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Showing posts from May, 2011

Societal "resilience" - Catastrophe Acclimation!

Most of this blog site is dedicated to the anticipation of ever escalating natural and man caused catastrophes as we move along the unavoidable and coincidental paths of disaster, natural and man made. This unfortunate coupling features ongoing triggering and detonation of woefully inadequate human engineering intended to help us... but destined to exacerbate the terrible effects of  natural calamity as systems fail and technology falls far short of intended purpose--in short... facilities overwhelmed by natural forces. Our situation is unprecedented, we are subject to socioeconomic meltdown, infrastructure and services collapse and an extraordinary exposure to a whole slew of natural catastrophe - simultaneously! This appears to be a quintessential multi-jeopardy for life in this cycle. We are faced with decades of environmental collapse as the fury of natural elements demonstrate the futility of mankind's desires to control the cycles of planetary change, which regardless of us,

IOU IO Slides and Videos

I had the chance to speak at Google I/O this week, giving two talks with Romain Guy , Honeycomb Highlights and Android Accelerated Rendering . The talks were fun, as were the conversations with the developers that came by our Android Office Hours. The conference was enjoyable and relaxing; I'm looking forward to my system recovering by sometime in June of 2012. Google's pretty good at posting content online (surprise, surprise), and I/O is no exception. Our Honeycomb talk was available on YouTube as we were giving it (nothing like streaming live to the world to keep the nervous tension alive), and I hope to see the Rendering talk posted there soon. In the meantime, Romain provided links to the all of the video, slide, and demo resources for our talks; check out his blog for all of the details. And hopefully see you at some future I/O or other Android-related conference!

Cycles of Recycling: Cycle 2

Extending students' word knowledge with Collocation forks If the previous cycle used collocations that students have come across in texts, this one involves more explicit teaching and elaboration. To help learners fully understand and use a new word, it is useful to provide them with its common collocates. This is particularly important with partially learnt vocabulary items. Recording collocations “Collocation fork” is a useful way of recording collocations when you want to elaborate on possible uses of a word. Draw it on the board and make sure students copy it into their vocabulary notebooks. Slowly they will get used to this recording format. For example, this is the word fork expanding the verb “join” an organization join the army the club Download this HANDOUT  where collocation forks appear more clearly or see an example in this photo: If you want to provide translations, remind your students that they have to translate the whole expression, rat

Life after New World Order - Globalization, epic fail?

I doubt anyone today challenges the notion of an attempted New World Order, a singular organization transcending sovereign rights and borders, a single political entity which brings the world a "one stop" governance, a common currency and even more frightening... universal laws with military style enforcement. While a "single world government" concept may hold the promise of benefit to some, it is an entirely foolish aspiration and is bound to fail. The quicker the NWO proponents are dealt with and disposed of... the better. As an experiment, globalization has proven an epic fail - at least for average citizens, perhaps not for the banksters and their elitist masters, sycophant politicians and gouging corporate interests--not yet anyway--but retribution if not restitution is in their near future as the extent of collusion, larceny and embezzlement emerges and is dealt with by the people for the people. In a practical sense managing anything with people involved, eve