Online calendars

The number of online calendars is proliferating. I have a CalendarHub account and I'm also signed up at planzo.com. I like planzo because it also has a "To Do" feature that emails me every day if I want it to to remind me of what I want to do.

And yesterday I signed up for a 30 Boxes calendar. I have to say it is easy to use, and one outstanding feature is the ability to have "buddies" whose events can come to your calendar, and your events to theirs, that is, if you want to do that.

Richard Mamanus on ZDNet reviews these and other "best of breed" online products. He cites Thomas Hawk's review of 30 Boxes as the "Best... Calendar... EVER."

Blogging via Flock

Flock, a web browser with a built-in blog editor, has been updated. The editor lets you

drop in photos from the topbar, include Web quotes and links, and tag your post. When you're ready, click Publish, and your wisdom is transmitted to your readers.

Also, you can store web items on the Shelf:

The Shelf is a scrapbook where you can keep interesting URLs, pictures or text snippets from any web page. When you're ready to blog about them, you don't have to search--they're on the Shelf.

Anything you drag from the Shelf into a blog post is automatically formatted as a blockquote, with proper citation.

Flock makes blogging easy. It's still in beta, however, so be prepared to encounter a few bugs.

Blogging for beginners

Darren Rowse (ProBlogger via LifeHacker) is having a series of posts for new bloggers to better understand how to go about blogging. He says,

Over the next weeks I will be presenting an introduction to blogging that will help PreBloggers and NewBloggers unpack some of the basics of blogging.

The series is based largely upon the questions I regularly receive from newer bloggers.

By no means do I want to come across as the all knowing expert in this
series - I’m very aware of my own limitations as a blogger and strongly
believe that it is only collectively as a group that we really know
anything. As a result I’d encourage everyone (beginners or old hands)
to see each post in this series as an invitation to share what you know
on the topics we cover. As we all contribute what we know I’m confident
that we’ll all learn and create a useful resource for bloggers starting
out.

Ants and teaching

John Roach in the article "Ants have teacher-pupil relations, researchers report" (National Geographic News) reports on the research of Nigel Franks and Tom Richardson, biologists at the University of Bristol in Britain, who assert that at least one species of ants have teacher-student relationships. Ants of the species Temnothorax albipennis teach other ants how to find where food is in a method called tandem running, a method in which one ant goes slowly so another ant can follow and find the food place. Franks and Richardson define a teacher as one that “modifies its behavior in the presence of a naïve observer, at some initial cost to itself, in order to set an example so that the other individual can learn more quickly.” According to these researchers, because the lead ant is “sacrificing” by not going as fast as possible, it is teaching.

Not all agree that tandem running is an example of teaching. Marc Hauser, director of the Cognitive Evolution Lab at Harvard University, believes that information is being acquired but not a skill, so it’s an example of communication not teaching. Franks and Richards disagree, saying that, although the ants gain information, they are also learning how to find the location of the food, which they apparently consider to be a skill.