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This doll-sized hot-water bottle from 1939 was made to sit on one's face. If you had a toothache, you could rest it on your outer cheek as you lay in bed.
This actually looks super useful, as it can be filled with hot water or crushed ice. — Read the rest
The All Purpose Everything Sauce is an AI generated commercial that feels like a bad LSD trip. If you're in the mood to watch a horror movie and can't decide what to watch, you've come to the right place.
According to the AI, the All Purpose Everything Sauce can be put on dessert, meat, and even inside of balloons while you stand under them and get drenched in the stuff. — Read the rest
The original Taco Bell building has been ripped out of the ground for safekeeping. In 2015, the first ever Taco Bell restaurant was uprooted from its original location in Downey, California, and driven down interstate 5 to the Taco Bell HQ in Irvine, CA. — Read the rest
… Or, actually, none of the time.
You know the old English proverb: Be careful what you wish for. The radical anti-abortionists in Idaho made it so women have to have babies – babies babies all the time! – and now we see the rather odd result: Ob/gyns can’t leave the state fast enough; and now an entire hospital has shut down its obstetric unit.
Ain’t dat funny? If you live in Sandpoint, you can’t have a baby or get any kind of natal care there! Wonder where the regional hospital that has some ob/gyns plus the budget to pay for all the lawsuits is.
And hey how bout that death penalty for mothers idea? That‘ll incentivize women to make babies babies all the time too!
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And then there’s Texas.
Tight & Nerdy is the world's first, and only, burlesque troupe devoted to "Weird Al" Yankovic. Showgals is an upcoming documentary that chronicles their final tour and explores themes of female empowerment, gender inequality, and body positivity.
Tight & Nerdy's "Al-stravaganza" performances are a blend of big personalities, over-the-top costumes, and unforgettable acts set to Weird Al's iconic tunes. — Read the rest
There's a new op-ed in The New York Times from Noam Chomsky and two of his academic colleagues — Dr. Ian Roberts, a linguistics professor at University of Cambridge, and Dr. Jeffrey Watumull, a philosopher who is also the director of artificial intelligence at a tech company. — Read the rest
Here's a series of photos where people have found clever ways to interact with statues around the world. The funniest photo is this series has got to be photo #2, where a person is about to get spanked by a giant man. — Read the rest
Note: this post had a previous title: Keeping alive the dream of an open, democratic, web-native way of giving and receiving recognition
This is a response to Justin Mason’s excellent provocation / blog post “Thinking Out Loud” About Why Static, Online, Competency-Based Microcredential Courses Are Boring. I want to use this post to get a bit more radical than Justin as I don’t have to include a disclaimer about my employer’s opinions 😉
Justin makes four points in his post:
Despite having four qualifications from universities, I don’t actually care that much about the continuation of Higher Education in its current form. It’s also been more than a decade since I’ve been employed by a formal education institution. So I want to highlight a point that Justin makes which reminds me that all but the most prestigious universities are about to be eaten alive:
In theory, we could develop practical microcredentials for all the contexts. But who has the resources to do that? You know who has the resources to at least try? LinkedIn, and huge companies like it. For example, you know who has a vast collection of LinkedIn Learning courses and is now promoting skills assessments to compliment them, and is awarding badges? You know who’s partnering with large higher education systems and other companies to develop microcredentials around LinkedIn Learning? Yup. If you’re developing short, online, static, competency-based courses + microcredentials with the idea that you’ll create a large collection of them, ask yourself if your institution has the resources to build microcredential collections that will compete with LinkedIn Learning’s microcredentials in scope and quality. And then allow yourself to have a good cry.
Dividing up existing courses into bite-size pieces will hasten the demise of Higher Education institutions, especially if they partner with organisations such as LinkedIn. Using a third-party provider to give students access to courses that make them more employable is all well and good, but at some point they will cut out the middleman. Why pay tens of thousands to go to university to get a series of microcredentials you can get from the same provider for less (or while working)?
Universities will realise too late that what they’re selling are experiences and signals. What they’ve got the opportunity to move into is recognition of the unique nature of each learner. So instead of making ever smaller generic credentials, they’ve got the chance to provide bespoke recognition.
I really believe that the next step higher education takes toward making itself more accessible, inclusive, and equitable is through the recognition of life-wide learning. I wager that microcredentials, or something very much like them*, will probably be a big part of how recognition of life-wide learning works. But if microcredentials are understood to be 100% about workforce development, then I worry they’ll contribute to the workforce-ification of public higher education, and that’s something I don’t want to see happen. I wish, oh how I wish, that faculty and administrators who advocate for higher education’s public mission would stop simply identifying microcredentials with workforce development. Instead, I would ask them to consider how microcredentials could be one available tool that helps us extend the reach of public higher education to previously unserved people, as well as extend the lens of liberal arts learning to encompass lifelong and life-wide learning! Seriously, our rapidly changing world needs that lens!
