The Standardized Testing Revolt

“My goal is that my daughters never take a standardized test,” Cimarusti said. “I see less and less value in it educationally and it being used more and more to beat teachers over the head.” Peggy Robertson, a teacher in Centennial, Colo., who is also an Opt Out board member, said she only expects the movement to grow.

“You can feel the momentum,” she said. “I think we’re headed for a full-on revolt next year.”

via More parents opting kids out of standardized tests

This growing sentiment among parents fuels the civil disobedience revolt against narrowing education to the anemic constraints of standardized testing. It might take this kind of revolution from parents to provoke school systems into transformation.

New Ideas, Not The Enemy

Beyond the literal mousetrap, history is full of metaphorical mousetraps that were initially rejected. Kodak’s research laboratory invented the first digital camera in 1975, but didn’t pursue it. Kodak didn’t believe that people would be willing to give up the quality produced by film pictures, so they paid no attention as Sony developed a different prototype and stole the future of digital photography out from underneath it. Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, once said, “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” H. M. Warner, founder of movie giant Warner Brothers, disregarded the idea of talking pictures, saying, “Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?” Charles Duell, former head of the U.S. Patent Office, claimed in 1899, “everything that can be invented has been invented.” Ironically, that was the same year that the patent for the spring-loaded mousetrap was issued. These are entertaining anecdotes, but they illustrate much more than the fact that intelligent people can be hilariously wrong when judging new ideas. They suggest that perhaps even the smartest among us have a hard time recognizing truly creative ideas. There’s even psychological research supporting the idea that we as humans are biased against new ideas.

via The Myths Of Creativity: Building A Better Mousetrap

This call to action implies that we need to teach people how to grow new ideas together instead of killing them. When we refuse to make new ideas the enemy, we have a chance to do interesting things.

Thanks, Jack

Our Memory, Online

With new apps like Memoto and Memoir in combination with ubiquitous recording and video devices, we have arrived in the age where we can capture, archive and retrieve every moment of our lives.

Creating a searchable database for our lives—if the way we’ve responded to other searchable databases is any indication—could result in having fewer personal details on the tips of our tongues. At the same time, it could allow us to retrieve almost every single detail, to show our children the first date with their father instead of tell them about it. “Every single thing in your life, you could have a perfect memory,” Hoffman says. Well, almost perfect. Cameras capture events, not feelings. Your perceptions of events may be different the second or third time around. Still, there are obviously upsides to a perfect recall of events. Michael Anderson, a memory researcher at the University of Oregon in Eugene, had his students keep “forgetting diaries” as a way to estimate how much time they wasted looking for the car keys and making up for other faults in our memories. On average, he estimated, forgetting things takes up about a month of time each year.

via Meet Your Future Memory, The Internet

The Feminine Edge

Why Are Women Adapting Better To The New Economy? Rosin claims it’s partly because women possess more of the key capabilities that are essential today – communication skills, emotional intelligence, the ability to “sit still and focus.”

But also, it’s because women are more adaptable to changing circumstances – while men can’t seem to let go of the old ways. This adaptability is a function of men’s and women’s different social positions. Men were top dogs, so for them change means loss. Women were underdogs, so for them change means opportunity. Sticking to old rules about masculinity, careers, and success limits men’s vision and flexibility.

Rosin cites data supporting this notion of adaptability. I’ll quote David Brooks’ summary of her evidence: “A study by the National Federation of Independent Business found that small businesses owned by women outperformed male-owned small businesses during the last recession. In finance, women who switch firms are more likely to see their performance improve, whereas men are more likely to see theirs decline. There’s even evidence that women are better able to adjust to divorce. Today, more women than men see their incomes rise by 25 percent after a marital breakup.”

via The End of Men… as Leaders?

