Barking at the World

Notes: 3065 / 1 year ago from tanya77 (originally from mabelmoments)

mabelmoments:

It’s easy to see which ants have been sipping which coloured sugar water drops thanks to their transparent abdomens. Father of three Mohamed Babu set up these photographs after his wife, Shameem, showed him some ants that had turned white after sipping on some spilt milk. Dr Babu mixed sugar water with edible colours red, green, blue and yellow and placed them in his garden to attract the insects. He discovered the ants preferred lighter colours such as yellow and green.

Awesome

It’s easy to see which ants have been sipping which coloured sugar water drops thanks to their transparent abdomens. Father of three Mohamed Babu set up these photographs after his wife, Shameem, showed him some ants that had turned white after sipping on some spilt milk. Dr Babu mixed sugar water with edible colours red, green, blue and yellow and placed them in his garden to attract the insects. He discovered the ants preferred lighter colours such as yellow and green.

Awesome

Notes: 9622 / 1 year ago from nprfreshair (originally from lookhigh)

nprfreshair:

lookhigh:

Sunset, Moonset

On Sunday, July 31, 2011, when Expedition 28 astronaut Ron Garan aboard the International Space Station looked out his window, this is what he saw: the moon. And, he saw it 16 times. Said Garan, “We had simultaneous sunsets and moonsets.” For Garan and the rest of the station crew, this extraordinary event is a daily occurrence. Since the station orbits the Earth every 90 minutes, each day the crew experiences this about 16 times a day. (NASA)

(HT: The Picture Show)

Sunrise…Sunset….

Notes: 113 / 1 year ago from infoneer-pulse

"If we were REALLY serious about educational technology, we would do things like… put a robust digital learning device into every student’s hands (or let them bring and use their own) instead of pretending that we live in a pencil, notebook paper, and ring binder world;
we’d teach students how to properly maintain and manage those computing devices rather than removing user privileges and locking down the ability to change any settings;
we’d show students how to edit their privacy settings and use groups in their social networks instead of banning those networks because they’re ‘dangerous’ and/or ‘frivolous’;
we’d teach students to understand and contribute to the online information commons rather than ‘just saying no’ to Wikipedia;
we’d understand the true risk of students encountering online predators and make policy accordingly instead of succumbing to scare tactics by the media, politicians, law enforcement, computer security vendors, and others;
we’d find out the exact percentage of our schools’ families that don’t have broadband Internet access at home rather than treating the amorphous ‘digital divide’ as a reason not to assign any homework that involves use of the Internet;
we’d treat seriously and own personally the task of becoming proficient with the digital tools that are transforming everything instead of nonchalantly chuckling about how little we as educators know about computers;
we’d recognize the power and potential (and limitations) of online learning rather than blithely assuming that it can’t be as good as face-to-face instruction;
we’d tap into and utilize the technological interest and knowledge of students instead of pretending that they have nothing to contribute;
we’d integrate digital learning and teaching tools into subject-specific preservice methods courses rather than marginalizing instructional technology as a separate course;
we’d better educate and train school administrators rather than continuing to turn out new leaders that know virtually nothing about creating, facilitating, and/or sustaining 21st century learning environments;
And so on…"

- My opening remarks at the Iowa Education Summit | Dangerously Irrelevant | Big Think (via infoneer-pulse)

Amen.

Notes: 51 / 1 year ago from infoneer-pulse

Report details largest US school cheating scandal

infoneer-pulse:

A new Georgia state report details the nation’s largest-ever cheating scandal, concluding that half of Atlanta’s schools allowed practices that inflated students’ scores to go unchecked for as long as a decade.

The report reveals that schools turned a blind eye to — or even condoned — teachers who erased wrong answers on test sheets or encouraged students to copy off one another.

» via MSNBC

Another reason to home school or send the kids to private school!