People need income to live, which usually means that they need to work. Most work, but not all work, comes in the shape of ‘a job’ which entails an employer. This does not mean that we need to tailor our whole education system to please employers. As Justin mentions, the ‘skills gap’ is a convenient fiction peddled by large organisations who do not want to spend money on training and development. It’s only recently, after all, that graduates were expected to be immediately ‘work ready’ for employers.
But even if we did want to please employers, the way that Higher Education seems to be approaching microcredentialing seems to be backwards. Instead of creating generic content that then needs to be applied to an area, the world of work requires extremely contextual and domain-dependent recognition of knowledge, skills, and understanding.
[K]nowledge and skills tend to be embedded in contexts. People (okay… mostly my relatives) bemoan higher education for being too abstract. Learning should be practical, they say. What my relatives don’t realize is that an amount of “abstractness” is necessary if you’re developing curricula intended for any and all contexts and learners. Take, for example, an introductory microcredential on project management. The trouble is that project management in the construction industry looks significantly different from project management in the health care industry or software development industry. Even within a given industry, project management will differ from one organization to the next. So microcredential designers must consider tradeoffs. They can either build a “practical” microcredential curriculum that is 80% useful to 5% of their potential learner-consumers, or they can build an “abstract” curriculum that is 40% useful to 80% of their potential learner-consumers (those percentages are made up examples).
A microcredential itself is not ‘content’ but rather a signal of having learned or mastered something. While a university might want to control the value of the different kinds of credentials it offers, it’s not quite as simple as that. As the illustration at the top of this post shows, there are many facets to take into account. What Higher Education institutions need to bear in mind that, as part of this great unbundling, there is no actual requirement that they are the ones who issue valuable forms of recognition.
The work that I’m involved with at the moment (alongside Justin!) through Keep Badges Weird and the OSN Open Recognition working group involves thinking about what happens when a Community of Practice takes the place of an institution. I think we could see the return of guilds run as a form of co-operative trade union which would recognise and legitimate workers within a given domain. They could push back against the overbearing power of employers. I think it would be massively preferable to the situation in which we find ourselves right now.
Most of the questions that badges have raised over the last 12 years have been ‘trojan horse’ in nature. What do we mean by ‘quality assurance’? How can we do assessment at scale? What’s the minimum viable qualification? In fact, when I was on the original Mozilla Open Badges team, the main opposition to badges came from exactly those kinds of universities that are now jumping on the ‘static, online, competency-based’ microcredential bandwagon. I suspect they’re, either consciously or unconsciously, looking for ways to embrace, extend, and extinguish an open standard to try and firm up their position within the ecosystem.
Perhaps I’m getting older, but I see a lot of issues that on the surface look like they’re about skills and credentialing that are actually deeper and more structural. There are assumptions about power relations baked into every conversation I have had over more than a decade in this area. At some point we’re going to need to have some real talk about that as well. My view, unsurprisingly, is that we need more democracy and autonomy in the workplace, and that this starts with this being practised within our education systems.
For now, though, I’d encourage those who see the world through the lens of microcredentials to read some work that my colleagues and I have done in this area over the last few years. I’d suggest reading these three posts, focused particularly on Open Recognition in the workplace:
Once you’ve done that, come and introduce yourself to the KBW Community, start earning some badges for recognition, and see if we can keep alive the revolutionary dream of an open, democratic, web-native way of giving and receiving recognition!
The post Wake me up when you’ve stopped talking about microcredentials for workforce development first appeared on Open Thinkering.Have you ever wondered, what's inside a snail shell? A snail's shell (its exoskeleton) protects the snail's soft body from the outside world. The video shows what a deceased snail looks like without its shell. Basically, it looks like a shelled snail, but all soft and mushy. — Read the rest
Flickr does some very fun things for me, and my pink and blue dot loyalty planted in March 2004 remains true. One of the fun things it has done numerous times over the past 6+ years is, without much a recognizable pattern, decides to locate my photos somewhere in rural China and remote regions of Russia.
Case in point, there is an edited photo of a valentine rose posted last week to flickr posted from home here in Saskatchewan but Flickr decides it is a bit farther away. Screen shot version here:
It’s happened so often that I mostly ignore or do not notice, but at least the all seeing eye of Stephen Downes noticed after I shared the photo in Mastodon:
Ah yes, greetings from Botsy (as Wikipedia spells it) “(?????) is a rural locality (a selo) in Dzhidinsky District, Republic of Buryatia, Russia. The population was 550 as of 2010. There are 5 streets.”
