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Oh, if there’s one song that means to me being 15 it’s PFM’s Impressioni di Settembre, the Impressions of September with Moog and pop bursting from all pores. Originally from PFM (=Premiata Forneria Marconi, which goes more or less like Marconi’s Awarded Bakery!), this song has been performed by many. Last, at Sanremo 2012, by nonetheless than my hero Patti Smith and the Italian group Marlene Kuntz.

Enjoy, folks, and be spirited up.

To all those who say in Italy we drive like crazy I say, yes, true. Crazy like whom?

Apparently, not crazier than the USA automobile killing club, according to Wolfram Alpha: Enjoy the stats, folks. Law-abiding citizens and lane-followers of the USA have far more fatal accidents than Italy or Spain, which are notoriously nations with the highest degree of degenerate drivers. Drivers who believe street signs are only “indications”, not obligations. Sure, Germany has a low profile: They know how to drive safely, even if they speed up. Know what? Kill the street lights, gentlemen, like they did in Holland, whereby reducing the number of accidents.

Here are the Wolfram Alpha stats.

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It’s late to talk about European decisions not being taken in Europe. The battle for the Euro, and for European unity is being fought today in the stock exchange bureaus and within the ever powerful financiers. We know that. More than ever sovereign decisions are taken not within the power chambers of each state -or union of states- but in finance circles, funds and similar multinational corporate interests.

It does not surprise learning then that Standard & Poor’s downgrading of a bunch of European nations’ credit rating has upset many among the economic knowledgeable and is being considered a big political decision. The fact is that SP’s decision may have been taken with accuracy -or may not, at this point this is irrelevant. The problem is that SP’s and Moody reflect the obvious decadence (to say the least) or North American capitalism being stretched now up to and over its possible limits. Shareholders may not be even aware of this, but the fact is SP and Moody belong to the same investors (again, finance funds) who with their left hand bet against the euro and its nations, and with the right hand score the euro-zone’s credit. Conflict of interest?

As many are beginning to see, a solution to Europe’s stagnation and possible crackdown (I dread such possibility, given the amount of energy I spent on the European dream) may well lay in the elimination of credit-rating agencies off the European coasts. Even Obama has derided them of late. And in the nationalization of finance banks. Yes, the most anti-capitalist measure there is on earth. But, see, finance banks do not really produce anything. They just bet on other people’s production and they do so with other people’s money. Sometimes, the models used turn bad and they provoke havoc, as it happened in 2008 in the US. Now, after being replenished with money -people’s money- from the governments of many nations, they turn back their menace: Hey guys! You are too indebted. Return us the money we lent! Now. Then, their allies SP’s or Moody lower the rating of indebted countries so that financing that debt is more and more costly, and it is more and more difficult to repay it. At that point the unlucky state (Ireland, Portugal, Greece, like Argentina before them) has to withstand the “measures” such corporate agencies demand of it, at all costs, social, political, economical. And at that point, the transfer of power has already taken place. It’s not Athens, or Dublin who govern in their countries. It’s Brussels or Washington. But those who end up governing are not the official powers in Brussels (the EU), or Washington (the USA): instead, and increasingly, they are the world finance funds, banks and trusts, sometimes on behalf of certain big corporations, like the construction, the military or the media businesses.

Which brings us to my second example of lost sovereignty. England’s “pirate” student, who is accused of linking to overseas websites streaming copyrighted movies with no authorization, has lost his case. The Guardian (and other media) report that a judge ruled that the

23-year-old student can be extradited to the United States for running a website posting links to pirated TV shows and films, despite significant doubts over whether such sites break any UK laws.

Said judge stated unbelievably that

There are said to be direct consequences of criminal activity by Richard O’Dwyer in the USA, albeit by him never leaving the north of England,” [judge] Purdy said. “Such a state of affairs does not demand a trial here if the competent UK authorities decline to act, and does, in my judgment, permit one in the USA.”

OMG. If this is not a case of renounced sovereignty, I don’t know what is. The UK government should take position here, and Europe’s as well. When there’s a void in power somewhere, someone will fill that void.

I conclude this with a thought on the diseased and (for now) deceased SOPA. The big media outlets have already cried out against Obama and his brave and just position against supporting such law. Watch for the next incarnation of SOPA, another indication of lost sovereignty -in this case to big media. None other than Rupert Murdoch wrote on Twitter:

So Obama has thrown in his lot withSilicon Valley paymasters who threaten all software creators with piracy, plain thievery. -

Rest in peace, Rupert, as well as the good old order.

Related articles

• Austrian downgrade reflects Europe’s complex web of problems (cnn.com)
• Sarkozy shrugs off French downgrade (cbc.ca)
• For Now, the Eurozone and the Markets Pooh-pooh the Downgrades. But the Long-Term Looms (globalspin.blogs.time.com)
• S&P downgrades European bailout fund (guardian.co.uk)

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I love traveling. Even when I do in the virtual space of the Internets. I love browsing the iTunes stores of remote countries, and see what treasures they hide. Sometimes it is disturbing to realize one cannot get the free tunes from other countries’ stores. Well, I mean, I could.

Open the alien Store, see if you like the free song, then download if from a torrent or YouTube. It was free in the first place, right?

Well, no, at least no for the SOPA-smoking people. So, rewind: here Wired Australia has a way to get an account in any iTunes Store, in any country. Cool! Of course, most free iTunes tunes are not really worth the trouble, but some, yes! Also, sometimes you find little gems, like Lana Del Rey who is free in the UK but not in the US. Yes, you feel a little like a hacker, but what the bell, a world so segmented in music and film features, deserves some hacking.

