New tech = New lit: Deconstructing the sms-ay

First week of university down. It looks like they might actually try to teach me something.

One of the units I’m taking is Multiliteracy in Middle Years. It involves identify and using different text types (in the classroom), and identify and also teaching your students which grammar is suited to the textual style. To explain the latter, the lecturer gave us this example – it’s the first few lines of what a 13 year old UK student submitted when asked to write an essay about what they did last holidays:

My smmr hols wr CWOT B4, we usd 2go2 NY 2C my bro, his GF & thr 3 :- kds FTF. ILNY. it’s a gr8 plc.

Anyone … ? I think she* visited Kuwait or something.

Some of you are probably smacking your heads in disbelief at that little effort. Grammar Nazis are possibly having fits. It is not even consistent, the writer ignored quite a few punctuation points and vowels, but then decides that an apostrophe for “it’s a gr8 place” is deserved (correctly).

What should a teacher do when confronted with this?

Build yourself a brain

Sydney does not have a monopoly on public science outreach in Australia.

This upcoming month the Queensland Brain Institute (at University of Queensland) is hosting a bunch of public lectures on neuroscience.

Wednesday, 22 July — Associate Professor Geoff Goodhill
Computational Neuroscience Laboratory, Queensland Brain Institute, The University of Queensland
“Building a Brain – wiring the brain”
Level 7 Auditorium, QBI, St Lucia Campus — 3.30 – 5.30 pm

Wednesday, 29 July — Professor Seong-Seng Tan
Senior Principal Research Fellow, Brain Development Laboratory, Howard Florey Institute, University of Melbourne
“Building a Brain – harm minimization following injury“
Level 7 Auditorium, QBI, St Lucia Campus — 3.30 – 5.30 pm

Wednesday, 5 August — Professor Dennis O’Leary
Molecular Neurobiology Laboratory, Salk Institute for Biological Studies, San Diego, California
“Building a Brain – building the cerebral cortex“
Level 7 Auditorium, QBI, St Lucia Campus — 3.30 – 5.30 pm

Thursday, 13 August — Prof. Michael T. Shipley
University of Maryland, School of Medicine, Baltimore, USA
“Building a Brain – deciphering functional circuits in the brain“
Level 7 Auditorium, QBI, St Lucia Campus — 3.30 – 5.30 pm

Directions to the QBI can be found on their website here.

Unfortunately I don’t think I’ll be able to make any of these because of late lectures and working evenings. Awwww…

Tokyo responds to North Korea

In the only way they know how:

A giant robot that will inevitably go berserk and kill us all.

*Punynari*

*AppuruPai*

More pics at Moé Passion and Flickr.

Forget the Ugg-Crocs. This is truly awesome.

I think I just peed a little.

This monster is somewhere in the Odaiba area on Tokyo’s Bay, which was already a pretty awesome area. Sadly, the life-size Gundam is not in position to duel the miniature Statue of Liberty that also lives there.

Homeopathic A&E

Hattip Max from the Brisbane Atheists Meetup.

From the Mitchell & Webb Look, BBC.

Today is special

Today was the first day of classes for my Graduate Diploma.

It only consisted of a lecture and tutorial for our field studies unit – but for some reason QUT has two hour lectures. Not that I am complaining or anything. At least one good thing you can expect from the education faculty is that the lecturers know how to teach.

Today was included some discussion on teaching/learning, as well as what exactly this “Middle Years” thing that I signed up for was actually about. There was also fruitful discussion on creating and developing our personal teaching philosophy – which in addition to our performance on pracs will form a major part of our assessment for this unit. In reflection, perhaps I should work towards obtaining the required texts for classes, they may actually be useful (then again everything does seem to be downloadable from the Blackboard site).

Some statistical information that came out of today included (note: some of these were dated 1998 and 2000*):

• 1 in 5 school students in Australia are affected by poverty
• 1 in 4 school students come from a culturally diverse background
• 83% of school students with a disability attend a regular school
• 18% of school students have a parent with a disability
• less than 40% of ATSI (Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander) children finish high school at a year 12 level
• roughly 30% of pre-service teachers are “career switchers”
• $21 million is spent on stress leave for Australia’s teachers each year

The last one was perhaps not the most encouraging thing to hear on our first day (but I guess at least it’s not $22 million, and remember these are only Aussie dollars, they quite literally give them away).

Image credit: Exploding dog

*They were also scrawled hurriedly in my notepad so may be less than acccurate

Why parents aren’t allowed on the internet

I have one friend’s Mum who keeps trying to friend me on facebook. It started even before I met her in person, and even then, I’ve met her maybe twice.* Now, thankfully, it will be a cold day on Venus before I have to deal with my own mother on facebook … but yet parents and elder extra-generational family members on social networks is a bit creepy.

Not only does it feel as if a bit of your privacy is being invaded – but it also means you have a bunch of adults interacting with children in unfamiliar territory without clear guidelines. Adults do not play nice when there are no rules.

In an attempt to win a prize for Lori Drew of 2009, when Margery Tannenbaum’s daughter started arguing with another girl at school – she decided to list the other girls mobile number on Craigslist as a phone sex chat line. The girls were nine years old.

