Imagine how much richer our lives would be if we could get past living in a world filled with “that’s just the way we’ve always done it” thinking, and replace it with a whole new set of completely unreasonable ideas that shake us up and help us see the world a bit differently.
Tag: Chris Betcher
Congratulations Chris. Intriguing role, does it include edu or is it more about business and beyond? Exciting times.
I ‘ve been asked to present a keynote and workshop at the National Education Summit in Melbourne in August. The organisers of the event wanted to do an interview and ask a few questions as a way of promoting the event, which I did via email. This has been published elsewhere, but I thought I’d c…
This is interesting reading in regards to the arguments of Gary Stager and Virginia Eubanks. I wonder if any part of the system is ‘neutral’ or amoral?
This is part two of my Beyond Belief project, where every month during 2019 I plan to experience a different religion that I know nothing about. This month its Sikhism.
I spent nearly five week in Bali over the December/January period, so Balinese Hinduism seems like an obvious place to start. As part of Indonesia, a predominantly Muslim country, Bali is a religious outlier with nearly 85% of the island’s population identifying as Hindu. Its version of Hinduism is a little different to that traditionally found in India, which is polytheistic (believing in many gods), and it has quite a different feel to the other Muslim parts of Indonesia. Balinese Hinduism claims to be monotheistic, with only one god, although it seems to me that in practice this is not always the case, based on so many different statues I saw everywhere. There were statues of Vishnu and Ganesha and many, many others that I didn’t recognise, so I’m not totally sure how the monotheistic thing applies.
In the first post of a new series looking at different beliefs, Chris Betcher reflects on his time spent in Bali their practice of Hinduism. This is more than Betcher’s attempt to write a Wikipedia page, instead he is open about the different customs and his particular experiences. In some ways this reminds me of John Safran’s documentary series, John Safran vs. God. I look forward to following this series throughout the year.
I still like social media, I just don’t want it to be a permanent proxy for my real life.
I too have progressively stepped away from social media. What I find interesting about all this is where it leaves blogging? Sometimes it gets tainted with the same brush, maybe because it is based on the same technology, however I still believe it is something different. That is why I have embraced the IndieWeb and the effort to manage my own online interactions.
This kind of pisses me off, because they do NOT have the rights to restrict access to my image like this, especially when they make it a subscription access thing. Whilst I choose not to use the NC (Non Commercial) aspect of the Creative Commons licensing system – which mean that people can indeed make money from using my photos if they wish – the SA (Share Alike) component means that they must publish under the same licence as they got it. In practical terms, this does effectively mean that my photos cannot be used commercially, since anyone using them has to make them freely available in the same way that I did. But what they are definitely not allowed to do is to restrict others from using them in any way, including watermarks or paywalls. I see this as a clear breach of the terms of my Creative Commons licence.
Right now, given that Google Play Music is going away, I’m leaning towards a switch to Spotify. Although if the New YouTube Music service adds the ability to upload my own files, then I could be swayed to stay in Google land, even if they do want an extra $2 a month to remove the ads from YouTube.
I saw all the news about YouTube Music and changes to YouTube Red, however I must have missed the information about the closing of Google Play Music. I wonder what will happen on Android for playing audio? I have actually come to like Google Music, so it is kind of annoying.
Reply to Chris Betcher and Location Tracking
I am wondering if this is the way of the future Chris? Are we coming to a time when insurance companies, car manufacturers or platforms collect our data whether we like it or not? It is baked into the Maps API infrastructure. I worry with the way that data is shared whether some of these companies even need our explicit permission anymore? Take for example the recent analysis of tracking on Android:
The tracker allows marketers to use machine learning to discover personas, uses cross-device ID, and even uses behavioral analysis to guess when a user is sleeping, and a probabilistic matching algorithm to match identities across devices.
What is disconcerting is that it may not be the application designed for location which provides a company with location information.