Good example of how big brother has his work cut for him. From Sunday Herald, by Jenifer Johnston:
In the controlled experiment dozens of thieves came away unchallenged and unrecorded in their efforts to take goods without paying for them from shops across the UK.
Hart said: “CCTV is useless in terms of loss prevention. We fitted out offenders with cameras and watched them as they stole – not one of them was stopped or challenged by staff in high street stores.
“They simply go out of sight of CCTV cameras and conceal what they are stealing. Often they will work in pairs with one person acting suspiciously as a decoy while the other hides the goods on their person in a camera blindspot. CCTV’s only function is to provide evidence for the police should the shoplifter be caught.”
Hart and other experts will tell a major conference this week at the University of Leicester that retailers would be better spending their security budget on training workers at the tills to spot suspicious behaviour than on expensive surveillance equipment.
Hart added: “If staff in a store say ‘hello’ to each customer, then dedicated shoplifters will immediately become paranoid that they have been rumbled and leave the store. But stores want easy technology instead of having to train staff in loss prevention.”
From The Daedalus Project:
When I was attending Haverford College, a Quaker School (middle school) in the neighborhood used what is called a “Story Path Curriculum”. The curriculum of a typical semester is embedded in an ongoing story-line set in a historically interesting period. For example, the students in the class are each assigned a character-role in a hypothetical late 19th-century iron-forging village in England. From baker to tax collector, from blacksmith to local pastor, they have a good variety of roles covered. For English class, they may be asked to write a creative piece of “a day in the life of …”. For History class, they may be asked to research the common social or seasonal problems an iron-forging village faced. For Math class, they may be asked to determine the optimal proportion of crops to plant or to calculate the most profitable trade routes. For Art class, they may be asked to create a small-scale model of the village. For Social Studies, the students may have to decide how to deal with a local epidemic of scarlet fever.
Thus, instead of having disparate subjects that students may not find relevant in their lives, the point of a Story Path Curriculum is to create a fun and interesting hook to draw the students in and then embedding the traditional subjects in a relevant and memorable way.
Additionally, some excellent thoughts and discussion on Kuro5hin regarding a proposal for a collaborative learning system.
When teaching video editing and camerawork, I have found that students learn faster when they are creating a story. If the student has both a short-term moment-by-moment goal, as well a longer-term goal, they hyperfocus on capturing and sharing the essential material. CityScape Motion Picture Education, founded by two former co-workers of mine from the Boston Film/Video Foundation, provides students with a unique motion picture production and training program by directly engaging them hands-on in real-life film projects written and structured by the teachers. Roger Schank's company Socratic Arts is approaching learning with the use of a "Story-Centered Curriculum." From the Socratic Arts website:
The idea behind the Story-Centered Curriculum (SCC) is that a good curriculum should consist of a story in which students play a key role (for example, VP of Information Security at a financial services company). These roles are selected to be ones that the graduate of such a program might actually do in real life or might need to know about (because he or she will manage or collaborate with someone who performs that role). Students, working in groups, are given detailed information about the simulated company they are working for together with detailed and authentic projects. Supporting materials and resources are available and faculty and online mentors are available to answer questions and point students in the right direction on an as-needed basis.
The effect of the SCC model is that as students work through the story to achieve the missions the story puts forth, they learn the critical skills they need to successfully accomplish their tasks. The SCC implements true learning-by-doing across an entire curriculum, not just within the scope of a single course. In fact, the SCC is about the elimination of courses in favor of a curriculum that tells a meaningful story that the student is likely to engage in again after graduation.
As this model is widely adopted globally by film and TV programs, and students leave school as multi-skilled digital storytellers, we will begin to see the democratization and decentralization of television and cinema. Furthermore, niche digital screening venues, spot-beam satellite distribution (meaning you can send your broadcast to a 6-mile radius, as in most of New York City), and innovative distribution strategies will provide ways people can make money making media.
Looks like they're studying news.google.com at Berkeley.
From:
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/academics/courses/is214/s03/google.html
Description of the project
Google News is a beta offering from Google. It "offers a news service compiled solely by computer algorithms without human intervention". As a result in addition to evaluating the site layout, content organization (e.g. automated grouping process), and supporting features (e.g. "sort by date" function), we will consider how well the content satisfies users "need for news". For example, do individuals prefer the contents of news sites which utilize more human interaction when choosing content?
In addition, depending on the methods we decide to undertake and the results we receive, it may be necessary to cover some concepts related to news presentation. For example, how does context influence a person's perception of a news item? Does an individual's understanding of an article on "total information awareness" differ if it is displayed within a Technology or General News section?
Google wants to know what's in our brains, where we're coming from, and what we want. Google wants to know context, so it can personalize its search results. Blogger is a tool that keeps track of a user's decisions and thought processes. Blogger gets inside our heads.
I interact with Google everyday. With Blogger, I leave my fingerprints all over the web, and I take home a little bit of the web with me. Google understands that my interaction with the Internet is valuable because I am in fact a tiny little data-miner, a categorization engine, and a commentator.
Jason Kottke writes that Google's biggest asset is "a highly annotated map of the web." But it's more than that. With news.google.com, Google is showing me the part of the map I want to look at before I've even asked. It's more of a map, a guide, and some instant transportation device.
How far away are we from an interactive Blogger? I post a link. Blogger hands a few back to me. Even better, Blogger hands me links annotated by humans like you or I. Now we're moving into the realm of broadcasting. Blogger provides critical analysis of the AP and Reuters-like wire feeds that Google has already parsed and the news is customized according to who's looking.
Google most valuable asset is that it knows what we want, and it can give it to us before we even ask for it. And that's entertainment.