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The Art of Conditional Pre-Tipping

Getting good service can be a difficult problem in our indecent, modern, world.  One way of guaranteeing good service is to provide a cash tip to the person assisting you.  In restaurants and in service bays where you are well-known, tipping helps get you good service; but what do you do with the incidental worker you may only see one time, like a moving company team, or a repairman?  How can you make sure they’ll get the job done to your satisfaction within your time requirement window?  Conditional Pre-Tipping is one method I use to ensure excellent, one-off, service.

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Chris Brown’s Urban Semiotic Problem

I’m not a big fan of singer Chris Brown.  I don’t like how he treated his girlfriend, Rihanna, but I do appreciate the pressure he’s feeling from his neighbors over an invented Urban Semiotic problem that he’s deeply invested in on a career angle.  No, I’m not talking about his Graffiti album, I’m talking about his driveway.

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Petting the Mainstream Middling Mind: An Indictment Against Standardized Testing

I have never been a fan of standardized testing in schools.  There’s too big a variable at play — missing the wild mind — and these tests praise and condone only the middle.  If you don’t do well on these tests, you are not moved forward or thought of as a significant thinker.  The system doesn’t mind if your wild view of the world matters.  The only thing the test givers care about is finding, and approving, the mainstream, middling, mind to guarantee, and impress, conformity.

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Four Corners Revisited: My People

I am cheating a little and using the Four Corners concept to quickly introduce to you people and ideas so that future articles on Portugal make a lot more sense.

Introducing Mr P — who does not really wish to be on the internet at all. Ironically, I met Mr P online playing a rather silly game called Tribal Wars. Mr P was born in Morocco of French parents and has been living in Portugal for most of his life. He has a degree in Biology from Pau University. He speaks French, Portuguese and English extremely well and has knowledge of Spanish, Italian and German as well. He has a strong sense of history and of culture. The mix of our cultures and our language brings a lot of humour to our lives. We love to travel — not just in the broadest sense — but in the everyday sense of exploration; not only of ourselves and our lives but in the beauty found all around us. We have adventures everywhere! This picture was taken at our handfasting where we took our vows in front of friends and family.

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The Need for Recess

When I was young my mother told me that as children, our minds were like sponges and that we could absorb much knowledge that our teachers gave over to us. An important thing that I would like to add to that, however, is that the transfer of information from teacher to student cannot be the only thing that happens from the time the student arrives in school until they go home for the day. Recess, it turns out, is an extremely important part of the children’s day.

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The Dead and the Scared: How Sandy Hook Stood Up to a Gunman

I’m not sure if there’s much more left to to say in the wake of the Sandy Hook killings in Connecticut that hasn’t already been shot to death before — except that it was excellent how, together, teachers and students faced down death that day — while our politicians will never be similarly brave because they are more terrified of the long and ugly shadow of the NRA than they are of dead children.

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Should We Find Out Obesity Likelihood at Birth?

As Fall arrived, I noticed a lot more children taking the train in the morning, on their way to school. I could not help but notice that this year, as in years past, the number of heavier set children seems to be on the rise — and sadly it is not just my observation but a recorded trend of an increase in the number of children and teenagers that are considered obese. When I was a child it was considerably more unusual than it is today and I fear that trends are moving toward more overweight and obese children, not fewer.

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Cybersecurity Education in Kindergarten

When I was a child, there was no need for cybersecurity because it was the early 1980s and there was no such thing as the Internet as we know it today. In the last twenty years the situation has turned around completely around — it is oftentimes difficult to determine who or what is real online and every day people come up with new scams to try to rip off people and steal everything from their identity to the contents of their bank accounts.

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The Up All Night Review

Up All Night is an NBC comedy that is one of the many shows that I regularly follow on Thursday night. My wife Elizabeth and I started watching it from the beginning last year because we wanted to see to what extent the show captured reality well or was just another television show whose relevance to the real world was minimal at best.

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Death from Internet Video Stupidity

When I was a child, my brother and I regularly heard about kids our age who would get into all kinds of dangerous wacky hijinks, endangering their lives in the process. We would see news reports about a child getting hurt or dying but we would never see the dangerous circumstances in which the child got hurt.

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