The Scout Report -- Volume 21, Number 38

The Scout Report -- Volume 21, Number 38

The Scout Report

October 2, 2015 -- Volume 21, Number 38

A Publication of Internet Scout
Computer Sciences Department, University of Wisconsin-Madison




Research and Education

  Encyclopedia Virginia
  Interactive WWI Timeline
  Global International Migration Flows
  The Big One: Earthquakes in the Pacific Northwest
  Yummy Math
  Microbe World: Podcasts and Videos
  NOVA: Dawn of Humanity
  The Film Space

General Interest

  Bauhaus: Workshops for Modernity
  Oberlin College Archives
  International Rivers: The State of the World's Rivers
  Toronto Poetry Map
  A People's Archive of Sinking and Melting
  London Transport Museum: Poster Collection
  Harvard Business Review: Videos
  Banned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read

Network Tools

  Markdown Tutorial
  KeepVid

In the News

  Commemorating 50 years of the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities



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Research and Education

Encyclopedia Virginia

·http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org

For educators teaching the history of the early United States and the history of Virginia, Encyclopedia Virginia is a cornucopia of primary sources, as well as commentaries, blog posts, and other information. Readers may want to begin with the featured resources on the landing page, such as the history of Indians in Virginia, and an article about the United States Colored Troops (USCT), an African American branch of the U.S. Army that was founded in 1863. The A-Z Index of the encyclopedia allows for easy browsing. For instance, selecting "H" reveals an entry on Thomas Hariot which then links to his book, A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia, and offers valuable perspective on the work and its context. Readers may also enjoy the Blog on the site, which boasts many erudite entries on topics such as whether the U.S. Constitution was a racist document. [CNH]


Interactive WWI Timeline

·https://theworldwar.org/explore/interactive-wwi-timeline

This entertaining and informative timeline from the National WWI Museum and Memorial will be a favorite with educators teaching the history of the 20th century. As a supplement to lesson plans and activities outlining the major developments of the war, the timeline brings events by integrating text, photos, drawings, maps, and videos. For instance, a quote by Kaiser Wilhelm II, "The sword is being forced into my hand," is followed by a 45-second video outlining the first months of the war, with Germany and Turkey forming alliances and the U.S. declaring neutrality. Though the figures and photos from the timeline offer a continual stream of excellent information, a few entries stand out, such as the 20,000 British troops that died in one day during the Battle of the Somme, or the ten suffragists who were arrested outside the White House on August 28, 1917. [CNH]


Global International Migration Flows

·http://www.global-migration.info/

This eye-opening interactive graphic from three researchers at the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital can be of use to educators teaching a wide range of subjects, from history to politics to economics to data analysis. It is also a visually arresting representation of the global migration flow of four five-year periods, 1990-1995, 1995-2000, 2000-2005, and 2005-2010. Based on the girth of the color-coded lines, readers may explore the migration of people from and to Latin America, North America, Africa, Europe, the Former Soviet Union, West Asia, South Asia, East Asia, Southeast Asia, and Oceania. There are also links to the peer-reviewed articles from which the data was drawn, as well as explanations About The Data, About The Plot, and other information near the bottom of the page. [CNH]


The Big One: Earthquakes in the Pacific Northwest

·http://www.burkemuseum.org/static/earthquakes/index.html

In July 2015, Kathryn Schultz's New Yorker piece, "The Really Big One," noted: "An earthquake will destroy a sizable portion of the coastal Northwest. The question is when." This site from the Burke Museum of Natural History & Culture at the University of Washington, which is based on an exhibit from 2002, fills in some of the information about the Pacific Northwest's earthquake proneness. Readers may like to begin with the Quakes Intro, and then make their way through the sections entitled Quake Science, Detective Story, Tsunamis, and Preparedness. Along the way, they will encounter lessons on the core, mantle, and crust of the earth, a peak into how geologists study earthquakes, and the threat of tsunamis, among other topics. Educators will find much on the site for lesson plans focused on geology, earthquakes, and related topics. [CNH]


