“While Kindle users have been able to post quotes from the ebooks they are reading to Twitter or Facebook for some time now, only recently has this feature been expanded to allow users to utilize their Kindle profiles in some potentially interesting ways. Before I get into what those ways might be, let me clarify that a Kindle profile and an Amazon profile are not one and the same […]. In a nutshell, Kindle profiles are focused on reading and Amazon profiles are focused on buying. […]
To get to your own kindle.amazon.com page, you must login (again) with your Amazon account information. Logging in again brings the now familiar Highly Followed Users and Books With the Most Public Notes, but it also lists your recent activity (passages that you have highlighted, annotated, or shared on Twitter or Facebook).” - Chronicle of Higher Education
Interesting. I see how this could be tremendously useful for teachers to guide their students through a reading, or for study groups and book clubs to share thoughts, questions, and references. It’s a nice step towards fostering a communality of reading, and it resembles the sharing features presently being incorporated into several e-based textbooks, perhaps a harbinger of more overlap between the industries.
It was 66 years ago yesterday when Japan surrendered to the Allied Forces in WWII. This short clip is from a week before when Truman officially announced that the United States had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, “a military base.”
“Three days after Hiroshima an atomic bomb would again be dropped, this time on Nagasaki.
Five more days later and Japan would surrender.”
(Source: picturesofwar)
“On August 2, Duquesne University, a private Catholic school in Pittsburgh, filed suit against Highmark Inc. because the insurer allegedly mishandled the school’s prescription drug plan over the course of three years. Duquesne’s contract with Highmark specified that the insurance could not cover contraceptives because they contradict the university’s Catholic faith, but Highmark went ahead and covered birth control (and other drugs it wasn’t supposed to cover) anyway.” - Mother Jones
This debate is not a new one, but it’s been stoked recently since the inclusion of the “conscience clause” in Obama’s health plan. It still seems to me that having one’s personal contraception determined at all by his/her employer’s religious beliefs is discriminatory and an infringement on an individual’s sexual freedom, not to mention the imposition of one individual’s faith upon another.
In terms of “conscientiously objecting,” there is a grave difference between declining to partake in an armed conflict, and denying one’s employees control over their own reproductive systems: Employers have not been called to fight a war in their employees’ bodies. (This may seem like an odd question, but if someone conscientiously objects to a war can he/she insist that his/her employees also refuse to participate?) Employers are not entitled to follow their workers home to watch their intimate activities, and yet strangely enough for matters of personal belief they may insist upon playing a super-visional role in them.
It is understood that religious institutions do not want their money to fund the taking of life, but if employees utilizing any form of birth control are on their payroll, then is it not just a matter of a *particular* dollar going to the health care provider? This one instead of that one? The employer’s denial of this specific aspect of health coverage, then, would seem merely a symbolic gesture — however, one that, while reminding their employees of their morals, also violates their employees’ freedom to develop and live by their own.
Fall Tuition Reminder?
“Student”? No, no - I think you mean to say “Doctor.”
*delete* (with pride)
‘How can you sue someone for stealing something that does not belong to you? That is the question AcademyOne, a company that aggregates course data from various colleges to facilitate the transfer of credits between institutions, is asking CollegeSource, an older company that offers similar services. CollegeSource is suing AcademyOne for paying contractors in China to systematically download PDF copies of college course catalogs — which CollegeSource itself had acquired for free and compiled, over the years, in a database that spans more than a decade. […]
The lines of ownership here are fine. On its website, CollegeSource claims copyright on “the text, graphics, images, video, design, course description data, PDF college catalogs, [and] information” in its database — as well as its “organization, compilation, [and] look and feel.” But U.S. copyright law might not apply to college course catalogs even for the professors or registrars who originally produced them, says one university lawyer.’ - Inside Higher Education
In short, CollegeSource’s argument for the legal protection of this data is that they have spent more than a decade assembling it, and thus to have the information then scraped by their potential competitor seems unjust. But the argument against actual copyright protection of their gathered information is that the material may not fall under copyright law at all. Previous rulings such as that of U.S. Supreme Court case Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service Company (1991) have decreed that copyright law can not apply to materials such as telephone directories…that is, aggregations of facts without original creation on the part of the compiler, and thus perhaps a college course catalog is of a similar vein. We shall see.
ArKinect = Archaeology + Kinect
Archaeologists are hoping to utilize a modified version of Microsoft’s Xbox Kinect to scan future excavations. At present the technology only works indoors, but a team of scientists at UCSD are working to adapt the technology to allow it to work on location, thus providing 3-D scans of unearthed materials, which would aid in preservation efforts, cataloging, and making models of the sites for researchers to study the finds remotely.
