How to Play like Keith

http://youtu.be/eRzJblB8Vo0 http://youtu.be/wv_xjJJyiYw

My Ideal Day

Dreaming of the Summer

The Art of making

Sublime

My Olympic Moment (on all sorts of levels)

And an even cooler version

Cool Bike Song

Found at Beemp3.com

Dickheads

triumph engine rebuild

Bullying and new idea

More Forensics (click for full image)

Source: eLocalLawyers.com

Created by: Forensic Nursing

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old

More on that Theme

The Diminishing Digital Divide Read Later by Krystal D'Costa | • April 30, 2012 Concerns about the digital divide have started to take on a bit of hysterical edge—think along the lines of Reverend Lovejoy’s wife: “But what about the children?! she would exclaim over every single slight change that threatened her sense of idyllacy. Make no mistake, however, there is more than ample reason to be concerned about the degree of access people have to technological resources, which includes equipment, information, and education. As technology becomes increasingly integrated with different—ahem, all—areas of our lives, not being connected can definitely present certain challenges with regard to information and services. These separations have been largely been aligned with age, education, and household income, but recent data from the Pew Internet & American Life Project report the digital divide is diminishing—thanks in part to the rise of mobile technologies. While age, education, and household income are the strongest negative predictors for Internet use, access has become less of a limiting factor for non-Internet users. In the last decade, only 6% of this group have cited a lack of access as the main reason they don’t go online. (Instead, a primary reason cited by non-users for why they don’t log on is a belief the Internet isn’t relevant to their information or communication needs.) Access is now almost ubiquitous since almost every electronic gadget that goes to market needs to be able to connect to the Internet to some degree. From cell phones to MP3 players to game consoles to e-Readers and tablets, access to online content has moved beyond the bulky, stationary confines of a desktop computer. Of the 88% of American adults who own a cell phone, 46% own a smart phone (Android, BlackBerry, iPhone). Smart phone adoption is high among the financially-well off, the well-educated, and adults under the age of 50, which are groups that are typically early tech-adopters. Race appears to remain an insignificant factor: Overall access and adoption rates have been consistently comparable for African-American and Latinos to the national average for all Americans. What is significant is that for a growing number of of people, cell phones and other gadgets represent their primary source of Internet access. For one-third of adults who primarily use their smart phone to go online, their device is their sole access to online resources—they do not have a high speed broadband connection. So what are smartphone users doing with their phones? You’ll note that making an actual old fashioned phone call doesn’t seem to have made the list. Instead, activities tend to lean toward the more “social” sphere. Mobile users are going online, but they’re also creating new content and sharing that content from the palm of their hands. The digital divide may be diminishing but what the Pew Internet & American Life Project has termed “mobile differences” seems an extension of a second tier of the digital divide—an issue that extends beyond access, and relates more to digital literacy. If we’re being programmed to use the Internet in pre-programmed “buckets” that take the shape of the apps we download to our smartphones, what do we lose in terms of critical thinking and understanding about the potential of the ‘net?

