Measure 79 and real estate transfer tax: Friday business roundup ...

Real Estate: Elliot Njus breaks down Oregon Measure 79, which would constitutionally prohibit taxes on real estate transfers. Specifically, Measure 79 asks voters whether the state constitution should prohibit the state, and its local governments, from imposing a tax on real estate that would kick in when a property is sold or transferred.

Here are other stories to check out from the business desk of The Oregonian:

Economy: Molly Young talked with Atlanta Fed Chief David Altig, who says The Federal Reserve's role may not be to fix the economy but rather to keep it from growing worse.

Tech: Mike Rogoway reports that OVP Venture Partners, once the biggest and most active venture capital firm in Oregon, is shutting down. Founded in 1983, OVP has invested $750 million overall in more than 130 companies -- many of them in the Northwest.

Hillsboro: Andrew Theen profiles Truth Custom Drums, a small biz tucked away in a Beaverton business park that ships specially designed drum kits across the United States and to distributors around the globe.

Separately, Theen reports that the Westside Medical Center has attracted much attention from the community.

Retail: From investigative reporting to analysis and features, Laura Gunderson does it all. Her latest blog post for "Hitting the Mall" checks out what's going on in Westfield.

Separately, Gunderson reports that Zupan's Markets has a made a major donation to Legacy Emmanuel.

Source: http://www.oregonlive.com/business/index.ssf/2012/10/measure_79_and_real_estate_tra.html

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Analysis: Smaller firms grab big slice of mobile advertising

(Reuters) - When Auntie Anne's, the pretzel chain, wanted to tempt moms in Atlanta shopping malls with free offers, it dished out coupons through smartphones that could be redeemed immediately for a free drink or other specials.

But while the moms received the coupons on their iPhone or Android device, the power behind the campaign was not Google Inc or Apple Inc -- it was Millennial Media, a nimble six-year old independent that has grabbed the No.2 spot in mobile advertising in the United States.

Google is No.1, but the flexibility of its smaller rivals is helping them catch up in a U.S. market that is expected to triple in size to more than $20 billion in the next three years, according to market research firm Gartner.

Smaller firms have the freedom to reach users who use any mobile operating system, unlike Apple, which promotes advertising on its Apple iOS platform, and Google, which handles advertising across all devices but also has its own platform, Android.

"Advertisers want to be able to reach the broadest population they can and in the mobile world, where the platforms are fragmented, this gives an opening to the providers who are truly platform neutral," Gartner analyst Andrew Frank said.

Google held 24 percent of the U.S. market last year, while Millennial had 17 percent and Apple 15.5 percent, according to market research firm IDC. Unlisted Jumptap held 9.5 percent, Yahoo Inc 7.5 percent and India's InMobi 2.2. percent.

Ireland-based Velti Plc, which listed in early 2011, is also chasing market share.

Investors are taking notice.

While Facebook Inc has been pilloried for lacking a mobile strategy, shares of Millennial have jumped 76 percent from a low of $9 in early August. Shares of Velti have leaped 59 percent from a life low of $4.99 on July 25.

Millennial, a roughly $1 billion company, is a great bet for someone looking for investments in mobile advertising, said Steven Dray, a portfolio manager at investment firm AlphaOne Capital Partners LLC.

"When you get to brand advertising, which is eventually going to be a huge pile of money that's going to move from traditional advertising to mobile, I think that's where Millennial and some of the smaller players could have very good success," Dray said.

AlphaOne bought into Millennial after its initial public offering in March and holds about 40,000 shares in the company.

Despite the run-up in their shares, the smaller firms have not run ahead of the sector. Millennial trades at 4.3 times forward 12-month sales and Velti trades at 1.3 times.

While their businesses are obviously much bigger and more varied, Google trades at a multiple of 4.6 and Facebook at 6.7.

As consumers increasingly surf the Web on the go, advertisers are looking to ply them with targeted information about nearby restaurants, pubs, theaters, shops and salons.

But there's no point pitching a shampoo to a skinhead, so the secret sauce for advertisers is user information -- and Millennial's trove of user data is what CEO Paul Palmieri is counting on to give his firm an advantage.

Millennial gathers "first-party" data -- information that users provide to a publisher, or that is gleaned from surfing habits that website owners share with advertising companies.

"It is also valuable to users because the more targeted-advertising they get, the more relevant their experience ends up being," Palmieri said, although analysts say the privacy issues this raises are yet to be resolved.

The smaller companies tout their tight focus on the mobile sector, rather than worrying about how that fits in with online advertising.

"We only focus on mobile. Google on the other hand has many different things to worry about. Yes mobile is important, but is it the most important? Probably not," said InMobi CEO Naveen Tewari, although he is not complacent about the challenge.

"The only way to compete with (Google) is by innovating faster," said Tewari, who expects his 850-person company to report billions of dollars in revenue in a couple of years.

RISING COMPETITION

But the big guns are not far away. The entry of Facebook and Twitter is expected to change mobile advertising.

Facebook, which declined to comment for this story, is investing heavily in improving mobile applications and creating new metrics to measure the success of mobile advertising -- a move expected to give a fillip to the wider market.

"There is a lack of maturity in the metrics that are available for measuring mobile campaigns," Gartner's Frank said.

