The marriage of low-cost netbooks and open-source technologies to create 1-to-1 computing programs is a relatively new development. Open-source technologies, which evolve when individuals voluntarily contribute their creativity and knowledge to online networks of innovation, were once thought to be too free-wheeling and untested for schools. But that is now changing as schools look for more creative and cost-effective ways to use technology.

“[Open source has] finally gained enough notoriety that people are starting to take a look at it,” says Randy Orwin, a school technology consultant at Orwin Consulting in Seattle who specializes in introducing new technologies into schools…

One of the pioneers of marrying netbooks and open-source tools is Jim Klein, the director of information services and technology for the 11,000-student Saugus Union School District in Santa Clarita Valley, Calif. Through extensive planning and documentation, Klein learned how to execute a successful Linux-based netbook program. When he launched a 1,700-netbook program two years ago, his goal was to have seamless and efficient implementation that would not require additional support staffing.Now, Klein wants to help others establish similar programs. He designed a system that makes it possible for anyone—tech directors, principals, and teachers—to replicate his 1-to-1 program without having to start from scratch. He developed a template of sorts that makes it possible for schools to set up netbooks for the classroom.

The Web tool he created and offers for free allows people to download a complete package of education-oriented applications and software programs onto a USB flash drive. The package is based on an open-source operating system called Ubuntu—a variation of Linux that is specifically designed for netbooks. While less than four gigabytes in size, Klein’s mix provides more than 50 free educational applications and tools, including OpenOffice Word and Spreadsheet, Firefox and Google Chrome browsers, Gimp and TuxPaint graphics design, Tux Math and Multiplication Puzzle games, Virtual Microscope, KWordQuiz, Audacity audio editor, and RhythmBox Music.

It was that mix that enabled history and technology teacher Scott to implement his school’s netbook program just four months after suggesting the idea to the district’s superintendent.

Entry Number One:

Click here to view the embedded video.

In celebration of the greatest athletic achievement by a man on a psychedelic journey, No Mas and artist James Blagden proudly present the animated tale of Dock Ellis’ legendary LSD no-hitter. In the past few years we’ve heard all too much about performance enhancing drugs from greenies to tetrahydrogestrinone, and not enough about performance inhibiting drugs. If our evaluation of the records of athletes like Mark McGwire, Roger Clemens, Marion Jones, and Barry Bonds needs to be revised downwards with an asterisk, we submit that that Dock Ellis record deserves a giant exclamation point. Of the 263 no-hitters ever thrown in the Big Leagues, we can only guess how many were aided by steroids, but we can say without question that only one was ever thrown on acid.

Sadly, the great Dock Ellis died last December at 63. A year before, radio producers Donnell Alexander and Neille Ilel, had recorded an interview with Ellis in which the former Pirate right hander gave a moment by moment account of June 12, 1970, the day he no-hit the San Diego Padres. Alexander and Ilels original four minute piece appeared March 29, 2008 on NPRs Weekend America. When we stumbled across that piece this past June, Blagden and Isenberg were inspired to create a short animated film around the original audio.

www.nomas-nyc.com

Entry Number Two:

As the man behind some of the most successful McLaren Formula 1 cars and the incomparable McLaren F1 supercar, Gordon Murray has designed some of the fastest cars ever. Now he’s building one of the smallest. And most radical.

The British engineer finally unveiled his T.25 City Car, the Lilliputian runabout he’s spent three years developing. Although the 74-mpg T.25 and its T.27 electric sibling recall the microcars of post-war Europe, it’s quite advanced. Beyond using a tubular steel frame, composite materials and a canopy that opens like a Lamborghini’s doors, the T.25 will use a manufacturing process said to tremendously reduce capital, space and materials.

Read More http://www.wired.com/autopia/2010/06/gordon-murray-t-25/#ixzz0sCoeWRiR

There’s a complicated fight in D.C. right now over how the FCC classifies broadband services, so it can regain the power to impose some basic rules on the industry.

Free-market groups and the industry are banging the table, arguing against the consequences — saying that the FCC is trying to regulate the internet and will kill innovation.

Here’s the simple truth: You don’t want your ISP to innovate.

At least not in the way, they want to “innovate.” [...]

In the last couple of years, ISPs “innovated” by changing how they handle users who type in a URL that doesn’t exist. Under net protocols, the ISP’s DNS servers are supposed to report an error code to your browser in those circumstances. Instead, ISPs are now serving up pages with ads, sometimes in ways that introduce huge security risks…

ISPs also recently dipped their toes into another innovation: Selling access to everything their customers do online in order to build profiles on them and secretly insert targeted ads into other company’s web pages…

What we want and need is fast, reliable and affordable internet access.

The dirty secret of ISPs is that even as broadband usage on their networks continues to increase 30 to 40 percent a year, their annual costs for shipping data onto and off the net’s main pipes continues to fall.

The problem isn’t the cost of shipping data.

The problem is that the large ISPs answer to Wall Street and instead of planning and investing for abundance, they prefer to spend their time thinking of ways to extract more money from customers without having to invest significantly in future-proof infrastructure.

