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.
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