"That's where there's an opening for innovation that some of the larger companies are not able to satisfy today."

Twitter, too, expanded its advertising program for the iPhone and Android devices and now sells promoted tweets and advertises promoted accounts on its mobile applications timeline, rather than only on a search page.

And Google is determined not to lose its No.1 spot. It bought mobile ad platform AdMob in 2009 and its YouTube video service recently launched a new iPhone app that carries video advertisements.

The success of iPhones and Android smartphones and the fact that Google owns many popular mobile applications also helps push its mobile advertisements.

ROAD BLOCKS

The mobile advertising model has its detractors, and some have groused that the small screen on mobile devices makes viewing advertisements difficult, while a lack of good mobile websites might keep away potential viewers.

Users tend to spend less time on their mobiles in one go and advertisements have to be designed for short attention spans.

"I think it's still a struggle. Most of the advertising that you see on mobile devices today is still predominantly not very well targeted or not very granually targeted," Frank said.

Uncertainty about how best to advertise on mobile platforms is holding back the valuations of mobile advertising firms, Baird and Co analyst Colin Sebastian said.

While industry-standard measurements are lacking, the companies argue that mobile advertising has five times the click-through rate of online advertising.

"You can touch the ad, flip the ad, move the ad, you can do things that you cannot do on a PC. Your interactivity levels are very high," Tewari said.

(This story was corrected to remove paragraph 29 that refers to Google's mobile advertisement revenue run-rate as the data was from 2011)

(Additional reporting by Aurindom Mukherjee; Editing by Rodney Joyce)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/smaller-firms-grab-big-slice-mobile-advertising-155811026--finance.html

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Kimi Raikkonen feels cautious about Lotus updates ahead of 2012 ...

Kimi Raikkonen feels cautious about Lotus updates ahead of 2012 Korean GP ? Formula 1 news

Lotus driver, Kimi Raikkonen is feeling cautious about the new updates which his team has planned to launch in the 2012 Korean Grand Prix.

The Enstone based team has planned to come up with a new Coanda-effect exhaust design in the upcoming race and the team principal, Eric Boullier is hoping to see considerable improvement in the car?s pace. However, Raikkonen believes that he cannot say anything about the team?s update package until he tests them on track during the free practice.

?You have to be [positive] don't you, otherwise you wouldn't print any of this stuff!? Raikkonen said. ?But we will see tomorrow, we know numbers from wind tunnel and calculations but until we run anything we don't really know what it's going to bring us. So hopefully it works as we expect and it will improve our position a little but we should know after practices tomorrow.?

The Finnish driver has performed tremendously well in the season until now and has impressed everyone with his incredible driving skills. At present, he is standing at third place in the drivers? championship. Furthermore, he is ahead of Lewis Hamilton and is behind his major rival, Sebastian Vettel of Red Bull Racing.

Even though, he is quite behind the current leader in the drivers? championship, Fernando Alonso of Ferrari. Nevertheless, he is confidently looking forward to come up stronger in the remainder of the season to win the championship title.

?For me it doesn't matter if I'm second or tenth, it makes no difference,? he added. ?I'd probably rather be out of second or third place so I don't have to go to the prize giving!?

Besides, he said that they have struggled with their qualifying pace in almost all the races until now due to which they could not secure competitive positions. Nonetheless, he said that they are trying their best to improve their qualifying pace in the remaining five races of the current season so as to be able to start from higher grid slots to attain good results.

Let?s see how the 2007 world champion performs in the forthcoming race which is to be held at Korea International Circuit this weekend.

?

Source: http://blogs.bettor.com/Kimi-Raikkonen-feels-cautious-about-Lotus-updates-ahead-of-2012-Korean-GP-Formula-1-news-a193997

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The Autobiography of Malcolm X Book Club, Part 3, Bryan Caplan ...

Malcolm and the Nation of Islam (Chapters 11-15)

Summary

At the urging of his siblings, imprisoned Malcolm writes a letter to Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam.? Elijah Muhammad responds, and before long Malcolm is not just a true believer, but a crusader.? This motivates him to improve his reading ability, but almost every book is too difficult for him.? So he gets a dictionary and copies the first page:

I woke up the next morning, thinking about those words - immensely proud to realize that not only had I written so much at one time, but I'd written words that I never knew were in the world.? Moreover, with a little effort, I also could remember what many of those words meant... Funny thing, from the dictionary first page right now, that "aardvark" springs to mind...

I was so fascinated that I went on - I copied the dictionary's next page.? And the same experience came when I studied that... That was the way I started copying what eventually became the entire dictionary... [D]uring the rest of my time in prison I would guess I wrote a million words.

Malcolm's religious conversion and free reading fill his life: "[M]onths passed without my even thinking about being imprisoned.? In fact, up to then, I never had been so truly free in my life."? By the time Malcolm gets paroled, he's a changed man. His brother gets him a job in Detroit as a furniture salesman.? He predictably dislikes what he sees:
Now I watched brothers entwining themselves in the economic clutches of the white man who went home every night with another bag of money drained out of the ghetto.? I saw that the money, instead of helping the black man, was going to help enrich these white merchants...
Still, Malcolm likes living with his pious brother and his family, and loves the local temple of the Nation of Islam:
I never had seen any Christian-believing Negroes conduct themselves like the Muslims, the individuals and the families alike.? The men were quietly, tastefully dressed.? The women wore ankle-length gowns, no makeup, and scarves covered their heads.? The neat children were mannerly not only to adults but to other children as well.