Now some tips. The UK Store is good. They have free weekly tunes worth checking. And then, something I learned. I can’t resist checking the iTunes Stores of, say, Uzbekistan, or even Senegal. I guess I’d find hidden troves of local music and so on. What? Only apps and iBooks? None in non-English? The latest bestseller is Moby Dick?

You got it: Call it Colonization. Much better than invading with steel or germs. iTunes suffices.

I wanted to do this for a long while. You see, while they were shooting Under Suspicion in Old San Juan (it must have been the year 1999) we were living in the old town and enjoyed watching the crew and actors when possible. Once, we found ourselves at a friend’s in Calle Sol, where my daughter Chiara used to play with this friend’s own daughter. So they did that afternoon, on the street, while we stayed there to check on them.

Then the movie crew was there, and the street was blocked. I was standing a few meters from Morgan Freeman, while he was opening his car’s door. He looked around. Then the director Stephen Hopkins gestured the cameraman to shoot the two girls playing on the sidewalk.

Thus my daughter came to be -super extra- in one Hollywood movie, albeit a minor one. Awesome!

I extracted a segment from the film, which I then edited with MPEG Streamclip, the super-useful video utility, since I wanted to show the initial credits together with the first scenes from Puerto Rico before the clip.

 

A tool I’m looking into for my project of Zen of Teaching is PressBook, a WordPress-based solution to author, produce and distribute books.

PressBooks lets you and your team easily author and output books in multiple formats including: epub, Kindle, print-on-demand-ready PDF, HTML, and inDesign-ready XML.

PressBook seems a powerful platform for publishing, and I consider using it after I end the first writing phase of Zen of Teaching, which is being done with a WP plugin, Digress It, a wonderful solution that divides text into paragraphs and then allows comments to be attached to them. After the discussion around the text has finished, though, I’m thinking of PressBook to make the sort of final version before the virtual press.

I discovered PressBook through this interesting article in WPMU: An Introduction to PressBooks: A Digital Book Publishing Tool Built on WordPress, which also introduced me to Anthologize, a nice tool which allows to construct a book from a WP blog.

Here is a slideshow:

Happy publishing!

Truth is, I was not fair to Rowan Atkinson in my post of yesterday. In it I wanted to raise the spirits with Trenet’s La Mer, sung while Mr. Bean ends up his vacation on a hilarious staircase improvised as he descends onto the sea. YouTube’s wonderful research library helped me with the video, only to inhibit its proper working when embedded. Ridicule as it is, you must watch the video on YouTube.

However, here I just want to focus on the extraordinary mimic capacity of Mr. Rowan, who does not talk in the movie, except for some weird mumblings, like

Bean, Sabine

(the two words do rhyme) when he meets the lovely Sabine.

In this video, which doesn’t as well work whence embedded herewith, Mr Bean uses all his histrionic abilities to improvise a show to get money in a Provence street market. It is absolutely fabulous in his interpretation of “O Mio Babbino Caro“, elsewhere known as the Puccini soprano aria sung by, among others, Maria Callas or Sissel Kyrkjebø. Even more fun when you realize the word of the aria do not match Mr. Bean’s actions! Watch it on YouTube, my friend.

{In truth, I cannot embed the movie segment here, even though I am publishing free marketing for the distributor of said movie,  Universal Studios Home Entertainment. Which sucks. Enough said. Need SOPA?}

What better way to salute the new year than with a blog post? And what better than celebrating it with the beautiful “La Mer” song by Charles Trenet? A song which has been played all over the world and is being heard in new versions all the time.

The new year begun and I had this song in my mind, but within the setting of Mr. Bean’s Holiday, the nonsense movie which ends with a very nice shot by the sea, with this song, played by Trenet himself. So here it is, enjoy: It’s good karma! {UPDATE: The embedding doesn;’t work; it has been disabled by request. Not mine! –YouTube’s contradictions! But it can be watched on YouTube itself. I wonder what were the conditions for this weird Faustian bargain…}

Here is Trenet live, half swinged, lovely!

And since YouTube is such a spectacular research library, here are some other versions which I love: Kevin Kline‘s version (from A French Kiss / yes, the actor Kevin Kline himself); and Bing Crosby’s version.

Image via Wikipedia

Some myths in education 2.0 (that I’ll need to address asap).

1. Socrates: “I cannot teach anyone, all I can do is make them think”.
   The myth of the relativist. But my definition of teaching is to make somebody think. Duh?
2. The future we cannot describe / the jobs we cannot imagine, etc.
   There is this old meme which comes around. We’ll have tomorrow jobs we can’t even imagine today. So? It’s always been like that, hermano.
3. Paying attention & learning: what’s the fuss?
   Danger lurking: the myth of learning within the classroom. Another version:
4. After learning this & that, they memorize only 36.4%.
   OMG, this is terrible. If you don’t remember, you haven’t learned it, sorry.
5. Learning styles?  Wheeler: “There are as many learning styles as there are people” (2009)
6. The image of a person (preferably, a girl) while listening/reading on her iPod with earphones. And the label: “xxx learning anytime anyplace”. Come on!
7. The identity education == learning, without using the word “to study”. In fact, interesting is that in George Siemens’ book Knowing Knowledge, said verb is not mentioned at all.

   Keep in sync with the gorgeous Zen of Teaching, where all this is taking shape.

Related articles

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• An Investigation into the Learning Styles and Self-Regulated Learning Strategies for Computer Science Students (downes.ca)
• Is my teacher an app? (blogs.netedu.info)
• Learning Styles (stevehumer.wordpress.com)