Even though our homeschooling organizational system is already fairly well organized, I am always looking to improve upon it.   Many other homeschoolers have raved about the workbox system which looks like a wonderful organizational method regardless of the type of homeschooling style you carry out. 

The only downfall that I could find to this system was the extra space that the boxes would require especially for a large family without any spare room to store these boxes. Every square inch of our house is already being used nor do we have a separate “school” room.  So, I adapted this set up to fit our needs and space, masha Allah.  

Five 4" three-ring binders on the bookshelf

I decided to stick with the three-ring binder system which I was already using to organize their educational materials.  We were fortunate enough to have been freecycled enough 4″ binders for  the children, alhamdulillah.  I kept the same organization within the binders as well, by using dividers to separate the subjects.  In addition to the dividers,  I inserted plastic paper protectors.  The page protectors store their daily activities.

They were also allowed to personalize their binders by decorating a page to slip in the front of the binders, masha Allah.  It was also enjoyable for them to transfer all of their work to the new binders. 

Now instead of having them retrieve all their books/activities down from the shelves each time they need their supplies, everything is already in the binder.  I have  torn out the consumable workbook pages, copied the current page being worked on in a textbook, prepared all the materials needed for hands-on activities, and inserted all of this into the respective plastic page protectors.  Each day  the binders are prepared using the weekly schedule that I created for each one before the week began.  The weekly schedule is placed inside a plastic page protector at the front of the binder.

Inside a three-ring binder

The following pictures are some examples of the materials that I set inside the page protectors.

Books

History coloring sheet

Hands-on math activity

Phonics work

 Just in the last few days that we have implemented this system,  I have found extreme benefits in planning and organizing the younger children’s activities.  Before this new method, I would struggle to prepare my preschoolers activities for each day and end up not using many of the wonderful materials I have stored away in the learning hutch.   Now, all the activities and materials are prepared ahead of time. 

My older children also enjoy not having to gather their books/supplies for each lesson.  They are ecstatic that everything is layed out in front of them in one binder. 

As a result of our success so far, I am also planning to put together a binder for my soon to be two-year old with age appropriate activities, insha Allah.

This morning I’m off to the Religious Communication Conference at Monash University, where tomorrow I’ll present the following paper:

Homespun and Studio-made: Aesthetic Differences in the Websites of Catholic and Evangelical Men’s Ministries

Across the Western world church attendees are approximately two-thirds women. There are significant debates as to why this is, ranging from women being innately more religiously inclined, through to churches having become feminised. This is problematic for those who believe men should have an equal (or even superior) place within the life of the Church. The response to this concern is the creation of men’s ministries, which aim to provide a masculine space within the Church for existing members and to bring new men in to the Church. Previous research (Gelfer, 2009) has shown that the types of masculine performances encouraged within men’s ministries tend to diverge along denominational/orientational lines: evangelical ministries tend towards a more “traditional” masculinity and Catholic ministries a “softer” masculinity. This paper argues that this distinction is also apparent in the aesthetics of men’s ministries websites: that evangelical websites tend towards a highly-produced and professional product whereas Catholic websites tend to appear more homespun. This aesthetic distinction echoes broader historical differences such as leanings towards a prosperity gospel or the epistemological privilege of the poor, as well as adding further insight into the differing masculine performances.

Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom

It’s an exciting idea, the way that Web 2.0 will transform the world of work, making collaboration the norm by providing wikis, bosses opening up dialogues by posting blogs that are open for comments, replacing meetings with discussion boards.

But before we get to that nirvana, we will have to live with the worrying answers to the question ‘how will the corporation subvert Web 2.0′

In the long term the Luddites always lose. In the long term the organisations which embrace Web 2.o will over-take those which resist it, just as Amazon has flooded out the bookshops and iTunes and Spotify have all but destroyed the the record companies.

What worries me, is the nature of that embrace.

Web 2.0, briefly, comprises the tools and attitudes that enable me to blog and enable you to rate my post and comment on it.  It’s FaceBook and Twitter and citizen journalism and mash-ups and crowd-sourcing and ‘Here comes everybody’.  It’s MySpace instead of A&R  It’s Wikipedia instead of the Brittanica. It’s Twitter instead of… well… instead of no Twitter. Web 2.0, so we all thought, is a force for democracy and good.  It cuts out the parasitical middle-person, it empowers individuals and enables them to form groups and enables those groups to face down corporations and governments.  It puts artists directly in touch with their audience. It enables me to publish this and you to read it with no more cost than our time. It turns base metal into gold and chocolate into a slimming aid.

