It is difficult to retro-fit compliance when you fail one of the “W. C. Fields” tests (Illegal, Immoral, or Fattening) Besides, children surrender all rights once they enroll in school.
http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=21786
UK: Schools fight biometric consent law
March 19, 2011 by Dissent
Irena Barker reports:
Headteachers are set to incur the wrath of civil liberties campaigners after challenging new laws that would force them to seek permission from both parents to use children’s biometric data.
The Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) claims a new bill forcing them to gain consent would be a “huge bureaucratic burden” for schools operating technology such as fingerprint recognition systems for cardless libraries and cashless canteens.
The new Protection of Freedoms Bill also gives pupils in schools and colleges the right to refuse to give their biometric data and compels schools to make alternative provision for them.
The several thousand schools that already use the technology will also have to ask permission from parents retrospectively, even if their systems have been established for years.
Read more on TES Connect.
So basically, the position of the ASCL seems to be that no one should make them actually do what they should have done from the git go, and by golly, now that they’ve invested all of this money in collecting information, don’t go and ruin it for them by protecting the human rights of the thousands of students whose rights they’ve already run roughshod over.
What’s the UK equivalent of “Pound sand?” And that’s the polite/edited version of what I’m thinking right now.
Every postal employee a spy? Hey we tried to have Google do this, but people objected. Until we can modify the black boxes installed every US-made car, this might be the best method we can come up with...
Postal Sensor Fleet Idea Gets Tentative Nod From the USPS
Late last year, we mentioned the idea floated by to Michael J. Ravnitzky, a chief counsel at the Postal Regulatory Commission, that the US Postal Service use its wide-ranging fleet to gather and upload useful data of all kinds — everything from weather conditions to RF coverage. Now, an anonymous reader writes
"A workshop on this topic is scheduled for April 12th in Washington, DC. This month, the Postmaster General sent a letter to Senator Thomas Carper, Chairman of the US Senate Subcommittee that oversees the Postal Service, expressing interest in exploring this concept."
This is interesting for several reasons. The government will “pay” doctors to move to electronic health records (unless you treat poor folks and don't share your records with the government)
DrChrono.com - Record Patient Data
You might be surprised to know that one out of five doctors in private practices uses an iPad already. But when you start thinking about it, such a thing makes a lot of sense. An iPad is infinitely less cumbersome than a laptop, not only physically but also in terms of applications. By their mere nature, iPad apps reduce the amount of effort that it takes to input data and have it processed.
And the only reason medical practices have not adopted iPads more widely is because there are not that many apps which have been built solely for them. But that is slowly changing. And apps like Dr. Chrono are here to point the way into tomorrow.
Generally speaking, this is an app that doctors can use to schedule patient appointments, take clinical notes and write prescriptions which can then be sent to pharmacies.
And just in case, Dr. Chrono can be accessed using a web interface. Leaving aside the process in which everything is inputted, the same kind of data can be recorded.
This application is all the more interesting because doctors are being actively encouraged to move to electronic records by the Obama administration. Well, Dr. Chrono will make such a transition a smoother one for everybody.
A simple and powerful tool for teachers and students. I tell my students about tools like this, then arm them with websites or blogs they could follow (the ones I follow) for each course.
Saturday, March 19, 2011
RSS or How Do You Keep Up With All of This?
How do you keep up with all of this? That's a question I am often asked after giving a presentation or when I meet people at conferences. One of the ways I keep up and learn about new things is through Twitter. In his guest post Steven Anderson recently offered some great advice about using Twitter. The other way, in fact the primary way, that I keep up is through my RSS reader.
I am currently subscribed to 257 blogs and websites in my RSS reader. Those 257 sites account for more than 1,000 daily posts. If I had to visit each one of those sites individually I would never have time for anything else (like walking Morrison). So what is an RSS reader and how does it help me efficiently process 1,000 or more blog posts per day? Watch the Common Craft video below to find out.
http://www.commoncraft.com/rss_plain_english
Applications for Education
You don't have to be trying to publish 100+ blog posts a month in order to benefit from using an RSS reader. Even before I was blogging I was using an RSS reader. I started using an RSS reader just to keep up with news from the BBC, CNN, and Reuters. I found it much easier to have the news come to me than for me to go to the news.
If you have a favorite education periodical, like the School Library Journal, chances are they have a web presence that you can follow in RSS. If you're students are doing research they can create a Google Alert and add it to their RSS readers to get updates each time new information about that topic appears on the web.
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