Notes: 5 / 1 year ago from vruz

How the U.S. government uses its media servants to attack real journalism

vruz:

by Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com

“The US has stopped running its global network of secret prisons, CIA director Leon Panetta has announced. ‘CIA no longer operates detention facilities or black sites,’ Mr Panetta said in a letter to staff” - BBC, April 9, 2009

____________

Earlier this week, the truly intrepid investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill published in The Nation one of the most significant political exposés of the year. Entitled “the CIA’s Secret Sites in Somalia,” the article documented that the CIA uses and effectively controls a secret prison in Mogadishu, where foreign nationals who are rendered off the streets of their countries (at the direction of the U.S.) are taken (along with Somali nationals) to be imprisoned with no due process and interrogated (by U.S. agents). Although Somali government agents technically operate the facility, that is an obvious ruse: ”US intelligence personnel pay the salaries of intelligence agents and also directly interrogate prisoners” and are “there full-time,” Scahill reported. On Democracy Now on Wednesday, the International Committee of the Red Cross confirmed it has no knowledge of this secret prison.

This arrangement, as Scahill told me yesterday, is consistent with standard Obama administration practice: ”they continue even the most controversial Bush terrorism policies by having some other government technically operate it so they can keep their fingerprints off it.” Indeed, the administration has even resorted to this playbook by using “torture by proxy” — as we saw when the Kuwait government, with at least the complicity if not direction of the U.S., detained and beat American teenager Gulet Mohamed during interrogation sessions. Just yesterday, a federal judge “reacted skeptically” to the Obama DOJ’s demands for dismissal of a lawsuit (on secrecy grounds) brought by an American citizen imprisoned for four months in Africa, where “U.S. officials threatened him with torture, forced disappearance and other serious harm unless he confessed to ties with al-Qaida in Somalia.”

Scahill’s discovery of this secret prison in Mogadishu — this black site — calls into serious doubt the Obama administration’s claims to have ended such practices and establishes a serious human rights violation on its own. As Harper’s Scott Horton put it, the Nation article underscores how the CIA is “maintaining a series of ‘special relationships’ under which cooperating governments maintain[] proxy prisons for the CIA,” and “raises important questions” about “whether the CIA is using a proxy regime there to skirt Obama’s executive order” banning black sites and torture.

Despite the significance of this revelation — or, more accurately, because of it — the U.S. establishment media has almost entirely ignored this story. Scahill thus far has given a grand total of two television interviews: on Democracy Now and Al Jazeera. No major television news network — including MSNBC — has even mentioned his story. Generally speaking, Republicans don’t care that the worst abuses of the Bush era are continuing, and Democrats (who widely celebrated Dana Priest’s 2006 Pulitzer Prize winning story about Bush’s CIA black cites) don’t want to hear that it’s true.

Meanwhile, the CIA has been insisting that discussion of this Mogadishu site could jeopardize its operations in Somalia, and while that typical, manipulative tactic didn’t stop Scahill from informing the citizenry about this illicit behavior, it has (as usual) led government-subservient American media stars to refrain from discussing it. Indeed, Scahill said that this site is such common knowledge in Mogadishu (where even ordinary residents call it “that CIA building”) that he’d be “very surprised” if international reporters who cover Somalia were unaware of it; he has confirmed with certainty that at least one correspondent covering East Africa for one of the world’s leading media outlets was aware of, but never reported, the CIA’s role at this secret prison.

While the establishment media has been largely ignoring Scahill’s revelations, a few particularly government-pleasing journalists have been dutifully following the CIA’s script in order to undermine the credibility of Scahill’s story. CNN’s long-time Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr — one of the most reliable DoD stenographers in the nation (she actually announced that the real Abu Ghraib scandal was the unauthorized release of the photographs, not the abuse they depicted) — has been predictably tapped by the CIA to take the lead in this effort.

— read more —

More ‘Hope & ‘Change’?!

Notes: 2015 / 1 year ago from thedailywhat

thedailywhat:

Morning Fluff: A baby duck takes it upon itself to feed all the koi in the pond.

[@mpoppel.]

Notes: 5328 / 1 year ago from photojojo

photojojo:

Lorenzo Duran cuts leaves into intricate images like this tiny forest-scape!

Leaf Cutting Art by Lorenzo Duran

Notes: 51 / 1 year ago from bijan

"So working in a group of 10 people within a large organization feels both right and wrong at the same time. On the surface it feels like the kind of group you’re meant to work in, but something major is missing. A job at a big company is like high fructose corn syrup: it has some of the qualities of things you’re meant to like, but is disastrously lacking in others."

-

You Weren’t Meant to Have a Boss

Paul has a way with words.

(via bijan)

Notes: 136 / 1 year ago from lickypickystickyme