...I thrilled to how we Muslim men used both hands to grasp a black brother's both hands, voicing and smiling our happiness to meet him again.? The Muslim sisters, both married and single, were given an honor and respect that I'd never seen black men give their women, and it felt wonderful to me.

His main frustration: His fellow Muslims aren't trying hard enough to make converts.? Malcolm finally meets Elijah Muhammad, who gives him a green light to proselytize.? He goes home to Detroit and gets to work:
Beginning that day, every evening, straight from work at the furniture store, I went doing what we Muslims later came to call "fishing."
Before long, Malcolm masters public speaking.? He spends more and more time in Chicago with Elijah Muhammad and becomes one of his ministers.? He gets to work in Harlem.? The crowds love him, but Muslim's strict code scares off most of the potential converts:
Any fornication was absolutely forbidden in the Nation of Islam.? Any eating of the filthy pork, or other injurious or unhealthful foods; any use of tobacco, alcohol, or narcotics.? No Muslim who followed Elijah Muhammad could dance, gamble, date, attend movies, or sports, or take long vacations from work.? Muslims slept no more than health required.? Any domestic quarreling, any discourtesy, especially to women, was not allowed.? No lying or stealing, and no insubordination to civil authority, except on the grounds of religious obligation.
Malcolm claims he spent over ten years celibate:
[I]t had been ten years since I thought anything about any mistress, I guess, and as a minister now, I was thinking even less about getting any wife.
Soon after, though, he marries Betty X, a fellow Muslim.? His New York temple starts getting media attention.? In 1959, the Nation of Islam is featured on a Mike Wallace television special, "The Hate That Hate Produced."? The Nation's ranks swell - and so does bad blood with mainstream black leaders.? Malcolm fiercely opposes integration:
"So let us separate ourselves from this white man, and for the same reason he says - in time to save ourselves from any more 'integration!'"
One of the Nation's key projects is recruiting former drug addicts to help current drug addicts:
In the ghetto's dope jungle, the Muslim ex-junkies would fish out addicts who knew them back in those days.? Then with an agonizing patience that might span anywhere from a few months to a year, our ex-junky Muslims would conduct the addicts through the Muslim six-point therapeutic process.?
By the early 60s, Malcolm is a major media figure.? He repeatedly attacks Northern liberals and mainstream black leaders.? What's his alternative?? Despite a lot of violent rhetoric, his main practical suggestion is self-improvement:
The black man in the ghettoes, for instance, has to start self-correcting his own material, moral, and spiritual defects and evils.? The black man needs to start his own program to get rid of drunkenness, drug addiction, prostitution.
Malcolm scoffs at Martin Luther King and his "Farce on Washington."? He speaks at universities around the country.? Chapter 15 ends with a striking exchange with a "little white college girl":
She demanded, right up in my face, "Don't you believe there are any good white people?"? I didn't want to hurt her feelings.? I told her, "People's deeds I believe in, Miss - not their words."

"What can I do?" she exclaimed.? I told her, "Nothing."? She burst out crying, and ran out and up Lenox Avenue and caught a taxi.

Critical Comments

Ideological movements often develop massive gaps between theory and practice.? The Nation of Islam is a notable example.? The theory, as Malcolm keeps reminding us, is that "The white man is the devil."? Given this theory, there are two plausible practical courses of action:

1. Violent resistance.? If your opponent is the devil, appeals to conscience or mutual self-interest are futile.? The devil enjoys your suffering.? If you want him to stop, you need to kill him, cripple him, or at least make him feel your pain.

2. Leaving the country.? If the devil is too strong to beat or intimidate, you might as well get out of Dodge.? On the assumption that the devil is the cause of all your troubles, starting over in a new country where he doesn't reside should be safe and effective.

Malcolm doesn't seriously push either of these strategies.? His rhetoric is occasionally violent, but almost all of the violence that he actually describes (wait for part 4) is black-on-black.? One common intra-black criticism of the Nation of Islam, Malcolm admits, is that the Muslims are all talk; unless a fellow Muslim is in trouble, they don't lift a finger.? And while his father preached "back to Africa," leaving the country is not on Malcolm's radar.

So what practical steps does Malcolm preach and practice?? Bourgeois virtue!? Puritanism!? Clean, honest, polite, disciplined, hard-working, studious, traditional living.? Bizarrely, then, his recommendations overlap almost perfectly with the hard-line view that poverty is primarily caused by irresponsible behavior, so poor people should repent and emulate the middle class.? While Malcolm provides no statistics, this prescription seems very effective.? At least on his account, Black Muslims behave well and quickly enjoy the predictable fruits of their good behavior.

