"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn." — T.H. White, The Once and Future King

A website by Shanta Rohse on learning, technology and design

Recently in: Portable Learner

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The continuing education of an educator

Book Notes

Gladwell’s Secrets of Success

The secret to genius is nurture, not nature. It's a nice theory but . . .
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Book Notes

Subverting Our Reverence for Books

We live in a culture that holds books sacred. Pierre Bayard puts it into perspective.
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Book Notes

The Amateur Gourmet: On Learning the Basics

Do you want to become a better teacher or learner? First, try making a batch of tomato sauce.
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The Cost of Fearing Strangers

So which would scare you more: an Amer­i­can Mus­lim fam­ily you knew noth­ing about or the guy from your church who had just gone through a divorce? You would prob­a­bly get this wrong; most of us are ter­ri­ble at risk assess­ment. Stephen J. Dub­ner on why the things we fear the most are sim­ply irra­tional:

Why do we fear the unknown more than the known? That’s a larger ques­tion than I can answer here (not that I’m capa­ble any­way), but it prob­a­bly has to do with the heuris­tics — the short­cut guesses — our brains use to solve prob­lems, and the fact that these heuris­tics rely on the infor­ma­tion already stored in our mem­o­ries.
And what gets stored away? Anom­alies — the big, rare, “black swan” events that are so dra­matic, so unpre­dictable, and per­haps world-changing, that they imprint them­selves on our mem­o­ries and con us into think­ing of them as typ­i­cal, or at least likely, whereas in fact they are extra­or­di­nar­ily rare.

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Weekend Food Blogging: Chocolate Chip Cookies
Field Notes

Weekend Food Blogging: Chocolate Chip Cookies

Chocolate chip cookies need just a few ingredients, and are easy to make. I've paired them with a suitably complementary simple web layout.
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Tech Law Crystal Ball

What’s in store for Canada in 2009 in the area of tech­nol­ogy law and pol­icy? Michael Geist’s month-by-month blow pre­dicts entrenched posi­tions, slow, com­prised progress on issues like copy­right reform and net neu­tral­ity, only to be inter­rupted and dis­placed off the agenda by a Novem­ber elec­tion (the fourth in six years). Funny in a laugh-instead-of-cry kind of way.

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Drug Companies, Doctors and Corruption

Clin­i­cal tri­als are bro­ken. In her review of three recently pub­lished books about the col­lu­sion between influ­en­tial doc­tors and phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies, Mar­cia Angell reveals the sys­tem­atic biases inher­ent in the very sci­en­tific method designed ensure best med­ical prac­tices. Knowl­edge trans­la­tion rests on the assump­tion that evidence-based research must make its way into prac­tice. Her con­clu­sion is sickening:

It is sim­ply no longer pos­si­ble to believe much of the clin­i­cal research that is pub­lished, or to rely on the judg­ment of trusted physi­cians or author­i­ta­tive med­ical guide­lines. I take no plea­sure in this con­clu­sion, which I reached slowly and reluc­tantly over my two decades as an edi­tor of The­New Eng­land Jour­nal of Medicine.

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Set in Our Ways: Why Change Is So Hard

Even though we yearn for what is new, most of us are unable or will­ing to make fun­da­men­tal changes in our lives. <a href=“http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=set-in-our-ways” title=“Set in Our Ways” Why Change is so Hard”>Change is rarely as easy as we think it will be. Our open­ness to new expe­ri­ences typ­i­cally increases dur­ing our 20s and then grad­u­ally declines until about age 60. After that, some of us become more open again, per­haps because our respon­si­bil­i­ties for rais­ing a fam­ily and earn­ing a liv­ing have been lifted.

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Weekend Food Blogging: Crock Pot Roast
Field Notes

Weekend Food Blogging: Crock Pot Roast

More experiments with web layouts and cooking. This time, a comforting crock pot roast.
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Skeletal Remains

Dinosaur mounts have become so fun­da­men­tal to our idea of what makes a nat­ural his­tory museum that it can be dif­fi­cult to imag­ine the insti­tu­tions ever exist­ing with­out them. So does it mat­ter that 140 years after the first Hadrosaurus foulkii mount, today’s pale­on­tol­o­gists have rein­ter­preted its reliance on four rather than two legs? Yes, says Jesse Smith:

… it’s not so much that, say, Hadrosaurus walked on four legs, but more that this new knowl­edge reflects a bet­ter under­stand­ing of the world as it was before we appeared in it. We’re com­pelled by improved under­stand­ings of those envi­ron­ments that have yet to open them­selves to human occu­pa­tion — Mars, the deep sea, the past. Under­stand­ing life in a way that either spa­tially or tem­po­rally tran­scends the pres­ence of humans builds a con­text that helps us under­stand that pres­ence. The fact that we have a bet­ter idea of what the Hadrosaurus’ skull looked like, that we can replace some of the bones Hawkins used to fill in the blanks, so to speak, sug­gests that an image of the past is fully con­structible if only we’re given the right parts.

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