This looks familiar...
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Roots N Wings Montessori School
The school is almost open! We are having an open house Saturday, November 19th from 1-4pm. Please stop by if you are in the Bay area.

2323 Euclid Ave.,
Redwood City.

We are a non-denominational Montessori school located on the property of Redwood Baptist church. The school offers programs for children from 3-6 years old for either four or five days.

This is one time I'd love to see the word spread!
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Unusual Traffic error
Anyone else seeing this? It seems like I'm getting it about once a day since we had the flood of buzz posts. It's getting annoying. I also feel that the number of times I'm getting errors on G+ has spiked.

Yes, I've run my virus software and computer optimization routines yesterday.
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Earthquake Cake

How does anyone else bake a cake and not have it have an earthquake?  This is not the first time this has happened to me?!?!
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Google + Spam and personal responsibility
When does the line between reporting spam profiles become spam itself in a general stream? Can we clean up the garbage faster and have those profiles removed faster as a general community if there is a rapid blocking and reporting? Profiles are eliminated based on community behavior.

There are three types of spam profiles.
1. Generally harmless, annoying ad profiles. Easy to ignore or report and block.
2. Profiles that circle large numbers of individuals, possible through bots, then share posts. These posts often seem to contain links back to malicious sites. At the minimum you get blasted with unwanted notifications.
3. Profiles that leave spam comments/links on your own posts requiring clean up. Currently there are some technical issues that require deleting comments before blocking and reporting of those profiles or the comment may not be visible to post owner, but visible to others.

A variant of the spam profiles involves explicit or pornographic profile pictures.

There is an interesting property with reshares and ripples that even blocked profiles still show up under "post ripples" even if the reshared post is deleted. This gives these profiles a huge advantage. (There is no "send feedback" on ripples)

Personally, I believe that I would rather see a limited amount of notification to block and report from people that I trust than to let them continue. It can be easily ignored.
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What I want to do..
Is not what I need to do-
Or what I have time to do
Or what I'm going to do.

What I need to do
Is what I'm going to do.
I may not have time for it either!
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Khan academy
After a couple of interesting discussions recently, I really wanted to learn more about the Khan academy. After about an hour and a half, my conclusion is that I'm disappointed.

This is not innovative education. This is a massive collection of video based lectures.

Education background matters, but funding apparently does as well. Please spend some time evaluating for yourself.

Most of the videos are high school (Algebra, biology, chemistry, calculus), college (differential equations) or general knowledge (computer science, astrology, credit crisis). There are large sections of Sal Khan working through test problems. Some of the sections are developmental math.

Developmental math sections
Basic lectures. No visuals, no manipulatives. I can see value in some of these for adults that understood the concept in an initial language and are trying to build English skills. The lecture on order of operations consisted of working a problem with the requirement that order of operations is "Do this first." No understanding of why. Place value was just the same. Repetition of words, no real understanding if the child did not understand.

CA Standards algebra 1 (Test problems)
Poorly labeled section titles. Blurry cut and paste problems. I found that the demonstration of one problem assumed knowledge in the answer. _i.e. "Multiply out using the distributive property." Then evaluated the multiple choice answers for the "distributive property." The lecturer was also audibly distracted by a firetruck going by.

Chemistry (Appropriate for 1st year HS or college.)
Introduction to Atom- first lecture listed under chemistry.

Khan (presumably) starts with a philosophical discussion of cutting an object into every smaller objects until you get to the "uncuttable." When he states that we now know an atom has parts - proton, neutrons, electrons he uses the term "orbit." He also explicitedly states that electrons aren't in an orbit and this view is incorrect or mentally incorrect (despite a visual.) It's not for several more minutes that he explains that an electron can really be in an orbital cloud. During this video he makes at least two references to really understanding atoms when you get to the segments on quantum physics.

There were several other things that bothered me about this lecture. "Protons are purple. It's a nice neutral color." The use of the term "He" to represent "Helium" before any discussion of what an element was. Jumping right into the periodic table in the same lecture. At 12 minutes out of 21, he discussed the atomic weight and mass of carbon and called it a neutral atom. (_First lecture remember!_)

History (Appropriate for 1st year HS or college.)
1620-1750 1st lecture.
I can sum this easily. There was this successful settlement, then there was this one, then not much happened for about this entire period of 130 years except the colonies formed and the British were here and the French were here. Then the British and the French got into a war.
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