Malcolm occasionally tries to reconcile his theory and practice by blaming black's irresponsible behavior on whites:

I knew that our strict moral code and discipline was what repelled them most.? I fired at this point, at the reason for our code.? "The white man wants black men to stay immoral, unclean, and ignorant.? As long as we stay in these conditions we will keep begging him and he will control us.? We can never win freedom and justice and equality until we are doing something for ourselves."
This is one of the most absurd conspiracy theories of all time.? Even if whites are devils, how does black drunkenness, drug addiction, gambling, and crime redound to whites' benefit?? Even if black drunkenness, drug addiction, gambling, and crime somehow benefit whites, precisely how do whites trick blacks into embracing these vices?? There's nothing during Malcolm's life of crime that's remotely consistent with such a story.? Instead, Malcolm's first-hand experience fits the common-sense theory that impulsive choices - not malevolent coercion - are the chief causes of poverty and vice.

You might reply that an effective creed needs an Enemy.? If you want to sell puritanism, you have to coat it with hatred of the Other.? Yet I see no reason to believe this.? Some puritanical creeds - e.g. literal Puritanism and extreme environmentalism - constantly inveigh against the Evil Ones.? But plenty of others - e.g. health nuts and exercise fanatics - forget the reprobates and focus on self-improvement.

Overall, chapters 11-15 of The Autobiography of Malcolm X are a classic tale of cult dynamics.? The new creed is thrilling at first.? Members acquire a sense of purpose.? They find meaning.? They become part of a community.? In the process, though, they start parroting a lot of nonsense and non sequiturs.? (How is the brutality of slavery in the 19th-century an excuse for drunkenness in the 20th?)? Cult members deify their leaders, and demonize their enemies.? Those who embrace the cult for social reasons often enjoy their membership for the rest of their lives.? Those who embrace the cult for its ideas, however, eventually paint themselves into a corner.?

Why?? Because if you take the ideas seriously, anomalies multiply.? You see conflicts between the doctrine and the facts.? You see conflicts between the doctrine and itself.? Worst of all, you see conflicts between the doctrine of your living god and his all-too-human behavior.? To stay in the cult, you have to live a lie.? To be true to your ideas, you have to leave the cult.? And even if you take the latter route, the cult may refuse to let you go in peace - as Malcolm is soon to discover.

Source: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/10/the_autobiograp_1.html

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free up your employee recognition program: lessons from the ...

employee recognition

A great book came out a couple of years ago called Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead. For those who might be less familiar with ?The Dead? phenomenon: over 2,300 live performances from 1965 to 1995 established them as the most popular touring act in rock history?all without a single top 10 hit (until 1987?s ?Touch of Grey? reached number nine, driven by what had grown into an enormous concert-going fan base). The book is written by two dedicated (or rather ?Dead-icated?) dead-heads who happen to be in the center of some of the biggest changes in marketing in the past 40 years. Brian Halligan, CEO of HubSpot, has attended over 100 Grateful Dead shows, and David Meerman Scott, the author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR, has seen?he thinks?45 (or so) shows.

Why would HR practitioners benefit from reading a marketing book??Two reasons: First, many of the lessons are ?business? lessons as much as they are marketing lessons.?And the more conversant you are with business strategy and ideas, the more credibility you bring to the table with your company leadership.?Second, we?ve found that our HR clients who partner with their marketing counterparts experience greatly increased influence on their organization.?How??By bringing their brand to life inside the company.?To do that well, HR leaders need to have a feel for marketing key marketing principles.

Another reason: inside of these marketing lessons from the Grateful Dead are some potent HR lessons, especially with respect to employee recognition programs.?

For example, the music industry has tanked in recent years due to its stubborn need to control content. As Halligan and Scott write in their book, The Grateful Dead figured this out a long time ago;?they focused on concerts as their main source of revenue, and allowed fans to record live shows:

??they actually established ?taper sections? where fans? equipment could be set up for the best sound quality.?When nearly every other band said ?No,? the Grateful Dead created a huge network of people who traded tapes in pre-Internet days.?The broad exposure led to millions of new fans and sold tickets to the live shows.?

Consider the ever-present urge in the HR world to control, to regulate, to create rules. Aside from things like health care benefits or sexual harassment?where rules are critical?in what areas of HR might you be able to turn away from rigid controls to get better results?

Imagine overburdening an employee recognition program with a thicket of rules.?That?s the LAST thing you want with an employee recognition program because each of those rules creates a barrier to adoption and pretty soon, nobody is using the program.?Wise HR professionals ?get? this and go the other direction by minimizing rules for recognition programs ? and in doing so, foster programs that really get used.?We?re not talking about people in tie-dyed clothing? passing joints around?your drug testing policies will manage that. We?re talking about people at work passing around kudos and high fives about great work.?Surely, we don?t need a lot of restrictions around that.

Beyond trusting your people, why not reward your recognition program?s greatest ?fans???Recognize the top recognizers. The Grateful Dead created a way to always put die-hard fans in the front row:

??Unlike nearly every other band, the Grateful Dead controlled the ticket sales for their concerts.?The unique ticketing system?led to word-of-mouth marketing like this: ?Want some great tickets to the Grateful Dead concert? You can buy tickets directly from the band. I know their phone number!??For most gigs, blocks of tickets were also sold at the venue box office and through electronic ticketing systems.?But the best seats always went to the band?s biggest fans.?

employee recognition

And how do you keep fans coming back?

?The Grateful Dead played over 2,300 concerts, and each one was completely unique due to their improvisational style.??Unlike traditional improvisation, the band ?improvised individually and as a group ? at the same time.?Musically, this simultaneous improvisation was profound as it required band members to listen carefully to what each of the band members were doing musically and build on it ? while simultaneously carrying on their own improvisational riffs.??

