Cappuccino culture for teenagers

In some schools, classrooms are being redesigned to resemble cyber cafés. Virginia Matthews of the Independent [London] reports

"At Colne Community School in Brightlingsea, Essex, the ICT Learning Centre – despite its 60 or so matt black, flat-screen computers – is designed to look more like a coffee bar than a secondary school, according to Mark Thomson, assistant principal.

"Yet despite the significant increases in GCSE grades, the better coursework presentation and what he calls "rising engagement levels among less motivated pupils" that have followed a £3m investment in technology, Colne's cyber café is just the start of things. ..."

Article continues at Virginia Matthews, Secondary teaching: Cappuccino culture for teenagers, The Independent [London], 01 November 2007, http://news.independent.co.uk/education/schools/article3113582.ece

Image credit: University of Pennsylvania, Accenture Cyber Cafe, http://www.seas.upenn.edu/cybercafe/

Mashing up the Once and Future CMS edit / delete Mashing up the Once and Future CMS

Malcolm Brown, Dartmouth, wonders with all the buzz that surrounds the Web 2.0, students' immersion in it, and the current focus on emphasizing the learner, if it doesn't make sense to implement Web 2.0 features into the CMS?

Url: Malcolm Brown, Mashing up the Once and Future CMS, Educause Review, vol. 42, no. 2 (March/April 2007): 8–9 http://www.educause.edu/er/erm07/erm0725.asp?bhcp=1http://www.educause.edu/er/erm07/erm0725.asp?bhcp=1

Ubiquitous Media: Asian Transformations

Ubiquituous Media: Asian Transformations

From July 3 to 16, 2007, a major media studies conference, entitled Ubiquitous Media: Asian Transformations, will be held at Tokyo University. Prominent scholars such as

• Friedrich Kittler
• Shigehiko Hasumi
• Rem Koolhas
• Bernard Stiegler
• Asada Akira
• and others

will serve as plenary speakers and there are literally hundreds of papers being presented, including many on film, anime and TV. You can check out the program and download registration forms at: http://www.u-mat.org/

The conference languages are Japanese and English.

The R Project for Statistical Computing

The R Project for Statistical Computing

The R Project for Statistical Computing is an Open Source application with binary installation routines for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. It is much much more than a simple statistical package. R provides an interpreted statistical programming language that looks a lot like S. The resemblance is so strong that I can use my old S language reference books to work with R.

R provides a graphing facility that goes far beyond what you might have used in spreadsheets like Excel.

R version 2.4.0 was just released last month (October 3).

Facing Facebook and Other Social Networking Technologies

Tracy Mitrano and Anita Rho, both of Cornell University, are leading an online workshop on November 8 to explore ways in which colleges and universities can use social networking tools: Facing Facebook and Other Social Networking Technologies. The announcement seems facebook (and marketing) oriented - If you’re starting a capital campaign at your institution, why not use social networking technologies for your alumni too, so they can create communities, post video and photos past and present, and "poke" old friends? - rather than academically oriented. Online studygroups, school clubs, political action, hobbies and recreation

Social Networking - Where the cool kids are

"The rapid growth of 'social networking' Web sites, such as http://www.myspace.com/ , continues to soar, according to the most recent numbers from Nielsen-NetRatings, released Thursday." Peer-to-Peer Networking For Podcasts and People

Royal Soc. attacked on open access

"A group of 46 senior scientists accused the Royal Society this week of putting its own considerations above those of science by adopting a negative stance on the issue of open access publishing, in which scientific literature is made freely available via the Internet. The letter-writers argue that the Royal Society is disparaging open access to protect the interests of for-profit publishers – including the Royal Society itself -- while the Society accuses petitioners of harbouring their own conflict of interest."

Stephen Pincock, Royal Soc. attacked on open access : Leading scientists criticize the UK's national academy of science for its negative stance, The Scientist, Daily News, Dec. 9, 2005 http://www.the-scientist.com/news/20051209/02

Towards the Visible Web

Gerry McKiernan, the blogging, theoretical, visual librarian sent this to the digital library list:

John Markoff, Your Internet Search Results, in the Round, The New York Times, May 9, 2005 SAN FRANCISCO, May 8 - For decades, computer researchers have experimented with the idea of displaying textual information in visual maps, but the concept has been slow to find practical applications. Now, one of the pioneering companies in the field is hoping that by making its software available as part of a standard Web browser it will be able to wean surfers away from the simple ranked lists of search results offered by Google and Yahoo. Groxis, a San Francisco-based company founded in 2001, has converted its desktop Grokker software program, which displays a Web search as a series of categories set in a circular map, to run as a Java plug-in for browsers. On Monday, the company will begin allowing computer users to view Yahoo search results with its visualization technology at http://www.groxis.com . [MORE at http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/09/technology/09yahoo.html

Gerry McKiernan's post includes links to good historical papers: [1] Gerry McKiernan, New Age Navigation, Innovative Information for Electronic Journals, The Serials Librarian, Vol. 45(2) 2003. p. 87. http://www.public.iastate.edu/~gerrymck/NewAge.pdf [2] Gerry McKiernan, The Big Picture(sm): Visual Browsing in Web and non-Web Databases, Cyberstacks, March 21, 1999. http://www.public.iastate.edu/~CYBERSTACKS/BigPic.htm

Humble Pi : Are the digits in Pi Random ?

The Christian Science Monitor published a editorial today touching on a fundamental tasks of academic computing - understanding numbers.

Pi's presumed infinite nature has absorbed mathematicians - and others - for centuries. According to "That Book...of Perfectly Useless Information," newly published, actress Melissa Joan Hart can actually recite pi from memory to 400 decimal places - not quite as good as a modern computer, which can take pi to more than 200 billion digits, but it's still pretty impressive.

But students young and old might not be aware of news generated by physicists at Purdue University that suggests pi, or 3.14159...., might not be as truly random as once believed.

The scientists just completed a study (published in the latest issue of the International Journal of Modern Physics) comparing pi's "randomness" to that produced by some 30 different machines that generate random numbers. Though they found that the sequences derived from pi are an acceptable source of randomness (a big factor in producing hard-to-decrypt code, or solving particular physics problems), pi's string doesn't produce that randomness quite as effectively as the machines. Call it a case of deus ex machina.

For now, pi's integrity appears safe. "We do not believe these results imply anything about a pattern existing in pi's number set," says Ephraim Fischbach, a Purdue physics professor.

The Monitor's View, Humble Pie, The Christian Science Monitor, April 29, 2005. http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0429/p08s03-comv.html

Purdue University News, Pi seems a good random number generator – but not always the best, April 26, 2005. http://news.uns.purdue.edu/UNS/html4ever/2005/050426.Fischbach.pi.html

Spotted by GCD's Brain, Math Tidbits.

Open Source Content Mangement

opensourceCMS.com was created with one goal in mind. To give you the opportunity to "try out" some of the best php/mysql based free and open source software systems in the world. You are welcome to be the administrator of any site here, allowing you to decide which system best suits your needs.

The administrator username and password is given for every system and each system is deleted and re-installed every two hours. This allows you to to add and delete content, change the way things look, basically be the admin of any system here without fear of breaking anything.

Why some systems are here and others are not? Below are the main system requirements.

1. Root access to the server is not required for installation.

2. The system must be php/mysql based.

3. opensourceCMS is not just for "open source" systems.

4. We may not know of the system.

5. Some systems we couldn't get installed.