Open Education Presentation – Concept to Reality.

I couldn't get onto the conference call today, but this is Stephen's outline.  See also DLORN (Distributed Learning Object Repository Network) which articulates what he's been talking about for a while.

[Serious Instructional Technology]

this is a nifty presentation. well worth reading.

Saturday Morning Cartoons. Whatever happened to Saturday Morning Cartoons? An astonishingly intelligent article about how Cable TV, dual-family households, regulations and more eliminated what more than a few of us remember quite fondly as the magical time when suddenly TV existed for our personal entertainment purposes. Anyone else remember occasionally dragging themselves out of bed at 6AM for what was ultimately five hours of really, really cool commercials? (Link from Fark!) [MetaFilter]

Let's be clear there were some horrible cartoons on then, i mean horrible, but some were classic.

friendster demographics. An odd thing about Friendster is its demographics. Based on the members in Norway (these are the only members I browse occassionally, apart from friends of friends) almost everyone's a designer, a musician, into cool technology or a blogger. Most… [jill/txt]

Well i finally joined friendster, and right now other than ego surfing it seems pretty uninteresting…. sure you can create a social network there, but isn't it more fun to use the whole web to do it, i think so….

Appalshop. The Appalshop, nestled in the hills of coal-stained eastern Kentucky, was founded in 1969 as a War on Poverty project designed to train young people in Appalachia for jobs in film and television. Today, it flourishes as one of the premier cultural outposts of a proud and struggling swath of America. Its projects include documentary films, a record label, and one of the best public radio stations in the country. [MetaFilter]

this is the sort of thing we should have more of….

The iX104, Xplore's rugged Tablet PC.

Christopher Coulter tips us off to the new Xplore iX104, a rugged Tablet PC that's really made by Wistron. The iX104 is designed to withstand a lot of abuse, and can handle extreme temperatures and humidty, a four-foot drop onto concrete, and being submerged in water. As far as specs, it has an 866MHz processor, a 10.4-inch LCD screen that automatically adjusts its brightness whether its inside or outside, and the option of using any combination of 802.11b, CDMA2000 1XRTT, or GSM/GPRS for wireless connectivity, with GPS and Bluetooth modules coming later this year. Christopher thinks that the iX104 might prove so popular with military and law enforcement (there's word that the Defense Department is placing a big order) that the best selling Tablet PC of all-time could be one most consumers have never even heard of.
Read

[Gizmodo]

nifty…

The Robotic Cannonball Run.

The route? A 250-mile course between Las Vegas and Los Angeles. The date? March 13th, 2004. The prize? A million dollars? Wired News article on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Grand Challenge, a road race in which all the contestants have to be “autonomous motor vehicles” that can drive and navigate entirely without any human control. The piece points out that DARPA's conditions for racing are so stringent that the race probably can't be won given the current state of technology, and will be held again every year for the next few years until someone finally does cross the finish line.
Read

[Gizmodo]

This sounds like it could be fun. I think you could do it with the current technology, but you would have to be more creative in its application than most people who approach technological design are.

If there's a Hell below, we're all gonna go. The Dante’s Inferno Test has banished me to the Sixth Level of Hell – The City of Dis. Detailed report… [Kieran Healy's Weblog]

I was in the City of Dis too actually on the #humanism channel on the undernet irc network there was some competition to see how low you could go. I didn't try particularly hard. I remember back in the early 90's that i had a game called escape from hell which was quite entertaining.

Private Vices and a Just Society.

Posted by The Happy Tutor