This was a big reason fans felt compelled to see the band again and again, and to create (and trade) as many tape recordings of shows as possible.?Variety kept everything they did interesting.

Our research with managers confirms employee recognition programs need variety to keep your people using them.?One-size-fits-all programs get old fast, and over time start to feel stale and less genuine.?Make sure you have strategies in place to 1) notice day-to-day effort, 2) reward above-and-beyond results, and 3) celebrate career milestones.?And then make sure you have a wide variety of tactics and tools available to deliver those strategies.

Jerry Garcia and friends might sum this up by saying ?have a little faith in people, reward your fans, give them variety, and let the goodness fly.??The Grateful Dead taught us that beautiful things happen when you trust people and let them help define the experience.?Maybe that?s why they were so grateful.

There are lessons to learn from FIS, a Fortune 500 financial services company. This global organization has used recognition to unify its culture and thousands of employees around the world following a number of mergers and acquisitions. The company?s recognition program has paid off. Eighteen months after the launch, FIS experienced a 61 percent increase in recognition, 16 percent increase in overall engagement, and eight percent increase in trust. Find out why the FIS story is one of team-building, communication, and unification.

Source: http://www.octanner.com/blog/2012/10/free-up-your-employee-recognition-program/

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Roger Rivard, Wisconsin Legislator, Criticized Over 'Some Girls Rape Easy' Remark

A Wisconsin lawmaker faces fresh criticism from his election challenger over comments he made last year about women who "rape easy."

State Rep. Roger Rivard (R-Rice Lake) spoke to the Chetek Alert newspaper in December about a 17-year-old who was charged with assault after having sex with his underage girlfriend on their high school campus. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Rivard said his father had warned him that "some girls rape easy." He explained that meant they'd verbally consent to sex, then later accuse the man of rape.

"If it's rape, it's rape," Rivard told the newspaper. "If it's not, it's not."

Rivard, who was endorsed by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) in August, told the Journal Sentinel Wednesday that his father's advice was taken out of context:

"He also told me one thing, 'If you do (have premarital sex), just remember, consensual sex can turn into rape in an awful hurry,'" Rivard said. "Because all of a sudden a young lady gets pregnant and the parents are madder than a wet hen and she's not going to say, 'Oh, yeah, I was part of the program.' All that she has to say or the parents have to say is it was rape because she's underage. And he just said, 'Remember, Roger, if you go down that road, some girls,' he said, 'they rape so easy.'

"What the whole genesis of it was, it was advice to me, telling me, 'If you're going to go down that road, you may have consensual sex that night and then the next morning it may be rape.' So the way he said it was, 'Just remember, Roger, some girls, they rape so easy. It may be rape the next morning.'

"So it's been kind of taken out of context."

Three hours later, Rivard issued a statement to the newspaper clarifying that "sexual assault is a crime that unfortunately is misunderstood." He also said he realized his comments "have the potential to be misunderstood as well."

Rivard's initial comments were ignored by the media in December. However, as the freshman legislator faces a tight reelection bid against Democrat Stephen Smith, a number of groups of Wisconsin have revisited the comments, criticizing the Republican for appearing to blame the victims of assault.

Smith, Rivard's rival in the upcoming election, told the Journal-Sentinel that the Republican's "extreme" views proved that he is "out of touch with the majority of voters."

Smith also mentioned that he was unaware of Rivard's remarks until August, when Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.) sparked national outrage by claiming that victims of "legitimate rape" do not usually get pregnant because the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down."

Also on HuffPost:

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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/10/roger-rivard-rape_n_1956491.html

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TeachThoughtEverything You Know About Curriculum May Be ...

By Grant Wiggins

What if the earth moves and the sun is at rest??What if gravity is just a special case of space-time? Following both counter-intuitive premises revolutionized science and ushered in the modern world. Could a similar counter-intuitive thought experiment advance education from where I believe we are currently stuck? I believe so.

The educational thought experiment I wish to undertake concerns curriculum. Not the specific content of curriculum, but the?idea?of curriculum, what any curriculum is, regardless of subject. Like Copernicus, I propose that for the sake of better results we need to turn conventional wisdom on it is head: ?let?s see what results if we think of action, not knowledge, as the essence of an education; let?s see what results from thinking of future ability, not knowledge of the past, as the core; let?s see what follows, therefore, from thinking of content knowledge as neither the aim of curriculum nor the key building blocks of it but as the?offshoot?of learning to do things now and for the future.

In our own era, this may seem to some as nutty as Copernicus? idea must have seemed. For over a thousand years a formal curriculum has been conceived of as an organized and logically-sequenced march from the basics to advanced knowledge. Well,?of course: whether we are Professors of Physics or third-grade teachers, when we develop a syllabus and lessons we consider the most important topics, and we then devise a sequence by which they are ordered and addressed via instruction. By this means we parcel out learning in clear and logically-sequenced elements. We design backward from human knowledge, in other words, and we sequence knowledge in ways that suit the learner?s prior and current knowledge. What else could a curriculum be?

