jason

One of my students in CS8932 sent me this link: Wiimote repurposed for multi-point interactive whiteboard

I’ve been searching for information on mortgages, particularly wondering if fixed or variable mortgages were better for me. A lot of sites referenced Mortgage Financing: Floating Your Way to Prosperity (2001) which is from the Individual Finance and Insurance Decisions Centre. This turns out to be at University of Toronto, so I searched about and found two more recent papers: Mortgage Financing: Should You Still Float? Four Answers (2004) and Mortgage Financing 2007:
What Now?. I’m going through all three papers, but the basic consensus is that it is cheaper the vast majority of the time to go with a variable rate (the first article says 88% of the time, and it is very analytic). I don’t mind doing what people say, but I have to understand it… as much as I can.

Check this whole thing out over at Gizmodo… it will just feeeeel right.

Classic Clips: Bill Gates Chews Out Microsoft Over XP

With Bill Gates saying good-bye to Microsoft this week, we’re realizing more by the day how much we’ll miss the guy. And when reading through the many interviews floating around this week, we came across this jewel from 2003. A leaked memo from Microsoft, it’s several pages of Gates just laying into his design and programming staff for—among other issues—his personal experience when trying to install Windows Moviemaker. And it’s a very fulfilling read if you’ve ever been frustrated by a Microsoft product.

From: Bill Gates
Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2003 10:05 AM
To: Jim Allchin
Cc: Chris Jones (WINDOWS); Bharat Shah (NT); Joe Peterson; Will Poole; Brian Valentine; Anoop Gupta (RESEARCH)
Subject: Windows Usability Systematic degradation flame

Bizarre Properties of Glass Revealed | LiveScience

Scientists have made a breakthrough discovery in the bizarre properties of glass, which behaves at times like both a solid and a liquid.

The finding could lead to aircraft that look like Wonder Woman’s plane. Such planes could have wings of glass or something called metallic glass, rather than being totally invisible.

The breakthrough involved solving the decades-old problem of just what glass is. It has been known that that despite its solid appearance, glass and gels are actually in a “jammed” state of matter — somewhere between liquid and solid — that moves very slowly. Like cars in a traffic jam, atoms in a glass are in something like suspended animation, unable to reach their destination because the route is blocked by their neighbors. So even though glass is a hard substance, it never quite becomes a proper solid, according to chemists and materials scientists.

How can this not be the coolest thing you’ll learn today. I ask you?

This is great wine, the rosé anyway. The chateau was 2km from our house in Puyloubier (at the other end of the village) and we walked to there a number of times.

globeandmail.com: The legionnaire spirit

CLAIRE ROSEMBERG
Agence France-Presse
June 17, 2008
PARIS — In true combative style, the much storied French Foreign Legion is going into the wine business to raise funds for its aging veterans.

“This is more than just a wine-tasting,” said commander-in-chief General Louis Pichot de Champfleury, launching its wines at a recent grand ceremony - a rare outing for the normally discreet, low-profile, elite force.

Called Esprit de Corps to embody the legionnaire spirit, its 2007 Côtes de Provence red and rosé vintages are produced from grapes grown on a property in southern France acquired by the outfit in 1953 to shelter its war wounded, as well as its elderly former fighters.

St. Lucie school officials interview Alex Barton

Alex Barton told St. Lucie County School District officials Tuesday about the day his teacher asked kindergarten classmates to vote whether he stayed in the classroom.

Alex’s mother, Melissa Barton, said Alex, 5, was asked to give a statement to the district’s human resources department and an attorney representing the district as part of the district’s internal investigation of the issue.

“He did a really good job,” she said. “He gave an excellent statement. His memory is amazing.”

Acccording to police reports, Morningside Elementary teacher Wendy Portillo brought Alex to the front of the classroom last month and asked other students to tell him how his behavior affected them. Alex, who was in the process of being diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome at the time, had left the class twice that day on discipline referrals. After classmates talked, Portillo then asked the class to vote on whether Alex should stay in the class.

Alex lost the vote, 14 to 2.

Facebook widgets pose privacy risks - Los Angeles Times

Facebook fanatics who have covered their profiles on the popular social networking site with silly games and quirky trivia quizzes may be unknowingly giving a host of strangers an intimate peek at their lives.

Those mini-programs, called widgets or applications, enable users to personalize their pages and connect with friends and acquaintances. But they could pose privacy risks. Some security researchers warn that developers of the software have assembled too much information — home town, schools attended, employment history — and can use the data in ways that could harm or annoy users.