One of My Bugbears

Is the 'net generation' a myth? Read Later by James Morgan23 April 2012 Dr Christopher Jones Dr Christopher Jones New research, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), has revealed that some university students are confused by the array of technologies available to them during the course of their studies. The report, led by Dr Christopher Jones from the Institute of Educational Technology at The Open University, also found that whilst many students are distracted by social networking sites during study, a small minority of their peers do not even use e-mail. One of our really interesting early findings was that there exists a very small minority of students that don't use e-mail. This came as a major surprise because in the first year, everybody is told that they need to be on e-mail if only for administrative purposes. However, there were a handful of students that neither used e-mail for social nor educational purposes. Dr Christopher Jones The project surveyed more than 2000 students to provide an empirically based understanding of the 'net generation' as they first engaged with e-learning in tertiary education. However, the researchers found evidence to suggest that the notion of such a generation is inaccurate. I interviewed Dr Jones to find out more about the implications of his research, and began by asking whether he was surprised to find evidence to suggest that the 'net generation' does not exist. "I can't say that I was surprised," he answered. "Previous studies have indicated that the matter is not as simple as popular literature might imply. A joint research project, led by the University of Wollongong's Dr Sue Bennett and published in the British Journal of Educational Technology, called for more empirical work in this area. In some part, therefore, the inspiration for my research came from a critical stance that had already been adopted by academic researchers in Australia." I went on to ask Dr Jones whether or not he thought that his findings were likely to be representative of the wider population. "It is important to note that there are clear differences between university students and the public at large," he said. "The first thing that I would say is that the use of web 2.0 technologies and internet and mobile technologies in general, is fairly prominent in advanced industrial countries. In a sense, therefore, our findings relating to the use of new technologies for social and leisure purposes are likely to be broadly representative of wider society. "The contrast comes, I think, when you begin to look at more specific educational uses. There is no clear link between the use of technologies for social and leisure purposes, and the ability to use them for educational purposes. Neither is there a clear link between using universal technological services, and the ability to use the particular services that students are required to engage with at university. Essentially, being able to use Facebook does not necessarily mean that you'll be able to effectively search for a journal article. Things that students might do in their social lives do not easily translate into an educational context." Dr Jones and his colleagues found little difference in the reported IT skill levels between the sexes. However, male students reported being more confident than their female counterparts when using spreadsheets, graphics, audio and video content, security software, and in the field of computer maintenance. "We unravelled numerous complexities; some of which we expected and others we did not," he said. "There has been a great deal of research in this area, but over the years, these differences have diminished. However, we found that certain, significant gender differences still exist. They are not as pronounced as they were, but they are still there. To a certain extent, these findings were expected. "What was interesting was that trends seemed to alter depending on when the surveys were taken. We only looked at first year university students and I think that there would be a bigger story to tell if we were able to examine the full span of a university career; after all, there were clear changes within just the first year. For example, a certain subgroup of young males actually became more involved in game-playing than they were when they arrived at university. Perhaps this is because of the social setting in which they find themselves; it could be a good way to make friends. Whilst our data cannot really tell us anything about why these changes occurred, we did identify clear gender differences, both in confidence with technologies and in the trajectory of students over the course of their first year at university." Student outside with laptopThe team found that students aged 20 years or younger reported being more engaged than their peers aged 25 years or above, with social networking sites, uploading images, instant messaging, text messaging, and downloading or streaming television programmes. Only 4.3 per cent of those aged 20 or younger never used social networking websites, compared to 78.5 per cent of those aged 35 years and above. Younger students also tended to use information and communication technologies for social and leisure purposes, whilst their older counterparts were more likely to utilise them for academic reasons. "We observed differences between the younger age group, and this was unexpected," explained Dr Jones. "When we divided students into those who were 18 and those who were just into their 20s, we noticed significant variations in behaviour. This was particularly interesting because notions behind the 'net generation' and 'digital natives' assume that there is something generic about the supposed change; that it occured because of the introduction of the internet, for example. It seems instead that specific technologies arriving at particular times – such as social networking sites in the mid-2000s – are having the most pronounced effect. If you're growing up, and technologies are changing around you, your appreciation of different technologies could well differ from that of your slightly older or younger peers. "It is an oversimplification to say, 'Young people born after the mid-1980s are different from older people in terms of their technological capabilities.' We need to be more subtle. An easy example is that of social networking sites. Generally speaking, it would be acceptable to say that the younger you are the more you use them, and the older you are the less you use them. However, this is not to say that older students are not using them; simply that they are using them to a lesser extent overall." Student in library with laptop97.8 per cent of those surveyed possessed a mobile phone, 77.4 per cent owned a laptop, 38.1 per cent had a desktop computer, and more than two thirds of students felt that their access to computers was sufficient to meet their needs. Whilst some students reported being initially surprised or confused about the array of technologies on offer to them at university, few thought that these issues resulted in long-term difficulties. The mobile phone was chosen by 83.2 per cent of participants as the device that they would most miss having access to. Despite these high levels of technological engagement, the researchers identified a small minority of students who didn't use e-mail or have access to a mobile phone. I asked Dr Jones whether he thought that it was significantly harder for students to obtain a modern degree without engaging with new technologies in an educational capacity. "I don't think that our data can answer that, but my personal suspicion is that it would depend on the course," he explained. "Our project did examine disciplinary differences, but again, I would like to investigate the trajectory of students throughout the course of a full degree. Humanity and social science students are required to look at online journals very early on in their degrees. This is typically not the case with science students. I would guess, therefore, that over time, the disciplinary elements would influence the difficulty of studying without technological engagement. "One of our really interesting early findings was that there exists a very small minority of students that don't use e-mail. This came as a major surprise because in the first year, everybody is told that they need to be on e-mail if only for administrative purposes. However, there were a handful of students that neither used e-mail for social nor educational purposes. There was a larger group that used e-mail for either one or the other, but there exists this tiny subgroup that clearly doesn't engage with technology. The possibility that educators and policymakers might not be aware of this group is a concern, as universities need to work closely with these students to bring them up to speed." I concluded our conversation by asking Dr Jones whether he believes that a genuine 'net generation' is inevitable. "No," he replied, "Although, I should qualify my answer with two points that may initially appear contradictory. The nature of this issue is not generational. One of the lessons that we can learn from this research is that we cannot treat young people as a single generational cohort. We cannot afford to look after older students by helping them become acquainted with new technologies, and leave their younger peers to their own devices. Many young people coming to university need assistance in learning how to use technology for educational purposes. Smartphone"We must understand that there are age-related differences, but that they are not generational. We should not simply divide students into 'younger' and 'older' groups. It would be more helpful to react to wave after wave of young people progressing through the university system. A major current change that we are seeing is the rise of mobile technologies; specifically smartphones. There is likely to be a wave of young people that is accustomed to mobile technologies, and this will inevitably impact on universities and their courses. Exactly how this impact will manifest itself is still uncertain, but if educators are able to meaningfully build new technologies into their pedagogies, students will engage with them at an educational level."

