This link has been bookmarked by 310 people . It was first bookmarked on 03 Feb 2008, by stone.
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30 Oct 12
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The entropy of closed systems undergoing real processes must increase.
For some people the second law translates to “everything progresses from order to disorder” or “it is impossible for complexity to arise from randomness.” The biggest promoters for this misguided interpretation are advocates for intelligent design and/or irreducible complexity, which are just thinly veiled pseudonyms for creationism. They argue that complex systems like the flagellum or the human eye could not evolve spontaneously because they are complex – A logically precarious stance to take since these claims have been thoroughly debunked by evolutionary biologists.1
A quick bit of reflection on our day-to-day lives produces examples of complexity arising from less complex components. Ants, neurons, and transistors are just some examples of small building blocks that become infinitely more complex systems when combined in the right circumstances.
It is easy to argue that the above examples are the result of agency but there are also many examples of objects naturally arranging themselves into complex structures. In fact, the natural world is very good at arranging atoms. Diamonds, ice crystals, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are just a few examples. Ambipolar molecules are an especially useful illustration of this tendency. When these molecules come into contact with water they form beautiful monolayers, bilayers, micelles and other structures.
So, returning to the 2nd law of thermodynamics, the correct interpretation is that complex structures – like those listed above - are possible, but at the cost of increased entropy in the surrounding environment.2
The tendency for a system to self-organize, when given the right circumstance and some energy from the surrounding environment, is one of the most important phenomena we observe. Yet, this transition from energy to order is not obvious when looking at our current laws of thermodynamics. This has led some researchers to suggest it may be possible to formalize a fourth law of thermodynamics that describes how complex systems arise.
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It’s easy for a field to fall into a groove, using the same approach again and again, until every mountain—no matter how small—has at least one flag waving at the top. Great research shifts your perspective, revealing new worlds and new peaks. Once the blinders have been removed it’s hard not to look back and think, “Why didn’t I think of that?”
[1] Why climb Everest? “Because it’s there.”
[2] Higher yield, fewer steps, green, single pot, atom economy, protecting group free. All different ways of seeking out some synthetic Platonic ideal [3].
[3] Disclaimer: Total synthesis requires dedication, intelligence, and perhaps a touch of madness. I have nothing but respect for those who do it so well.
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29 Jun 12
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13 Jun 12
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We exchanged contact info and he gave me the address of his blog which he would be updated along the way. This was his way of letting his family know where he was and share pictures
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When I travel around the country, I feel like I have so many online friends that if something every happened, I think I could contact someone I “know” for help. This feeling connected is very important to me and I wish I had these years ago
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12 Jun 12
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It took me two years to get decent at solving a certain class of problems concerning deterministic distributed algorithms (roughly 2004 – 2006). There was then a two year period where I was satisfied to use only this hammer and go seek nails, no matter how hard they became to find.
The issue I faced was that my field was moving forward. Randomization was where the interesting new work was being done, and my approach was in danger of becoming dated.
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The problem here is that most graduate students tend toward the opposite of this approach. Their biggest fear is that they’ll propose a result and someone more knowledgeable will look at it, declare it “trivial,” and therefore validate their nagging imposter syndrome. Accordingly, students tend to rush to add technical complexity right away, as if a page full of math validates their ability.
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02 Jun 12
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18 May 12
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17 May 12
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Digital is its own audit.
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a big chunk of the "accelerating change" meme actually emerges from our experience of the future shock induced by our Martian invaders — the corporatist liquidation or privatisation of human social structures not mediated by money, culminating ultimately in the experience of disaster capitalism.
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Who’s going to pick up another book by a writer who says “My readers are awful pieces of shit and I can think of twenty of them, right off the bat, who should be drowned in hot pig blubber”? Nobody. “My audience are all complete pissflaps. Have you read my website comments threads? Utter inane gibberish. I would like to train a giant horse to fuck out all their eyes.” Who’s going to say that?
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the power weirdo — and its subset, the gonzo futurist — is particularly well-placed to deal with a turbulent decade.