Maybe the mis-mapping is some issue with the GPS data captured in my iPhone, but as the EXIF data shows on this photo in flickr, the longitude (around 105 W) is correct.
So if I click the link for flickr’s location in Russia, it reveals 64 of my photos taken around Botsiy!
The clue is in the URL parameters (see why it pays to be curious about URLs?)
https://www.flickr.com/search/?lat=50.46908&lon=105.71585&radius=0.25&has_geo=1&view_all=1
it references longitude as lon=105.71585 which is Longitude EAST. If you flip that value negative to lon=-105.71585 you get some 2386 photos correctly mapped to my area in Saskatchewan.
The question for flickr is- why can you map 2386 photos correctly why do you mess up in the other 64?
I decided to reach out for help in the flickr forums with a post explaining the situation. Alot of user replies came in, suggestions, people tried even reporting my photo and got the same result. Oh, and others confirmed its an old bug. But nothing from Flickr Official.
Someone even noted mine was a duplicate post, I had asked the same question in 2021 (but forgot, there’s nothing that really helps me find my posts in these forums).
The key result I did get was that as a FlickrPro user, if I send via a bug report form, I would get direct service. Where is that? I ended up web searching to find it at https://www.flickrhelp.com/ a site that looks different from the vintage layout of the user forums.
The only thing I did find was via a Contact link to a general request form, which, if you read the top sounds like its more about issues with account access. But I will try anywhere! And BOOM! The response was in maybe 2 hours:
I appreciate you letting us know that you are experiencing an issue with the geolocation mab box on your profile.
from Amanda at Flickr Help
At this time, our engineers have been alerted and are working to resolve the issue.
While I do not have any exact timeframe for when this will be resolved, we are doing everything we can to get everything smoothed out again as quickly as possible.
To which I replied:
It’s not a significant issue for me, I more wanted Flickr to know if this problem. I have seen it happen numerous times over the years; before 2018 when I lived in Arizona, I saw 100s? Of my photos mapped to remote parts of China (my only visits there was to Shanghai and twice to Hong Kong)
Do you need me to find more examples?
Again it really does not bother me, but as a huge fan of Flickr since 2004 I want to help identify any problems.
I went deeper in digging for info on the rose photo that set this off using the Flickr API for the method flickr.photos.getInfo and the photo id 52690089339 the API reveals the wrong location data — longitude="105.715850"
FreshRSS 
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<rsp stat="ok">
<photo id="52690089339" secret="05b60de37e" server="65535" farm="66" dateuploaded="1676431124" isfavorite="0" license="9" safety_level="0" rotation="0" originalsecret="323b86829c" originalformat="jpg" views="112" media="photo">
<owner nsid="37996646802@N01" username="cogdogblog" realname="Alan Levine" location="Archydal, Canada" iconserver="7292" iconfarm="8" path_alias="cogdog" />
<title>By Any Color</title>
<description />
<visibility ispublic="1" isfriend="0" isfamily="0" />
<dates posted="1676431124" taken="2023-02-14 16:31:15" takengranularity="0" takenunknown="0" lastupdate="1676471187" />
<permissions permcomment="3" permaddmeta="3" />
<editability cancomment="1" canaddmeta="1" />
<publiceditability cancomment="1" canaddmeta="1" />
<usage candownload="1" canblog="1" canprint="1" canshare="1" />
<comments>0</comments>
<notes />
<people haspeople="0" />
<tags>
<tag id="14901-52690089339-986" author="37996646802@N01" authorname="cogdogblog" raw="rose" machine_tag="0">rose</tag>
</tags>
<location latitude="50.469080" longitude="105.715850" accuracy="16" context="0">
<locality>Botsiy</locality>
<neighbourhood />
<region>Buryatiya Republic</region>
<country>Russia</country>
</location>
<geoperms ispublic="1" iscontact="0" isfriend="0" isfamily="0" />
<urls>
<url type="photopage">https://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/52690089339/</url>
</urls>
</photo>
</rsp>
Then I look up the same photo’s exif data via flickr.photos.getExif and the location data looks correct:
<exif tagspace="GPS" tagspaceid="0" tag="GPSLatitudeRef" label="GPS Latitude Ref">
<raw>North</raw>
</exif>
<exif tagspace="GPS" tagspaceid="0" tag="GPSLatitude" label="GPS Latitude">
<raw>50 deg 28' 8.69&quot;</raw>
<clean>50 deg 28' 8.69&quot; N</clean>
</exif>
<exif tagspace="GPS" tagspaceid="0" tag="GPSLongitudeRef" label="GPS Longitude Ref">
<raw>West</raw>
</exif>
<exif tagspace="GPS" tagspaceid="0" tag="GPSLongitude" label="GPS Longitude">
<raw>105 deg 42' 57.06&quot;</raw>
<clean>105 deg 42' 57.06&quot; W</clean>
</exif>
It looks like to me somewhere the conversion from 105 deg 42′ 57.06 West longitude to numerical is fouled. But I have no idea how it works.
