“ I love the process of unpacking something. You design a ritual of unpacking to make the product feel special. Packaging can be theater, it can create a story.”
— Jonathan Ive
tofias dot net
log | a bucket full of thoughts
“ ‘Don’t be evil’ has been over for a long time.”
— John Gruber on Google’s new privacy policy
“ What has been said about Newt is pretty much true. He had to step down because Republicans, conservative Republicans, wouldn’t vote for him again as Speaker. Because he’s not really a conservative. I mean, he’ll tell you what you want to hear. He has an uncanny ability, sort of like Clinton, to feel your pain and know his audience and speak to his audience and fire them up. But when he was speaker, he was erratic, undisciplined.”
— Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (so this could be true)
iBooks Assessments
The two most reasonable assessments of iBooks, iBooks Author, and the near future of ebooks more generally come from Andy Ihnatko on 5by5’s podcast The Ihnatko Almanac: Some Assembly Required (episode #16) and Duke Sociologist Kieran Healy’s blog post Apple for the Teacher.
Both are recommended.
UW–Syllabus
I was under the impression we were required to make our syllabi publicly available. However in response to an open records request from an allegedly conservative political group, the University of Wisconsin System says not so much:
UW officials contend that university course syllabi are not public records because they are subject to copyright, and therefore exempt from production under Wisconsin’s open records law.
“We’ve long held that those syllabi are not subject to open records requests,” said David Giroux, spokesman for the UW System. He confirmed that the schools the NCTQ queried did indeed deny the group’s requests for information.
Perhaps we are only required to make them available to the university community?
I always post the syllabi for my courses on my website.
“ English’s emergence as the global language, along with the rapid progress in machine translation and the fragmentation of languages spoken around the world, make it less clear that the substantial investment necessary to speak a foreign tongue is universally worthwhile. While there is no gainsaying the insights that come from mastering a language, it will over time become less essential in doing business in Asia, treating patients in Africa or helping resolve conflicts in the Middle East.”
— Lawrence H. Summers on the future of higher education
10 Championship Games in 12 Years
The Hub of the Universe indeed.
Police Stations as Markets
As suggested by the Milwaukee police in response to several Craiglist-based robberies.
“ So I’ve had the experience of leadership. Now Speaker Gingrich has also been a leader. He was a leader for four years as speaker of the House. And at the end of four years it was proven he was a failed leader. And he had to resign in disgrace. I don’t know if you knew that. He actually resigned after four years in disgrace. He was investigated under an ethics panel and had to make a payment associated with that and then his fellow Republicans, 88 percent of Republicans, voted to reprimand Speaker Gingrich. He has not had a record of successful leadership.”
— Mitt Romney
“ It doesn’t have to be linear, but if you replace the longform text with video & twiddly knobs, it ceases to be an ebook. Text, and the presentation of the body of text, has to be the heart, spine and body of the story.”
— Baldur Bjarnason, “What is an ebook?”
