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Sunday, October 20, 2013
Is Pitbull 'Mr. Education'? Rapper Opens Charter School In Miami
Pitbull is one of a growing list of celebrities who have opened their wallets or given their names to charter schools.
Jeff Daly/AP
Pitbull is one of a growing list of celebrities who have opened their wallets or given their names to charter schools.
Jeff Daly/AP
Rapper Pitbull (Armando Christian Pérez) is the latest in a long list of celebrities lending their star power to the flourishing charter school movement. Alicia Keyes, Denzel Washington, Shakira, Oprah — all support or sponsor charter schools.
The Sports Leadership And Management Academy (SLAM), Pitbull's new public charter school for students in grades six through 12, opened this fall in Miami's Little Havana neighborhood. Pitbull says SLAM's sports theme has a vocational bent as a way to hook kids for whom school is boring.
"If sports is what you love, one way or another, it's a business you can get involved with ... whether you're a therapist, an attorney, a broadcaster," he says. "They're already labeling me 'Mr. Education.' "
It's an interesting twist, considering that at the last school Pitbull attended, the principal couldn't wait to get rid of him. "He literally told me, 'I don't want you in my school ... gonna give you your diploma ... get out of here.' "
Pitbull's parting words were: "Thank you."
Seventeen-year-old Austin Rivera says he transferred to SLAM after Pitbull spoke at his previous school. "He came from nothing and became something huge. ... It shows like not a lot of people are handed everything," Austin says.
"[A] lot of these kids are so creative ... but no one believes in them. ... No one motives them," Pitbull says. "I relate to them ... but then I give it to them raw."
The rapper's parents fled Cuba and settled in Miami, where they struggled. His father went to jail for dealing drugs. And at 16, Pitbull began dealing, too — and rapping. He chose the name "Pitbull" because, he says, pit bulls are too stupid to lose. The name and the "outlaw" image stuck.
Pitbull's breakthrough hit came in 2004 with a song titled "Culo," a vulgar word in Spanish and "booty" in the rap vernacular.
It wasn't long before Pitbull was making millions, touring with rappers Eminem and 50 Cent. Pitbull's problems with drugs and alcohol, his womanizing and his profanity-laced lyrics didn't exactly qualify him for opening a charter school. Surprisingly, parents and educators at SLAM didn't think that should disqualify him, either.
Critics say Pitbull is not the issue. It's the school itself that they find objectionable.
"[I] don't know if it's going to provide something useful at the end of the day," says Raquel Regalado, who is on the Miami-Dade County Public Schools' school board. "I guess you can expect Pitbull to show up every now and then, and that's cool if you're a Pitbull fan ... [but] how does that translate into academic achievement? That's the difficult part of this that parents don't understand. ... I think it's a marketing ploy, honestly."
Nina Reese, who heads the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, says she's not about to apologize for supporting the rapper's school.
"Whether it's Pitbull or Meryl Streep in Rhode Island or Sandra Bullock in Louisiana," she says, "charters do benefit from celebrities because public schools, they do have to market themselves to families because these are schools of choice."
Reese says she has no problem with Pitbull's music, either.
"We're not endorsing his music, but welcoming him as an investor," Reese says. Besides, she adds, everybody is entitled to their own tastes. "I admit that I'm a fan of his music."
Three of Pitbull's six children attend charter schools.
"I'm not just a charter school advocate. ... I'm a charter school parent," Pitbull said when talking at this year's National Charter School Conference in D.C. "And that makes me one of you."
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Could a stand-alone DM app let Twitter take on BBM, WhatsApp, and Facebook?
Twitter appears to be planning a revamp of its direct messaging feature, possibly including the launch of a standalone application for the feature. Recently, the company began allowing people to receive direct messages from all users, should they choose, including those that they do not follow. But Twitter may also preparing a standalone app for direct messages, which could arrive later this year, according to All Things D:
But Twitter’s new vision for direct messages will go further. It has kicked around the idea of launching a standalone direct-messaging application separate from the Twitter app, according to three people familiar with the matter. It is unclear, however, what form the final revamp of direct messages will take.