Well, this works fine if the present is just like the past; if ideas turn into competent action automatically; and if theory, not effects, matters most. Alas, each notion stopped being thought of as true?in the time of Copernicus. That?s why folks like Comenius, Rousseau, Spencer, Dewey, Bruner, and Toffler have been arguing for?fundamental?change over the last 300 years ? not in the ?content? but in the very meaning of education and thus curriculum.

So, suppose knowledge is not the goal of education. Rather, suppose today?s content knowledge is an?offshoot?of successful?ongoing?learning in a changing world ? in which ?learning? means ?learning to perform in the world.?

As odd as that might sound for academics, it makes perfect sense in our everyday lives. The point of child-rearing, cooking, teaching, soccer, music, business, or architecture is not ?knowledge?; rather, knowledge is the growing (and ever-changing) residue of the main activity of trying to perform well for real.

In athletics this is very clear: the?game?is the curriculum; the?game?is the teacher. And each game is different (even as helpful patterns emerge). Knowledge?about?the game is secondary, an offshoot of learning to play the game well. As I learn to play, knowledge ? about rules, strategy, and technique ? accrues, but it is not the point.

So, it would be very foolish to learn soccer (or child-rearing or music or how to cook) in lectures. This?reverses?cause and effect, and loses sight of purpose. Could it be the same for history, math, and science learning? Only blind habit keeps us from exploring this obvious logic. The point is to do new things with content, not simply know what others know ? in any field.

Boredom in Schools

The Copernican hypothesis eventually made sense because it did two things: made better sense of the data, and dealt with increasingly embarrassing anomalies in the Ptolemaic view. Similarly for my theory: thinking of knowledge as an offshoot and performance as primary helps us make sense of current oddities and failures in schooling. For example, boredom is rampant in schools; perhaps it is the?inevitable?result of focusing on knowledge instead of performance (which is inherently more engaging). Forgetfulness is constant: students rarely recall what was taught a few weeks ago. How can content move from short-term to long-term memory if there is always more content to memorize tomorrow? And test results reveal over and over that few students can transfer learning to new challenges and overcome basic misconceptions. What do these unending ?discrepant phenomena? tell us?if we would only attend to them?

Video games are especially startling from the perspective of conventional views of curriculum and instruction. According to the standard view, I shouldnever?be able to learn and greatly improve at the games since there is?noformal and explicit curriculum framed by knowledge, and ? even more puzzling ? no one teaches me anything! I shouldn?t learn but I do. In games (and in life), I begin with performance challenges, not technical knowledge. I receive no upfront teaching (or even manuals any more in games and other software!) but I learn based on the attempts to perform and feedback from trying ? just as I did when learning to walk or hold a spoon. How is that possible? Conventional views of curriculum and instruction have no good explanation for it.

So, perhaps our ?crazy? thought experiment has promise.

What else might follow from thinking of performance, not knowledge, as the aim of education? We might finally realize the absurdity of marching through textbooks. You want to learn English or be a historian? You would think it very foolish if I said: OK, sit down and let?s march for years through a dictionary or an encyclopedia, A to Z. Yet, that is basically what textbooks do: march through content, logically organized. Want to learn to cook? Read the?Joy of Cooking?all the way through its 700+ pages ? before ever setting foot in a kitchen??? Yet, this is what we do and have always done in conventional textbook and lecture-driven schooling. It is also absurd to teach novices lots of technical jargon upfront, as if that will somehow have meaning and stick for later use. Yet, from Friday vocab. quizzes to almost all tests terminology is an absurdly major focus. We must only still do it, like medieval monks, if at some level we still think that giving things names and possessing plus appreciating (eternal?) knowledge is the point of education.

Beyond these examples of transformed curriculum, there are other reasons for declaring that all conventional curriculum-writing is badly misguided and is doomed to fail the moment we frame it backward from topics and content instead of performance. The following questions are suggestive:

  • If curriculum is a tour through what is known, how is knowledge ever advanced?
  • If learning requires a didactic march through content, why are movies and stories so memorable ? often, more memorable than classes we once took?
  • If a primary goal of education is high-level performance in the world going forward, how can marching through old knowledge out of context optimally prepare us to perform?
  • If education is about having core knowledge, and we are more and more teaching and testing all this knowledge, why are results on tests like NAEP so universally poor, showing that over?decades?American students have not progressed much beyond basic ?plug and chug??

A revealing shift in the winds has in fact occurred in our era in professional education. In medicine, engineering, business, and law courses are no longer built backward from content. They are built backward from key performances and problems in the fields. Problem-based learning and the case method not only challenge the conventional paradigm but suggest that K-12 education is increasingly out of touch with genuine trends for the better in education.

The thought experiment I propose is not new, as suggested by the reference to Dewey and to the case method in law ? both over 100 years old. As in the history of science, this idea of designing backward from the ability to use content well for worthy present and future purposes has lurked under the surface or in pockets of the medieval paradigm that still dominates curriculum for centuries. All one has to do is read Plato?s ?Allegory of the Cave? and the?Dialogues?more generally, Kant?s criticism of conventional education, Rousseau?s?Emile, Hegel?s?Phenomenology, dozens of books from the Progressive era in the 1920s ? 30s, Piaget on what mental growth demands educationally, Bruner?s?Process of Education, the recent book?Shop Class As Soulcraft,?as well as current research on student misconceptions and their persistence to see perpetual papered-over weaknesses in the standard view and the promise in alternate conceptions.

