Dreamworks Launching How to Train Your Dragon live show

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Craft and heart breathe fiery life into dragons

First they did it with dinosaurs. Now, the team at Global Creatures is about to unleash dragons onto the stage.

The arena version of the DreamWorks Animation film How to Train Your Dragon will have its world premiere in Melbourne on March 2, before a 10-day season in Sydney from March 15.

The mechanical engineers, sculptors, painters, costumers, model makers and puppeteers from the Creature Technology Company (CTC), the animatronics arm of Global Creatures, will create at least 24 dragons for a show that will include acrobats and aerial artists, projections and flying creatures.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/craft-and-heart-breathe-fiery-life-into-d...

The annotated apocalypse: Anthropologists tackle 2012 – Boing Boing

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Excerpt from a long, great interview!

"...MKB: Tell me a little bit about the real science that forms the backbone of this 2012 mythology. When people talk about this stuff, what artifacts and research are they building off of?

JH:The real stuff behind it, it comes in several flavors. The main real stuff are prophecies in The Books of Chilam Balam, the Books of the Jaguar Priest. That's really a set of different manuscripts from colonial Yucatan and it was published in the 1700s. But they recount stories that were collected much earlier, including ones from the time of Spanish arrival. Chilam Balam is a legendary prophet who made various pronouncements that are collected in these books. That's what's referred to as "Mayan prophecies." The scholarly discussion of them goes back to the 1930s.

Then, beginning in the 1970s you also have discussion of a monument called Tortuguero Monument #6. It appears in Linda Schele's work in 1982 [Schele was one of the key researchers in the story of how modern scientists learned to decipher ancient Maya hieroglyphics—MKB] and discussed at the Maya Workshops in late 1990s. As we got closer to 2012, David Stuart published the new translation. [Stuart is a student of Schele's and another key figure in the translation of Mayan writing.—MKB]

It's the only monument known to have the date 13.0.0.0.0—the Mayan date that corresponds to December 21, 2012—on it. The monument is damaged. So it's hard to read and it takes a lot of cleverness to decipher what the text actually says. The preliminary translation came out in the late 1990s. However, the inscription isn't at all clear. There's some discussion about whether it's even a prophecy, but I think it is. It refers to celebration of a god called Bolon Yok'te K'uh. This deity seems to be associated with warfare and with the king of Tortuguero. The most recent translation suggests that whatever they said would happen then was really just the dressing and honoring of this deity, nothing more.

The date 13.0.0.0.0 is a logical extrapolation of how the Mayan Long Count Calendar works. The first published mention of that date was in the 1800s, came from the work of Joseph Goodman. But it wasn't actually written anywhere other than the Tortuguero monument, which was discovered in the 1970s.

MKB: When did you start noticing the 2012 movement as a phenomenon? Did it grow out of something else that you were already following, or kind of appear on its own?

JH: It had been something on the edge of my consciousness for a while. The Mayan Factor by Jose Arguelles is a book was part of the New Age Harmonic Convergence of 1987. That came out right as I finished my dissertation. I didn’t pay much attention at the time because everybody had just written it off. By that point, people were joking about New Age and not taking it seriously. But at that time, Arquelles was writing about December 21, 2012. And it just grew from there. I didn’t pay much attention until 1995, which is when I noticed two things.

First, that was the year that the first interactive, graphic Maya calendar orientation program came out on the web and it gave December 21, 2012 as the date that corresponded to the Mayan date of 13.0.0.0.0. Then I got an email from Daniel Pinchbeck. We had a common interest in Burning Man and he contacted me saying that he was writing about Jose Arquelles and 2012 for Rolling Stone. That’s when I realized that this had taken on a life of its own. But I hadn’t really realized until early 2003 that it was something people were still paying any attention to...."

Great post on educational-origami - 21st Century Pedagogy - obvious cross-disciplinary relevance!

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Long post & detailed - here's an excerpt:

The key features of 21st Century Pedagogy are:

- building technological, information and media fluencies[Ian Jukes]
- Developing thinking skills
- making use of project based learning
- using problem solving as a teaching tool
- using 21st C assessments with timely, appropriate and detailed feedback and reflection
- It is collaborative in nature and uses enabling and empowering technologies
- It fosters Contextual learning bridging the disciplines and curriculum areas
- Knowledge

Knowledge does not specifically appear in the above diagram. Does this mean that we do not teach content or knowledge? Of course not. While a goal we often hear is for our students to create knowledge, we must scaffold and support this constructivist process. The process was aptly describe in a recent presentation by Cisco on Education 3.0 [Michael Stevenson VP Global Education Cisco 2007]

We need to teach knowledge or content in context with the tasks and activities the students are undertaking. Our students respond well to real world problems. Our delivery of knowledge should scaffold the learning process and provide a foundation for activities. As we know from the learning pyramid content delivered without context or other activity has a low retention rate...."