Twitter is also preparing a major refresh of its mobile app for later this year, and its possible that direct messages will have a more prominent place then. It's quite a change from just a couple of years ago, when Twitter's app was redesigned, and direct messages moved, almost hidden away. Completely discontinuing direct messages was discussed at one point as well.
But Twitter seems to have caught on to the fact that users often want a way to message their friends privately. Messaging apps like WhatsApp are increasing in popularity, and Facebook has its own standalone messaging app. Twitter may be hoping that a renewed focus on direct messages will help solve its growth issues ahead of their upcoming IPO.
How do you use Twitter's direct messages? Would you want a standalone app for them? Let us know in the comments.
Source: All Things D
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K.J. Noons: 'If I lost, I would've retired'
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Rielle Hunter Apologizes For Affair with John Edwards, Book Exposing Relationship
Rielle Hunter, best known for her affair with North Carolina Senator John Edwards that destroyed his marriage and his political career but produced a daughter, is apologizing for her earlier book that revealed intimate details of their relationship.
In Hindsight, What Really Happened: The Revised Edition: John Edwards, Our Daughter and Me is an e-book out today that sets the record straight and apologizes for both her behavior and her decision to write about it.
Hunter takes the interesting tack of annotating her previous best-seller, 2012's What Really Happened: John Edward, Our Daughter and Me.
For example the opening sentence of the original book read, "I don't like to think of myself as a stupid person, but I have done a lot of things in my life that were just plain stupid."
In the revised version, Hunters adds this in bold: "<I feel now that one of the stupidest things I have done (lately) is publishing this book when I was still so hurt and publishing it before John Edwards read it.>"
Hunter outlined her reasons for doing the revision and previewed the new book in an essay at the Huffington Post.
Hunter writes: "I behaved badly. That may seem obvious to you but it's taken me a long time to admit that, even to myself. For years I was so viciously attacked by the media and the world that I felt like a victim. I now realize that the attacks are actually beside the point. The point is: I behaved badly. I am very sorry for my wrong, selfish behavior. Back in 2006, I did not think about the scope of my actions, how my falling in love with John Edwards, and acting on that love, could hurt so many people. I hurt Elizabeth and her kids. I hurt her family. I hurt John's family. I hurt people that knew Elizabeth."
She goes on to add, "And then instead of apologizing when I should have, I went on to hurt more people by writing a book. I truly did not realize at that time how damaged I was and because of that, when I wrote my book I made more mistakes, ones I feel horrible about."
Hunter and Edwards, the 2004 Democratic vice presidential nominee, began an affair in 2006 with videographer Hunter.
Their daughter, Quinn, was born in February 2008. Hunter first claimed the father was Edwards aide Andrew Young, but news of the affair ended Edwards' political career.
Finally in 2010, Edwards admitted he was the father of the child. Elizabeth Edwards announced her intention to divorce him but died in December 2010 of cancer before it could be finalized.
In Hindsight, What Really Happened is available now in e-book format from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other digital booksellers.
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Saturday, October 19, 2013
Kids Should Hack Their School-Provided iPads
This article originally appeared in Zócalo Public Square and the New America Foundation’s Weekly Wonk. Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, the New America Foundation, and Arizona State University; Zócalo Public Square is a partnership of NAF and Arizona State.
Last year, 40 tablet computers were delivered to the children of two remote Ethiopian villages. The villagers were 100 percent illiterate—the kids had never seen road signs, product labels, or printed material of any kind.
Technicians from the One Laptop Per Child program dropped off a stack of boxes, showed a couple of adults how to use the solar chargers, and then walked away. Within minutes, the kids had cracked the packaging open and figured out how to turn the tablets on. Within weeks, they were singing their ABCs, picked up from the English-language learning software installed on the tablets. Within five months, some kid figured out that the tablets had built-in cameras—they had been disabled for ethical reasons—and hacked the Android operating system to activate them.
So, frankly, it shouldn’t have come as much of a shock when a few hundred of the tech-drenched children of Los Angeles figured out how to “hack” the $678 iPads they were given by their school district, just one month into the new school year.
In recent weeks, Los Angeles distributed iPads to 50,000 students in the public school system as part of a pilot for a $1 billion citywide initiative. Kids at Westchester High, one of the few schools that allowed students to take their tablets home, quickly noted that they could bypass the district-installed security filter with two clicks, allowing them to access banned sites like YouTube and Facebook.
