Google Sets
: The new tool from the ever-inventive is fun. Enter a set of related items, and Google will predict other items in the set. Like if you put in “Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez, and Madonna”, it will spit back a list of other pop stars. (Oddly, it can’t find any common set between “Britney Spears, Woody Allen, and Margaret Thatcher”!) By far, the Register came up with the best sample set. [link via Pigs & Fishes]
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Too Little, Too Late?
Netscape 7.0 probably isn’t going to be an IE-killer, but it’s getting good reviews.
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Disruptive Educational Technology:
I was talking with some Blackboard co-workers today about some of our partners and prospective partners that are creating solutions around PDA’s in the K-12 education market. We were noting that PDA’s as educational tools in K-12 (or higher ed, for that matter) really haven’t reached critical mass yet.
One of us commented on how much things had changed since we were kids. (We’re all thirtysomethings.) I recalled three specific instances of technology disrupting the educational structures from my own middle and high school experience.
- The biggest technology disruption I remember was, believe it or not, the Erasermate pen. Erasable ink! What a concept! For some reasons, though, teachers that frequently required that work be completed in pen, instead of pencil, were terribly averse to the Erasermate. I think most of them hated it because Erasermate ink was notoriously smeary, but I distinctly remember one teacher saying of answering questions on a test “If you can’t write it right the first time, you shouldn’t get the chance to correct it.” Silly, but true. Erasermates were, for a time, banned from my school.
- Sometime in the early 80’s, I got a good ol’ Commodore 64 computer. Sixty-four KILOBYTES of RAM! Whoa. Now that was power. And I had a 5.25″ floppy drive, which was smokin’ compared to the cassette tape drive. And get this — I had a dot matrix printer. Sexy! I remember turning in a paper that I had proudly printed out on the dot matrix printer, which promptly got handed back to me by the teacher with instructions to “use a typewriter” since the text was “unreadable.” Apparently the fact that the dot matrix was incapable of printing letters with descenders that actually descended below the baseline was flipping her out.
- By far the biggest disruption occurred in my AP Computer Science class in 1984. I’ll never forget the day. Bill Carloni, our CS teacher, wheeled in an AV cart with this funny little box sitting on top of it. What the heck is that? we asked. “This, gentlemen,” Mr. Carloni said (which he could say because there were no girls in the class), “is the future of computing. Nothing will be the same after today.” Of course, what he had was the original Apple Macintosh. Our first assignment that semester had been to write a Pascal program on the classroom Apple IIe’s that would draw a circle on the screen in the Apple IIe hi-res graphics mode. That was it. Use cosine or sine or some such math nonsense to compute the coordinates and draw a circle. And here was Mr. Carloni, booting up this computer that had pictures on the screen like a game (who knew they were called “icons”?!?) and launching something called “MacPaint” where you could draw a circle with a pointer controlled by a hunk of plastic with a wire coming out of it. A mouse? Well, yeah, I guess it kinda looked like a mouse…
Mr. Carloni was right. Nothing was the same after that.
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DOD says open source is “more secure, less expensive” than Windows. Duh.
Microsoft has been pushing the Department of Defense to give up it’s open source use in favor of Windows. Today the Washington Post reports (amidst all the Chandra Levy stories) that a “report prepared for the Defense Department concluded that open source often results in more secure, less expensive applications and that, if anything, its use should be expanded.” Oops. That’s what happens when you ask someone to actually examine the real space instead of listen to the marketeers.
Given their own track record, I don’t understand Microsoft’s strategy of bashing open source software on the grounds of security, especially when there are much better arguments in favor of Microsoft technology, such as the plethora of applications and developers for their platform.
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Pop Quiz:
Doc Searls asks “What do you call a blogger who won’t link?” Answer: a journalist. [link via Scripting News]
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Take Two Tablet PCs And Call Me in 2004:
IASlash has an article on Microsoft’s new “tablet PC” approach. Microsoft is serious about this; I recently attended a presentation by the general manager of Microsoft’s worldwide education division, and the tablet PC concept is a cornerstone of their strategy.
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Yeah, Maybe For You:
Personally, I’ve seen little to no evidence in six years that DC is the #1 city for singles. [link via Missy]
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Mmmmm. Gummy fingers.
A Japanese cryptographer has discovered a way to fool fingerprint scanners using fake fingers made of Jell-O.
Okay, well, they’re made of gelatin, which is a little more generic, but I get a kick out of thinking of James Bond foiling a fingerprint scanner with a finger made of flourescent green lime Jell-O.
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Copyright Battle Heating Up:
According to Business Week, “Forget about Bill Gates, folks. The biggest enemy of free software may be Senator Ernest F. Hollings.” Hollings is the sponsor of the proposed legislation to require copyright-protection software to be embedded in any device that handles digital data. Big Media trying to mandate hardware development via legislative puppets like Hollings — well, call me paranoid, but that’s creepy.
Over at LawMeme, a great article points out the flaws in the arguments made by Hollings and Big Media.
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