posted Jan 11, 2010 1:01 PM by Zoe Buck
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updated Jan 11, 2010 1:03 PM
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From now on I will be posting at ZBlog 2.0, which is at zbuckster.blogspot.com. Comments are enabled there. There is a link on the sidebar to get you there. |
posted Jan 5, 2010 2:30 PM by Zoe Buck
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updated Jan 5, 2010 3:11 PM
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My grandmother sent me a New York Times clipping this week about preschool math education based on cognitive neuroscience. I know, sending cut out pieces of newsprint through the mail, how quaint. Yet somehow comforting. Maybe I'm biased, but I just love the smell and feel of newsprint. Unfortunately my selfish sensory desires won't save the trees. Or the newspaper industry. Or journalistic integrity. Sigh.
Anyhow, as I was saying before I got distracted. The article, entitled "Studying Young Minds, and How to Teach Them," profiles a math curriculum at the Stanley M. Makowski Early Childhood Center in Buffalo. Above the headline, three adorable four-year-olds in matching green sweatshirts organize the numbers 1-5 printed on sets of green cards. Reporter Benedict Carey (per the byline) describes a program called Building Blocks, which makes no assumptions about at what age children are "wired" to learn certain concepts. This whole idea flies in the face of the traditional Piagetian stages of development. It also seems to lean toward what has traditionally been associated with behaviorism: in particular drills, drills drills. But the drills are not designed to help children memorize multiplication tables. Instead they are designed to encourage certain connections in the brain. Very cognitive science. For example, the teacher shows the children a paper plate with three dots on it, and then covers it quickly. She wants the students to be able to recognize the number three without counting. In my opinion this reeks of associationism (which fits neatly into behaviorism). But it's definitely not traditional associationism. Instead of training children to produce the correct responses to a very narrow set of questions, Building Blocks is training children to think about numbers and patterns in a certain way, which will allow them to think about questions in a better way, and formulate mathematically accurate responses. Very constructivist in this light. Building Blocks is also said to incorporate games, play and artwork into the math curriculum. Very Vygotsky. The curriculum, although clearly based on the vocabulary of cognitive neuroscience, appears to incorporate smart methodologies from the whole gamut of learning theories.
According to the article, the method has been extremely successful, as measured by tests of simple arithmetic skills (addition, subtraction, and number recognition). After participation in Building Blocks, children scored on average 26 percentile points higher than their non-Building Blocks peers (the test was graded on a curve, so do the math).
If nothing else, stories like this one make me happy that people are rethinking teaching math. Math is a lovely thing, and should not be reserved for graduate students. Of course, these preschoolers are not creating proofs, but it sounds like some of what they do without ever touching a pencil to paper is a lot closer to real math than what can go on in the classrooms of children twice their age. Despite highly public complaints that we are falling behind in math and science education, we are getting better, and programs like this one prove that it is possible to bring untraditional programs into the classroom. Hope for the future! Woohoo!
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posted Jan 4, 2010 5:49 PM by Zoe Buck
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updated Jan 4, 2010 6:34 PM
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I finally got back to my hard drive and was able to post some writing samples. I chose a smattering of some of my favorite stuff. Everything opens up nicely in my browser, but if anyone has problems opening or seeing something please let me know. Unfortunately I don't have much of what I wrote for the N&O electronically, and when you search my name in the N&O archives you have to pay $2.50 per article to see more than just the first paragraph. |
posted Jan 3, 2010 5:51 PM by Zoe Buck
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updated Jan 3, 2010 6:05 PM
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Last night I was so pooped from driving all day, that I just fried up some frozen tilapia (only food left in the house). Then I sat down at the computer only to find my internet wasn't working. Skip to two hours and three AT&T representatives later (they sent me to "level 2 service, the internet gods"--this is a direct quote) I was finally back online. Then I went to bed and slept for ten hours. Nice.