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the beneficiaries of that particular shift (a narrow technological elite, and their masters in the shape of the 0.1%, the financial/social engineers who direct the new hive-organism aristocracy) have made a fetish out of change, ignoring (for the most part) the uncomfortable fact that "creative destruction" is an oxymoron:
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I guarantee you that even the sweetest and kindest writer has thought that exact thought more than once in their lives. And its corollary: “Oh god, my readers are such horrible demented shitbags, what am I doing so wrong that I attract them all to me?”
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there is an unmistakably faith-mobilizing pseudo-transcendentalizing strain to be discerned in this very PR marketing imaginary, deranging us from our present distress into a yearning toward consumer techno-futures bathed in pastels and robots and cars and DNA helices and chocolate and glossy hair and youthful skin and golden sex.
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The pattern analyst is less likely to find her job outsourced or automated, but, to effectively lever the patterns in the noise, we have to be able distinguish between real patterns and the faces in the clouds.
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The gonzo futurist is resilient. She works smart, not hard. She has one eye on the ‘adjacent possible’, switches codes, and contributes to the commons.
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Cayce Pollard, though something of a ‘self-facilitating media node’, provides a model for the gonzo futurist.
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Bombarded by stimuli, the gonzo futurist is an OODA cyborg. Observe, orient, decide, act.
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her role of sensitive-slash-coolhunter is more bodily disposition than career.
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09 May 12
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28 Feb 12
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26 Jan 12
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erry’s story shows that what the QR Code resolved to and the effort he put into producing the content won the day, not the QR Code itself. This should be the QR Code Marketers mantra.
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23 Jan 12
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29 Dec 11
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03 Dec 11
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26 Nov 11
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The folks who have the joy of creation are not the parents, staff, or kids, especially in charters! It's the folks with the resources and connections to initiate them and who will be their future bosses: their board.
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Charters were intended as a nudge, a provocation, in systems that are not friendly to inventiveness.
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Instead, charters exist today in a setting of super-regulated schools (some of whose regulations hamper charters, too) used as threats.
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18 Nov 11
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守规则与不守规则的奖惩效果是如此明显，当然最后只会是诱导鼓励大家都不守规则。而且，越是后胜者，使出来的取胜手段也就越发烂污。国民党取代北洋，中共取代国民党，就是这负筛选的生动例证。
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08 Aug 11
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29 Jul 11
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…outstanding teachers witll teach their students how to learn the content.
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18 Jul 11
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14 Jul 11
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- What if students were empowered to lead hang out discussions and if necessary the teacher could move from discussion to discussion.
- What if the teacher set discussions with groups of students as it made sense.
- This could be great for meetings of educators who are not from the same school. Think librarian hangouts, science teacher hangouts, etc.
- This is a nice tool that could be more efficient for staff who are located in different districts. Rather than spend time commuting, just set up a hang out.
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lick this link for information about why it's great for folks who create graphic novels / comics.
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09 Jul 11
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04 Jul 11
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simply too messy to lend themselves to the heroic narrative of leadership that underpins revolutionary history. There was no masterplan, no clear leader, no single ideology – just a ferment of ideas, as intellectuals, officials and revolutionaries devoured new theories in science, technology, history and politics, arguing about China's decline. Some blamed the Manchu emperors, others the suffocating dominance of a backward-looking Confucianism, with its stress on social hierarchy that had ended in stagnation. A republic with representative democracy was a widely shared aspiration.
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Surely the overthrow of what the party still calls the "semi-feudal system" that had delivered a weakened China into the hands of foreign powers is a moment any revolutionary party would celebrate?
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On the Origin of Species may have stormed the west in 1859 but Darwinian scientific and social thought did not reach China in any significant way until four decades later, when the nation was in turmoil, says Brock.
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There is another significant anniversary this year of a milestone on the way to this moment of economic power: the centenary of the 1911 revolution, which brought an end to the Qing dynasty and with it some 2,000 years of imperial tradition. Unlike the birthday of the party, however, it is being oddly underplayed.
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The corrupt and failing Manchu dynasty fuelled revolutionary aspirations, while a crisis of national confidence emerged with Japan's military triumph over China in 1895. T
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historical narrative casts it as the only begetter of China's liberation and subsequent rise, this awkward complication is hard to overlook
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The revolutionaries of 1911 might recognise the system they fought in today's communist China
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Survival of the fittest took on a very different meaning for the wounded nation.
