Monthly Archives: May 2007

Teaching done right

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Cory Doctorow has been teaching an undergraduate course at the University of Southern California called ‘PWNED: Everyone on Campus is a Copyright Criminal’. The class was open to anyone on or off campus, and lectures were podcasted. The students edited a class blog and were expected to improve Wikipedia posts relevant to the class. For the end of semester, each student turned in a final project that related the course material to their lives and major areas of study.

In this post Cory highlights some of the projects. “From the class discussions and one-on-ones”, he writes,

I knew I had a really amazing bunch on my hands, but I was absolutely gobsmacked by the incredible quality of the final projects. From founding a record label to conducting public polls to writing guidelines for journalists to interviews and classroom materials, my students did me better than proud.

I encouraged my students to do work that would be of use to the world at large. I hate the idea of the usual college final paper, which the student doesn’t want to write, the prof doesn’t want to read and no one else wants to ever see. Instead, I challenged them to produce useful work that the world could benefit from, and they met and exceeded the challenge…

Worth reading in full. Wonderful stuff. Cory is a genius.

Quote of the day

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Lecturer: What’s the difference between ignorance and apathy?

Class: Zzzzzzzz…..

Lecturer: Oh come on — surely someone knows the difference!

Bored student: I don’t know and I don’t care.

From a talk given by Jeremy Hunt MP at the launch of the Open University’s Ethics Centre.

Google bans essay writing adverts

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From BBC NEWS…

Google is to ban adverts for essay writing services – following claims that plagiarism is threatening the integrity of university degrees.

About time, too. Stand by for squeals of protest from purveyors of bespoke essays to clueless undergraduates.

On this day…

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… in 1934, bank robbers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were shot to death in a police ambush as they were driving a stolen Ford Deluxe along a road in Louisiana.

Just thought you’d like to know.

Google: your, er, trusted advisor

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From today’s FT.com

Google’s ambition to maximise the personal information it holds on users is so great that the search engine envisages a day when it can tell people what jobs to take and how they might spend their days off.

Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said gathering more personal data was a key way for Google to expand and the company believes that is the logical extension of its stated mission to organise the world’s information.

Asked how Google might look in five years’ time, Mr Schmidt said: “We are very early in the total information we have within Google. The algorithms will get better and we will get better at personalisation.

“The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’ ”

Now why am I not reassured by this prospect?

The article goes on to discuss the implications of Google’s personalised search offerings. It also reports that

Autonomy, the UK-based search company is also developing technology for “transaction hijacking”, which monitors when internet surfers are about to make a purchase online, and can suggest cheaper alternatives.

One of the non-exec directors of Autonomy is Richard Perle, aka the Prince of Darkness.

Microsoft invents fat (finger) controller

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From Technology Review…

Retrieving the stylus for a personal digital assistant takes time. But for detailed work, a stylus is usually better than a finger. Microsoft researchers believe that they’ve found a better way to activate tiny targets, such as a name on a contact list or a street on a map.

Microsoft’s solution, called Shift, allows users to employ their fingertips to select pixels in a new way. First, the user presses a finger on the screen over the area of interest. Holding down her finger activates the Shift software. A detailed view of the area of interest appears nearby on the screen, in a pop-up window on top of the original image. With slight movements of her finger, the user can guide a pair of crosshairs over her desired target within the pop-up window and then make her selection by lifting her finger off the screen…

BBN back in the network design business

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Aaah!….. a blast from the past. Tech Review reports that Bolt Beranek and Newman have got the contract to rethink the network design.

NEW YORK (AP) — A government contractor that played a key role in the Internet’s birth will oversee efforts to redesign the network from scratch.

The National Science Foundation announced Monday that BBN Technologies Inc. will get up to $10 million (euro7.5 million) over four years to oversee the planning and design of the Global Environment for Network Innovations, or GENI.

Many researchers want to rethink the Internet’s underlying architecture, saying a ”clean-slate” approach is the only way to truly address security, mobility and other challenges that have cropped up since the Internet’s birth in 1969.

The NSF already has been funding several projects at universities and elsewhere through Future Internet Network Design, or FIND. It has been pushing to build GENI as a testbed for researchers to explore clean-slate ideas without damaging the current Internet.

Much of the work on GENI so far has been conducted by professors and other researchers. Naming BBN brings a full-time staff to the project, said Larry Peterson, chairman of computer science at Princeton University and head of the GENI planning group.

”They have a track record in large government projects of this sort, and they are very much committed to working with the research community to build the experimental facility we want and need,” Peterson said of BBN…

Footnote: Hmmm… That AP report isn’t entirely accurate. Although BBN played the central role in the design and implementation of the ARPANET, I don’t think it had any significant role in the ‘internetworking’ project that followed from 1973 onwards.

Intel steals a march on OLPC

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Cute, isn’t it? Wonder if Bill Gates put them up to it. (He’s been very rude about the One Laptop Per Child project in the past.) Anyway, Intel claims to be shipping this gizmo to the developing world. According to the blurb:

Classmate PCs are rugged and include features that are commonly found in today’s mainstream PCs (such as storage and built-in wireless), and are capable of running mainstream applications including video and educational software. These PCs are equipped with unique functions such as a water-resistant keyboard, an integrated educational feature set that allows teacher-student and teacher-parent collaboration, and an advanced theft-control feature using a network-issued digital certification. Intel works in each market with local software, hardware and communications companies that manufacture, distribute, service and support these Intel-powered classmate PCs.

Translation: these devices run Windows and are designed to (a) wean poor people onto Microsoft software and (b) make piracy difficult.

Over at OLPC, Nick Negroponte is not amused.

There are various differences in both the hardware and software, but Professor Negroponte believes the main problem is that his machine uses a processor designed by Intel’s main competitor, AMD.

“Intel and AMD fight viciously,” he told CBS. “We’re just sort of caught in the middle.”

Professor Negroponte says Intel has distributed marketing literature to governments with titles such as “the shortcomings of the One Laptop per Child approach”, which outline the supposedly stronger points of the Classmate.

Mr Barrett [Intel’s CEO, Craig Barrett] told CBS: “Someone at Intel was comparing the Classmate PC with another device being offered in the marketplace. That’s the way our business works.”

He dismissed claims that Intel was trying to put OLPC out of business as “crazy”.

“There are lots of opportunities for us to work together,” he said.

According to the BBC report, “Intel says it already has orders for ‘thousands’ of Classmates, which currently cost over $200 (£100).”

Bushed Telegraph

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The Daily Telegraph site was completely unavailable for most of this (Monday) afternoon. Bit flaky for an organisation that is betting the ranch on the Web.