There are, it seems, two current views of what happens when Web 2.0 meets the Enterprise.  In the first view, Web 2.0 brings about innovative, hierarchically flat organisations where knowledge is freely shared, where anyone who comes up with a bright idea can get it aired and taken up, where discussion boards pwn meetings and where gatekeepers and barriers to innovation are no more.  Google is reported to be just such a place.  The other view is that Web 2.0 and the enterprise are oil and water:  executives and managers will resist Web 2.0 either because they don’t get it, because they think it is a distraction, or because they are just plain running scared.

But I am not convinced by either.  Web 2.0, combined with an internal search engine, are powerful surveillance tools.  Any well-governed Wiki will tell you exactly who made which changes when, and far more neatly than you can track the changes in Word.   You can capture Instant Messenger logs and run searches on them in a way which you cannot tape and search conversations by the water cooler.  Nobody minutes meetings any more, but a discussion forum can be there for as long and the server farm lasts and longer.

Web 2.0 facilitates networks and interactions, but it also makes them more visible, and therefore easier to track.  We already know that the web is destroying privacy.  These days it takes diligence, vigilance and consistency to hide in cyberspace.  It is hard not have your name published by other people when school mates tag you on photos in FaceBook.

So it is surprising that hierarchical organisations don’t espouse Web 2.0 tools more actively, and this supports the theory that this is because execs and managers just don’t get it.

As something of a Web 2.0 evangelist, that places me on the horns of a dilemma.  A trilemma, actually. Do I:

1. promote Web 2.o tools because they empower people and democratise knowledge
2. stop promoting Web 2.0 tools because they expose people by turning situations which they are used to considering private into permanent searchable records or
3. use the argument that they can improve audit and accountability in order to get them into an organisation because they are just so flippin’ COOOL?

Plan to apply a doctor program in organization behavior at Economics department of Osaka University starting from next April. So has to write-up a research plan for the future study, haven’t really decided yet in specific but already had some research questions in mind.

Background, with the technology innovation of WEB 2.0 there are some new concepts coming too which has huge impact to organization (here I mean private just to define the research scope), to people’s behavior within the organization. Specifically I am interested in Enterprise 2.0 invented by Andrew McAfee and Management 2.0 advocated by Gary Hamel both from Havard Business School.  

Research Questions, not articulated yet… well, how the new behavior initiated in an organization; in what kind of conditions/forces (external, internal); driven by what kind of people; going through what kind of process; finally becomes part of the culture of the organization (norm of behavior and shared value).

Literature Review, theory on organization culture formation should be the ground framework. Then I guess should be reviewing literatures on change forces , character/leadership of change agency (people) and change process. Currently I did some reading on proactive behavior/proactivity, which I believe is the key factor of character/leadership of change agency (people).

In reading Capital I was troubled by Marx’s description of the capitalist’s generation of surplus value through the production of a commodity. He describes how the capitalist has paid 27 shillings for the cotton, spindle, and labour power used to produce an amount of yarn with 30 shillings of exchange-value, thus generating a surplus value of 3 shillings. He then claims: “… the laws governing the exchange of commodities have not been violated in any way. Equivalent has been exchanged for equivalent” (Marx 290). This statement confounded me after having read his earlier works, which clearly described labour as a rather special type of activity – a primordial function of the human being that mediates the metabolism between man and nature (Marx 227). Certainly then the use of labour-power for the extraction of surplus-value cannot be characterized as “equivalent for equivalent”, for the meaningfulness and fecundity of labour has a vastly different qualitative significance.

In what sense then, is Marx speaking of equivalence here? Looking at the persons involved in the transaction (the capitalist and the labourer selling his labour-power), Marx claims that “both buyer and seller of a commodity, let us say of labour-power, are determined only by their own free will. They contract as free persons, who are equal before the law” (Marx 273). While they may indeed be equal before the law (and this point is certainly disputable in practice), the situation of the labourer selling his commodity is subject to all sorts of external pressures that impinge upon this notion of being a “free person”, free to contract as one will. The pressures of necessity – of maintaining shelter and making enough of a wage to continue to put food on the table for one’s family, for instance – make the contract a matter of anything but equality. The labourer does not have much of a choice: to sell his labour power at the going rate, or starve. Such pressures are hardly the circumstances of the “free person”; this is the situation of the coerced person – a person merely managing to respond to necessity.

Discussing this contract between labourer and capitalist, Marx references here as well the notion of equivalence: “each enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent” (Marx 273). Labour, as the creative activity that builds our world and makes our lives, must certainly have more “value” than the mere wage that it is exchanged for. Is it really worth only what someone will pay for it?

Therein lies the crucial concept: the notion of value. Value is, in the Marxist discourse, a dialectic entity – it is always attached to or mediated by something else. Thus we have different forms and functions of “value”: we have use-value, exchange-value, surplus-value. “Value” does not stand alone as an abstract quality, but acts rather as a quantifier with relation to a particular functioning (e.g. the accrual of capital through surplus-value, or the market price of something expressed through exchange-value). Given that all products are created through labour (even products of the earth require farming and transport), how is this levelling of qualitative aspects achieved such that they can be converted to “value”? Marx explains:

It is only by being exchanged that the products of labour acquire a socially uniform objectivity as values… Equality in the full sense between different kinds of labour can be arrived at only if we abstract from their real inequality, if we reduce them to the characteristic they have in common, that of being the expenditure of human labour power, of human labour in the abstract. (Marx 233-234)

So, in order to operate within the market as an exchange-value, the qualitatively different kinds of labour have to be treated abstractly as representative of human labour power in general, and quantified as such. In this manner, the social meaning of the productive act has also been modified. In terms of the use-value of a product, qualitative considerations still apply, but its social nature is enacted in the exchange process, in the market, and as such is stripped of its actual qualities as a particular product of a specific labourer (Marx 229).

What maintains this alienating, inhuman system? Marx notes that “only the products of mutually independent acts of labour, performed in isolation, can confront each other as commodities” (Marx 226). The inhumanity of this process seems to lie in this: that our productivity is socially organized in such a way that the producers are isolated from each other, and that the sociality of their product is realized only as it confronts other products as commodities (as an object of exchange-value). We cannot recognize the truly social nature of the productive act under these circumstances, because the product is commodified, and is transformed into a quantitative exchange value. Producers do not face other producers, but rather their products face each other, in competition for market share. Money mediates this process universally; acting as a general equivalent, it makes all things alike upon their monetization (McNally 178). It is thus that they can be exchanged “freely” (by equal contract) without real consideration of the qualitative nature of the commodity. And so labour, that fundamental human facility that links us metabolically with nature and the world, becomes just another commodity.

We can only speak of value within an exchange system. Ideally, the social nature of labour should not have to be mediated by exchange at all – one could produce what one will for the use of the other, as they produce for our needs (producers in association, rather than products in competition). In recognizing one another’s human capacities and needs, and acting to fulfill them, we have enacted our own social natures in such a way that our humanity was not alienated in the process. This seems to be the ideal of socialism. Take for example a poor community in a remote area: the town needs a new school for the children, but there’s no money circulating, and nothing to exchange with the nearby contractors. So, the townspeople get together, pooling their skills and labour-power, and build it themselves, with no commodity exchange ever having taken place in the production process. This is communal labour, democratically and socially organized. As David McNally notes of such production, from the outset the labour involved is posited as social labour (McNally 192).

McNally reminds us of Marx’s view of transitional states, lest we become disenchanted by the seeming impossibility of jumping straight from a capitalist-mode of life to a socialist mode of living. We may first have to employ labour certificates or other forms of fiat and continue to rely on the exchange process (McNally 195), for each new society develops from the old, and is “thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges” (Marx 320). Such transitional states may still bear some of the markings of the previous mode, but there are significant differences. Labour certificates, for instance, are still an exchange-based mode of distribution, but one that does not require a denial of the social nature of labour – the social significance of the labour has already been determined and realized. The act of production is not organized around the need for the accumulation of surplus value, and so the entire structure of the social organization has been revolutionized, despite the apparent similarities to the old world. Revolutions can be quiet, subtle things.

Works Cited

McNally, David. Against the Market: Political Economy, Marxist-Socialism, and the Marxist Critique. London: Verso, 1993.

Marx, Karl. Selected Writings (Simon, ed.). Indiana: Hackett Publishing Co., 1994.

I’ve had a fiddle factor (or, ahem, “Stradivarius’ Constant”) tucked away in a not-insignificant corner of my code for some time now.

I have been meaning to find this constant analytically for a Reasonably Long Time™. Naturally, having more important work to do caused me to make this a priority.

