You might want to look at www.epsilen.com - owned by NY Times, I believe. Not free or OSS, but more affordable and comes with access to NY Times content.
Fortune article has a little more on his methodology and said:
"Munster's team called 50 Apple Stores on Sunday and found that 49 of them had sold out of iPad 3Gs and most had run out of Wi-Fi-only models as well. But it's not clear whether that's because demand was high or supplies were low. Munster believes it was probably a bit of both."
I have trouble taking that state senator too seriously.
He's clearly outraged about "being bullied" by Amazon...
but it's less clear that he has done an cool-headed analysis of the impact of the legislation on all parties (Amazon, affliates, customers, state treasury).
My wife's employer has that sort of high-handed approach to control of employee behavior. I'm rather astonished that a progressive, 2.0, "open government" administration chooses that sort of avenue to security/leak-control/discipline (or whatever their actual motivation).
I assumed the motivation had to do with the legal requirements that the White House is supposed to follow regarding tracking communications coming from the White House.
If they don't have a way to keep tabs on any messages that get twittered, sent via facebook or even worse, webmail; then it's far easier to just block it.
The history of AOL reads like that of the U.S. auto industry:
• Pick the easy money as fast as you can
• Pick old-school corporate leadership and hope it'll work in a new, highly competitive world.
• Don't worry about looking at the latest innovative directions - or seeking a CEO who can create new ones for your corporation.
There must be some technological/business assets left in AOL. What about finding some leadership that wants to be ahead of the next wave of digital communication?
Justin Frankel actually technically worked for AOL (via Nullsoft) when he wrote Gnutella and WASTE. Probably the best things to come out of AOL (by proxy) in the last decade. (Not that they didn't try to stop it, either).
I'm a rather low-tech guy, but does anyone have any experience installing such a Linux setup on a external HD.
I've got no PC (or Intel-based) machine around, but I'd like to be able to set up a local serve for my beginner development projects - using a long-in-tooth (667MHz) PPC Powerbook. And I've got an external (firewire) HD (250GB).
This seem workable to anybody? (I'm between jobs and trying to ramp-up my trial projects.)
Erm? Does it speak well of Amazon when it "boldly" presents negative customer reviews on its pages? I mean, yes, I think it's useful, but I don't think that presentation of user reviews reflects particularly well OR poorly on Mozilla.
"I was having an epiphany. Isn’t it remarkable, I thought, how the students whined and said it was hard putting 200 words together on any subject? But when they forged excuse notes, they were brilliant..."
To me this is a great example of one of the fundamental problems with so much education: it is full of unchallenging, unrelated-to-life, contrived tasks. When any process (creative writing, math, coding) is harnessed to a fascinating, meaningful-to-students goal... well, of course they're motivated. And creative.
That has always been true of me - when in grammar school, and decades into employment.
Question for you then. In high school, should a kid only interested in reading & writing (english class, journalism) be required to take math and sciences?
How about a kid who's interested only in physics, should we make him read and write poetry?
Even if each class is taught the best it possibly could be, individual interests will outweigh, and the kids will be bored in the alternate classes.
So the options are either 1) uninterested kids, or 2) uneducated kids.
Basically, since interests vary so much, even among middle school aged kids, there's no platonic ideal of a "perfect class that every kid will love".
Personally, I think that given an intellectually stimulating home environment, passionate teachers, and a great curriculum, (almost) every kid will be interested in both poetry and physics, because they are both fundamentally interesting and beautiful things.
I can confirm this. In high school I hated math, planned on getting an English major, because the English teachers were so good. Previously, in middle school I hated critical analysis of books, but because my math teacher was so good I was an absolute math geek.
I remember my high school Algebra II teacher was asked, "Why should we care about what you're saying?" His answer: "You shouldn't care. You're here to get a grade. You'll never use this and it's not fun." This while my English teacher was staying an hour after class to debate Lolita, Ulysses, A Space Odyssey, and a whole ton of other stuff with basically every student willing to talk to him. There were a lot.