“A realistic 3-D portrayal of ancient cookware, for instance, would be a lot more valuable than a 2-D photograph, because it would show more detail and craftsmanship and even help researchers understand how an artifact was used.”
In addition, scientists estimate that this adaptation of existent gaming technology also has the potential to scan and digitize debris following natural disasters, thus assisting in recovery efforts.
Planting Sunflowers to Reduce Nuclear Radiation ‘Fukushima city officials sowed sunflower seeds Wednesday at a plaza in the city as part of efforts to remove radioactive materials from the soil. Sunflowers are said to absorb radioactive substances, and the 6,000-square-meter plaza, located on a hillside about 1 kilometer away from the prefectural government offices, is one of the so-called “hot spots” where radiation levels are sporadically higher than other areas.’ - Mainichi Daily News
![Growing Home
Growing Home is a project brought forth by Philadelphia’s Center City Nationalities Service Center (and supported by the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s City Harvest Growers Alliance initiative, as well as by donations) that - through community gardening - seeks to ease the adjustment of refugees now residing in the United States.
“The refugees from Bhutan—ethnic Nepalis—and the refugees from Burma—ethnic minorities—experienced severe discrimination in their home countries and spent years in refugee camps before arriving in America. When [… asked…] what would make the difficult transition here easier, a place to work the soil was at the top of the list.” - UTNE
So for the past few months, the garden site - formerly five adjacent vacant lots on Emily Street - has been cared for by seventy immigrant families seeking to reestablish a connection with the earth. There are seventy-two active planting beds.
“Growing Home seeks to improve refugee diets by providing nutritious produce indigenous to their ethnic backgrounds; offer refugees a therapeutic outdoor space in which to build community, reconnect to their agricultural roots and engage in regular exercise.” - Growing Home
This is such a beautiful project - well done, Philly.](http://library.vu.edu.pk/cgi-bin/nph-proxy.cgi/000100A/http/web.archive.org/web/20110917143242im_/http:/=2f27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lnkarulhf51qz5h5go1_500.jpg)
Growing Home
Growing Home is a project brought forth by Philadelphia’s Center City Nationalities Service Center (and supported by the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s City Harvest Growers Alliance initiative, as well as by donations) that - through community gardening - seeks to ease the adjustment of refugees now residing in the United States.
“The refugees from Bhutan—ethnic Nepalis—and the refugees from Burma—ethnic minorities—experienced severe discrimination in their home countries and spent years in refugee camps before arriving in America. When [… asked…] what would make the difficult transition here easier, a place to work the soil was at the top of the list.” - UTNE
So for the past few months, the garden site - formerly five adjacent vacant lots on Emily Street - has been cared for by seventy immigrant families seeking to reestablish a connection with the earth. There are seventy-two active planting beds.
“Growing Home seeks to improve refugee diets by providing nutritious produce indigenous to their ethnic backgrounds; offer refugees a therapeutic outdoor space in which to build community, reconnect to their agricultural roots and engage in regular exercise.” - Growing Home
This is such a beautiful project - well done, Philly.
![Finches Appreciate Good Grammar
A Kyoto University study performed on Bengal finches suggests that they are capable of recognizing ungrammatical changes in song syntax, that their own bird song structure is based on learned rules, and that they are able to detect changes in syntax even within newly introduced songs.
‘They may not have verbs, nouns or past participles, but birds challenge the notion that humans alone have evolved grammatical rules. […] [Their reactions to hearing changes in song structures] indicates the existence of a specific rule in the sequential orderings of syllables in their songs, shared within the social community,” Abe told New Scientist.’
(via)](http://library.vu.edu.pk/cgi-bin/nph-proxy.cgi/000100A/http/web.archive.org/web/20110917143242im_/http:/=2f28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lngp02B2w21qz5h5go1_400.jpg)
Finches Appreciate Good Grammar
A Kyoto University study performed on Bengal finches suggests that they are capable of recognizing ungrammatical changes in song syntax, that their own bird song structure is based on learned rules, and that they are able to detect changes in syntax even within newly introduced songs.
‘They may not have verbs, nouns or past participles, but birds challenge the notion that humans alone have evolved grammatical rules. […] [Their reactions to hearing changes in song structures] indicates the existence of a specific rule in the sequential orderings of syllables in their songs, shared within the social community,” Abe told New Scientist.’
(via)