hilarious safety vIdeo

Intersting alternate take on yesterdays post

7 year-old newsflash: Kiwis driving less and loving it; MoT/NZTA curse freedom of choice
By Stu Donovan, on March 29th, 2012

Hindsight may show that the transport sector is in the midst of unprecedented change.

NZTA’s latest report on state highway traffic shows that volumes were down 1.2% in 2011. And if you look further back you can see that total vehicle volumes on the state highway network have been static since around 2004. In the same period, New Zealand’s population has increased by approximately 7%, while real GDP grew by around 11% (Sources: Statistics NZ and Reserve Bank of NZ). Taken together, this data suggests that per capita demand for vehicle travel has declined by around 1% per annum in the last seven years.

The plateau in vehicle volumes since 2004 is an unprecedented change from the last century, when we experienced consistent growth in vehicle travel.

In the 1950s and 60s this growth was largely driven by a combination of increasing vehicle ownership and sustained low fuel prices. And then in the 80s and 90s increased workforce participation (i.e. baby boomers and two-income households) caused a second spurt in the demand for vehicle travel. Throughout this whole time drivers were aided and abetted (albeit unintentionally) by poor planning/pricing practises that subsidized vehicles over other modes of travel. Homogenous land use zoning and minimum parking requirements being among the most notable (despicable?).

Since 2004, however, this momentum has clearly dissipated: Vehicle volumes on New Zealand’s state highway network have been static or even falling. And as this earlier post notes very similar trends are emerging overseas, even in countries that are considered to be ‘culturally remote’ from NZ. This in turn suggests that the emerging trends in state highway traffic volumes in New Zealand are not a localised abberation, but in fact reflect broader forces that are changing people’s travel choices.

NB: The graph uses data up to 2007, which was the peak in NZ’s highway traffic volumes. More recent data would show a longer plateau or even the beginning of a downward trend. Nonetheless, a marked slowdown is already apparent in most of these countries.