Today I looked at some open houses (everything was bleh, nothing good) and filled the house with food. Tonight I made falafels (yum). The recipe is super easy; I can't believe as a near-vegetarian that I've never made them before! I looked up a bunch of recipes but ended up kind of making it up as I went along. I used: A can of garbanzos some chopped onion and a big chopped clove of garlic a bunch of parsley pinches to taste of turmeric, coriander, paprika, red pepper flakes, salt, pepper juice of half a lemon splash of olive oil two tablespoons flour splash of egg whites from a carton I squished everything up with a fork. Then I fried half of them in olive oil (canola oil would be better but I didn't have any) and baked the rest. Delicious! I even took a picture. |
posted Jan 2, 2010 10:52 AM by Zoe Buck
I'm leaving in an hour to go back to Santa Cruz. And in two weeks I'm going to DC. I had a wonderful time at home, hanging with my parents and seeing my friends, and cooking and knitting and starting a blog. I'm feeling good. |
posted Dec 30, 2009 3:13 PM by Zoe Buck
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updated Dec 30, 2009 4:37 PM
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| Old Software/Hardware | Replacement in the Cloud | Screenshots (click to enlarge) | | MS Word | Adobe Buzzword. Buzzword is cleaner, easier and more intuitive than Google docs if you are used to word, but of course not as conveniently incorporated with Gmail. I think of docs as more of a filing cabinet than a word processor, at least right now. The menu organization is great.
Buzzword doesn't have much of a font selection (I could care less), nor does it have all the automatic formatting stuff that word does (automatic paragraph indentation, etc.). If someone has a better cloud word processor, email me (I wish I had comments, I really do). | | | MS Excel | Zoho is better than docs, but neither satisfies my needs yet. There are still things I can't figure out how to do, like data verification. The nice thing about Zoho (Zoho anything) is that you can use your Google account to log in. | Not worth a screenshot. | | Adobe Photoshop | Picnik. Not the same, by any means, but Photoshop is seriously huge and RAM intensive. I've been using a mixture of Windows Paint and Picnik. | | | MS OneNote | Haven't found an adequate replacement yet. I love OneNote and use it religiously. Zoho does have a notebook program that looks kind of like OneNote, but lacks all my favorite things about OneNote (including offline access). No audio/video recording, no transcription, no easy clipping, no intuitive organization etc. Google notes is another animal entirely. | | | Eudora (or Outlook, or Thunderbird, or whatever) | Gmail. I used Eudora for years. Don't ask, it's a family tradition. Anyhow Gmail is an excellent replacement for a desktop email software, at least for my needs. Labels are smarter and more convenient than folders. Gmail filters are easy to make and efficient. Google Gears, which is automatic with Chrome, allows offline access to email and will queue unsent emails until the next time you're online. Integrates perfectly into the beta Chrome with extensions, displaying the number of unread emails in the top right corner of the browser, and when I click on an email link it opens a Gmail compose window. Gotta love it in every way. | You know what it looks like. | | MS Endnote | CiteULike. There are other things like CiteULike that are probably better, but that's what I use. Of course there's nothing like BibteX, but that's another story. I'm a social scientist now, I need to forget my love of TeX and move on. | | | Hard Drive | I'm not saying get rid of your local data storage, I'm just saying that you can keep enormous amounts of data on the internet for free. Mozy and other services like it offer a few free gigabytes. Windows Live SkyDrive offers 25 free gigabytes. Not to mention Google Docs (which isn't really storage because it converts everything into it's own format, but works anyhow). For less than $5 a month Mozy will give you unlimited space. That's $60 a year. Granted an external drive is a one time payment but in the cloud there is no apple juice to accidentally spill on your hard drive. No hard drive crashes. UNLIMITED SPACE. That's insane. | | | Journal | A Blog (duh). I've been asking myself exactly why I'm blogging. It's basically for me. I know nobody is really reading it (sigh I miss being a reporter) but it helps me organize my thoughts and obsessions. I can't be as brutal or honest as I can with a personal journal, obviously, but that's what my personal thoughts are for. Anything that I don't feel comfortable putting on the internet probably doesn't need to be externalized. | See screen. | | MS Windows (Yeah that's right I said it) | Google Chrome OS. Nuff said. | |
