Making It in America. What manufacturing in America looks like in 2012. Fantastic work by the Atlantic.
Making It in America
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The first 80% of a blog post writes itself. The rest? It’s like pulling teeth sometimes.
Daily Routine of a 4 Hour Programmer
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Daily Routine of a 4 Hour Programmer. A slightly different approach to a similar problem as what I wrote about a while back. Creating habits that lead to predictable productivity is my biggest goal for 2012. Relatedly, I might try a more adjustable desk setup.
Concussions in adolescents and the future of football
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Jonah Lehrer on concussions in adolescents and the future of football. There is a part of me that wishes I played football in high school. I think I could have been a decent wide receiver. Reading this article makes me glad I didn’t.
My Sunday night reading list
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Spent the evening with my Kindle, a few cups of tea, and my most recent items from Instapaper. The highlights of my reading list for the night:
- The History, and Future, of Web Protest – Anil Dash
- The next SOPA – Marco Arment
- A Word to the Resourceful – Paul Graham
- How I Test Ideas – Shawn Blanc
- The Greatest Running Shoe Never Sold – Bob Parks
- The Boy Who Heard Too Much – David Kushner
- A completely arbitrary list of takeaways from two unconferences - Matt Waite
Will fact-checking go the way of blogs?
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With any luck, what’s happening to blogs will also happen to fact-checking. As fact-check columns proliferate and become impossible to ignore, reporters will start incorporating their conclusions in their reporting, and will eventually reach the (shocking!) point at which they habitually start comparing what politicians say with what the truth of the matter actually is. In other words, the greatest triumph of the fact-checking movement will come when it puts itself out of work, because journalists are doing its job for it as a matter of course.
Felix Salmon - Will fact-checking go the way of blogs?
Blogs, term papers, and a fear of what’s new
Cody Brown tweeted a link to this New York Times article earlier today about blogs and term papers. It’s a fairly shallow piece with many things I’d enjoy responding to, but I’ll pick one: the patronizing way the old guard portrays newer forms of writing.
Here are two quotes from that article. The first is from Douglas B. Reeves, a columnist for the American School Board Journal:
It doesn’t mean there aren’t interesting blogs. But nobody would conflate interesting writing with premise, evidence, argument and conclusion.
The second is from William H. Fitzhugh, founder of The Concord Review:
Writing is being murdered. But the solution isn’t blogs, the solution is more reading. We don’t pay taxes so kids can talk about themselves and their home lives.
Fitzhugh and Reeves aren’t engaging with the idea of blogs from an academic or evidence-based perspective. They seem to fearful of the new medium and seek to discredit it with all the tact of a gossip writer.
“We don’t pay taxes so kids can talk about themselves and their home lives” is a great soundbite, but it is ridiculous. First, are we so sure there is something wrong with giving kids an outlet to write about themselves and their home life? Second, what does it matter what the output is if the learning that happens in the process of getting there is substantial? I think Fitzhugh and Reeves are far too concerned with the potential output of these blogs than they are with what kids may learn by writing in a medium they enjoy.
If you want to say that blogs have, through research, been the cause of decreasing critical thinking among students that is fine. Merely asserting it does not make it so, though. You need evidence to back your claims, just like the term papers Reeves and Fitzhugh glorify.
If, instead, you are going to characterize the only benefit of blogs as the fact that some are “interesting” and imply that “premise, evidence, argument and conclusion” are only achieved through dead tree term papers, then you are full of it.
These two would be better off taking Reeves’ advice and using premise, evidence, argument, and conclusion to analyze writing on the web.
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Snow flurries
Snapped while arriving in Port Angeles this afternoon. The drive back to Portland was pretty nasty.
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While I’m heading out for the ferry back to Port Angeles I had a fantastic time at WordCamp Victoria. They put on a great event. Thanks Paul, and the rest of the organizing team!