Yummy Math

·http://www.yummymath.com

For educators who are continually looking for up-to-date, real-world examples of how mathematics impacts daily life, Yummy Math is a welcome ally. In fact, every article on the site seeks to link math to what is "relevant to our world today." For instance, a recent article presented some of the math-related possibilities for the upcoming release of the new iPhone 6S and 6S plus, suggesting that students explore past iPhone launch sales data in order to predict sales for the new model using bar graphs and scatter plots. Educators can scout the site by Genres (Holidays and Annual Events, Math and Food, Math and Science, Math and Social Studies, and others), as well as by grade level. While all activities are freely accessible, some educators may select to sign up for a membership, which provides extra services, such as solutions to activities, access to a wider variety of resources, and access to teaching tips. [CNH]


Microbe World: Podcasts and Videos

·http://www.microbeworld.org/podcasts

The Podcasts & Videos section of Microbe World, a website dedicated entirely to microbes and their interactions with humans, animals, plants, and the environment, are as entertaining as they are informative. Here readers will find six different podcast series: This Week in Microbiology, This Week in Virology, This Week in Parasitism, MicroWorld Video, BacterioFiles, and the Spanish-language educational program, Mundo de los Microbios. In addition, readers will find much to explore in the two documentaries on the site, including the four-part series Intimate Strangers: Unseen life on Earth. Educators teaching microbiology and related subjects will find hours of audio and video resources perfectly suited for use in lesson plans of all kinds. [CNH]


NOVA: Dawn of Humanity

·http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/evolution/dawn-of-humanity.html

This two-hour special from NOVA and National Geographic, which premiered online on September 10, 2015, explores the amazing discovery of ancient remains in South Africa that may help to rewrite our understanding of human and prehuman history. There are many worthwhile clips in the episode that can easily be integrated into lesson plans. However, the video in its entirety is well worth watching as it allows viewers to experience the thrill of discovery as scientists descend into a "vertical, pitch-dark, seven-inch-wide passage" and begin removing what turns out to be over 1,500 bones. Readers will also find additional video resources on evolution in the Related Links section of the page. [CNH]


The Film Space

·http://www.thefilmspace.org

Founded in 2013, The Film Space is a British not-for-profit organization dedicated to building "an understanding and appreciation of the moving image, in all its forms, amongst children and young people." A handy tool for educators, the site has a well-stocked Resources section that offers ready-built lesson plans sorted into categories such as Shakespeare, Citizenship, Modern Foreign Languages (some lessons, such as La Haine and Amelie, are composed in French), and Film and Media Studies among others. The resources within each of these categories are plentiful. For instance, selecting Film of the Book reveals study guides and teaching resources on classics like Sense and Sensibility, Lord of the Flies, and 1984, while the Selma Resource offers teaching suggestions for such complex and important issues as Civil Rights, Prejudice, and Storytelling. The film library may be far from complete, but novice and veteran teachers alike will find much inspiration among the site's detailed and classroom-relevant offerings. [CNH]


General Interest

Bauhaus: Workshops for Modernity

·http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2009/bauhaus/Main.html

Of the many schools of avant-garde art that blossomed in Europe in the early 20th century, the Bauhaus was perhaps the most impactful. Founded by the architect Walter Gropius in 1919, only months after the end of the devastating first World War, the ideas developed at the school continue to influence the thinking of artists and critics to this day. On this site from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), readers may like to begin with the Timeline, which overviews the history of the institution from its founding in the city of Weimar to its move to Dessau and its subsequent relocation to Berlin. Next, Life at the Bauhaus tells the story of this tight-knit community through photographs and written descriptions, while Behind the Scenes features video clips of exhibit curators and staff discussing the ins and outs of the project. The Kandinsky Questionnaire also shouldn't be missed as it takes readers into the mind of the famous Russian painter who taught at the Bauhaus from 1922 to 1933. [CNH]


Oberlin College Archives

·http://www.oberlin.edu/archive/

Since its founding in 1966, the Oberlin College Archives has been gathering a "vast and varied collection of rare, original, and reproduced materials in printed, electronic, and digitized formats." While most of the materials here are related to Oberlin as an institution, there is plenty for the average reader to admire and explore. For instance, the Virtual Exhibit on the Architecture of Oberlin College provides an overview of the campus's past and present buildings and monuments, including photographs, illustrations, and descriptive information. The Browse Buildings section is especially interesting. Here readers may select any of the buildings from the alphabetically ordered list to view photographs and fascinating descriptions of the college's architectural heritage. [CNH]