What is the Goal of Curriculum?

Back to Tyler, everyone.

A key person in the Progressive era was Ralph Tyler, the Director of Research for what came to be called the 8-Year Study ? a major investigation, funded by the Carnegie Foundation, into the effects of progressive education. Tyler went on a few years later to write the modern classic text on curriculum-framing (based on his work as Director of Evaluation for the 8-Year Study) entitled?The Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction. Yet, in spite of the book?s success ? it is still widely read in graduate courses ? Tyler?s rejection of the standard view of curriculum continues to be ignored.

He was quite blunt about the error of conventional curriculum: ?it is clear that a statement of objectives in terms of content headings?is not a satisfactory basis for guiding the further development of the curriculum.? The critique resulted from a premise about the aim of education (since curriculum is the formal path by which we achieve our educational aims). What is the aim of?any?curriculum? According to Tyler, the general aim is ?to bring about significant changes in students? patterns of behavior.? In other words, though we often lose sight of this basic fact, the point of learning is not just to know things but to be a different person ? more mature, more wise, more self-disciplined, more effective, and more productive in the broadest sense. Knowledge is an?indicator?of educational success, not the aim. Thus, the conventional view of curriculum and the process of conventional curriculum writing?must?be wrong:

?The purpose of a statement of objectives is to indicate the kinds of changes in the student to be brought about so that the instructional activities can be planned and developed in a way likely to attain these objectives; that is?to bring about these changes in students.?Hence it is clear that a statement of objectives in terms of content headings?is not a satisfactory basis for guiding the further development of the curriculum.?The most useful form for stating objectives is to express them in terms which identify both the kind of behavior to be developed in the student and the ? area of life which this behavior is to operate.? pp. 45-7.

So, let?s re-consider Tyler?s claim. Let?s follow the logic, since it holds out some promise of solving vexing and persistent problems of boredom and ineffectiveness that we see daily.

This article originally appeared on?Grant?s personal blog; Image attribution flickr users tulanepublicrelations and josekevo

Terry Heick is an educator, husband, and father of three children. He is interested in improved social capacity through the design of progressive learning forms.

Source: http://www.teachthought.com/learning/everything-you-know-about-curriculum-may-be-wrong-really/

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Turnstyle ? Show Me The Money: Conference Tackles Urgent and ...

Photo Credit: Jesse Lara

SAN FRANCISCO-What does it mean to make a living as a musician in the digital age, and what are the most viable revenue streams to help achieve that dream?

Those were two of the dominant questions at the SF MusicTech Summit this week, where representatives from internet radio, app companies, music publishing, and the recording industry gathered to discuss, as they did at February?s gathering, the implications of music?s unbridled digital transmission between consumers, as well the expanding opportunities to charge people for that content.

As the Summit kicked off and Pandora?s breakdown of its payments to artists ricocheted around the Internet, Pandora founder Tim Westergren held court at a panel here to discuss the rates the streaming radio platform pays to artists. During what Lauren Danzy, Marketing Manager for performance rights group SoundExchange, called a ?lively discussion,? Westergren stumped for the Internet Fairness Act, of which Pandora has been a leading proponent. Westergren maintains that the current rates that Pandora pays are making its business unprofitable, and he suggested that has a trickle-down effect that stifles the company?s capacity to create new revenue opportunities for musicians.

Part of what drew Danzy to attend SF Music Tech for the first time was her interested in galvanizing artists to get involved in the fight for increased payments. ?This conference is just great. It?s got a lot of people in the tech space, I mean, serious movers and shakers. Everybody from entrepreneurs with startup businesses to more established organizations, and a lot of music advocates, which I love. I love to be here with people who are really fighting on behalf of artists,? she enthused.

Artists themselves seemed to be outnumbered by ?suits,? both from large internet companies and from music technology startups (many of the latter hastened to remind audiences that they were once, or are still, musicians themselves). There were a few working musicians on panels here, included Berkeley?s Lyrics Born and cellist/composer Zoe Keating, who walked a fine line between expressing resoluteness and weariness that it seems incumbent upon artists to be enterprising beyond the creation of their art itself and continually boostrap their way to new revenue sources. ?I never had any expectation of a roadmap,? Keating said of her approach to artistic sustainability. ?If there doors are closed, make your own building. If suddenly streaming closes a door, I?ll just make another building to make money in.? Keating, who had just posted her 2011 income online the night before the Summit, acknowledged the risk in such transparency, saying, ?For a lot of artists, there?s a tradition that if they start talking about finances, people say, ?Shut up and make music.?? She cited the band Grizzly Bear, who told fans, essentially, ?If you want to help us, the best thing you can do is buy an album,? and when a debate ensued, Keating said, ?there was silence on their end.?

Inevitably, there were many references to how artists have funded projects via Kickstarter, but they came with a cautionary note and mentions of Amanda Palmer, who faced backlash after raising more than a million dollars on the crowdfunding platform and then asking people to volunteer for her tour.