It seems my initial guess of 2.675 wasn’t far off. A tedious derivation has finally yielded an answer of 2.6680.

Yes. My Ph.D. research is this interesting.

The Professional and Technical Surveyors Act 40/1984 requires the SA Council of Professional and Technical Surveyors (PLATO) to accredit academic courses as qualifying graduates of those courses for registration in the PLATO categories of professional and technical practitioners. Under Section 19 of the Act there is established the Education Advisory Committee (EAC) one of whose functions is “to investigate the syllabus of instruction and the standard of training” provided by educational institutions… (more)

sebuah roller-coaster emosional yang fantastis. requiem for a dream dan happiness adalah dua film yang sangat menarik. thinking of buying the DVD’s. yang tersisa adalah Funny People. mungkin setelah praktikum final Kimia Dasar semester 1. akhir-akhir ini mendekati UAS, kuliah semakin sibuk.

pesta mikro 3! Minggu, 29 November 2009 4 pm till drop. semoga bisa datang, terutama karena izin dari ibu yang cukup sulit untuk acara-acara malam yang tidak terautorisasi dan tidak ditemani teman ygn sudah dikenal cukup baik (baca:sudah dikenal ibu). ingin rasanya belajar chiptune. gameboy-gameboy sisa masa SD masi ada di rumah Jakarta, tinggal software dan mungkin orang yang bersedia menuntun dan mengajarkan.
revolusi musik fidelasi rendah, anyone?

http://rss.businessweek.com/bw_rss/topSlides

So I recently had the privilege of sitting in on an educational session at CDRP concerning the relationship between food/diet and mood and mental performance in recovery. It covered various processes and brain/blood chemistry, with a specific focus on how we can organize our diet in recovery in order to replenish critical neurotransmitters which are depleted by drug and alcohol abuse (I got jokingly called the “class chemist,” which I find hilarious since I hated chemistry throughout my education. But now, it heavily concerns me. Things change).

Just a quick review of three neurochemicals (protein-based, so from foods) that are  heavily hit by prolonged drug and alcohol abuse, their functions and potential consequences:

-Dopamine: responsible for muscle movement, attention span and motivation. Depletion for lead to lessened attn. span, a total lack of motivation and tremors which, if serious enough, can lead to granmall seizures.

-Neuronephrine: responsible for alertness and mood. Depletion leads to depression, lessened “staying power” or alertness and positive feelings, and fatigue (neuronephrine is a precursor to adrenaline, so less of this chemical leads to less adrenaline).

-Seratonin: responsible for regulating sleep, appetite, pain threshold and sensory processing. Depletion can lead to chronic insomnia, eating disorders and difficult processing sensory information (including hallucinations).

HOWEVER, in recovery, we can organize what and when we eat, so as to maximize the replenishing of these vital chemicals.

Given that these are protein-based chemicals, they come from specific foods. But to complicate the picture, proteins compete for absorption from the blood into the brain. In order for a specific protein to enter the brain, it needs to be the most plentiful in the blood and another can enter only when it trumps the originally abundant protein.

Dopamine and neuronephrine spawn from a protein called tyrazene, and it is very abundant. Protein also leads to increase alertness, etc, so these foods should be eaten during the day so as to avoid drowsiness.

Seratonin on the other hand develops from a protein called triptophane, which is quite scare. Therefore, in order for it to be absorbed into the brain, other proteins need to be scare in the blood. To do this, we should eat starchy foods with complex carbohydrates. As a consequence, the body releases insulin which forces all other proteins other than triptophane into muscle tissue, leaving it as the most abundant protein at that time. However, this protein leads to relaxation and drowsiness, so we should eat heavy carbs and no other proteins at night, which is a huge contrast to how most Westerners organize their diet.

So, here are some suggestions for when to eat certain types of foods so as to maximize the production of these vital neurochemicals (Reminder: this is for people in recovery. “Normies” should not necessarily organize their eating in this way as their brain chemistry is different):

Dopamine/neuronephrine (tyrazene): fish (tuna, salmon, sardines), chicken (breast, no skin, and baked or broiled), lean beef, shell fish, milk (not whole), low/non-fat yogurt, tofu, beans, lentils, nuts, turkey To be eaten during the daytime hours. Do not fry these foods or eaten with fats as these proteins are not high-fat soluable.

Seratonin (triptophane): unripe bananas, turkey, whole milk, carb-rich, low-protein meals (pastas, rices, potatoes and other starches) To be eaten in the evening/night time.

