Subscribe to this blog in Radio:
Didn't find what you were looking for?
E-mail this blog's author, Bruce Umbaugh:  |
|
 |
Wednesday, August 06, 2003 |
Literacy Skills for the World of Tomorrow - Further results
from PISA 2000 -- a report from OECD.
Not all of these differences [in
skills and knowledge] are due to the social and economic conditions in which
students live and schools or countries operate.
Some
countries have managed to mitigate the influence of social background and
some have achieved this while reaching a high overall level of performance.
3:22:33 PM 
|
|
Gravitating To
Location Services: Analysts Debate Revenue
Potential Of Location-Based Apps. By Brad Smith, WirelessWeek.
All you wives out there: Imagine having the ability to track
your husband's location, knowing whether he stopped off at a bar after work
or is on his way home. Or you singles: Imagine being able to find a
compatible partner in a crowd and hooking up for a date.
Those are a couple of examples that Dave Singer, executive vice president
of Gravitate Inc., uses to illustrate some of the possibilities of
personalized wireless location-based services. Both of the scenarios are
real, made possible by Gravitate products. The first is operational in
Korea and the second is available in Japan.
The ability to locate subscribers, coupled with the delivery of
personalized information, is often cited as a future high-demand service.
If the speculation is true, such services will only increase in importance
as network-based location information becomes more precise.
. . .
Privacy, of course, is an important consideration in location-based
services.
1:22:16 PM
|
|
Why I Infringe,
by Annalee Newitz, AlterNet.
I like to violate copyright everyday. Usually it's in some
small way. I'll copy an Oingo Boingo CD for a friend, photocopy an
interesting essay from an anthology, or maybe download an episode of Six
Feet Under from a file-sharing network. Sometimes I go bigger, like when I
bought a bunch of cracked software from a guy who was literally standing in
a shady doorway, or when I bought a pirated DVD on the street in New York
City (yes, it looked like shit when I played it).
. . .
I know it's sentimental of me, but I think of creative works as if they
were somehow human, as if they had lives of their own – many lives, playing
out in strange, unknowable ways inside each mind that absorbs them. And
when I see art and music and writing and movies and TV shows forbidden to
me by draconian copyright laws, I don't think about legal documents full of
tidy little justifications of property law. I see living beings in chains.
I see Mickey Mouse, who has tried to escape again, burned by the lash. I
hear Marilyn Monroe, imprisoned by her copyrighted image, howling to get free.
And I want to set her free. I want to see Marilyn running around in the
open air, somersaulting in the grass, smiling and pirouetting for anyone
who wants to watch her. I want people to invite her into their own
imaginations and turn her into something else.
Via politech.
12:22:07 PM
|
|
BNA News:
11:22:19 AM
|
|
Loss of e-mail 'worse than divorce': A week without e-mail is
more traumatic than moving house or getting divorced, say techies. (BBC
News)
Electronic mail is playing such a key role in companies that
most people start to get annoyed after just 30 minutes without e-mail
access, the study found.
11:22:16 AM
|
|
Robot
'guard dog' protects Wi-Fi setups, by Declan McCullagh, CNET News.com.
A strange two-wheeled creature was skimming through the
halls of the Alexis Park Hotel on Sunday--a robot that sniffs out
network vulnerabilities.
Created by two members of a loose association of security experts
called the Shmoo Group, the robot is designed to wheel around on its
own detecting and reporting the security problems of Wi-Fi wireless
networks.
The point of the hacker robot is that it can become an autonomous
hacker droid, said Paul Holman, the robot's co-designer, who
demonstrated it for the first time at the DefCon hacker convention
here. It can get in close to the network. On the offensive side, it
can be used for corporate or political espionage. On the defensive
side, it can be used for network vulnerability assessment.
11:22:04 AM
|
|
Little miss
moviegoer: The 8-to-18 female audience not only
reads a lot of books but also flocks to movies based on those
books, as Hollywood is discovering. By Andre Chautard, L. A. Times.
Girls are reading a lot, and they're looking beyond "Harry
Potter" and "Holes." Girls see a lot of movies, too, so it's no wonder that
Hollywood is taking notice. Now, some of the hottest girl-centric titles —
a mix of Cinderella stories, coming-of-age tales and sassy comic novels —
are coming to the screen with a number of on-the-rise teen stars in tow.
