Gallery View VI
Tuesday, January 14, 2003
Images from 052802, 061602, 071202.
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June 2001: The Absurdity of Block Grants in Educational Technology Educational technologies could revolutionize education if used wisely... Funds of over $800M per year are at stake... All that money that could have a concentrated impact at the national level will, instead, flow through our hands like sand and have no significant impact on teaching or learning.
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'Soul of Nowhere':
Author Craig Childs Journeys into the Wilds of the Desert
I looked out from my perch. Cinder cones lifted in front of a barren volcano at the horizon, the place called Volcán Santa Clara that was my destination. No direction of travel seemed any better than another. My eyes struggled for some pattern, a guide to follow. There was none. I saw currents and crosscurrents in the once-fluid rock. Whirlpools sat frozen, surrounded by waves of black, hard cake batter. Fossilized ropes bunched against each other.
It is alive, I thought. I listened to myself breathe as I thought this. Not life in the way I would imagine. It is alive in the way that water is alive, filled with direction and intention. The wealth of shapes plagued my eyes, so much happening all at once, frozen in this moment so that I could walk across the surface of creation and destruction without them rising to strangle me.
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I'd seen this and wanted to link to it, Raymond mentioned it to me in passing, and Isaac did link to it: In Virtual Museums, an Archive of the World (NY Times)
The goal, officials at several museums say, is to link many collections in cooperative databases. Ben Williams, the lead librarian at the Field Museum, said, "We're all heading toward a kind of digital global museum" — in effect, a catalog of the world. This is what the IU is working to help put in place, and what is necessary to continue work with academic and K-12 partners.
Right now anyone with access to the Internet, whether a Ph.D. candidate or a seventh grader, can check the mammal collections of 17 museums at once on Manis, the Mammal Networked Information System. While this may merely be a time saver for a biologist in Seattle, it can be invaluable for researchers in third world countries who lack physical access to collections. A great deal of information on African animals, for instance, is available in American collections.
Access is an easy word to throw around; most tools that make this access possible are not easy to use and don't really give a user the set of tools needed to create, annotate, save, reuse, and share personal collections.
For example, one specimen is described as coming from "Highway 17, Park Ave. offramp, Oakland." The entry notes: "There is no Park Ave. anywhere near Highway 17. The specimen was a boa constrictor, in case you were wondering."
Park Blvd. in Oakland runs from Hwy 13 in the Oakland hills down towards the flatlands, under Hwy 580 and past Oakland High School, ending at E. 18th St. where it turns into 4th Ave which continues for four blocks or so where it ends at Laney College. Once upon a time 4th would've run right up to Hwy 17, which is now usually called 880. But there is no offramp onto 4th. There are indirect offramps from both 580 and 13 to Park, but they are indirect. So where was this specimen found?
Say...
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