Avoidance foods: individuals in recovery can experience headaches, agitation, anxiety and higher blood pressure upon consuming these foods as they are the raw material for adrenaline.

-Black licorice, aged cheeses (cheddar), raisins, soy sauce, avocados, etc.

So, individuals in recovery should reduce their fat intake and increase their consumption of high-quality proteins and complex carbohydrates. Proteins should be eaten during the daytime hours while high-carb. and starchy foods should be saved for the evening/night.

In a few hours, I’ll be purchasing my first Apple computer…seems weird to say that considering I grew up using Apple computers before PCs.  The film & video program at Collins College requires that the students have an Apple Macbook Pro laptop for the program.  Of course there is irony to the word “require” when used with the finest portable computer currently available…I guess I’ll “force” myself to buy this top-of-the-line piece of electronics!  But seriously…Apple has been the darling of the artistic & creative media world for many years.  It’s the graphic and visual artists who probably kept Apple alive in those lean 90s years when Apple was not so mainstream and admired as it is today.  It was the iPod and iTunes that really brought Apple back to life and back to the mainstream.  Music is a very powerful medium and Apple really bet right on the digital music explosion.  And since then, they have continued to wow us all with the iPhone  (which I also own), and their desktop and laptop computers.

I think what really makes Apple stand out from the crowd is their innovation.  Not only are they innovative in the functionality and technology of their software and hardware, they are most importantly innovative in their look and style.  Most of their competitors like Microsoft simply don’t put much energy into their style.  As an Architect and a Designer, I definately understand the power of design and style.  Apple really does make everything with an incredible modern, slick style that is uniquely their own.  Now of course, if their technology didn’t also function well, all the design in the world couldn’t save them.  But because their technology does work well, they can ask a premium for their products because their design style is like no other.  Just watch TV shows and movies and notice that you will often see Apple computers and technology showcased in the media.  And why is that?  Because Apple technology is considered very attractive, just like our favorite movie stars.

Back to computer nostalgia…as a Gen X kid of the 70s, I grew up during the birth of the personal computer.  I learned how to program on the Vic20 and the Commodore 64.  Its funny to me now to think back to me plugging my Vic20 computer into the old Zenith TV we had and playing games and writing my own “game” programs.  They were simple “treasure” hunt games where you answered questions and got to certain things based on which answers you chose.  I don’t think I’ve done much programming since the 80s.  It was in the late 80s and early 90s that Apple and Microsoft came out with much more sophisticated machines and I wan’t interested in the programming aspect of computers…I was interested in the Creation aspect of computers.  My Aunt & Uncle bought their first computer, the Apple IIe, when I was in middle school or early high school I think.  My cousin Chad and I used to play games on it and make birthday cards and banners.  The Apple computer was just pure fun and I remember being in awe of how cool it was for them to have all of this matching Apple technology.  The computer, the monitor, the printer, the software…it was just all Apple!

Ironically, Apple computers were the mainstay at middle and high school.  We had those tiny macintosh computers with the little 8″ square black and white screens packaged into a shoebox size vertical housing.  I used to write papers and create things on those tiny little computers.  But at some point my parents bought us a computer and we switched to a PC.  It was probably mostly due to cost and due to Microsoft Windows emerging dominance of the PC market.  And I loved my Windows 3.1 computer…it opened up all of these doors to creating handouts, banners, graphics, and all sorts of cool stuff.  And of course going into Architecture, AutoCAD was the dominant software to learn for computer aided drafting and my switch to the PC was complete when I entered the business workplace in 1998.  But I remember our computer labs at the University of Arizona were filled with Apple computers…so even while I was making the switch to the PC, I still had one foot in Apple as well.

I’m just so thrilled to be getting back to Apple technology after more than a decade apart.  Apple has vastly improved their hardware and software and they now are at the top again like in the 80s.  Who knew that all of that exposure as a young kid would come back to me now as I make my first career switch.  Everything old is new again!

There is a good new article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. It is about how libraries are innovative and collaboratively building collections for their patrons.

But in response [to the economy], librarians are doing more than tightening their belts. Some see the crisis as a chance to change the way they do business. It has spurred efforts to dream up ambitious solutions to big problems, such as collaborative storage networks that let libraries share the costs of housing valuable but burdensome print collections. The money pinch has also heightened the appeal of open-access content.

This is just a short blurb. The article goes into more detail about other collaborative efforts.