According to Suffolk County authorities, the mother of the girl intercepted calls before her daughter answered. She said she received 22 calls in one day, in all around 40 calls from various men who saw the ad, including some seeking an escort service. After Craigslist was issued a subpoena, authorities said they were able to track the account to Tannenbaum.

…

She said, “This is her mother. Can I help you?” The male replied, “Oh. Hot lady lives with foxy mamma?”

There are actually several groups dedicated to getting parents of facebook altogether. I can’t bring myself to actually fan that movement, I do find facebook a useful tool for keeping in touch with my Dad and Canadian relatives (or at least theoretically useful for this purpose).

Image credit: unknown – somewhere on teh interwebz

*Ye knoweth who thou art

Behold the UggCroc

Pic: UggCroc at the Valley Markets (yes, it’s what you think), originally uploaded by David Jackmanson. (Creative Commons by Attribution)

Pure Awesome.

Surf safe strategy #8

moar funny pictures

Original picture: mine from flickr. Taken at Bondi Beach, Sydney.

Love, share, learn

As seems to always be the case, as soon as I decide to take a short blog break, people link to me.

Greg did it twice. Hat-tipping me for that cool UK Swine Flu video I spotted – and also featuring some of my flu posts on this month’s Scientia Pro Publica – a collection of awesome science blogging written for the people – this month’s theme: OMG … Science is Everywhere! You can read more about SciProPub at Grrl Scientist.

I have also been quoted (and named, with my real name!) at BNET Pharma industry blog. I do have to agree with the sentiment. It would be a lot easier to sound sane if when I try to defend Pharma against claims of unethical practices if the industry I am trying to defend would just kindly stop engaging in them…

Jump, on Three…

Darn you Auntie!

You taunt me too much. I’m fairly sure I’d just started my previous job and you taunted me similarly with some sort of awesome youth television hosting opportunity (think it was travel around Australia and videotape it for JTV).

This time ABC has announced a casting call for all eager beavers interested in hosting any sort of television show on their upcoming children’s programming channel, ABC3. All you need is a high school certificate. Why again am I trying to get yet another degree?

I just hope they get some decent talent, and not the airheaded morons who host those sponsored video music shows on the weekends at midday, and not contrived scripted personalities like The Shak. Being  non-commercial channel, Auntie has had a good track record of cultivating actual talent.

Applications for MeOn3 close next Friday.

Alas as it was for the BestJobInTheWorld, I don’t have a video camera, so can’t put an entry together. Besides, we are meant to stick to the plan this year.

My new housemate (who I went to high school with) has also suggested this to me. Grrrr…

Taxonomy bugs (I mean fail)

When I was trawling through the internet for some taxonomy fails to feature I came across some in the flickr stream of bug girl (from bug girl’s blog) – specifically these cases where an incorrect insect was used to illustrate an article on the insectoid origins of carmine, a common dye  that can be used in foods (the article made mistakes beyond just the wrong picture – read at bug girl).

At the time I decided not to run them on the blog. I mean identifying insects is tough work. They are  the most diverse group of animals on the planet. I got a migraine trying to wrap my head around the 50-70 marsupials of Dasyuridae which fit into the category “oversexed hoppy rat-like thing which may or may not have a pouch” – differentiating 1,000s of species, when your samples are usually smaller than your fingers – that’s hardcore. So, in my ignorance I was willing to forgive a news editor who uses a relatively unknown insect to represent another relatively unknown insect*.

Scientific American is slightly less easier to forgive when they use the same beetle with the incorrect story. It then gets a little bit crazier as editors decide to use their own stock imagery – any old insect will do, even a freaking ladybug.

This is not a once off. Bug girl highlights another capture of “bugs are bugs” in which stinkbugs are used to represent bed bugs (though, while they may only drink plant sap, I still would not want the former in my hotel room).

Or there is this epic taxonomy fail Alex Wild at myrmecos blog spotted on iStock Photo – either that or someone mutated a Drosophila a bit too much.

Oh dear…

And to leave you with a picture to round things off:

see more Fail Blog

*Before entomologists send me hate mail – after my scale insect mimic identification, I now kow how different a carmine scale insect differs from the beetle pictured, so I can understand your frustation better. But hey, whatever, they’re still just bugs. Hate mail can be directed to zayzayem [at] hotmail [dot] com.

Name your job

One of the final pieces I need to line up is part time work while I study, if only to minimise my need to deal with Centrelink.

This means dusting off and brushing up the old resumé… and making myself as appealing as possible to employers.

Something interesting in my “to post” box was some research out of Canada that showed employers are discriminating against persons with non-English names that might be perceived as difficult to pronounce. If you’d like to see the names they used, the actual working paper here: Why Do Skilled Immigrants Struggle in the Labor Market? A Field Experiment with Six Thousand Resumes.

A few weeks after I read this item, the story circulated in the Australian press, this time citing an Australian study from ANU that used only 4,000 resumes. Headlines abounded stating that Australian bosses were racist.

Now this may be fair conclusion, but it neglects to mention that this scenario is the same any where – someone with a local sounding name is always more likely to be hired (the Australian study found that Italian surnames were no hinderance in Melbourne, a city with Australia’s largest Italian community). This does not mean it’s an okay practice, but it is something to consider.

Moving in pictures

From this:

Sydney

To this:

Brisbane