So what gives? Why are kiwis (and people overseas) driving less? I think the following five factors are likely to lie behind the static/declining trends in per-capita vehicle travel that has been observed in New Zealand and overseas:

Travel saturation – People already drive about as much as they can, given other constraints on their daily lives. I suspect that for many people’s their lives are “saturated” by vehicle travel – hence they are unwilling to travel further. This was not the case a few decades ago …
Demographic shifts – The baby boomers are getting older and simply don’t need to travel so much, especially at peak times. Meanwhile, young people simply aren’t as attached to their cars as previous generations; smart phones are the new i-sexy item. Thus the need/desire for vehicle travel being undermined in both the younger and older age groups.
Ongoing urbanisation – While we like to tell stories about our rural heritage, the reality is that NZ is a highly urbanized population, and increasingly so. One of the key reasons people are attracted to urban areas is because they can reach many more activities without having to travel as far, especially by car. My parents are in this category – not only are they semi-retired baby boomers, but they have also recently moved into the “city” from a lifestyle block on the urban periphery. They now consequently drive far, far less than they did previously. And they love it!
Transport costs/policies - High fuel prices has slowly but surely driven small changes in travel and land use choices and increased demand for substitutes to vehicle travel, such as public transport and home delivery. In downtown Auckland and Wellington, the removal of minimum parking requirements has allowed the value of parking to rise to more reasonable levels, which has in turn driven considerable mode shift and allowed for more intensive development patterns (NB: Minimum parking requirements should be abolished). Meanwhile, the price of domestic airfares have reduced faster in real terms compared to car travel, which has subsequently chipped away at the demand for long distance vehicle travel.
Technological change – the internet, which powers this very blog, is having a profound impact on travel demands. Booking flights and internet banking are just two examples of tasks that are now routinely undertaken from home, without needing to travel anywhere. More interesting, however, is the impact on global/domestic supply chains. Whereas previously you would drive to the store to buy a book that had been delivered by truck from a warehouse, the same book is now delivered straight from the warehouse to your door, potentially replacing several intermediary trips. Meanwhile, online journey planners and smart phones have helped to demystify public transport networks. And finally telecommuting is slowly coming of age: I work from home at least 1-2 days per week and travel to work outside of peak times when I do, mainly because technology now makes it easy to do so.

These five factors are, I believe, causing much of the stagnation and subsequent decline in per capita demand for vehicle travel (let me know if I have missed something that you think is important!). And the key point is that (aside from fuel prices) they are all the result of people’s choices. And for this reason you would have to assume that the people making these choices are doing so because it makes them better off. Yes that’s right – Kiwis are driving less and they are doing so because it makes them better off.

Unfortunately, the government seems to be cursing kiwis for making these choices, or at the very least are in denial about the fact that is occurring. To provide a somewhat banal example, to access data on traffic volumes through NZTA’s website you actually have to click on a green box titled “Traffic volumes are growing – see how much“, as illustrated below.

Errr …. no, they’re not growing actually. And in the entire time that NZTA has existed as an organisation they have actually been falling. But, honestly, what do facts matter?

More concerning, however, are comments made by the General Manager of MOT. When he was recently questioned by parliamentary select committee on recent trends in traffic volumes, he suggested that we should not base future forecasts on recent trends. Errr …. yes, you should actually. The GM is mistaken for several reasons. Firstly, these trends are not that recent; they have been evident for approximately 7 years. Standard traffic engineering analyses will base their calculations of future growth on the last 5-10 years of data. This means that very soon what the GM has dismissed as a “recent trend” will actually be “the only trend in town” (unless of course transport engineers sneakily start extending their time horizons back in time). Second, as mentioned previously the very same trends are evident in other countries overseas, i.e. they seem to be a global phenomenon, and in some countries they have been evident for some time.

So what gives? If kiwis are driving less and loving it, why is NZTA and the MoT so keen to dismiss their behaviour as an irritating aberration? Do they begrudge the fact that people are freely and willingly choosing to curtail their driving? I’m not a conspiracy theorist but I can’t help but suspect that the attitude MoT/NZTA is quite deliberate and has nothing to with either a) reality or b) what the public wants. It’s all about them.