Generosity Rules

Implications: Now we have some mathematical evidence that there is an evolutionary advantage to generosity, other than just good karma. With Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” ingrained in our brains, it often seems like every man for himself is the best strategy, and kindness is just an anomaly. But it’s an uplifting surprise to see a study that says that’s not the case, that we evolve best when we help each other. The study; From extortion to generosity, evolution in the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma; appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

via Study: Generosity Is More Evolutionarily Advantageous Than Selfishness

Libraries Beyond Books

An all-digital public library is opening today, as officials in Bexar County, Texas, celebrate the opening of the BiblioTech library. The facility offers about 10,000 free e-books for the 1.7 million residents of the county, which includes San Antonio. On its website, the Bexar County BiblioTech library explains how its patrons can access free eBooks and audio books. To read an eBook on their own device, users must have the 3M Cloud Library app, which they can link to their library card.

The app includes a countdown of days a reader has to finish a book — starting with 14 days, according to My San Antonio.

The library has a physical presence, as well, with 600 e-readers and 48 computer stations, in addition to laptops and tablets. People can also come for things like kids’ story time and computer classes, according to the library’s website.

via Bookless Public Library Opens In Texas : NPR

Mojo In Motor City

TEDxDetroit draws a couple dozen bright spots from hundreds in Detroit where resilience reigns these days.

Researchers find a definite link between determined optimism and the ability to weather adversity. When I ask about the grimness of the latest news out of Detroit, Wollborg jokes, “Nonsense! We’re all Pollyannas here.” But seriously, he says, “That’s one of the reasons we did this. If it was burning, bleeding, or bankrupt, that was the only story they were telling out of Detroit.”

If it was burning, bleeding, or bankrupt, that was the only story they were telling out of Detroit. The conference this year is packed with successful stories of local entrepreneurs, scientists, activists, and artists: from the Backyard Brains crew doing crowdfunded DIY neuroscience, to a regional resurgence in breweries, wineries, and cider, to Detroit Bike City, whose Slow Roll is the largest weekly community ride in the country.

via Four Lessons In Resilience From Detroit

Freeosk

Matt Eichorn launches a new startup next month: Freeosk. The idea belongs in the genre of “Why didn’t someone think of this a long time ago?” It promises the future of market research that catapults over conventional approaches that yield less reliable data.

Freeosk, as its name suggests, is a kiosk of free samples. Its all-white frame features shelves of products, along with a scanner and high-definition touchscreen. They could soon become fixtures of major retailers, with brands like Airborne and Snickers featuring their products on Freeosks on a weekly basis. To get a free sample, just swipe your loyalty or membership card, and a free sample will be dispensed immediately. Then, if you decide to purchase the product later, Freeosk will “pair up its data with sales data, to have a clear picture of the adoption process,” Eichorn says. “Did you buy the product? Did you continue to buy it? Or did you buy a competitor’s?”

It’s simple and smart. The key is that it integrates with retailer membership services—“it could be a warehouse membership card, or a Wallgreens or Duane Reade loyalty card,” Eichorn says—allowing brands to finally see the impact of their sample touch points. Before, when a customer snatched up a free sample, brands had little if any insight into its affect on sales, at least directly. Did you enjoy that new flavor of Skittles? Were you more likely to purchase it later? Nobody knew.

via Introducing Freeosk, The Redbox of Free Samples

The Dignity Of Homeless Showers

Of all the indignities endured by the homeless, chief among them is living among the filth of the streets often without the possibility of a shower. That reality was driven home to San Francisco resident Doniece Sandoval during an encounter with a young homeless woman. “She was crying, and she kept saying over and over to herself that she would never be clean,” Sandoval explains. “I knew that her words meant a lot of things I couldn’t fathom.” She thought to herself, “Maybe on the superficial level I could do something.”

Sandoval began researching what kind of opportunities San Francisco’s homeless have to take a shower. The facts were bleak: The city’s 3,000-plus homeless share about 16 showers. All but one of the facilities with a shower are clustered in the heart of the city, which means hundreds of homeless people would have to travel to access them. “They’re not giving away free bus tickets,” she notes.

Sandoval’s solution? To bring showers directly to the homeless through a fleet of municipal buses, renovated to house two private showers. Sandoval says she’s not the first to come up with the idea: About a dozen cities around the country have projects that bring mobile showers to the homeless, including Los Angeles, Seattle, and Portland. Speaking with organizers of those projects in other communities only emphasized the importance of such work: “They all told me the same thing,” she says, “stories of transformation–that the homeless that they work with said…they felt human for the first time in a long time."

via These Mobile Showers To Offer The Homeless The Dignity Of Cleanliness

File under Brillant.

