Google Glass: how to get one

Google Glass: how to get one

February 21, 2013

(Credit: Google)

“We’re looking for bold, creative individuals who want to join us and be a part of shaping the future of Glass,” says the Google Glass team.

“We’d love to make everyone an Explorer, but we’restarting off a bit smaller. We’re still in the early stages, and while we can’t promise everything will be perfect, we can promise it will be exciting.”

“Using Google+ or Twitter, tell us what you would do if you had Glass, starting with the hashtag #ifihadglass.”

• Your application must be 50 words or less
• You must include #ifihadglass in your application
• You can include up to 5 photos with your application
• You can include a short video (15 secs max)
• Be sure to follow us on Google+ (+ProjectGlass) or Twitter (@projectglass) so that we can contact you directly
• You must be at least 18 years old and live in the U.S. to apply
• For more details, please see our full Terms and FAQ

“The deadline for applications is February 27th. If you are chosen, we will reach out to you with an invitation to become a Glass Explorer (please remember to follow us so that we can contact you directly). Explorers will each need to pre-order a Glass Explorer Edition for $1500 plus tax and attend a special pick-up experience, in person, in New York, San Francisco or Los Angeles.”

Via kurzweil.net

Morning Psalm 103

<sup>MORNING PSALM 103

11</sup>  For as the heavens are high above the earth, 
          so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him; 
¹²  as far as the east is from the west, 
          so far he removes our transgressions from us. 
¹³  As a father has compassion for his children, 
          so the LORD has compassion for those who fear him. 
¹⁴  For he knows how we were made; 
          he remembers that we are dust.
¹⁵  As for mortals, their days are like grass; 
          they flourish like a flower of the field; 
¹⁶  for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, 
          and its place knows it no more. 
¹⁷  But the steadfast love of the LORD is from everlasting to everlasting 
          on those who fear him, 
          and his righteousness to children’s children, 
¹⁸  to those who keep his covenant 
          and remember to do his commandments.

Church as Café

Here is a cool use of a church sanctuary in London: Coffee shop.
Works well with foot traffic. How about with heavy car traffic?
Hmm. Something to pray about.

As a Hen Gathers Her Brood

As a Hen Gathers Her Brood
by Barbara Brown TaylorBarbara Brown Taylor teaches at Piedmont College in Demorest, Ga. This article appeared in The Christian Century, February 25, 1986, page 201; copyright by the Christian Century Foundation and used by permission. Current articles and subscription information can be found at www.christiancentury.org. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted & Winnie Brock.

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On the western slope of the Mount of Olives, just across the Kidron Valley from Jerusalem, sits a small chapel called Dominus Flevit. The name comes from Luke’s Gospel, which contains not one but two accounts of Jesus’ grief over the loss of Jerusalem. According to tradition, it was here that Jesus wept over the city that had refused his ministrations.

Inside the chapel, the altar is centered before a high arched window that looks out over the city. Iron grillwork divides the view into sections, so that on a sunny day the effect is that of a stained-glass window. The difference is that this subject is alive. It is not some artist’s rendering of the holy city but the city itself, with the Dome of the Rock in the bottom left corner and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in the middle. Two-thirds of the view is the cloudless sky above the city which the grillwork turns into a quilt of blue squares. Perhaps this is where the heavenly Jerusalem hovers over the earthly one, until the time comes for the two to meet?

Down below, on the front of the altar, is a picture of what never happened in that city. It is a mosaic medallion of a white hen with a golden halo around her head. Her red comb resembles a crown, and her wings are spread wide to shelter the pale yellow chicks that crowd around her feet. There are seven of them, with black dots for eyes and orange dots for beaks. They look happy to be there. The hen looks ready to spit fire if anyone comes near her babies.

But like I said, it never happened, and the picture does not pretend that it did. The medallion is rimmed with red words in Latin. Translated into English they read, "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!" The last phrase is set outside the circle, in a pool of red underneath the chicks’ feet: you were not willing.
The same lament appears in Matthew’s Gospel, but Jerusalem does not mean the same thing to him that it does to Luke. Luke’s Gospel begins and ends in the temple in Jerusalem. Zechariah learns in the temple that he and Elizabeth will have a child. Mary and Joseph bring their own child there when the time comes. Simeon and Anna deliver their prophecies there, and Jesus returns when he is 12 years old to take his place among the teachers of Israel.