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posted Dec 29, 2009 4:31 PM by Zoe Buck
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updated Dec 30, 2009 3:12 PM
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All Subaru's come standard with AWD, and thus cannot be towed on two wheels. According to Subaru, my car should be towed either on a flat bed with no wheels on the ground, or with all four wheels turning on the ground. When I broke down on Mulholland Christmas day, the guy towed it down to Van Nuys for me with two wheels on the ground. It made a horrible noise, and after a few hundred feet of the noise, and me frantically asking him what was wrong, he stopped in the middle of Mulholland and did something that I couldn't see. Then he told me that "his parking brake was on." The noise continued, and he kept asking me if it was a stick. I said well yeah, it is a stick. He said "well then it shouldn't be doing this, I don't know why it's doing this." So the noise continued all the way down to Van Nuys on Sepulveda. I was freaking out, kept peering back at my car and telling him that I was worried. He told my car was only worth five hundred dollars anyway and laughed when I told him I thought it was worth a few thousand. He told me I should get rid of it and I was kind of miffed, because my car is my best friend and the only thing I own that doubles as a house. Once you go Subaru you never go back.
Turned out he destroyed my car. I wish I knew more about towing, because I thought he knew what he was talking about because he is a tow truck driver, so I figured he wouldn't destroy my car. But he did destroy my car.
Anyhow wish me luck. My car is important to me, sentimentally speaking, practically speaking, everything speaking. I wanted to include a picture of it but the only one I can find is from two and a half years ago. It's aged a bit since then, elegantly of course.
So now I'm waiting to see what happens. They have to pay for it, I just hope this doesn't turn into a giant hassle with my car worse for the wear. I certainly learned my lesson. Don't trust the tow truck driver even if he says it's okay. I knew something was wrong, but I trusted him because I figured he knew what he was talking about. I told him it was all wheel drive multiple times and asked him if that was the problem, and he responded by asking me over and over again if it was a stick.
Update: Car is being fixed at the dealership. Tow company is paying for it. Hooray!
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posted Dec 28, 2009 1:04 PM by Zoe Buck
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updated Dec 28, 2009 2:01 PM
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Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer has forced me to re-examine what I thought I believed about why I eat what I eat. I first began thinking about my own consumption as an ethical issue in my sophomore year of college in Peter Singer's class Practical Ethics. I had always considered myself an "ethical" person, despite not being a religious person by any means, but it wasn't until Singer's course that I encountered different systematic approaches to personal decision making. My college boyfriend fancied himself a deontologist and I fancied myself a rule utilitarian and we would argue for hours. Based on my rule utilitarian analysis of the world coupled with a heavy dose of Peter Singer, I became a strict vegetarian for a few months, eventually expanding my eating to animals that were "ethically treated," an ambiguous phrase that I wasn't even sure how to define myself.
In my junior year of college that deontological boyfriend gave me my first Michael Pollan book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and I devoured it. I went on to read The Botany of Desire and In Defense of Food and began to revise my definition of what it meant to eat ethically. I became obsessed with factory farming, corn and sustainability and decided that there were a number of factors that would impact my decision to eat meat. In In Defense of Food I learned the word "flexitarian" and adopted it for myself. Venison and other wild game became my meat of choice.
In my senior year of college I visited several farms for my journalism courses, including Bobolink Dairy. The owners of Bobolink, Jon and Nina White, were generous hosts and showed me what a farm could look like. Both Jon and Nina knew most of their cows by name, and could point them out to me from across snowy fields. They introduced me to a newborn calf named Beltane, and then invited me back in a few months for the festival of Beltane, when they would eat him. In those few months before the festival, I thought long and hard about what it meant to be eating an animal that I had met and been literally introduced to. Did it make it more wrong, or more right? Should it matter?
