Monday, December 12, 2011


According to Google, this is my 2,000th Blog entry.
Since I only post once a day, that also means I've been at this for 2,000 days (285.714286 weeks, 65.7098224 months, 5.47581853 years). I probably write about 10+ articles every day, so that means I've made 20,000 snarky little comments. To get those articles I probably scan about 200 articles a day via my RSS reader – that means I've read 400,000 articles.
None of this takes into account the years of emails before I started the Blog and the years of actual paper clippings before that.
I still have the dream that someday all of this will make sense...


My kind of Blog post!
Copyright and Your Face
December 11, 2011 by Dissent
A terrific post by Derek Bambauer on PrawfsBlawg begins:
The Federal Trade Commission recently held a workshop on facial recognition technology, such as Facebook’s much-hated system, and its privacy implications. The FTC has promised to come down hard on companies who abuse these capabilities, but privacy advocates are seeking even stronger protections. One proposal raised was to provide people with copyright in their faceprints or facial features. This idea has two demerits: it is unconstitutional, and it is insane. Otherwise, it seems fine.
Go read it. It’s the type of blawging that gives us non-lawyers a better grasp of what the law says and what the legal issues are without a ton of legal terminology.


Since this law is paid for and written by Netflix, the answer is “Gutting It!” Mostly... Of course, tape is no longer the medium...
Updating Video Privacy or Gutting It?
December 11, 2011 by Dissent
Danielle Citron writes:
The video rental business is among a few sectors of the U.S. economy with strong federal limits on the collection and sharing of consumer data. Under the Video Privacy Protection Act, which was passed in 1988, “video tape service providers” generally are not permitted to share a consumer’s video usage information without “the informed, written consent of the consumer given at the time the disclosure is sought.” VPPA also prohibits companies from retaining personal information beyond the period prompting its initial collection. Companies like Blockbuster ran afoul of VPPA by sharing its users’ rental information with social network contacts, without their consent, and by retaining personal information, including credit card numbers, of users who canceled their accounts. In September, Facebook began making it easier for millions of U.S. customers to effortlessly share, via a new timeline, more of their online activities, such as the music they’re enjoying and the articles they’re reading. Left off the timeline: the details of the movies they’re renting–due to VPPA’s requirement that consumers explicitly consent at the time of disclosure. Thus began Netflix’s renewed lobbying efforts to amend VPPA, so that Facebook users could automatically share their Netflix rental activity without requiring their rental-by-rental consent.
Those efforts have begun to pay off.
Read more on Concurring Opinions.


It's not tomorrow, its today. (Health and Politics seem to be the biggest areas of of interest.)
December 11, 2011
Brookings - Ten Facts about Mobile Broadband
Ten Facts about Mobile Broadband, Darrell M. West, Vice President and Director, Governance Studies - December 08, 2011. The Brookings Institution
  • "Mobile broadband is reshaping society, communications, and the global economy. With smart phone usage surpassing that of personal computers, there has been a sea change in the way consumers access and share information. Powerful mobile devices and sophisticated digital applications enable users to build businesses, access financial and health care records, conduct research, and complete transactions anywhere. This revolution in how consumers and businesses access information represents a fundamental turning point in human history. For the first time, people are able to reach the Internet in a relatively inexpensive and convenient manner. Regardless of geographic location, they can use mobile broadband for communications, education, health care, public safety, disaster preparedness, and economic development. In this report, I review ten facts about mobile broadband. I show how the mobile economy is reshaping the global landscape. Both in developed and emerging markets, there are major opportunities to create jobs, and create social and economic connections. With the mobile industry generating $1.3 trillion in revenues, it is important to understand how telephony is affecting the way people relate to one another."

(Related) How can Doctors get the best technology in the shortest time?
iPad: ‘Wild West’ of Medical Apps Seeks Sheriff
Mark Cain got his big break on June 9, 2008. The chief technology officer at a little-known medical software company, MIM Software, Cain was invited onstage at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference to promote his company’s iPhone app, a way for doctors to view incredibly detailed scans of their patients.
It was a cool demo of what the iPhone’s great graphics and touchscreen interface could really do. With hordes of international press looking on, Cain moved through a three-dimensional iamge of a human body, toggling between a CT scan and a PET scan.
… But the fun was short lived. Two months after the demo, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration told MIM Software to remove their app from Apple’s store, saying it needed to be cleared for medical use. That process took more than two years. And it cost about $150,000.
But that’s not what bugs Cain. What bothers him is that there are so many other medical imaging apps out there — many of them similar to Mobile MIM — that are being bought and sold without FDA supervision.


