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The market as communication tool, and how government garbles the message

You may think at first glance this post is about politics. It’s not. It’s about communication. It’s about how a garbled message leads to inaccurate results. It’s interesting to think about both the bailouts of the Bush administration and the Obama administration, as well as the cranking up of the Treasury printing presses, as noise in the channel.

John Stossel may make too much sense in his post “Government Sets Us Up for the Next Bust.” But it’s worth reading it all the way through.

Just for some basic background, here’s a post entitled “Does Government Spending Bring Prosperity?” Prof. Greaves may have written it in 1975, but its truths still hold today.

PSTCC faculty to conduct SL workshop

One of our own will be conducting a workshop for faculty across all of Second Life interested in using SL for teaching. This notice went out yesterday from the Community Colleges in SL group to all its members:

Group Notice From: Pipsqueak Fiddlesticks

Hi Everyone,
We are canceling this Wedneday’s meeting in favor of a teachshop on Monday 12/8/08 by Travis Willsmere of Pellissippi State Community College. Travis has wide experience in-world and will be sharing some of his knowledge with us. Landmark will be sent soon so watch for it. 🙂 I hope you all are well and surviving finals! Pip

I will post a link to the site, along with the exact time, when it becomes available.

Community college resource in SL

You know, I can find more in the first five minutes I’m awake every day that needs doing than I have time to get done all day.

Without going into all the links involved in finding this (thanks, Greg, for getting me started!), I want to share with you a great resource especially for the community college faculty who read this blog. If you have Second Life installed on the machine you’re sitting at, you should be able to go to the CCSL presence by following this link:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Eduisland%203/81/151/25

You need to also find the group and join it for free.

They have a lot of resources for teaching in SL, and as nearly as I can tell, they are somehow connected with the EduIsland folks who can provide space for teachers who want to use SL, but whose institutions do not yet have Island or other space for them. I am way behind on how this works, but I will post more information when I get it.

In the meantime, you probably also want to check out their Web site, a Wiki with tons of useful information.