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Non-Fungible Tokens are the NFTs of Education

In my last article, I wrote admiringly about John Fetterman, and later that day he had a stroke; so I’m a little wary of writing about cryptocurrency and non-fungible tokens again, lest they, too, continue their precipitous clambering downward trends. However, I am excited to write about the future importance of a decentralized information network, and to discuss how the blockchain will enhance freedom, and independence, and I want to firmly, and vehemently, set the expectation that NFTs will become the new publication pathway for distributing information — as well as becoming the de facto standard for education.

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What We Have Become and What Cannot be Undone

We live in a selfish world where Social Media has become the public square replacing the private confessional and the anonymous donation box. We click a LIKE button and we feel better. We promote our private good deeds in an open airing and our righteousness quintuples in the amount of retweets we earn. This is all wrong and misguided. We shouldn’t do good things just to be rewarded. We must not aspire to be the hero of our own invention just because that’s the immature nattering standard of the day.

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From Wrist to Hand and Back Again: Apple Hands You a Future as Your iWatch Watches You

I love it when Apple unwittingly, but always purposefully, hands us our future — for a steep admission price. Watching our new watch-centric Futureworld unwind yesterday — in the din from a bright new set of iPhone 6 twins — was a surreal and foreboding experience. Apple takes us by the hand and we lovingly follow, and play along, all while paying up — and we believe we’re all better for it in the effervescent end; but are we?

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Obey Your Children

There are times when children are right and parents are wrong.  We’re so often trained to think that children know nothing when they actually know quite a lot when it comes to their thoughts and feelings.  It’s just too easy for parents to overrule their children just because they “say so” and because they’re older and taller and heavier than the kids below them.  Sometimes parents need to obey their children.

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Sleeping in Public at the Queens Mall in New York City

I work near a bunch of shopping malls in Queens.  There’s one mall, in particular, that I call the “Sleeping Mall” because random men, throughout the day, flop on couches and take over chairs for hours at a time to sleep in public.

I can understand this sleepy behavior if you’ve been shopping all day and you sit down to rest your feet and you happen to nod off — that happens to all of us at times — but these men are dedicated, daily, regular ,snoozers who, as you can see in this photo from yesterday morning, even remove their shoes and fall over because they are so thoroughly swimming in deep REM tides.

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When Google Burps, We Swallow

Yesterday, I was checking out the “new and improved” Google Now feature on my iPhone, and when I pulled up the weather card, I was met with this remarkable temperature:  125 degrees in the light rain in Jersey City at 11:18 in the morning.

What?

Huh!

I quickly checked my other favorite weather site — forecast.io — on my iPad, and learned the actual temperature in Jersey City was a balmy, but humid, 75 degrees with scattered rain.  A 50 degree bogus increase in temperature is a really bad result from a company you pay to trust.

It was a little alarming to see how bluntly and boldly Google Now delivered the absolutely wrong — and dangerous! — temperature.  Sure, mistakes happen, but there was no subsequent notification, or even acknowledgement later, that the 125 degree temperature was a hiccough in the Google world — and that should concern us all.

When Google burps, we all involuntarily swallow.

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Electronic Belongings: Just What Are You Leaving Behind?

The rise of Big Brother has long been a topic of discussion here. We have talked about cameras in the classroom, the FamilyMap service and the potential use of Google Earth by terrorists and all manners of surveillance and invasions of privacy in between.

However how diligent are we when taking action to guard our own privacy?

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