My curiosity got to me- was my memory correct? I dug into the Flickr Oragnizr where I can use the bottom options to select my geotagged photos (like 23,000), and then via the Map button I could get a view of all these places in China, Russia, Mongolia where my photos were mis mapped
More than 1100 photos of mine are shown in parts of the world I have never seen. But I can spy the patterns, The locations marked lots south of Irkutsk Russia is where I live now in Saskatchewan. The other area with lots near Henan province in China are ones I took when I lived in Strawberry Arizona. In between these two are photos I took from my early road trips back and forth.
Those ones down in Laos? Some of those were from my times in Guadalajara Mexico.
What we have here is somewhat of a reverse image map of where I have been and roamed over the last few years… let’s see if I can get a comparison map thing going (the location map has to be reversed so the names are backward):
To help flickr I found examples that are explicitly obvious:
The one from Kamloops is telling as others have noticed- my good photo friend from Australia, Michael Coghlan commented in 2017:
You’ve taken pix of this photogenic place before…..but seems Flickr thinks it’s in Mongolia!
https://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/33564084071/#comment72157678621828423
I actually don’t care or even want flickr to fix my locations. I like the quirkiness. I just think they should know in case it matters to other people.
As for me? Yes, go ahead and believe I have been up and down the 5 streets of Botsiy, or lived for years in ???, ???, ??, drove through a desert to sea level in ??, ???, ?? south of Jinana, drove through a canyon in Avdzaga, Bulgan, Mongolia… I like the notoriety!
But Flickr, you might want to know what flips the longitude, because it makes a map difference to some folks.
Featured Image: One correctly located!
The mystery of the awful 2021 Tesla crash, about which I wrote here, has been solved.
A final report from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board found that a 2021 fiery crash that killed two people in a Tesla was a result of the driver speeding and being intoxicated… NTSB’s investigation determined the probable cause of the crash was “the driver’s excessive speed and failure to control his car, due to impairment from alcohol intoxication in combination with the effects of two sedating antihistamines, resulting in a roadway departure, tree impact, and post-crash fire.”
You can take the Texas good ol’ boy out of twentieth century car technology, but you can’t take him out of revving the engine plus polypharmacy.
People at the time were quick to blame Tesla.
Their services are held at abortion clinics. “Planned Parenthood” is the name of their denomination. They tithe to abortion providers.
UD‘s a little astonished, but she recalls Katha Pollitt’s words: “Religion is what people make of it.”
I mean. I strongly support abortion rights, but this is really over the top.
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Oh come to the church of Planned Parenthood
Oh come to the church in the mall…
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And by the way – I don’t think all abortion providers are Planned Parenthood affiliated, are they? I think a better name for this denomination would be Church at the Abortion.
A visit to another of the world's fascinating archives, this time to Australia's Library of Air.
The post A Library of Air appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Customers at a Mobile, Alabama gas station were upset by a real dick they encountered in the parking lot. "It was a whole d*ck." one employee said. Police arrived to collect the severed member and later commented that the incident is "not being investigated as an assault or murder." — Read the rest
If [John] Eastman is ultimately disbarred, it would be a sudden end to an ignominious legal career. He is not very good at reading the Constitution or the law. In 2020, well before he began plotting to overturn that year’s election, he published a widely derided op-ed in Newsweek suggesting that vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris might be ineligible for that office because she was supposedly not a U.S. citizen at birth. You do not need to be a former Clarence Thomas clerk or a former Chapman University law professor, as Eastman is, to Google “Kamala Harris birthplace” and read “Oakland, California,” thus making her a natural-born citizen.
Eastman then suggested, however, that birthright citizenship itself might not be constitutional, a theory that characterizes much of his approach to the law during the 2020 election. The answer to any legal question is whatever John Eastman wants it to be, and if someone as misinformed as, say, the Supreme Court of the United States disagrees, they are also wrong and should correct themselves accordingly. This approach led him to conclude in an infamous set of memos after Election Day in 2020 that the Twelfth Amendment allows the vice president to throw out individual states’ electoral votes at his discretion and personally declare a winner. The point here is not to be right or correct—fortunately for Eastman, because he was neither—but to give a legalistic guise to a coup attempt.
The New Republic
Watch out folks, A pickle with a mind of it's own has been created in a top secret laboratory. The pickle looks quite rambunctious, and could be on the loose by now. Next time you get a burger, take a peek under the bun just to make sure you don't see any lively pickle slices. — Read the rest