All told, Luke mentions Jerusalem 90 times in his Gospel, while all the other New Testament writers combined mention it only 49 times. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Luke loves the place -- so rich in history and symbol, so dense with expectation and fear. Jerusalem is the dwelling place of God, the place where God’s glory shall be revealed (Isa. 24:23). It is also the place where God is betrayed by those who hate the good and love what is evil (Mic. 3:2). Nothing that happens in Jerusalem is insignificant. When Jerusalem obeys God, the world spins peacefully on its axis. When Jerusalem ignores God, the whole planet wobbles.

If the city were filled with hardy souls, this would not be a dangerous situation. Unfortunately, it is filled with pale yellow chicks and at least one fox. In the absence of a mother hen, some of the chicks have taken to following the fox around. Others are huddled out in the open where anything with claws can get to them. Across the valley, a white hen with a gold halo around her head is clucking for all she is worth. Most of the chicks cannot hear her, and the ones that do make no response. They no longer recognize her voice. They have forgotten who they are.

If you have ever loved someone you could not protect, then you understand the depth of Jesus’ lament. All you can do is open your arms. You cannot make anyone walk into them. Meanwhile, this is the most vulnerable posture in the world --wings spread, breast exposed -- but if you mean what you say, then this is how you stand.

Given the number of animals available, it is curious that Jesus chooses a hen. Where is the biblical precedent for that? What about the mighty eagle of Exodus, or Hosea’s stealthy leopard? What about the proud lion of Judah, mowing down his enemies with a roar? Compared to any of those, a mother hen does not inspire much confidence. No wonder some of the chicks decided to go with the fox.
But a hen is what Jesus chooses, which -- if you think about it --is pretty typical of him. He is always turning things upside down, so that children and peasants wind up on top while kings and scholars land on the bottom. He is always wrecking our expectations of how things should turn out by giving prizes to losers and paying the last first. So of course he chooses a chicken, which is about as far from a fox as you can get. That way the options become very clear: you can live by licking your chops or you can die protecting the chicks.

Jesus won’t be king of the jungle in this or any other story. What he will be is a mother hen, who stands between the chicks and those who mean to do them harm. She has no fangs, no claws, no rippling muscles. All she has is her willingness to shield her babies with her own body. If the fox wants them, he will have to kill her first.

Which he does, as it turns out. He slides up on her one night in the yard while all the babies are asleep. When her cry wakens them, they scatter. She dies the next day where both foxes and chickens can see her -- wings spread, breast exposed -- without a single chick beneath her feathers. It breaks her heart, but it does not change a thing. If you mean what you say, then this is how you stand.

Via Religion Online

Leadership Training has reached a tipping point

Alan Roxburgh believes that leadership training has reached a tipping point.

The amount of change we are facing as national and regional church leaders in the United States continues apace. I believe the same is true of the UK.

Institutions we've come to take for granted are coming under pressures that fundamentally change their identity. I have heard about a number of large, significant seminaries struggling with massive challenges around debt and student decline. We know that large numbers of small, struggling seminaries across North America won't survive into the next decade. But when large, well-established, prestigious schools are confronting big financial challenges, one's sense of confidence in the stability of systems is shaken a bit.

We are working with a number of national denominations, listening to regional executives describing the ministry challenges they're facing. A common theme that keeps cropping up centres on concerns that they're not getting the kind of congregational leaders they need from the seminaries, persons able to lead congregations engaging rapidly changing communities. Some of these regional leaders are now seriously asking if they shouldn't be developing their own regionally-based training programs for clergy. They may be onto something!

I recently read an article in The American Interest (volume VIII, number 3) in which its lead story was The End of the University as We Know It - an article by Nathan Harden. The inside page headline was,

Everyone knows that change is coming to higher education but few realise just how destructive (and creative) the coming revolution will be.

Harden argues that in less than a generation, half the colleges and universities in the US will no longer exist. What is also clear is that in less time than that the majority of seminaries and Bible schools will no longer exist.