But another view of Kickstarter?s benefits for artists came from Theda Sandiford, VP of Digital Marketing for Universal Republic Records. On a panel called ?Predictions, Proclamations, and Educated Guesses,? she described what happened when a Universal band called The Last Bison wanted to make a video during their recording period, when they couldn?t yet dip into the marketing budget. ?They went on Kickstarter, raised $5,000, and made an amazing video. The got their friends to help out, funded it, pulled it off, and with no marketing help (from Universal) got 80,000 streams on the record.? The story duly impressed her higher-ups, Sandiford said. ?I love it when bands take initiative. I?m constantly encouraging them. Every time they find some success, I share that story, and try to turn that ?Not right now? into a yes.?

Sandiford also said that increasingly, artists are negotiating directly with internet companies to stream their content, but that without the leverage that record companies have, those artists are at a disadvantage. ?Working with a big company that has the leverage, we are able to negotiate more favorable rates. People forget?the accounting of the money per stream is messy business. We?re talking about fractions of a penny here that get added up.? She said for Universal Artists with 360 deals (in which the record company derives revenue from artists assets beyond the music, like performances and merchandise) the next frontier is selling their live performances, once publishing hurdles are cleared.

Speakers on her panel, per its title,?were asked to issue the prognostications for the industry. ?What I predict,?said John Battelle of Federated Media, who acknowledged that he was ?the old guy? on the panel and who also delivered a lot of its zingers, ?is that musicians will increasingly say ?fuck it? and drop out of this system.?

Perhaps. But in the meantime, they continue to experiment with new delivery systems for their music and apps to connect with fans, of which plenty were represented at the conference.

The SongFreaks app was one that was highlighted by panelist Darryl Ballyntyne of LyricFind (he added that the company just announced an AOL deal), who said the app lets music fans apply ?the location check-in principles of FourSquare to their favorite artists? concerts. ?You can compete to become the top fan?and artists can leverage that to create better touring,? he explained. The app is building in ?gamification? with extra prizes for superfans who?ve demonstrated loyalty through concert attendance, Ballyntyne said, proposing to fans ?if you come to the show, come backstage, we?ll do little meet and greet.?

There were also plenty of startups like Throwdown.fm, which lets users create collaborative, themed playlists, like the one that co-founder John Ceccarelli made for watching the presidential debate. Cecarelli said the conference was useful for networking, and also to discuss significant business plays like that of music service Rdio opening up its API, so that apps can integrate its music catalog into their services. For apps like his, Ceccarelli explained, ?you?re either licensing ?the music (through record labels), which is a real pain; or working with people who own the rights to their own music, which is a whole different business; or the third way is you?re trying to figure out how to bring in the music through these music services. You add value to your site through what they?re doing and trying to monetize in a different way.?

Ceccarelli also repeated the sentiment that resounded through the conference, and one that?s an overarching theme at almost any discussion of music and technology: ?Of course, none of them have figured out what their monetization angle is yet. Everyone?s got very strict limits on monetization.?

Related posts:

  1. Helping Musicians Make Money [SXSW]
  2. YouTube Shares Ad Revenue With Musicians, But Does It Add Up?
  3. Stageit.com: Musicians Take A Lesson From CamGirls
  4. Bandcamp Offers Musicians More, Lures Them From MySpace
  5. If Your Favorite Radio Show Doesn?t Podcast, Use This ?DVR For Radio?

Tags: John Battelle, john ceccarelli, lyrics born, Pandora, sf music tech, SoundExchange, tunecore, zoe keating

Source: http://turnstylenews.com/2012/10/10/show-me-the-money-conference-tackles-urgent-and-perpetual-issue-for-musicians/

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Father of Yankees manager dies

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The father of New York Yankees Manager Joe Girardi died on Saturday and Girardi kept the news from the team until Thursday to avoid distracting them from their playoff series with the Baltimore Orioles.

Jerry Girardi, 81, died at a healthcare residence in Metamora, Illinois, the Yankees said in a statement. He had suffered from Alzheimer's disease, his son said.

Jerry Girardi served in the U.S. Air Force during the Korean War and later worked in construction sales for National Gypsum Company, the Yankees said. He also worked as a bricklayer.

"One of the reasons I didn't say anything, I knew talking about it would make it probably even harder," Girardi told reporters.

"I only told a couple of people...I didn't tell any players...I didn't want the team to have to deal with it," he said.

Girardi said he received the news while on the team bus on Saturday.

"I had tears in my eyes on the bus so I put sunglasses on," he said.

Since receiving the news, Girardi has managed three games in the playoffs, including Wednesday night's thriller when he made the bold decision to pinch hit for Alex Rodriguez, the game's highest-paid player, with Raul Ibanez.

The move paid off as Ibanez homered to tie the game in the bottom of the ninth inning then homered again in his next at-bat in the 12th inning to give the Yankees a 3-2 victory and a 2-1 lead in the best-of-five American League Divisional Series.

Girardi said he had planned to tell the team after the Orioles series, but did not explain what led the team to announce the death on Thursday.

Girardi's mother died in 1984 and he has three brothers and a sister.

Visitation and prayer service have been scheduled for Sunday in Illinois, with an additional visitation on Monday ahead of a funeral Mass and burial.

Should the Yankees advance to the American League Championship Series, they would be scheduled to play on Sunday but not Monday. (Editing by Julian Linden)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/father-yankees-manager-dies-213210915--mlb.html

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