Critics of new media sometimes use science itself to press their case, citing research that shows how “experience can change the brain.” But cognitive neuroscientists roll their eyes at such talk. Yes, every time we learn a fact or skill the wiring of the brain changes; it’s not as if the information is stored in the pancreas. But the existence of neural plasticity does not mean the brain is a blob of clay pounded into shape by experience…

The effects of consuming electronic media are also likely to be far more limited than the panic implies. Media critics write as if the brain takes on the qualities of whatever it consumes, the informational equivalent of “you are what you eat.” As with primitive peoples who believe that eating fierce animals will make them fierce, they assume that watching quick cuts in rock videos turns your mental life into quick cuts or that reading bullet points and Twitter postings turns your thoughts into bullet points and Twitter postings…

It’s not as if habits of deep reflection, thorough research and rigorous reasoning ever came naturally to people. They must be acquired in special institutions, which we call universities, and maintained with constant upkeep, which we call analysis, criticism and debate. They are not granted by propping a heavy encyclopedia on your lap, nor are they taken away by efficient access to information on the Internet.

74 Democrats signed a joint letter to the FCC supporting internet throttling by Verizon, ATT and Comcast. Throttling lets carriers slow or block internet traffic. This is a clear attack on net neutrality.

Here is where you can do something about it!

Online courses are, for lack of a better term, shit. No one who has taken or taught one can claim in earnest to have learned more than they do in traditional courses. Few could honestly claim that they learned anything at all. When the author of DIY U describes a model of students “cobbling” together a self-guided degree consisting of “course materials readily available online,” I cannot convince myself that the Yale-educated author believes that even as she is paid handsomely to type it. Perhaps 1/10 of a percent of undergraduates are mature and motivated enough to effectively direct their own course of study. What Kamenetz describes feels more like replacing the 12-course tasting menu at El Bulli with a trip to Old Country Buffet and calling it a wash. The idea that anything meeting her description would qualify as an education is prima facie ridiculous and requires no further discussion…

Like adjuncting, online courses have become a pandemic, especially at poorly funded, lower tier public institutions (Eastern State U., etc). Online courses are moneymakers, and thus of great interest to institutions that are chronically short on money. The proliferation of “Online MBA programs” you see on billboards and TV commercials represents nothing more than financially strapped and savvy institutions reacting logically by combining a highly profitable program in which no real learning takes place anyway – unless one counts Jack Welch books and management platitudes as learning, which I do not – with the lowest-cost delivery method. If anything colleges do can be described as profit-maximizing, this is it.

These changes are coming, and higher education in a decade or two will probably look quite similar to what Kamenetz and her supporters envision. I have neither doubts nor illusions about this. But I insist that we call it what it is. It is a lot of highfalutin language being thrown around by administrators to justify cutting costs – and not the costs to students. It is the replacement of tenured faculty with a permanent Ph.D.-holding underclass barely cracking the poverty line and undeserving of pesky expenses like benefits or offices. It is a way for state legislatures to continually slash higher education funding while rationalizing it as a good, or at least value-neutral, deed. It is a way to make changes that promise short term rewards to a group of decision-makers who will be long gone before the true costs – cohort after cohort of “college graduates” with even fewer useful skills and less useful knowledge than the already substandard ones churned out today – become painfully clear. It is a way, like everything else the think-tank conservatives and market acolytes sell to the public as a means of reducing costs or democratizing something, to make it more profitable. Not better, not cheaper, and not more accessible. Only a mind that conflates “better” and “more profitable” can continue to promise the former with a straight face.

The devices, known as memristors, or memory resistors, were first conceived in 1971 by Leon O. Chua, an electrical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, but they were not put in effect until 2008 at the H.P. lab here.

Don’t get me wrong… It’s not an either/or kind of thing… Both the public and private sectors are necessary elements of capitalist development. This has always been the case. A more current example of this dynamic comes to us from China. The significant public investment China made in developing high-speed rail is now going to pay off as it begins to sell its expertise on the global marketplace.

The Chinese government has signed cooperation agreements with the State of California and General Electric to help build [high-speed rail] lines. The agreements, both of which are preliminary, show China’s desire to become a big exporter and licensor of bullet trains traveling 215 miles an hour, an environmentally friendly technology in which China has raced past the United States in the last few years.

You see… The public sector is capable of doing what the private sector cannot; it can make significant investments in long-term projects with little hope of short term viability. However, making those investments on the front-end opens up possibilities for the private sector to build off of those investments. And, if you look at China’s competitors for the California market, you will see a list of nations who followed the same path.

China is not the only country interested in selling high-speed rail equipment to the United States. Japan, Germany, South Korea, Spain, France and Italy have also approached California’s High Speed Rail Authority.

Let’s be clear… I’m making this argument based on the logic of capitalism. That the free marketeers of the early 21st century dismiss these ideas out of hand as ’socialist tripe’ demonstrates how out of whack the body politic has become.

So, today’s news that Google will be bringing this practice to an end is a real shocker… but the real dirt relates to why Google has changed course…

Google has decided to stop censoring search results in China, after discovering that someone had attempted to hack into the e-mail accounts of human rights activists. The company disclosed the move in a startling announcement posted to its blog late Tuesday.

Google said it was prepared to pull its business out of China, if issues around the surveillance and its decision to stop censoring results could not be resolved with the Chinese government.

I don’t know if this is Google playing hard-ball with the Chinese government, but this demonstrates that senior management feels extremely confident and does not fear a shareholder revolt. Whatever it may be, this is simply beautiful.

We have taken the unusual step of sharing information about these attacks with a broad audience not just because of the security and human rights implications of what we have unearthed, but also because this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech. In the last two decades, China’s economic reform programs and its citizens’ entrepreneurial flair have lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of poverty. Indeed, this great nation is at the heart of much economic progress and development in the world today.

We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that “we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.”

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

Now if we could just get our elected officials to play a little hard-ball with our mercantilist “trading partner”….

Click here to view the embedded video.