There are three reasons for this massive change:

1. Economic: Seminary education is now far too expensive. It's less and less affordable to students who are acquiring more and more debt, and the schools themselves are less able to keep ahead of overhead costs through endowments etc. There is a wave of deferred giving up ahead that will last for a short window while the 'loyalty' generations pass on and their gift promises pay out, but after that, the money simply will not be there the way it has been in the past. At the same time, we are reaching the point where, in many denominations, over 50% of congregations can no longer afford full-time clergy and many of the remainder can't pay their clergy the salaries needed to maintain a decent living and pay down their student debt.
2. Technology: This, when combined with the financial challenges, is the game-changer. The classroom is about to go virtual. Tablets and the revolution in connectivity are now fundamentally changing the nature of higher education. We are now able to connect students to the best teachers and learning experiences at a fraction of the cost of existing campus-based schools. And, this distributed, on-line education can be done in ways that enable students to do much of their learning on the ground, in their local settings rather than be pulled out and located within some distant campus for three-to-seven years.
3. Disconnection: There is a disconnect between the kind of leader that seminaries are producing and the growing sense of the kinds of leaders now needed on the ground in congregations. There is a heightening of anxiety across church systems that what seminaries are producing is simply out of step with what is needed. There is a growing conviction that the established model of the 'professional' clergy will go the way of the Dodo. We are in need of shaping new kinds of contextual learning communities which are working at discovering together what the new leadership needs to look like. This is not an abandonment of classical or intellectual skills but a loss of confidence in the existing professional, graduate models of leadership.

This set of new realities is providing regional and national church leaders with an array of possibilities for those ready to embrace the space opening up before us. There is a confluence of factors coming together to remake the education of church leaders.

Some of these new realities are:

• A massive shift in power. National denominations and schools, in partnership with credentialing organizations, have been able to set the agenda and standards for the training and education of leaders for the churches. They have determined what is taught, how it is taught, where it is taught, and who will be taught. It's all about to end! For those ready to embrace it, new kinds of distributive, learning networks are waiting to be created. Regional leaders thinking about how to train leaders for the realities the churches are asking the right questions in a moment when this confluence of change is picking up speed.
• A significant overproduction of PhDs coming out of theological schools and seminaries. These represent bright, young men and women looking for places to teach that no longer exist. There are fewer and fewer positions available. As more and more schools struggle to survive, there will be even fewer positions in the classic, traditional teaching profession of the seminaries. This means a growing pool of young, energetic, creative teachers are becoming available. Will they be open to participating in creating new forms of training for a networked world, one in which they will not have salaries and tenure to lose? A majority of young people are less and less willing to move across the country to spend three-to-seven years in an on-campus school getting an education because that is the established requirement of denominational and accrediting agencies. In other words, there is a growing pool of young, creative men and women ready and eager to experiment in the emerging virtual classrooms that allow them to stay local for most of their experience and do this at a fraction of the cost of traditional seminary education.
• Once dominant denominations are waning and morphing. They will soon be unable to plug the dike and maintain their controls over the credentialing of clergy leaders. Established credentialing has lost its gloss; it no longer holds the prestige and privilege it once did. Current critiques of on-line and networked education simply don’t hold water anymore. We have reached the tipping point in terms of the interactive technologies being available for creating rich educational experiences, and there are enough studies emerging to show that this kind of learning can be high quality.
• There is now a new environment of experimenting. Some schools are putting 'everything' on the table in an effort of discern the adaptive shifts they need to make. This is creating a new openness to developing experiments in learning and training. We are in a space of new learning and discovery. No group has an inside track on what it all needs to look like but... regional and national leaders of churches have before them an unparalleled opportunity for cultivating new ways of training leaders for their churches. A distributive, networked, interactive world is not a futurist's prediction; it's already here. Technologies are now available that make it possible to create just-in-time learning and training educational experiences.

We are seeing tectonic shifts reframing how emerging generations live and think in a networked world. It is not all wonderful, there are downsides, but we are, unquestionably, in the midst of the ending of practices long thought essential (the 'seminary' as we know it is mostly a 20th century creation). We have entered yet another time of amazing opportunity and creativity. A confluence of factors provide a moment for church leaders to heed the Spirit's invitation to experiment and learn together how to form leaders for the strange new space into which God has brought us.

Via Fresh Expressions