One of my biggest pet peeves is people who will eat absolutely anything unless it has eyes, or a beak, or some other feature that is a reminder of the animal the meat comes from. I used to be like that as a child, covering my eyes in front of the fish counter at Ralph's or while walking by the hanging ducks in the window of the Asian grocery. But this ickiness feeling is a construction of our culture, not a part of human nature, and a harmful construction in my opinion. Are we really so disconnected from the origins of what we put in our bodies that we can't deal with anything that reminds us of the fact that these animals were once alive? If we can't deal with the fact that these animals were once alive do we have a right to eat them? I say no. With this in mind I set out to catch a fish in Yosemite this last summer and insisted that the ranger who lent me his equipment let me kill it. It was hard, and there was a little ickiness in my stomach, but I did it and felt good about it because it didn't last long (and also the trout up there are not native). I breathed a sigh of relief and ate the trout for dinner (that's me on the left eating my trout). I have never felt so connected to what I was ingesting and it felt awesome. I can't wait to be in a place in my life where almost everything I put in my mouth was harvested or killed by my own hand or that of someone else I know.
Anyhow the point is I ate Beltane the calf and I liked it, and I felt better about it than any bovine I had ingested before or have ingested since.
Eating Animals takes a stance that is a lot more hard-core than Pollan's philosophy. Although Foer praises Pollan's writing, he implies that the author has not gone far enough in his recommendations. Foer is convincing, describing the horrors of factory farming in far gorier detail than Pollan or Food Inc. But I am halfway through the book and he has yet to address the possibility that one can eat eggs, dairy and meat responsibly. I am not going to give up my flexitarian status yet, but I am going to be a lot more discerning about food labels that claim things like "cage free" or "organic." I've also given up a lot of seafood. If Foer's statistics are correct, it is almost impossible to find real food out there from real farms. However, it is out there, I can probably find it in Santa Cruz, and that makes me happy.
Still, I can't help but wonder if I've been careless in some of my food choices. It's hard, and I'm a hypocrite sometimes, I'll admit it. It is just hard for me to understand how most of the world, good people who make very ethical decisions every day about how they treat other people, domestic animals and the environment, can willingly support an industry that is so very, very evil and horrible and gross. I'll say that here because it's my blog, but I'm scared now to publish it because omnivores will think I'm judging. That's kind of the stereotype of vegetarians as "judgmental" and "preachy." I'm not judging: like many life decisions what you eat is a personal, ethical decision. I'm just trying to put my own thinking into words for anybody who cares.
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posted Dec 27, 2009 5:38 PM by Zoe Buck
 A year ago (December 17, 2008 to be exact), I used store bought whole fat cows milk to make a traditional cheddar that I waxed and aged in my personal cheese cave. My personal cheese cave is in fact a dorm fridge that my parents keep their wine in. So it's a little colder than it should be. A typical cheese fridge should be around 50-55 degrees F. This one was around 35 degrees F. Anyhow I just opened it up and had a bite, and the cheddar turned out looking like, well, cheddar. And tasting like it too! There's something a little bit odd about the texture, which tastes like I lost too much butterfat along the way. But over all, I gained some hard cheese making confidence. When I get back to Santa Cruz I will rejoin the goat's milk cooperative I was in, and ask them for fresher milk. They had been giving me Sunday's milk on Wednesday, and the final product was a little sour, like yogurt. It was good, but I want to try it with milk that has a lower initial acidity (i.e. fresh milk). I need to get better at titrating so I can understand this a little better. I have this cheap little acid titration kit that never seems to work just right. Probably user error. I'm in the market for a little dorm fridge if anyone has one they're trying to get off their hands, by the way. |
posted Dec 26, 2009 9:47 PM by Zoe Buck
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updated Dec 26, 2009 10:31 PM
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The mechanic doesn't open until Monday.
I'm Google's biggest new fan, and they still haven't invited me to use Google Voice or Google Wave. I'm hurt.
Check out wave, they explain it in the clip below. I just hope it doesn't require instant action like IM, which is too much pressure for me.
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