Pilgrim for design guidance and CSS creation
Erin Clerico at Weblogger.com for site hosting and comments configuration
Brent Ashley and Matt Mower for technical assistance
the entire Userland discussion group for moral support.

(drum roll please)

Now, on with the show.......................

Friday, September 27, 2002

Classical Education at Home

4:27:24 PM

comment []

The JOHO-dude nails public education. David Weinberger got an ear full at the local curriculum night. I'm not going to buy into his theory that all the bad stuff comes from above, but the "gub'mint", both federal and state, can take a lot of the blame. I don't know where he lives, but in GA the public schools are a disaster -- just abysmal.

Edumacation. It's a bad thing when you come back from the feel-good Meet the Teachers night at the local, progressive public school and need a drink. After hearing what's in store for our 11 year old in sixth grade, Ann and I were shaken, angry and depressed.
[...] The culprits here are easy to identify since the staff of our local school is dedicated, loving, smart and thoughtful: It's raining stupidity from above. "Test and blame" is the message coming from the feds, the commonwealth and even the town.
Home schooling anyone? [ Source: JOHO the Blog]

So we did home school. And there are more and more people doing just that, because of the quality of education the public schools provide. One problem in home schooling is the deep-rooted streak of Christian fundamentalism -- all the curriculum and materials are geared toward educating the child more about Christianity than anything else. If you hold other beliefs, are home schooling for non-religious reasons, or if you just want a broader view, it can be difficult to find suitable materials.

Assembling your own curriculum can be frustrating, and added to the stress of running a home school you get some highly stressed home school parents. So most choose to go with a prepared curriculum. But I found a fantastic book for this problem some years ago.

The Well-Trained Mind, by Jessie Wise and her daughter Susan, provides instruction on how to build a curriculum. But more importantly, it helps you understand how and why a curriculum should be structured in a certain way, and provides a framework around which a solid, classical education can be built.

When I first read this book I was a little sad that I was never taught this way and only now, in my 40s, am learning much of what I should have known years ago. But I got over that and soon was reveling in just how good a K-12 education could be. In the time since we stopped home schooling our kids I've loaned this book to several friends considering home schooling. All have found it an enlightening guide to using home schooling to teach their children how to "love more of the world," -- not less.

Sunday, September 22, 2002

Digital Rights Management and PDF

1:38:21 PM

comment []

Part one of a two-part excerpt from a recent work on digital rights management. The book, Digital Rights Management: Business and Technology by Bill Rosenblatt, Bill Trippe, and Stephen Mooney, was published at the end of last year. I've not read it, my only exposure being the excerpt linked here.

The excerpt presents a reasonably broad view of the DRM situation and makes some good points. But I take issue with the authors' treatment of DMCA and the Digital Signatures Act as just "a couple of new laws".

Digital Rights Management: A primer
Excerpt from the comprehensive new book by industry experts
[...]We take a broad view of the meaning and scope of DRM. When you create content (information), you inherently control a set of rights to that content--to see it, change it, print it, play it, copy it, excerpt it, translate it into another language, and so on. Traditionally, those rights have accrued from three sources:
--Legal: Rights that you get either automatically under law (such as inherent copyright) or by some legal procedure (such as applying for a patent)
-- Transactional: Rights that you get or give up by buying or selling them, such as buying a book or selling a manuscript to a publisher
--Implicit: Rights defined by the medium that the information is in
The most important thing to remember about DRM is that the first two sources of rights haven't changed much with the advent of technologies such as the Internet, cell phones, and MP3 files. Various parties have called for a complete gutting and replacement of the standing intellectual property (IP) law, but this hasn't happened and isn't going to. As discussed in Chapter 3 of this book, legislators have responded to new technologies by adding a couple of new laws instead, such as the Electronic Signatures Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.[...] [ Source: PDFZone]

Perhaps this excerpt takes the position out of context, and Chapter Three covers the far-reaching implications of DMCA more thoroughly, and more fairly. If anyone has read the full book I'd be interested in your opinion.

Saturday, September 07, 2002

Review: Managing the Unexpected

5:19:30 PM

comment []

A review of "Managing the Unexpected: Assuring High Performance in an Age of Complexity" by Karl Weick with Kathleen Sutcliffe. Reviewed by Jim McGee.

[...] Weick and Sutcliffe take an intriguing route in this book. They ask what lessons might be found in the experiences and practices of high-reliability organizations. What's an HRO? Flight-deck operations on an aircraft carrier. Nuclear power plant control room. Fire fighters. Cockpit operations on a 757. Common to all of these is a tension between routine operations and potential disaster. All face the problem of how to take ordinary, fallible, human beings and create organizations that work; organizations that operate reliably day-in and day-out, avoiding disasters for the most part, and coping effectively when they do. [...]

[

Source: McGee's Musings]

Saturday, August 31, 2002

Systems Thinking Books

9:07:00 PM

comment []

Very nice review of two systems thinking authors by Jerry Michalski.

Redesigning the Future and Ackoff’s Fables by Russell Ackoff. The Systems Approach and Its Enemies by C. West Churchman. Supplemented by good overview and background material.