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historical narrative casts it as the only begetter of China’s liberation and subsequent rise, this awkward complication is hard to overlook.
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messy and virtually unplanned affair.
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23 Jun 11
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16 Jun 11
Kandace RimmerGoogle Reader is a web 2.0 tool powered by Google. If you already have a Google account then you already have a Google Reader account waiting for you to use it. Google Reader is a form of something called RSS--really simple syndication. It creates a space for you where news comes to you and saves you time so you don't have to go searching for it. Subscribe to your favorite sites, blogs, and news casts today for free and make your life easier with Google Reader.
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11 Jun 11
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10 Jun 11
Mr. Coleman"Present.me is a service that allows you to easily record your presentation with video and audio linked to the PowerPoint presentation. You upload your PowerPoint slides, and then present.me converts them to a web based file. Then, you go to the site, click record and present in front of your web cam, clicking your slides just like you normally would. Now you have a single file that has your slides, you, and your voice all linked. You can then share it with others, embed it, or just keep it for yourself.
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07 Jun 11
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30 May 11
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Too many people spend money they haven’t earned, to buy things they don’t want, to impress people they don’t like. – Will Rogers
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29 May 11
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A teacher's effectiveness in the classroom must be determined using multiple measures. These measures should include observations by trained evaluators who have knowledge about teaching, the subject matter, and the context. They could also include student and parental feedback and portfolios of student work. And the evaluations should include the academic growth their students make over the course of a year. Growth should be determined based on fair and objective assessments, but should not be based on the results of one test given a single day. States and districts should consider using results from district-developed assessments or portfolios of student work throughout the year graded against a consistent rubric.
-Secretary Arne Duncan, A Conversation with CEC Members, 2011
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The issue of linking test scores to evaluation is a controversial topic. Aside from the numerous environmental and contextual factors impacting student achievement that are beyond a teacher's control, it's been estimated that 80% of teachers do not teach in subjects where standardized tests are available.
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So here's our challenge. What will it take to offer an alternative system of accountability beyond test scores? What if teachers had to create something similar that had their student portfolios, classroom videos, and other documentation? What would states and districts have to do?
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Establish evaluation criteria and expectations. What exactly will teachers have to prove in their evaluation of multiple measurements?
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07 May 11
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29 Apr 11
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11 Apr 11
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I can only really get a social life through my work. So I needed work. And I’m unemployable due to eccentricity, so I had to start a company.
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I can only really get a social life through my work. So I needed work. And I’m unemployable due to eccentricity, so I had to start a company.
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11 Mar 11
Di WhiteNew technology would dramatically extend battery life for mobile devices
from ScienceDaily: Latest Science News
Technophiles who have been dreaming of mobile devices that run longer on lighter, slimmer batteries may soon find their wish has been granted. Engineers have developed a form of ultra-low-power digital memory that is faster and uses 100 times less energy than similar available memory. The technology could give future portable devices much longer battery life between charges. The researchers use carbon nanotubes as electrodes and tiny amounts of phase-change material as the bit. -
26 Feb 11
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12 Feb 11
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hildren has been obscured by the recent emphasis on reading with children. The study found that back-and-forth conversation was strongly associated with future improvements in the child’s language score. Conversely, adult monologueing, such as monologic read
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rambunctious
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staking out
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allow more room for creativity.
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07 Jan 11
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03 Jan 11
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30 Dec 10
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21 Dec 10
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The current jargon – empowering, accessing, service-users, delivering services, service-providers, advocacy, client – implies at number of assumptions that in my view are inimical to the cause of the mentally ill. First it implies a relation between the sick person and his healer that resembles that between the purchaser of a pound of peas and the shopkeeper more than that between what we used to call the patient and the doctor. Second it seems to imply a sort of hostile intent on the part of the healer: that treatment whether clinical or otherwise is a sort of coercive intervention from which the ‘client’ needs protecting. Third it implies that the sick person is a rational being capable of taking informed decisions about his own condition and treatment.
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but sharp stones are aimed at managerial staff whom he considers to be often of low intellectual quality. Salmon’s provocative stance is that their increased involvement in patient care has been associated with a shift of emphasis away from effectively treating and supporting those with mental disorder towards an unhelpful focus on ‘issues around mental health’
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Also an anathema is the repositioning of mental health charities towards addressing all mental health problems, serious or not, and their focus on ‘stigma, fear and prejudice’ at the expense of practical help.
