“I’m HR. To save time let’s just assume I’m never wrong.”
~ Ben Hur Brown
Bush Summit PM in Wagga Wagga, New South Wales
Save the planet by eating beef and drinking wine
Bush Summit 2025 in Mount Gambier: Premier Peter Malinauskas, experts tackle SA’s regional future
A mining company executive has labelled climate change as “nonsense”, lashed “net zero hysteria” and says the best method to save the planet is to eat beef and drink wine
The End of Handwriting
Wired – no paywall – “For years, smartphones and computers have threatened to erase writing by hand. Would that be so bad? Parents, educators, and fellow penmanship advocates have been lamenting the end of handwriting for years. Email began edging out cards and letters decades ago. Then smartphones hit the market, and our reliance on paper notes, wall calendars, and Post-it reminders dwindled.
In US public schools, the focus has shifted from handwriting to typing, as more and more kids are exposed to iPads and computers in tandem with pencils. And in the past few years, AI has made it so that humans barely need to think, let alone jot something down.
Now more than ever, it might seem as though handwriting is doomed. It’s not. While the handwringing and emotions are at an all-time high, the case for handwriting is stronger than ever, too. Sure, some of the attachment is nostalgia. In the US, there’s even a weird sense that knowing cursive is some sort of civic duty for Americans. All of those arguments for handwriting overlook something:
There are real benefits to learning to hold a pen in your hand and use it. Young people entering classrooms this fall need a totally different tool set than the generations before them.
US public schools still require that kids be taught handwriting, so it’s not yet a lost art, but there is some evidence that digital natives are less “ready” for writing now than students in the past, says Karen Ray, a lecturer in occupational therapy at the University of Newcastle in Australia.
In 2021, Ray coauthored a studyexamining whether kids who grew up with devices possessed the same fine motor skills as kids who did not. While those students met the expected performance levels on manual dexterity tests, their overall motor proficiency was lower than previous norms.
Ultimately, the researchers hypothesized, time spent holding devices rather than pencils might be impacting whether kids had all the motor skills they needed to learn handwriting when they entered kindergarten…”
- See also beSpacific – Handwriting shown to be better for memory than typing, at any age and The psychological benefits of writing by hand
- See also LitHub – What Happened When I Tried to Replace Myself with ChatGPT in My English Classroom. Piers Gelly on a Semester-Long Dive into the AI Discourse
I Wanted to Find Out What Google Knows About Me and Finally Found a Way
MakeUseOf: “I’ve always known Google had a lot of information on me, but “a lot” is vague. I wanted to see the receipts. That’s when I stumbled upon a tool hidden in plain sight: Google Takeout. It gave me a way to download my data directly from Google’s servers, neatly packaged for my inspection