“Everything requires you to give access to personal information or it forces you to ask your friends to do the same — it becomes a real nuisance,” said David Dixon, 40, an information technology consultant who recently deleted most of the applications he had downloaded to his Facebook profile after reading on a blog that developers may have access to his information. “Why does a Sudoku puzzle have to know I have two kids? Why does a postcard need to know where I went to college?”

DUH!
Ya, most of you know that you’re giving away all your personal information everytime you use your airmiles card too. But why do you sell yourselves so cheaply? I play with Facebook, et al., as part of my job, and a lot of my information is public because I work for a public institution, but without that need would I be giving away personal information to people and companies for free? Nope. It happens, but it is a judicious decision as much as possible, and lamented when it is not.

Fight the theft.

Legal experts say lawsuit in autistic boy’s case could have merit

West Palm Beach attorney Jeff Vastola sent a certified letter last week placing the district on notice he intends to sue the district on behalf of Alex Barton, the 5-year-old voted out of his Morningside Elementary class last month after class members told him what they thought of his behavior.

His teacher, Wendy Portillo, has admitted to police the event took place, but told police she was trying to make Alex understand how his behavior affected his peers.

Barbara Woodhouse, a University of Florida law professor, said from a human rights perspective, the child’s rights might have been violated, based on what she has heard of the case. The fact Alex was in the process of being tested for Asperger’s syndrome, a type of high-functioning autism, moves the case closer to something that ” ’shocks the conscience’ as opposed to poor judgment or insensitivity on the part of the teacher,” she said.

recognition for ainu in japan:

In the 19th Century, Japanese people called the northern island of Hokkaido “Ezochi”.
It meant “Land of the Ainu”, a reference to the fair-skinned, long-haired people who had lived there for hundreds of years.
The Ainu were hunters and fishermen with animist beliefs.
But their communities and traditions were eroded by waves of Japanese settlement and subsequent assimilation policies.
Today only small numbers of Ainu remain, and they constitute one of Japan’s most marginalised groups.
On Friday they will have something to celebrate.

Aaron Schutz at the Education Policy Blog Post-Fordist Education: “I think emancipatory education must involve teaching skills that actually generate collective power, which progressive education does not.”

Stewart Martin writes about the “Pedagogy-of-Human-Capital” at Mute magazine - Culture and politics after the net

Efficiency is the name of the game, with reduced resources per student the supreme goal, both from the side of provision and from the supplements students must contribute. The rich can buy more resources, but not another goal.

Of course, many of these phenomena and their apparent conflicts can be understood as a direct consequence of commodification. This is certainly fundamental, but what form does this take exactly? Stacking high and selling cheap only accounts for part of these developments. It doesn’t explain their ideological function, which draws on certain emancipatory claims. The liberation of ‘choice’ and ‘opportunity’ is usually the carrot; the stick is the threat of deserved poverty, whether of the individual or the nation. It is all too clear that education has become a way for rich nations to manage class conflicts, either through keeping people off the unemployment register, or through seducing their populations into the idea that they can all be middle class, with proletarianisation becoming an attribute of newly industrialised nations like China or India, or immigrant work forces. Within this ideology, failure is educational failure. The idea that contemporary education is characterised by the move away from authoritarian forms of indoctrination and towards forms of self-directed or autonomous learning is perhaps the most powerful emancipatory ideology in this context. ‘Life long learning’ is exemplary. The phrase oscillates between the dream of fulfilling self-transformation beyond the privileges of youth, and the nightmare of indiscriminate de-skilling and re-skilling according to the dictates of a ‘flexible’ labour market. It modifies the ideology of meritocracy, which is perhaps the core educational ideology through which the contradictions of capitalism and democracy are recoded as the successes and (more usually) ‘failures’ of disciplined individualism: ‘life long learning’ extends ‘meritocracy’ to the whole of your life. Qualification is a receding horizon; its promise of maturity takes the form of infantalisation.

While in Rethinking Domination and Resistance: Challenging Postmodernism (pdf) Schultz writes:

I explore the possibility that postmodern fascination with the pastoral may divert attention from the blunt discipline generally experienced by those at the bottom rungs of society. I look to different examples that indicate how these different forms of oppression tend (or fail) to incite different forms of resistance. I then explore a range of efforts by scholars and activists to develop more effective resistance strategies.

I like anything that rubs the educational nose into fordist and post-fordist tangents, but primarily due to my opposition to the institutionalization of lived experience and the necessity for autonomous spaces. But I realize that I get a bit reductionist in that approach; mainly because it is still often a novel thought for peeps. I would like to see if I can figure out how to get Schultz paper into my course that starts in 2 weeks.