International Rivers: The State of the World's Rivers

·http://www.internationalrivers.org/worldsrivers

The State of the World's Rivers is a site that seeks to map the health of the world's 50 major river basins, including the Amazon in South America, the Congo in central Africa, and the Mekong in Southeast Asia among many others. It will likely come as no surprise to most readers that the ecological balance of most of these river basins is currently in disarray. However, the details can be fascinating. To navigate the interactive database, readers may select any of the categories to pull up detailed information including data sources, methodologies, or short descriptive essays. For instance, selecting "Total Number of Existing Dams" within the River Fragmentation section provides readers with basic information, such as the fact that there are over 50,000 dams on the planet. Meanwhile, selecting the Nile Basin brings up a host of information, including the river's distinction as the world's longest, and the threats to the river, including population excess and irrigation needs. In all, this fascinating site provides readers with reams of data on the world's biggest rivers. [CNH]


Toronto Poetry Map

·http://www.torontopoetry.ca/

The Toronto Poetry Map creatively introduces readers to the poetry of one of the world's most vibrant and multicultural cities. Brought to fruition through the efforts of Toronto's poet laureate, George Elliott Clarke, and the Toronto Public Library (TPL), this interactive map lets readers explore the city's neighborhoods via the verses that have been written about them. Selecting any one of the grey-colored dots on the map reveals numerous curated excerpts. For instance, selecting the dot associated with Union Station navigates to nearly a dozen stanza fragments that mention the landmark, such as these lines from Michael Ondaatje, "I write down now/ a fiction of your arm/ or of that afternoon/ in Union Station/ when we both were lost." Readers will also find a link to the book from which the fragment was drawn, which navigates them to the TPL website. Library members may reserve the book forthwith; non-members, of course, may take down the details and find the volume at their local library or bookstore. For lovers of poetry, this site is a lively new take on the relationship between geography and verse. [CNH]


A People's Archive of Sinking and Melting

·http://www.sinkingandmelting.org

While many websites provide information about the science of climate change, A People's Archive of Sinking and Melting provides a unique perspective on the cultural, social, and personal impacts of the rising sea levels that will likely accompany the warming of the globe. Here readers will find a "collection of materials contributed by people living in places that may disappear because of the combined physical, political, and economic impacts" of the climate crisis. To view the archive, readers will want to select Visit the Archive Online, where they will find an array of objects - anything from a rusted steel wire from Denmark to a shard of brick from Cuba. The site is beautifully curated, providing the seemingly random objects with a clear and harrowing narrative. Importantly, interested visitors are encouraged to contribute their own objects to the archive. Directions can be found on the landing page. [CNH]


London Transport Museum: Poster Collection

·http://www.ltmcollection.org/posters/index.html

With over 5,000 posters and 700 original poster artworks, this digital collection from the London Transport Museum is one of the web's finest repositories of Great Britain's public art. Readers may like to start by selecting "Learn more about the collections..." This link navigates to a page with some contextualizing information as well as a number of Stories behind the collection. Readers will find such illuminating narratives as the story of Frank Pick, the London Underground's publicity man in the early 20th century who revolutionized the form of the modern graphic poster. Also in the About section, readers will find links to various themes through which they might explore the collections, such as Beyond the City, Entertainment, Events, London's Transport System, Wartime London, and others. [CNH]


Harvard Business Review: Videos

·https://hbr.org/video

Since the Harvard Business Review (HBR) was first published in 1922, the magazine has cycled through many iterations, including editor Theodore Levitt's expansion of the brand in the 1980s to bring it to a wider audience, and the more recent decision to publish in eleven different languages. This section of the HBR's website focuses its considerable intellectual powers on producing and disseminating videos that will be relevant to readers from a number of different fields. For instance, in a video published on September 21, 2015, Herminia Ibarra, a professor at France's international business school, INSEAD, speaks about the challenges of transitioning to a new role, whether in a corporate office, a nonprofit, or an educational administration. Other videos cover such topics as how to change people's perceptions of you and the art of asking questions. [CNH]


