June 6, 2011

The diplomatic incident around RMS' visit to Israel

A week ago a story broke - RMS would not be talking at Israeli universities while in Israel, since the sponsors of his visit in the West Bank (soon to be a democratic Palestine inshallah) are adamant about this boycott. The odd thing is that the University of Haifa is the Alma Mater of many Arabs, some told me that maybe most of the students currently enrolled are non-Jews. It’s also a pretty petty demand that he is allowed to speak in Israel but not in a university building. It made absolutely no sense to me.

March 23, 2011

Israeli Blogger hit with a SLAPP suit

Shai Tubali is a some-what familiar name in the media, because unlike other nutty cult leaders, he published a successful book, and his name is also known from the time he served in Galey Tzahal almost two decades ago. His cult is quite small, reported to be under 30 followers these days, but several news sources (Yediot, Channel 2) have published worrying stories about the way he abuses his flock. One of the people who also wrote about him several times is reporter, blogger and newage academic Tomer Persico. Of all the publications, Tubali decided to skip the national media and pick on Persico and hit him with a 220K NIS libel suit. More Info (also in Hebrew) in NRG.

January 9, 2011

Bidirectional writing in Wordpress

This howto aimed at bloggers wanting to post in more than one language and need bidirectional support. I could not find this info gathered elsewhere, so I’m summarizing what I know here. Distribution license and other info is at the end.

The options I’ve encountered so far:

1. Open two blogs and “ignore” the problem, like Dr. Gadi Taub and others. There are localized RTL themes ans editions of Wordpress in Hebrew ( T1 T2), Arabic ( T1 T2) and Farsi ( T). The maintainer for the Arabic WP is an Israeli, btw.

September 18, 2010

Marketing idea: Better Place Software to estimate/simulate driver experience

This just sent via email to Better Place:

Dear Sir/Madam

I would venture a guess that many of your early adopters (or switch-registrants for now) are also gadget lovers or at least tech savvy. Most of them walk around with a smartphone with a GPS or at least have a GPS in their cars. The idea is that by submitting you their GPS data from driving their gas cars they could get your estimates on car usage and maintenance patterns, and have a better idea on the EV experience ahead. Better Place can use this as a market research as well as active marketing tool, of course.

February 25, 2010

Choice of learning style

This post is in English for several reasons. Mostly it’s because it was originally posted in English on " Metacognition: Learning to Learn" on Linked-in and I care not retype the whole thing, much less translate it (most of it was pasted without editing). For more about English posts in my predominantly Hebrew blog see my new page about this.

I’m a beginner in the field of education, but I want to become a better teacher. Here’s one of the issues that bugs me the most - Is there a widely agreed-upon taxonomy of teaching/learning styles, accompanied by tools to figure out which approach is needed by each student?