WARWICK, England (CNN) — A mathematical formula calculated by a British university professor has found that time actually is money.

Economics professor Ian Walker, of central England’s Warwick University, says process can show people just how valuable their time is in relation to any task they have to perform, from a lie-in or cooking a meal to sleeping and working.

You want the equation? Click the link. But hurry.

Pretty good piece in Microcontent News about the weblog ecology. (First point: who knew that there’s a trade mag — even an online one — about microcontent?) The piece could use a serious edit, and the top of it shows some startling naivite about the media feeding chain. But when the author turns his attention to weblogs, there’s lots of good information here.

This is from The Register, and contains a link to the core document from the ACLU:

Face recognition kit fails in Fla airport. How about fifty false positives a day?

Authorities here in New York just put in a face recognition system to monitor the line of tourists queuing up to get on the boat to the Statue of Liberty. This despite ample evidence — even before these Palm Beach findings — that face recognition is not ready for prime time.

To answer my own question: No, I don’t feel any safer. Thanks for asking.

This story originated on Gulf News Online, but I heard about it through BoingBoing and New World Disorder:

Fighting against what clerics call “penetrating Western culture” with a crackdown on icons of America, Iran’s hardline judiciary has launched a campaign to confiscate all U.S.-made Barbie dolls in Tehran.

Recently Moral Police have stepped up arrest and harassment of shopkeepers for selling Barbie dolls and whatever decorated with different shapes of Barbie and its image which are immensely used by school children.

Tehran Judicial Department has arrested many of Barbie traders and shopkeepers mainly in Tehran  and other places accusing them for spreading obscene Western cultures since last month.

I’m intrigued by something in the lede: Why “U.S.-made Barbie dolls”? I mean, I understand why they might want Barbie dolls out of the culture. And I understand why they might want U.S.-made goods gone, too. But why specifically “U.S.-made Barbie dolls”? Would Taiwan-manufactured Barbies be less of an anathema? Or are we just knocking up against less-than-fully conversational English?

Jerome K. Jerome. “It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.”

 

Think twice before accepting a lifetime guarantee on a pacemaker. — Dan Rosenbaum

 

My friend and colleague Jeff Duntemann has been kind enough to make Over The Edge one of three blogs linked from his own long-running weblog. One of the others is written by Jim Mischel. I have no idea who Jim Mischel is, but I’ve had a ton of fun reading his stuff. Jim’s major contribution to my day, however, has been a link to The Flo Control Project, wherein, well…:

The guy’s using a digital camera hooked to a computer to take a picture of his cat Flo on the way into the house.  If the picture compares favorably with a picture on file, then the cat’s door is unlocked.  If the cat is carrying a mouse or a bird or other present, or if the cat at the door isn’t really the cat, then the door remains locked. 

My friend Paul Schindler (whose blog is cited below) has left the technology publishing business to do what he’s long threatened: get his California teaching ticket and become a high-school math teacher. He’ll be terrific at it.

The current issue of his weblog contains, down at the bottom, a long-ish e-mail from a friend regarding public education and what it’s good for. The correspondent, Peggy Coquet (a wonderful name, that), echos the views of the author Neil Postman, in his book The End of Education. Coquet talks about the twin roles of schools: the training of children to be citizens, and the training of children to be economic units.  Postman argues that the pendulum has swung far to the second view, as business has become ever ascendent in our society.

Not surprising, really. It’s fairly easy to measure an economic unit. You spend X dollars per student and test the output. If the output score is sub-par per dollar spent, there’s something wrong with the process. Fixing a process is made easier by reducing the process to standard set of steps, each of which can be examined and tested. Of course it works: there are more McDonalds than four-star restaurants, and more people can go to them, besides. Isn’t that good?

A friend of mine used to work for AT&T. They used to say, “if you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist.” The corollary is “if you don’t measure it, it doesn’t exist.” The base assumption is that everything can be measured, which is fine if you’re worried about the reliability of a telephone network. It’s less fine if you want children who are capable of running their own town, nation, and world.

Of course everything can’t be measured. It’s hard to measure the key things that demonstrate success in a citizenship oriented school. It’s hard to measure critical thinking, creativity, social involvment. It’s hard to teach them. Simpler and more reliable to produce economic units trained to perform to a test. Five onions on the burger, and 2 ounces of ketchup. Salsa is outside the box.

Lord knows that kids need to know how to add, and spell, and show up on time, and sit still in their seats. But even if schools were doing a good job of that, it would only be the start. It’s what comes after that that’s important. A citizen unit is more than an economic unit — harder to teach, harder to live with, and vastly more powerful and subversive.

I have two five-month-old boys, and I live in an affluent neighborhood with one crappy public school and five excellent and expensive private schools. This subject is not only not closed, it’s barely open.

My long-time colleague, erstwhile boss, and good friend Paul Schindler has, for the last four years, been writing a weekly weblog. It touches most parts of his life, and is therefore as wide-ranging and interesting as the author himself. He hand-coded he thing, so it’s not on any of the major blogging communities or aggregators. Pity — it’s quite good, and something I hurry to check out every Sunday evening or Monday morning.

You should, too: https://www.schindler.org/psacot

And more to the point, he’s inspired the next item.

Video Game League on the Verge. The Cyberathlete Professional League receives a much-needed $45 million cash infusion, a commitment from Intel and exposure from ESPN. But will anybody watch?

We have digital cable. I live in the city where they invented the televised Yule Log. Apparently, some people will watch anything. I understand that the video game industry is bigger than the movie industry. I even understand that video games are fun (though I myself come mostly from the pinball generation).

But a professional league with spectators? Color me “He Hate Me.”