Very soon static/declining traffic data will have catastrophic implications for the business cases of many of their projects. The Puhoi-Wellsford business case, for example, assumed annual traffic growth of 4% per year over several decades, before being “trimmed back” to only 1.5% thereafter. So if the MoT/NZTA actually acknowledged that traffic volumes were not actually growing that much, then it removes much of the justification for their pet projects. It’s really just pure, unadulterated bureaucratic self-interest (please, can someone who lives in Wellington track Bill English down and let him know that the MoT/NZTA are out of control and are wasting billions of dollars? As Minister of Finance he really needs to know).

Given that the views of MoT/NZTA are increasingly irrelevant then we will just have to think through the wider implications of the decline in per capita travel demands for ourselves. Here are just some impacts that spring to my mind (I’m sure there are others):

Major road capacity expansions should be deferred: Overall vehicle volumes are not increasing – not unless the background population growth is sufficiently large to offset the decline in per capita demand for vehicle travel (approximately 1% per annum). I would suggest that all major highway capacity expansions are deferred for the foreseeable future.
Declining fuel excise revenue – NZTA and the MOT will simply have to make do with less money. The revenue implications may even be amplified by a shift towards more fuel efficient cars, which pay less excise tax per kilometre. With less money coming into the NLTF it’s important that public transport becomes more efficient and reduces its dependence on operating subsidies. Otherwise we risk being in a situation where we have increase demand for public transport, but less revenue available to fund it.
Flatter peak travel demands – the factors listed above are also likely to result in flatter peak travel demands. I expect that (semi-)retired baby boomers will simply elect to arrange their lives to avoid travelling during the peak period, and why wouldn’t you? Also, technological changes may continue to cause more people to work from home in the morning before heading into the office later on. Taken together, I would expect the peak/base ratio to reduce over time.
Public transport networks need to focus on all-day travel – This is a natural extension of the previous comment. Our public transport services typically focus services on meeting demands during peak periods, rather than all-day travel. As travel patterns increasingly disperse (in a temporal sense) they will need to focus on all-day demand patterns.

None of this is to suggest that roads will suddenly be unnecessary or that targeted capacity expansions are not needed. Indeed in rapidly growing areas some capacity improvements may well be warranted. For the average New Zealander cars will still be “king”, and will continue to be so for the forseable future.

But the key point is this: Decisions on major new investment should be driven by the marginal user; it is their behaviour (rather than the average users) that should be the primary determinant of future investment. And it seems patently clear (based on the available evidence) that, at the margin, New Zealanders are choosing to reduce their demand for vehicle travel. To put it bluntly MoT/NZTA need to wake up from their self-induced coma so that they can revise their planned transport investments in light of this “new information” (which I guess in Government is defined as anything that happens within the last decade or so, or if you’re a conservative then anything within the the last millennium is considered “recent”) .

It’s quite simple really: Per capita demand for vehicle travel has been declining steadily for around seven years and for many people, like my parents, has left them better off. We’d be even better off, however, if the MoT/NZTA recognised that these changes were occurring and responded by revisiting their proposed transport investment mix. How about it?

Car Free Cities

I am getting sick of the rhetoric surrounding issues of 'sustainability" and "greening the cities" as a pathetic excuse to either 1) save money or 2) make money.
I say this because my employer has embarked on a series of measures which really only line his own pocket but are sold as being sustainable practice or ridding the city of dirty cars. The first is forcing all employees to empty their own trash, clean their own offices and largely keep the workplace ticking over by constantly complaining about jobs that are not being done by largely transparent staff. I say transperent because the cleaning staff have largely disappeared by stealth.
The second point relates to the cynic in me which suggests that it was all part of a Green-inspired anti-car (read: anti-freedom) crusade to boost the numbers using public transport. A public transport system that largely does not exist. So we now pay for our car parking (actually a pay cut of $600-$1000 a year ) or have to scramble for an ever decreasing number of free parks - themselves being whittled away by pay or restricted time parks heavily monitored by parking wardens which boost the cities coffers by $900k a year. That these said parking wardens are regularly being assaulted or themselves resorting to neo-Nazi monitoring techniques seems to be a huge game played out by non-suspecting participants. That self serving pseudo environmentalists let this happen without embracing these self same principles is a mockery.

Deaddrops - an idea

Restoring a Dead Drop
Read Later April 2, 2012

Last August when I was travleing across Canada, Giulia Forsythe and I went searching in Toronto for the location of the one dead drop located there. Dead drops are in many ways akin to the Piratebox, publicly placed peer to peer file sharing approaches using a rather simple mechanism, USB drives embedded into a wall, like above, with only the business end sticking out.

The one we tried to find was no longer there, and after having place one already in Fort Erie, we went back to Toronto yesterday with a thumb drive and some patch compound to restore the one off of Front Street- see a video of our effort

New deaddrop (USB drop) in Ontario, US! Return to Front Street (4 GB)

— Aram Bartholl (@Dead_Drops) April 1, 2012

Berlin artist Aram Bartholl started the ‘Dead Drops’ project during his 2010 visit to New York City (I mistakenly said 2011 in the video) and over 850 drops, all over the world, are listed in the database:

‘Dead Drops’ is an anonymous, offline, peer to peer file-sharing network in public space. USB flash drives are embedded into walls, buildings and curbs accessible to anybody in public space. Everyone is invited to drop or find files on a dead drop. Plug your laptop to a wall, house or pole to share your favorite files and data. Each dead drop is installed empty except a readme.txt file explaining the project.

If you can go past the snickering about it being a place for viruses and porn (which I do not discount, but find not allt hat interesting to harp on), they present a curious approach to doing some place based activities/games/storytelling. One difference I can see is that a dead drop’s files could be sequentially edited by visitors, e.g. a text document growing like an exquisite corpse approach:

Exquisite corpse, also known as exquisite cadaver (from the original French term cadavre exquis) or rotating corpse, is a method by which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled. Each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, either by following a rule (e.g. “The adjective noun adverb verb the adjective noun”) or by being allowed to see the end of what the previous person contributed.

We even had a play at this last year in ds106 via a Google Doc.

There’s no reason why the file could not be am image, audio, or video file (the latter would take more effort).

We are hoping to run a session on pirate box / dead drop at Northern Voice in June- what we’d really like to do is go outside and place a few in places nearby the conference location.

I just noted there are some mobile apps made for dead drops though the iPhone app just spun for me. I might check out the layar layer (that one told me that Bruce sterling was around the corner from here- hmmmm).

These are intriguing to me, and I am eager to hear your ideas on what could be done with say a distributed set of dead drops.

The use of social media in education

Thought I would hook up again on one of my bugbears. This extract through the dion of all anti digital Andrew Keen

The Role of Digital Technology in Learning
by noreply@blogger.com (Mark Bullen)
Here's another study that suggests student use of digital technology in higher education is more complex and nuanced that the net gen discourse suggests. Gabriel et al's approach and findings are very similar to ours in the Digital Learners in Higher Education project. Among other things, like us, they found differences in how students thought about and used digital technologies in their academic and non-academic live:

"Students' most frequent use of technology outside of school was email, Internet, social media, texting on cell phones, instant messaging, and talking on cell phones. The focus was on communication and socializing with others. The students' most frequent use of digital technologies in school were (in descending order) accessing information on the Internet, using email, word processing, math and science programs, texting on cell phones, and accessing electronic databases. In school, the students tended to use digital technologies to collect, select, and work with information. The differences between these two lists are significant. Some students felt that there was a place for all technologies in an educational form, while others wanted to maintain a separate digital footprint for inside the classroom as well as outside the classroom digital technologies."

The Role of Digital Technology in Learning: Expectations of First Year University Student

Old lady sings

Old guys

Two Laps from Passion Pictures on Vimeo.

Try this link

http://www.facebook.com/kiwisummerRNZ