Apathists

This week in DC I attended the Pub Theology gathering hosted by pastor, writer and pub theologian Brian Berghoef. It’s a regular event bringing people with and without various faiths into common reflection on engaging life and spiritually related questions. We often generalize the “faithless" into the cousin camps of atheists and agnostics. I’d suggest a third category: apathists.

In contrast to the atheist’s insistence on a godless universe and the agnostic’s insistence on uncertainty, apathists don’t care. They do not lack passion for life, just for questions of theology. They deem these questions irrelevant to the meaning of their life better defined by other questions of cosmology, ontology and epistemology.

Apathists might not help advance the theological questions but will aid in the advancement of the alternatives.

The Dream

A palpable sense of respect and presence shaped the tone of the crowd at the Mall here in Washington in commemoration of Dr. King’s Dream speech 50 years ago today. President Obama’s point that “Change doesn’t come from Washington, change comes to Washington” reflected the visual collage of diverse faces focused on remembering to go forward. Giving voice to social justice at the grass roots of thinking and action has made a difference. Without it, no progress would have been possible.

In commentary, NPR’s Linda Wertheimer reminisced to her presence at the event 50 years ago and not remembering the speeches as much as the feeling of the crowd. I recall watching it on TV and would make the same parallels today. Movements are inspired by people on podiums and made by the people standing shoulder to shoulder with a dream.

Farm To Fridge

Offering an alternative to food products warehousing, Good Eggs, lets you order local food online and then brings it to your house. “When you go to goodeggs.com, you place an order for your groceries,” says co-founder and CEO Rob Spiro in this video, part of a series that Collaborative Fund (who we’ve worked with before) has commissioned about some of their portfolio companies. “Those orders go directly to the food producers. The farms are actually pulling produce out of the ground based on your order or bakers are baking the bread for you.”

via Creating A “Farm-To-Fridge” Economy To Keep Local Food Fresh | Co.Exist | ideas + impact

The model disintermediates the food ecosystem with lower carbon footprints and more sustainable products on all levels. An idea worth scaling.

Cultivating Insight

Cognitive psychologist Gary Klein, author of Seeing What Others Don’t: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights, outlines five ways to cultivate insights.

These epiphanies and flashes of sudden clarity tend to come at the most unexpected moments. So do we have any control over these insights, and is there a way to train the brain to become more attuned to them? Insights may be unexpected, but we can actually teach ourselves to see connections that others may never notice.

“An insight is an unexpected shift in the way we understand things,” says Klein. “It comes without warning. It’s not something that we think is going to happen and that’s why it’s unexpected. It feels like a gift and in fact it is.”

via How To Train Your Brain To See What Others Don’t

On his list: curiosity, daydreaming, leveraging contradictions and coincidences and acting on insights. All dimensions of mindfulness, being in the present with boundless awareness. A must for anyone engaged in design as core to what they’re about.

Corruption At The Core

NYU historian Diane Ravich questions the validity and wisdom of the Common Core standards now devastating the confidence of and in schools across the US.

Forty-five states have adopted the Common Core national standards, and they are being implemented this year.

Why did 45 states agree to do this? Because the Obama administration had $4.35 billion of Race to the Top federal funds, and states had to adopt “college-and-career ready standards” if they wanted to be eligible to compete for those funds. Some states, like Massachusetts, dropped their own well-tested and successful standards and replaced them with the Common Core, in order to win millions in new federal funds.

Is this a good development or not?

If you listen to the promoters of the Common Core standards, you will hear them say that the Common Core is absolutely necessary to prepare students for careers and college.

They say, if we don’t have the Common Core, students won’t be college-ready or career-ready.

Major corporations have published full-page advertisements in the New York Times and paid for television commercials, warning that our economy will be in serious trouble unless every school and every district and every state adopts the Common Core standards.