Banned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read

·http://www.ala.org/bbooks/bannedbooksweek

Banned Books Week for 2015 is celebrated September 27 - October 3, but in addition to the time sensitive events at this site from the American Library Association (ALA), there are plenty of year-round resources. The ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) collects data from U.S. libraries, schools, and the news media on books that have been challenged in some way and uses this information to inform the public about potential censorship efforts. On this site, visitors will find lists of Frequently Challenged Books going back to 1990, the year the ALA OIF started collecting data. Among these lists are the "top-10 most frequently challenged books of 2014," and a timeline celebrating 30 years of defending the right to read, complete with full-color replicas of book covers and the comments made about them. The timeline begins with Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, 1982, and includes both popular and scholarly works such as JK Rowling's Harry Potter series, and Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paulo Freire. There's also a confidential form where anyone can report a challenge. [DS]


Network Tools

Markdown Tutorial

·http://markdowntutorial.com

For those who find HTML to be excessively verbose, brittle to construct, and difficult to read, Markdown can provide a simpler alternative. In essence, it is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web content writers that is modeled on well-written email so it is both easy to read and easy to write. Users considering a switch to Markdown (plugins exist to use Markdown for a variety of content management software, including Drupal and Wordpress), will find this tutorial a great place to start. Each lesson begins by introducing a single Markdown concept and offers a sandbox for practice. Once the concept is mastered, users can proceed to the next (there are seven in total). For writers concerned more with content than design and who are looking to learn a simple formatting solution, this is a wonderful resource. [CNH]


KeepVid

·http://keepvid.com/

The premise of KeepVid could not be simpler. Just copy and paste a link from YouTube, Vimeo, SoundCloud, DailyMotion, and other supported sites and select Download. The program then downloads the video or audio onto the user's computer free of charge. While KeepVid is safe and legal, readers will want to be careful about how they use their downloaded content. For instance, downloading the latest Taylor Swift video to one's computer is legal. However, using that video for profit or any public purpose is usually a violation of copyright laws. Nevertheless, for readers who would like to download their favorite videos from YouTube and other sites, KeepVid is an excellent resource. [CNH]


In the News

Commemorating 50 years of the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities

Cultural Capital: 50 Years of Investment in U.S. Arts and Humanities
http://www.npr.org/2015/09/29/444527506/both-in-headlines-and-quiet-2-agencies-fuel-american-arts-for-decades

See Early National Endowment for the Humanities Grants to Marlon Brando, Noam Chomsky, and Elie Wiesel
http://time.com/4052064/neh-grants-1965/

NEA 50th Anniversary
http://arts.gov/50th

Explore All NEH Projects
http://www.neh.gov/explore/all

Q&A with David Bromwich: 50 years of the National Endowment for the Humanities
http://news.yale.edu/2015/09/29/qa-david-bromwich-50-years-national-endowment-humanities

The Contest for American Culture: A Leadership Case Study on the NEA and NEH Funding Crisis
http://www.upenn.edu/pnc/ptkoch.html

On September 29, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act. With that, a new era of funding for the arts and humanities in America was born. While the programs started small - the annual budget was set at $2.5 million in 1965 - by the 1990s the yearly allocations had reached well over $150 million. Times haven't always been easy for the programs, however. One president and a phalanx of congressman have, over the years, attempted to either abolish or defund the NEA and NEH, calling the foundations wasteful and elitist and sometimes objecting to the controversial artists that have been awarded federal dollars. Through it all, the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities have supported the works of Marlon Brando and Elie Wiesel as well as a variety of public service projects, such as the Wolf Trap Foundation, which places professional performance artists in public school classrooms. This week, we celebrate 50 years of the NEA and NEH. For, as President Johnson said when he signed the bill into law, "Art is a nation's most precious heritage." [CNH]

The first link takes readers to an NPR story that chronicles the eventful history of the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities. Next, a Time magazine article features photographs of 10 original NEH grants awarded between 1967 and 1976, including one to Noam Chomsky for the expansion of his theories of universal grammar. The third link takes readers to the National Endowment for the Arts' own 50th Anniversary Website, which includes a tremendously informative timeline with dozens of articles related to the history of its projects. After that, readers may like to explore all of the NEH projects featured on the National Endoment of the Humanities' official web page. Here users may filter by division or search by keyword among the thousands of fascinating projects that have come to fruition through federal funding. The fifth link navigates to a short interview with Yale English professor David Bromwich on the importance of the humanities, while the sixth link takes readers to an article about the NEA/NEH funding crisis of the 1990s.





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