Your second paragraph struck a chord with me - through middle and high school, nearly all my math teachers would preface various topics with "You'll never use this in real life..." With that kind of sentiment, its no wonder why a lot of students did not want, or develop, an understanding for math :/
But the teachers are right, you know. Professional mathematicians doing research will practically jump at the chance to tell you that their work is meant to be beautiful, not practical. I think that's the message we should be imparting to students: math doesn't have to be useful for you to study it, just as poetry doesn't have to be useful for you to read it.
I remember my year-12 math teacher being the first true teacher I had for the subject in a very long time who actually cared, A student who came up with a varied or creative solution to a normal problem was praised with an overwhelmingly happy and teary exclamation.
I tried harder that year than ever before, Not just because of the importance of my results, But because I wanted to understand her euphoria at really giving yourself over to the problem.
Unfortunately Teachers who inspire such enthusiasm are a desperately rare breed.
It should delight them that writing proofs help you think about thinking logically, monads help you write abstract code, prime numbers (and the difficulty of factoring them) helps you think about encryption; it's just that explaining that "doing this proof is like doing stretches before you work out" leaves some unfulfilled.
Does it need to be so either/or? Not everyone needs to be expert at everything, but on the other hand ignorance creates enormous barriers to entry - illiteracy being an extreme example.
If we focus on educating people as consumers and then gave them discretion on which subjects they are sufficiently interested in to become producers, we might gain more. for example, politicians and marketers abuse statistics on a regular basis, secure in the knowledge that the average person has little statistic knowledge. So we have a small set of people who understand statistics very well, a larger population that are very credulous, and a similarly sized one that think all statistics are BS, an only slightly less ignorant position. You can imagine parallels with rhetorical fallacies or logic and science.
I suggest that students need to be well-rounded enough to assess the quality of information they're likely to encounter or use frequently and then follow their interests from there. So we should probably be teaching financial numeracy, basic statistics and perhaps geometry/trigonometry much earlier, because those are massively important life skills. Algebra, maybe not so much.
When I look at verbal political debates, they seem to me to center around the 8th grade level or even a bit lower. Written debates (eg newspaper editorials) seem to float in the 6th-12th grade level. Then again, I can't help noticing the existence of a TV quiz show called 'Are you smarter than a 5th grader' :-/
False dichotomy. Forcing people to take classes does not make them educated. Yet if they are free to participate in the activities they choose, they will educate themselves.
Ok, you are quite the optimist to truly believe that every kid will learn enough math by their own choice. No matter how much encouragement and good environment and teachers, there will be kids who just don't want to learn statistics, or compound interest.
So you're left with either forcing them to go, where they at least learn something exists, or letting them do their own things, and never learn anything about math at all.
Many people commenting here have this idealized view of education as "if only... xyz... then every kid would spend 12 hours a day teaching themselves!". That's absurd, and any realistic look at education has to realize that sometimes we need to teach kids skills that are useful, but not interesting.
Before 1900, curricula in schools ranging from elementary school right up through university level were prescribed with no choices left to the students.
The attitude also was one of sink or swim, with the idea being a comparatively few "educable" people would become truly learned while the rest would pursue utilitarian goals tied to earning a living.
The classes emphasized formative skills ultimately tied to the idea of learning how to think as opposed to specific instruction that was supposed to instruct in any immediately practical way.
Even the learned professions were regarded as mere utilitarian applications to be pursued only after one had become properly educated.
A very elitist and, one might say, "strongly typed" view of how education should proceed.
It is a modern concept that students should even be able to choose among electives or follow their own inclinations without rigorous guidance from instructors using a strictly prescribed format.
Of course, all this has completely changed today, with the result being an "idealized view of education" (to use your phrase) to the effect that all students are capable of learning, and will learn, if given the freedom and motivation to develop their abilities.