One of the student hackers—if two clicks can be called “hacking”—was Westchester High valedictorian candidate Brian Young, who was hauled into the principal’s office for a dressing-down. “He wasn’t threatening me, but he told me millions of dollars of technology had been compromised because of me,” Young told the Los Angeles Times. Young said he fiddled with the security settings innocently, after having trouble getting online at home. Apparently, the iPads are configured to work well only on the limited in-school network. Young said he’d hoped to download some apps that the school’s network couldn’t handle or didn’t permit. We don’t know whether young Young was looking to download something to help with his math homework or whether he was pursuing … other extracurricular activities. But that didn’t stop school administrators and local media from panicking.
L.A. Unified School District Police Chief Steven Zipperman fretted in a confidential memo obtained by the Los Angeles Times that students would share their “hacks” via social media. “I’m guessing this is just a sample of what will likely occur on other campuses once this hits Twitter, YouTube, or other social media sites explaining to our students how to breach or compromise the security of these devices,” Zipperman wrote. “I want to prevent a ‘runaway train’ scenario when we may have the ability to put a hold on the roll-out.”
But why would students gaining mastery over their digital devices be considered a “runaway train” at all? The iPads were loaded with software from the textbook giant Pearson, so perhaps the fantasy was that high school students would be content paging through glowing versions of their textbooks.
But the whole point of introducing current technology into the classroom is to help education catch up with the rest of the world, which has been utterly transformed by fast computers with fast Internet access.
Unfortunately, when it comes to technology in education, traditional schools tend to use fuzzy math. Give ’em iPads, the thinking goes, and the test scores will soar. The intended mechanism isn’t always clear, and the vision becomes even more muddled when the inevitable committees, unions, and concerned parents get involved. The result too often is restricted access to semi-useless tech crippled by proprietary software deals and censored Internet.
Implementing bold ideas like “flipping the classroom”—having students watch lectures at home and spending their classroom hours doing problem sets, engaging in group discussions, or getting one-on-one tutorials—means letting kids use the relevant tech on their own time and in their own way. It means trusting them with access to devices like the ones they might someday use at work.
Schools are supposed to be places of free inquiry, where kids seek knowledge and debate ideas in a safe space. Limiting access to such basic sites like YouTube signals that kids can’t be trusted to make their own decisions—about information sources or time management.
One of the most famous innovations in online learning to date is Khan Academy, which offers thousands of tutorials on subjects from A to Z. What site does Khan use to host those lessons? YouTube. Sorry, L.A. school kids!
One Laptop Per Child considered the Ethiopian kids’ hack a success. “The kids had completely customized the desktop—so every kids’ [sic] tablet looked different. We had installed software to prevent them from doing that,” a contrite Ed McNierney, OLPC’s chief technology officer, told the MIT Technology Review. “And the fact that they worked around it was clearly the kind of creativity, the kind of inquiry, the kind of discovery that we think is essential to learning.”
On Oct. 1, LAUSD pronounced its ed tech experiment temporarily out of control and admitted that several schools were in the process of attempting to pry the new tablets from their students’ clammy hands.
Los Angeles should take a page from OLPC’s lesson book. School officials say the project has not been halted and that schools are still on track to distribute another 300,000 tablets next fall. But unless administrators are willing to radically rethink their goals for the billion-dollar tech initiative in the coming months, a few hundred kids figuring out how to customize their iPads may just be the most beneficial result.
Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/10/l_a_school_ipad_program_students_should_hack_their_tablets.html
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Heidi Klum and Martin Kristen Keep Henry Healthy
Giving some personal attention to her oldest boy, Heidi Klum and Martin Kristen took Henry to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center on Saturday morning (October 19).
The "Project Runway" host wore a black maxi dress as she held the hand of her son while he jumped to try and touch the ceiling of the parking garage.
Recently, the busy 40-year-old working mom decided on a new place to call home, closing on a mansion in the Stone Ridge section of Bel-Air.
Set on four acres, the 11,000 square foot home with an in-ground pool will be perfect for her four children and boyfriend.
Source: http://celebrity-gossip.net/heidi-klum/heidi-klum-and-martin-kristen-keep-henry-healthy-946208
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