It's just a matter of when. (Don't judge the article by the picture. Students are not that ignorant.)
"Students and teachers in grade school through higher education are using the iPad to augment their lessons or to replace textbooks. Jennifer Kohn's third grade class at Millstone Elementary School in Millstone, New Jersey, mastered the iPad with minimal training. For the most part, the students didn't need to be taught how to use their apps, Kohn says. College students are also turning to the iPad to do what they do instinctively well: saving themselves money. Marianne Petit, a New York University staff member, recently began taking credits in pursuit of another certification, and uses her iPad in place of textbooks. 'The price of the iPad pays for itself after a single semester,' Petit said. 'iPad books cost so much less it's a legal alternative for students who are using BitTorent [to pirate books].' Like the PC before it, Kohn noted that the iPad isn't a panacea for educators: It has its appropriate time and place. 'I don't use them with every lesson or even day. It's not always appropriate to lesson or objective of what I'm trying to teach,' Kohn noted."


Something to make my students think! (Sorry for using the “T” word )
December 11, 2011
NYT Timeline Predicting the Future of Computing
Predicting the Future of Computing: "Since no supercomputer can yet predict the future, we need your help. Readers are invited to make predictions and collaboratively edit this timeline, which is divided into three sections: a sampling of past advances, future predictions that you can push forward or backward in time (but not, of course, into the past), and a form for making and voting on predictions. The most prescient prophet might receive an iPad 2 in 2050. But if the past is any guide, this prediction will almost surely be wrong."
  • See also Everyone Speaks Text Message: "For the vast majority of the world, the cellphone, not the Internet, is the coolest available technology. And they are using those phones to text rather than to talk. Though most of the world’s languages have no written form, people are beginning to transliterate their mother tongues into the alphabet of a national language. Now they can text in the language they grew up speaking."


This reminds me of a certain law professor I know...
He Has A (Power)Point


Lots of cool geeky stuff!
… That metaphor also extended to the administration’s proposal for a new education technology agency: ARPA-ED. $90 million was earmarked in the President’s 2012 budget for the new agency, which according to the Department of Education, would fund both private and public research by industry, universities, and other organizations to work on projects such as personalized digital tutors, adaptive learning platforms, and game-based learning (PDF).
… STEM skills are likely to permeate all jobs — we don’t simply need more scientists and engineers; we all need to become technologists. (See Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce for detailed statistics on jobs, education, and earnings released this year.)
… MIT’s Scratch continued to be a popular choice for introducing young students to programming and computational thinking. Scratch hit a major milestone this year too, with over 2 million Scratch projects uploaded to its community site. Scratch was the inspiration behind Stencyl, a game creation studio for Flash games, that launched this year. Microsoft also released its own game-building tool Kodu to help kids learn to build XBox games, holding its first annual Kodu Cup competition (You can read my interview with the winner, 10-year-old Hannah Wyman here). And while Google’s Android App Inventor gave me a bit of a scare this year when it appeared as though the project was getting the ax with the closure of Google Labs, Google ended up donating App Inventor — the code and the project — to MIT, along with some cash to seed a new Center for Mobile Learning.
2011 wasn’t just a good year for getting kids exposed to software development. There were several exciting new hardware projects too that were aimed at young engineers: Raspberry Pi — a $25 ARM/GNU Linux box. littleBits — snap-together circuit boards. Arduino — open source hardware and software. All of these are meant to provide an affordable and accessible way to learn.
… A number of education/technology startups launched in 2011 aiming to help anyone learn to program: Treehouse, Codecademy, Code Academy, and General Assembly, to name a few.


For my Geeks...
DOWNLOAD Think Different: How To Build Your Own Hackintosh


For my students and my fellow teachers...
Sunday, December 11, 2011
Bookboon is a free service offering free full-length textbooks, travel guides, and business books in digital form. The textbook section of Bookboon offers more than 500 digital textbooks. On Bookboon there are etextbooks available for twenty-five subjects, but the bulk of the etextbooks are focused on Economics, Engineering, and IT. You can browse the title lists to find a book you want or you can search Bookboon by keyword. Bookboon hosts books written in five languages. All of the books are free to download. The only catch is that you have to provide an email address before you can download the books.
Bookboon's books are targeted to university students, but that doesn't mean that some of the books couldn't be used with high school students. And since the books are free it wouldn't hurt to download one that you think might work for your class and use excerpts of it to supplement other materials that you are already using in your classroom.

No comments: