New Year 2019 CE / 2562 BE

For those not in Cambodia, Laos or Thailand, 2562 is the Buddhist Era (BE) date, which is 543 years ahead of the Common Era calendar. New Year, The Last Before 2020 Ah yes, the end of a year and beginning of another. A time to reflect, etc., etc. Well, this year much was accomplished and ... Read more

Mnemonic Devices and Learning

On January 1, 2009 CNN published an article on memory. Now would be a good time to review and expand on that article, in the hopes of improving our own memory. It may be useful to conceive of the Art of Memory as having four broad application areas, a set of techniques (often called mnemonic ... Read more

Cuba and the Mother of Invention

Necessity being the mother of invention, what if a densely populated, but small (~10m) country were to have zero access to petroleum for fertilizer and agriculture in general? Sustailable Agriculture would be a result (or starvation). What if Sustainable Agriculture Weren't Theoretical? The Case of Cuba Cuba's Agrifood System in Transition How to make prosperous ... Read more

Prehistory and Post Apocalypse

The thing about history is that there is a lot of it. And prehistory, well, so much more. The highlights: carbon/methane sequestration 50mya seas and temperatures Return of the wooly mammoth Arctic resources Emigration for the next 1,000 years O Canada Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) > At least since 1997, the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum has ... Read more

Amazon Canada Incompetence

By Amazon Canada, I am referring to the Amazon Advantage Canada operation. Pure, unadulterated incompetence. Support requests go something like this: - Me: Here is my problem, with detail - AC: Request for information (which is already in the detail) - Me: Submission of requested info, again - AC: Thank you, please wait - AC: ... Read more

Spatial Visual Ability

I'll come back and write more about this later (especially how to help with this with one's children), but for now here are some resources: Submenu Navigation - Nielsen Norman Group Seeking information online: the influence of menu type, navigation path complexity and spatial ability on information gathering tasks Online Spatial Reasoning Task Recognizing Spatial ... Read more

High-Achieving, Gifted, Highly Gifted

There are significant differences between high-achieving, gifted, and highly gifted children. When one recognizes unusual, advanced early development, understanding what one is seeing is important. There are different vulnerabilities and burdens for each of these groups: - The Burdens of Gifted Children - The Truth About Gifted Versus High-Achieving Students - Vulnerabilities of highly gifted ... Read more

Bezos and Jobs on Hiring

Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs have similar insights when it comes to hiring the best. This is equally relevant when one is building a school. Hire the best teachers possible, if you want a high-performing school. Three Questions When Making a Hiring Decision From the 1998 Amazon Shareholder Letter: It would be impossible to produce ... Read more

Time Horizons in Terrible Times

For various reasons, now is a terrible time (in the world). (Note: this is 2018, and we thought that was terrible. 2020 laughs hysterically at you.) At the same time, my own time horizons have shifted due to having young children. My eldest may graduate from high school in 15 years, give or take a ... Read more

Childhood Fever

> There is no evidence that fever itself worsens the course of an illness or that it causes long-term neurologic complications. Thus ... improve the child's overall comfort rather than focus on the normalization of body temperature. - Pediatrics research article