Brandymore Castle

Although I doubt prosecution will do any good, that is not the real question, it is just the only response a failed society has to clean up the mess its made, to lessen the shame of failing to provide a safe learning environment for Phoebe. Stalking, assaulting and verbally abusing an adult is a crime. It ought to be treated seriously when one child commits violence on another. Bullying is a serious violation of human and civil rights of the individual. Those rights do not disappear just because a person is a child. Ensuring the right of an individual to autonomy and safety requires greater vigilance when a child is concerned, because they are less capable of defending their self or even prohibited from self-defense by school rules, which the bully does not care to follow, but the victim must to avoid being doubly victimized, first by the bully and second by the clueless school administrators. The bullied child is often put in a situation with no way out. They are forced by law to atte...

The blacksmith knows, when you have too many irons in the fire, the iron you leave in the fire will burn before you have time to hammer the iron you're working on. The expression 'having too many irons in the fire' comes from blacksmithing and stands for having too many tasks competing for your attention. I just realized how accurately it describes being overwhelmed by stressful commitments. The trouble is, in life, we often need to put several irons in the fire. For example, you may need to go back to school for continuing education, but you can't go right away, so you make plans, you make an appointment for the required tests and schedule of classes, you anticipate months of class work. This one task, going back to school, becomes an 'iron in the fire.' While you're anticipating going back to school, other things will come up, daily life, a new person, a new project, but all the worries of going back to school will still be on your mind. As life goes on, w...

We need to enable people to curate collections. This means blogging the contents of an archive, which can be as simple as a blogger selecting certain items (by surrogate, typically a picture but also 3D rotatable image or video) and posting them to the blog along with any caption available through the collection's online database. They don't have to say anything original to be useful. The basic requirement is that archives places their collections online, giving access to potential curators outside the archive. Curating is anything a user does to create context for the cultural artifact, commenting, annotating, writing that contextualizes the artifact (like wiki pages). User curation of the archive helps people feel connected with the archive and its contents. Involving non-academics in the archives is important for the continued existence of an instituation and the collection, the value of which exists partly in the memories of people and in the objects themselves. I learned f...

I have frequently been the victim of an author who has a peculiar view on a subject, which turns out to be simply wrongheaded. Because there are so many books, many more than I could purchase, read and evaluate and because turning to book reviewers is frequently just as useless as getting the wrong view from the wrong authority, the value of books can be somewhat limited. It is easy to assume that if a book is published on a subject that the author knows something about the subject, that they are well versed in he subject and The problem is that authors have differing views on the same subject. They have different backgrounds and differ about what is important to them. Writers generally write what they know. This is a problem, for example, in music. Thirty years ago you could not find a book explaining harmonic theory behind blues harmony. Oh, there may have been a few academic or musicological works on the subject, but generally, if you wanted to learn blues harmony you had to listen ...