For a fascinating comparison of the old way with the new, read Albert Jay Nock's 1931 assessment (given as part of the Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia) of what he considered the utter failure of the modern approach to deliver on its promises of universal education. (http://mises.org/story/2765)
Nock's defense of the old way is undoubtedly narrow, even embittered, but his critique of the new way is often intriguing. At the very least, it makes us examine our assumptions about modern education in ways that we do not often do.
If anyone goes to the link, use the index up front to skip past the preliminaries and get to the substantive parts - otherwise, it is a very long read.
Knocking holes, but I'm sure there were a very large number of people who didn't attend university before 1900. Probably a lot of people also left school to get a job at some point before they turned 18.
If being ignorant of statistics is such a terrible thing, then it shouldn't be very difficult to persuade people that they should learn it. Make your case, and let them make a value judgment. I question the value of locking people in rooms and calling the truancy officer if they don't show up. That's prison, not education.
The solution to that is a complete change in the way society views education. If education were seen as a lifelong thing and it was the norm for people to pick up new skills then things would be so much better.
The current system forces people to make choices at a point in their lives when they don't even know who they are yet, let alone what they want to do with their lives. Instead of Google's 20% time, we need 20% education time.
But the issue is that most every person is not going to go "ohh boy! Compound interest!". Even though society is better off when both sides understand mortgages and car payments.
They aren't going to go "ohh boy genetics!", in order to understand what they're voting for when it comes to science positions of political candidates.
Basically, in my view, both society and individuals benefit with a certain base level of knowledge. I also believe that a majority of people would never learn parts of that base level if they had to do self-directed learning. I know that I never would have picked up poetry, or music if I wasn't forced to.
Remember that we are the exception here. We are the cream of the crop in self-educating, self-motivated people. I think it's far too optimistic to say "let people get self motivated", and hope that they learn everything they need.
Well I had read somewhere the society is driven by need-of-development and human-needs are ignored. People take science even if they are interested in arts, code even if they are interesting in drawing..it's because former will give them jobs. Most of the time work != fun. It's especially true in countries like India and China. We love singing but we need to do some maths assignment because our teacher said so, becaused our parents forced it that way. They say it's good..it's necessary. But interesting things or we can say old-bore content taught in an interesting manner does make life good. Ofcourse I'll go for option 1 because option 2 was never in my domain :(
But yeah there exist classes every kid loves and they are more or less like halley's comet.
You expound an overly romantic view of education, that is completely at odds with the actual practice of learning. There are many things you only learn by repeated application of the same basic principle to a great many 'contrived tasks'.
I wouldn't have been as proficient at arithmetic as I was at age 9, if I hadn't done the same simple "2-digit number times 2-digit number" exercise hundreds of times. You can't possible practice that on 'challenging, related to life' tasks.
Figuring tips, baseball statistics, extrapolating energy consumption with population growth, arithmetic competitions, currency conversions for price comparison, price comparisons given a unit price, the price of 2400 grams of apples...
Most of these you can do with division instead, and some of them you have to, but it's harder. The competitions are probably the most effective way to motivate some students to be really excellent; I don't know how effective they are at raising the average competence level.
Well, document management is free to move to the cloud.
But to the users it sure isn't (for many of commercial solutions). Consider (from the OP):
"According to the company's price list on-premise version of Knowledge Tree has an annual fee of $2,400 for a 20-user license at the basic level. The most basic SaaS version is $2,950 for 10 users, and is limited to 50 GB of storage"
What about small-time users? How about a small-sized offering?
As a "recovering journalist" who constantly recommends Readability to friends, the lack of authorship attribution concerns me greatly.
I don't write Javascript, so I can't provide myself with such a service, but as annoying (heavy bandwidth/printwidth) as many posts are, I think the average web-browsing citizen is soon going to catch on to the joy of reading clean copy.
Here's my vote for Readability (or some other enterprising JS coder) to offer this service along with attribution of authorship and original URL. —just my 2¢