Rhizome | We Copy Like We Breathe: Cory Doctorow's SIGGRAPH 2011 Keynote #infdist

We Copy Like We Breathe: Cory Doctorow's SIGGRAPH 2011 Keynote

Jason Huff | Friday Aug 12th, 2011 0

Still image from Cory Doctorow's Keynote speech at SIGGRAPH 2011

When Cory Doctorow started his Keynote speech at this year's SIGGRAPH conference he started bravely by granting the audience "unequivocal permission to record video, audio, and to use those recordings ... in all media now known or yet to be invented throughout the known universe." This past Wednesday, two days after the speech, the Keynote was available on YouTube.

In the speech, Doctorow, co-editor of Boing Boing, outlined copyright and digital rights management's current state of affairs by providing details and examples that took the conversation far beyond the typically polarized copyright debate that divides the analysis into two mutually exclusive parts - either bad or good. In warming up to a proposal of his own set of laws he outlined an important issue that affects those experimenting on multiple portable platforms such as the iPhone, iPad, Android, and other emerging devices. Apple worked as the central example because of their sophisticated management of DRM, supported by the fact that they are generally good at what they do. Doctorow's concern about Apple's proprietary restrictions on transferring purchases from iTunes or the App Store were compounded by a recent announcement in the Guardian that German patent court has granted Apple a preliminary injunction that would prevent any import of Samsung's new Galaxy tablet into the country. This is certainly a concern for consumers and adds to the importance of Doctorow’s speech - but it’s an even bigger concern for artists who are experimenting on these platforms. As more artists make apps for the App Store they are opting into a restricted environment. If a consumer buys their app, and wants to transfer it to another device, they have no recourse except to ask Apple for permission. The chance that Apple will forego their ownership of the app's DRM for creative freedom is slim. Combined with the myriad of extraneous copyright laws that Doctorow outlines and the fact, as he states it, that artists are by far the most aggressive content copiers and producers - there is definitely a reason to be concerned.

The second half of the Keynote was spent reviewing Doctorow's three laws:

1: "Any time someone puts a lock on something that belongs to you and won't give you the key, they didn't put the lock there for your benefit."
2: "Fame won't guarantee fortune, but no one has ever gotten rich by being obscure."
3: "Information doesn't want to be free, people do."

Most AWESOME Mobile $ Experiment - Jonathan Stark wants you to use his Starbucks card - latimes.com

There is such a thing as a free cup of coffee.

Just ask Jonathan Stark, a mobile applications consultant from Providence, R.I., who started conducting an experiment in social sharing in July. That's when he began letting people download his Starbucks card to their smartphones to buy coffee on him.

Really. 

Stark, 42, calls it "broadcasting money." He asked only that people keep purchases to $3 or less and that they tweet about his project. And, if they wanted to pay it forward, to add some money to the card. His Twitter account posts the card's balance.

Stark was researching mobile payments for a Boston start-up when he hit on an idea: He says he took a screen shot of the bar code in the Starbucks app on his iPhone. He emailed the screen shot to himself. Then he could open that email on any of his phones so the Starbucks barista could scan it. Then he made the screen shot available to the world. People who didn't have smartphones printed out the screen shot. One person even had the barista scan his laptop.

In the beginning, he had fewer than 100 people following him on Twitter, so the card balance always remained fairly low. But over the weekend, Stark's experiment was discovered and the lattes began flowing.

Stark estimates that the Starbucks card has gone through about $4,400, most of it in the last two days. That's $4,000 in anonymous donations, he said.

"95% of people are super cool and like the idea. The last I checked, about an hour ago, the number of people getting drinks versus people contributing money was 2 to 1," Stark said.

Jack Black Adapting Daniel Clowes’: THE DEATH RAY FOR SCREEN w Chris Milk Directing- DISCOSALT

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What's up with this project???

"Now, the darkly humored superhero deconstruction novel is rumored to be adapted into a film by Jack Black’s Electric Dynamite Productions with a script from Clowes, under the direction of music video and commercial director Chris Milk (The singing heart video for Gnarls Barkley’s Who’s Gonna Save My Soul). The film will however, will reportedly take a slightly different direction with the story, most notably, changing the main character, Andy, to a middle-aged adult."