Monthly Archives: January 2010

City in Crisis: Improving Public Education in Savannah, GA

Posted on by
Reply
View from Fort McHenery

Baltimore

This is an update: since starting this quest to bring financial education, stock market, education, and some incentive program into the schools in Savannah considerable progress has been made, however, as with most things these days there is a budget shortage that is preventing any forward progress. In short I need your help to see this through, and fortunately this idea should be in the Pepsi Refresh project June voting block, so your vote could earn this idea the funding it needs to actually see this get implemented in Savannah. Please go to http://www.refresheverything.com/, sign up and after June first vote for this project every day!

The American dream is the belief that we can do whatever we put our minds to, that the limits to our success are the limits that we place on our own dreams, and that our children will be able to succeed greater than we can even imagine. Throughout history, we celebrate our winners while little is noted about those that fail. We elevate those who beat the odds, like the football team that comes back from behind to clinch the title in the last minutes of the last game, or the business leader that go from rags to riches. General Patton summed up our feelings when he stated that, “America loves a winner. America will not tolerate a loser.”

Our quest to achieve success starts in America’s homes, communities, and public schools. Yet, if we look around today, we find ourselves facing a crisis that threatens to cripple the future of our country. Recent estimates show that nearly a quarter of our nation’s high school students fail to graduate, a fact made even worse by the rapid advancement of highly technical and skilled trades and the off shoring of traditional low skilled occupations. However, this country fails to address this problem either due to ignorance, as over one third of the high schools in this country have graduation rates above 90%, or disbelief, as evidenced by the failure of this nation to confront this problem.

If you are looking for something worthwhile to contribute to just go to : http://www.stocksinthefuture.org/

If you need to know why read the rest of the paper attached to this entry here : City In Crisis – Improving Public Education in Savannah GA

The Eagle and the Waterbug – Emily's Fable

Posted on by
Reply
Somewhere on the Mississippi

Somewhere on the Mississippi

The Eagle lived in a little town quite a while ago.

“I am strong, brave, and heroic”, said the eagle, “I will let no harm come to this town!”

Waterbug was watching from the lake. Then, one day the town caught fire.

“Help us Eagle!”, all of the animals screamed.

“I must save my own tail”, squawked the Eagle, and flew to the tallest tree, away from the flames, to watch the city burn. Waterbug knowing that the eagle would be of no help began splashing water at the town from out of the lake. Soon, the fire was put out.

“A hero must be brave in deed as well as in word!”, Waterbug told eagle.

She flew away to the mountains to hide her embarrassment, and never came back.

Is there an easier way?

Posted on by
Reply

The take away from the following video could be summed up as:

Why are we doing this?
What problem are we solving?
Is this actually useful?
Are we adding value?
Will this change behavior?
Is there an easier way?

[blip.tv ?posts_id=1362881&dest=-1]

The last point, is there an easier way, could be the key to success. Everyone who has gone through business school inevitably hears the phrase ‘cash is king’ yet it seems that cash is easily traded for convenience, and in the case of software this comes down to usability, which really comes down to the fact that people will almost always take the easier way. The trick becomes trying to find out, as Einstein has been quoted as saying how to make your software, product, site, etc ..  ‘ as simple as possible, but not simpler’.  Unfortunately, in the track record for software has been to add more, not less with every release, the challenge is to go against the mainstream and do one thing and do it well.

Creating a new way to learn web design.

Posted on by
Reply
An empty highway somewhere in middle America

An empty highway somewhere in middle America

There seems to be a gap in the bookshelves today when it comes to basic web development. It seems that today people are focused on two ends of the spectrum, which perhaps is just an extension of the polarized world that we live in, in general. On one side is the collection of books for ‘dummies’ and ‘idiots’, and on the other hand are must reads like Collective Intelligence in Action, where the merits of harnessing the masses and using that collective know

ledge to leverage advanced search algorithm and other new media ideas are kicked around. Both have their place, however, it is strange that a series based on titles that degrade their readers cracked the top spot on so many charts, yet there seems to be a lack of books aimed squarely at the casual developer that is looking at maintaining a small business, nonprofit, or organizational website. The emergence of templates, do it yourself packages like i web  and yes even this blog platform that allow users to create pages with little knowledge of the code and even tout that as a major advantage does not help.

Even more troubling is the lack of a concrete example that people would actually like to use, that can be coded using open source editors (both image and HTML), and that is relevant and visually appealing.

Too much is taken for granted – those in the development community can crack open an Ajax library such as Ext, dojo, or YUI and produce layouts that used to take endless hours of coding to produce by hand.

The intent of this experiment is to design a real word type application in order to show many of those users that are not exactly wed developers, however, do know more than the average user some of the thoughts that go into the design and development process, and some of the tools that can be leveraged to get the job done professionally.

The goal is to write one topic every week that can later be incorporated into a book that will serve as a text for beginning web design students.

The hope is that many of the readers of this project will leave their mark on this work, thus creating a unique collection of real world knowledge packed into one book.