Haiti

by Ben Robison on January 14, 2010

Act, Give, Support, Help.

The thoughts and concern of the Fractor Team is with our neighbors to the South.

You can help immediately by donating to the Red Cross to assist the relief effort. Contribute online to the Red Cross, or donate $10 to be charged to your cell phone bill by texting “HAITI” to “90999.” Find more ways to help through the Center for International Disaster Information.

And one other group: Partners In Health have been in the Central Plateau in Haiti for 25 years and are setting up a temporary field hospital in Port-au-Prince and a supply chain through the Dominican Republic. PIH is an incredible organization and have the long standing relationships in place to help quickly and effectively.

In general, it seems that cash donations are best way of helping. Save the in-kind donations for a month down the road when distribution will be easier and the items will be more useful. Haiti needs our support now and for years to come.

Along those lines, consider supporting: Edeyo and the school they are building/rebuilding. Their École du Bel-Air is set in one of the poorest areas of Port-au-Prince, which like the 9th ward in the aftermath of Katrina, has been particularly devastated.

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Fractor, Drupal and OS

by Ben Robison on December 16, 2009

In anticipation of Fractor’s spring launch (whisper, whisper), we want to announce that Fractor’s code is Open Source. We utilized Drupal as our content management system and created a number of customizations, including a java based news and action platform and a java based recommendation engine.

We are currently looking over our site to determine what useful functions can be abstracted and returned to the Drupal community and hope that this announcement will serve as a starting point to a fruitful and rich relationship with the Open Source community.

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Art and Meaning in a Technologically Fluid and Globally Interdependent Age

December 9, 2009

A prevalence of certain types of genius at particular epochs in history—Jesus, Socrates, Buddha or Shakespeare, More, Marlowe, Johnson, and Milton —seem related to transitional periods between various social, ecological, political or philosophical conditions. We are clearly in such a period as technological advances increase at an exponential rate and global information, economics and travel [...]

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The End of Poverty?

November 30, 2009

Last weekend Cinema Village screened “The End of Poverty”, a documentary that traces the cause of today’s global inequality. The filmmaker Philippe Diaz wonders how it is possible that in a world with so much wealth so much poverty can exist? To answer that question the film begins in colonial times with the exploitation of [...]

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Multiple modes of communication

November 6, 2009

Yesterday’s NYT’s contained an interesting article on the value of text messaging to improve compliance of teenage transplant recipients with daily medications. It is not clear from the study whether the messaging or the back-end warning messages sent to parents or caregivers had the most impact but the results were significant.
The combination of [...]

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Fractor Digital and the Power of Chocolate

November 2, 2009

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Online education beats the classroom.

November 2, 2009

The US Department of Education published a report this summer that compared online versus traditional in class teaching from 1996 to 2008. The study concludes that “On average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.”
The report analyzed 99 samples across the 12-year span, most of which take place in college [...]

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Politics and Critical Thinking through Service

October 28, 2009

A key portion of yesterday’s debate between New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his opponent Bill Thompson focused on education. According to Bloomberg, state statistics show that students are performing better in key metrics, but Thompson argued that the metrics themselves were flawed and that schools need to cultivate student’s critical thinking skills over and [...]

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The emergence of 21st Century Curricula

October 28, 2009

The need for 21st Century relevant curricula are being touted by policy makers and supported by educators. How this plays out in the intersection between problem based learning, service based learning, cooperative learning as well online and offline environments is a fertile point of discussion.
What is clear is that the process of learning itself is [...]

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Fractor films? Emergent Acts mmmmm…

October 24, 2009

mmAct – Will let this one speak for itself

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