A report from the Council on Foreign Relations last year (chaired by Joel Klein and Condoleeza Rice) warned that our national security was at risk unless we adopt the Common Core standards.

The Common Core standards, its boosters insist, are all that stand between us and economic and military catastrophe.

All of this is simply nonsense.

How does anyone know that the Common Core standards will prepare everyone for college and careers since they are now being adopted for the very first time?

How can anyone predict that they will do what their boosters claim?

There is no evidence for any of these claims.

How Tech Redefines The Middle-Class

David H. Autor is a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. David Dorn is an assistant professor of economics at the Center for Monetary and Financial Studies in Madrid. They have a great new piece in the NY Times outlining the role of technology in the great bifurcation of jobs around the world leading to a redefinition of the middle-class. The origins and destiny of technology displace jobs that can be automated. As machines become more intelligent with sensors and artificial intelligence, the two kinds of job remaining go to experts and laborers. The erosion of the mid-level competences continues to grow.

In this world with seemingly boundless horizons for technology development, we continue to be deviled by a tenuous relationship between denial and optimism. The greatest optimism resides in the future of personal service jobs.

In Praise Of Body Art

As a writer, I like elaborate body art that expresses a persona of narrative. I always expect some kind of story implied in each figure and text exposed, however skillfully or crudely conceptualized or etched. And I suspect a different layer of meaning in the unseen art. In this world of commercially duplicative and often culturally sterile fashions, uniqueness is less possible unless maybe you design your own apparel and accessories. Tattoos are among the media most apt to unique visual narratives.

Making Things People Love

Aaron Schildkrout is CEO of the product development firm HowAboutWe.com. He has a series on how to get innovation teams unblocked, which is the key to making things people love. It’s a core competency for the future of all new product incubation. At the heart is curiosity.

The staple of most product teams is: GET THINGS DONE! HIT DEADLINES! SHIP ON SCHEDULE! Don’t get me wrong; I believe very strongly in getting things done on time and in working your ass off. But I also believe that the most effective source of effective productivity is actually curiosity–the insatiable drive to learn. If you build your product development process around this core human drive you’ll discover that curiosity unleashed is a lion, not a sheep. Curiosity is the exponential rocket fuel that makes great product teams hum.

via Unblocked: A Guide To Making Things People Love (Part 1) ⚙ Co.Labs ⚙ code + community

The Future Of Gossip

Schadenfreude is joy in the misery of others. It’s the quintessential motivation for gossip. How much media content today is simply gossip disguised as “news?” The trade-off of gossip is that at the cost of weakening community, it creates and strengthens bonds in cliques and clusters.

My sense is that as communities grow, gossip becomes more marginalized as available but not a significant distraction to the business of positive engagement.

The Minimum Wage Status In The US

Minimum wage advocates love to point to Australia’s $16.88 an hour minimum as evidence that a very high wage floor needn’t stifle a country’s growth. After all, Australia hasn’t had a recession in 20 years. But Australia is hardly an outlier. Most developed countries have a higher minimum wage than we do. The U.S., unsurprisingly, is on the bottom but it’s tied with Japan. And Australia isn’t on top; that goes to France, which has a lower average wage than Australia, which makes up for a lower minimum wage and leads to a higher ratio.

via The U.S. has a $7.25 minimum wage. Australia’s is $16.88

It might be that the mindset in the US is an irrational belief that depriving companies of profits with higher wages must be punished with layoffs. It has reached the level of self-fulfilling expectation. Psychology is always the most significant dynamics in economics.

The Future Of Festivals

One of the community well-being indicators needs to be the frequency and richness of festivals. If we are going to reinvent festivals we need more than those supplied by religious traditions. Festivals are more than concerts, fares or parades. There are transcendent mythologies celebrated and the economic drivers are not figural. The palpable sense of participative creating of experiences eclipses the anemic reduction of people as consumers. Entertainment neither crowds nor dominates conversations animated by the unique energy there.

There can be festivals with and without personal significance to the community or region in which they occur. They can or cannot accompany significant staged or natural events like world games, conferences and gatherings as well as changes in seasons and celebration of unique local flora and fauna.