"Ella Enchanted," based on the popular fantasy tale by Levine, will be
released by Miramax next spring with Anne Hathaway of "The Princess
Diaries" in the title role, and Lindsay Lohan, who stars in the current
remake of "Freaky Friday" (originally a young adult novel by Mary Rodgers),
is filming an adaptation of Dyan Sheldon's "Confessions of a Teenage Drama
Queen" for Disney. The studio has also signed Raven, star of the hit Disney
Channel series "That's So Raven," for a big-screen version of Cabot's book
"All-American Girl." Brashares' publishing sensation "Sisterhood of the
Traveling Pants" is in development at Warner Bros. and scheduled to shoot
next year with director Ken Kwapis, while Paramount and Nickelodeon are
working on an adaptation of Rennison's "Angus, Thongs and Full- Frontal
Snogging," which has been described as a "Bridget Jones's Diary" for the
younger set. And a sequel to "The Princess Diaries" is set to shoot in
November, with Hathaway, Julie Andrews and director Garry Marshall all
returning.
This increased interest from studios in young adult fiction aimed at girls
is a marked change from past years, says "Ella Enchanted" producer Jane
Startz, who has worked on adaptations of young adult and children's books
for over two decades. When I first started out, I was doing after-school
specials based on young adult books and that was really the only venue for
those stories, she says. Nobody considered the audience economically
viable to do a project for that audience on a feature level. But
unexpectedly muscular grosses from films like "The Princess Diaries,"
"Legally Blonde" ($96 million) and "Save the Last Dance" ($91 million), for
which girls made up a large part of the audience, changed that perception.
. . .
The time I was growing up in this industry, the conventional wisdom was
girls will watch something that has a boy [as the lead character], but the
boys won't watch something that has a girl, Startz says. That may or
may not be true But I think what people are realizing is it really doesn't
matter that much if the boys are going to come or not because there is such
a faithful following for some of these girl projects.
10:23:23 AM
|
|
Ticketmaster's Privacy Policy: Opting Out is Not an Option, by Ed
Foster, GripeLog.
As I read that statement, I couldn't help but think about some
of the times I've purchased tickets through Ticketmaster, and some of the
"Event Partners" who may therefore know a lot about me. After all, event
promoters in sports and entertainment aren't always the most trustworthy of
folks. And I believe some of the artists I bought tickets for my son to see
are in jail now - do you suppose they're trading my contact information
with their cellmates for cigarettes? Under Ticketmaster's privacy policy,
they would certainly have the right to do so.
10:21:54 AM
|
|
While I was away, Scott reflected on the first year of Salon Blogs, saying, among other things:
Blogging is a vast terrain these days -- and with AOL about to step into the fray, bound to get vaster. From where I sit, our little piece of the blogosphere has more creativity, personality and quality per URL than any other comparable community of weblogs. Aside from the business side, the other "result" of the experiment that does not surprise me in the least is that the greater Salon community would turn out to harbor so many great bloggers -- and so many new ideas about what to do with a blog.
. . .
Since in the coming year it is unlikely that peace, love and understanding will conquer all, and more likely that the flow of news and events will continue to provide us with too much to talk about and to be disturbed by -- including more than one election! -- I can't think of a better group of cantankerous, contrary, eloquently individual people to be posting with. Thanks to all you bloggers, past, present and future.
7:16:59 AM
|
|
Julie, y'know, of Julie/Julia, hosts this totally intimidating person coming over to dinner, I need to have insouciant perfect wine, I’m freakin’ out, dude! Today.
7:08:59 AM
|
|
Smart Mobs on the subject Rolling Stones Marry Hi-Fi and Wi-Fi. I already wrote here in Smart Mobs about how the Rolling Stones were using wireless networks during their concerts. Now, ITWorld Canada also is reporting that the Rolling Stones are using wireless technology for their Forty Licks world tour.
They started implementing wireless networking a year ago. By using this technology, they were able to drastically reduce the number of plugs and the time to deploy all the network. They also update the rollingstones.com Web site from the concert locations. Finally, they can receive detailed maps of the venues before going to the next show to better prepare it.
My summary contains additional details.
7:04:02 AM
|
|
Dave: Jonathan Zittrain: The Copyright Cage. "Bars can't have TVs bigger than 55 inches. Teddy bears can't include tape decks. Girl Scouts who sing Puff, the Magic Dragon owe royalties."
6:58:17 AM
|
|
Swollen Orders Show Spam's Allure. A New Hampshire company appears to be grossing close to half a million dollars each month by spamming people with sales pitches for an herbal 'male enhancement' product. The discovery may explain the intractability of junk e-mailers on the Internet. By Brian McWilliams. [Wired News]
6:51:32 AM
|
|
|