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18 Dec 10
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12 Dec 10
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30 Nov 10
Young Holcombhttp://juicedeals.com Frozen vegetables
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27 Nov 10
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IDE — that’s an integrated development environment, the handy, dandy piece of software that acts as text editor, debugger and compiler all in one
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26 Oct 10
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- personalized learning is contextual, self-directed, reflective and meaningful to you and your work
- blended formal and informal learning differentiates the ways, the tools and the learning spaces; combining job-embedded learning with face-to-face and online
- balanced learning involves the self and others; alone, 1:1, group, PLNs, critical friends and mentors
Three words continue to surface for me as I connect with staff and discuss how we learn as professionals today. Developing as a professional is best when it is personalized, blended and balanced.
From these threes ideas, professionals develop holistically:
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14 Oct 10
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ting Add starLike Share
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04 Oct 10
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28 Sep 10
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15 Sep 10
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14 Sep 10
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“I’ve been scrapbooking an
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29 Aug 10
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19 Aug 10
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08 Aug 10
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- Background webquest for Romeo and Juliet WIKIPAGE assignments should be complete the class has completed a handout about the play’s background information.
- Scholars should be studying the Characters from play and the Key Facts about play . Here is the plot diagram for the play. Click here for a variety of Power Points or click here to see 2 videos about the movie.
- This week the class will be creating Insults and Compliments. Compliments will be posted onto the Class Blog and Insults will be posted onto the Class Blog as well.
- This week we will also Illuminate a Sonnet and create a Sonnet Movie using Photopeach.
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- completing a variety of comprehension check ins
- speak in the language of Shakespeare
- create blog posts in the voice of a chosen character
- creating a Sonnet/Monologue Movie
- creating a PowerPoint/Movie that changes the ending of the play
- create a brochure that researches an issue from the play (the need for effective communication with parents, combating hate crimes/violence and suicide)
My Scholars will have to demonstrate their understanding of the play by:
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04 Aug 10
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This feels odd to ask but my husband and i are looking into starting a similar relationship and i'm wondering if you're happy. Not just happy to please but happy. Do you still go for movies and to the park?
Yes, i am very very happy being in a married M/s relationship, and yes that goes beyond being happy to please/serve into more general happiness with my life. All aspects of me are fulfilled in this relationship and i am the happiest i have ever been. Having said that, i am aware that i am lucky and quite privileged in my relationship and that i am allowed to do things that some other slaves are not - for example Sir does take me to the cinema, to restaurants, out for walks and trips and holidays, He treats me to spa days and i am allowed to join clubs and groups and go to them regularly, visit friends and family, etc, etc. But even if He took all that away tomorrow, and my whole life revolved around looking after the children and serving Sir, i think i would still be happy. Things like going to the cinema and walking in the woods are extras which help to keep me happy and well-balanced as a person, but they're not necessary to keep me happy as a slave. If that makes sense. But each M/s relationship will be different and be aware that once you have given your consent, technically your Master does not have to provide you with anything beyond the basics - food, water, shelter - so make sure you know what you're getting into and is that really the level of control you want to hand over? -
Some men like their women to be in the kitchen when they get off work. That’s not you, and that’s not her.
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I like to struggle, but I hate getting free. I want to pull at the ropes tight against my skin, but they should never, ever get loose & if they do… well, Daddy would be there to tighten them up for me, of course.
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03 Aug 10
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I felt drawn to sessions and conversations that seemed to be taking me to where we need to go with what we’ve got. There seemed to be two kinds of conversations going on in the presentation rooms and in the halls. There was training, and then there was professional development. There were those who pursued new tools and their mastery. And then there were those who wished to walk away from the presentations and conversations with new insights, better understandings, new stories, more philosophical backing, and a richer and more practical vision of contemporary education.
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30 Jun 10
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22 Jun 10
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Google Reader Play is a fun way to browse interesting stuff on the web. Give it a try!
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19 Jun 10
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Saying "Happy Pride!" is really just a shorter, easier way of saying "Congratulations on not being driven completely batshit insane! Way to go for not taking a rifle into a tower and taking out half the town! Well done, being YOURSELF!"
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