US Cybersecurity Agency launched. You can all now sleep safely [The Register]

through centralization you can create a monoculture, and through that you end up making your position weaker than a plural and decentralized system…

Not Rocket Science. Simon Willison is collecting his excellent series of writeups on practical CSS magic under the rubric CSS ain‰??t Rocket Science. He should be wrong, it should be like rocket science: predictable, deterministic, with an engineering ruleset saying How To Do It. Except for the tools are broken. To be specific, Microsoft‰??s tool is broken. And in recent news, apparently they don‰??t care. Which is maybe just fine. … [ongoing]

this is nifty, handy, and all that…. the problem of coruse is that rocket sceince isn't very predictible, deterministic, or heavily governed by an engineering ruleset, though many believe it to be. at its heart, it is a science, which means that it is only as determinate as human error allows it to be, it is only as engineered as social structures allow for, and in the end, it is broken and disastrous, but it does make good tv.

Agile programming and analogies. Boundary objects and software development is the topic of one of the papers (pdf) for Analogy Fest. [Link by Tesugen.com.]… [Imaginary magnitude]
sounds like a cool paper….. its a topic I'm intersted in.

STS blogs. Blogs by people in the Science and Technology Studies field: an index… [Imaginary magnitude]

so anyway, i added Gustav to my blogroll, so here is where he linked to me… there has to be more STS blogs out there in the world, come on people speak up.

Hellenic Ministry of Culture. The Hellenic Ministry of Culture The Hellenic Ministry of Culture and its many guides and maps for hundreds of Greek archaeological sites, monuments and museums. Here's one of Herakleion, in Crete. [MetaFilter]

for those who are planning on hitting greece this year, I'd like two, but i think depending on my situation, that i will do a greece/turkey think next year because i just have to see http://www.olympostreehouses.com/

Comment on the Department of Education's third
National Education
Technology Plan.

See also the USDE
press
release. [A blog doesn't need a clever name]

if you haven't commented comment soon, comment loud….

Harvard Chief, at Commencement, Vows Change. Speaking on Harvard's 352nd commencement day, Lawrence H. Summers, the university's president, pledged to reshape the undergraduate experience, including the core curriculum. By David M. Herszenhorn. [New York Times: Education]

If i were he, which i am not, i would propose the following changes. The core curriculum should be 10 3 hour classes, and each student would have to complete 2 more 10, 3 hour class majors or one extended 15 class major with a 5 class minor. for those 90 hours, 3 years, they would receive their B.A. in Liberal Arts with their majors/minors listed. There would be no professionalized degrees at that level. There would be no 'engineers' for instance or Business majors. they would be awarded with a masters in their specific area after 2 more years of study, the first would be an honors b.a. year, the second would be a master's year. this would be a leadership move in solving the problem of the professionalization/technicalization of the bachelor's degree.

Fail while daring greatly.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.  The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face in marred by dust and sweat and blood;  who strives valiantly;  who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming;  but who does actually strive to do the deeds;  who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause;  who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

- Theodore Roosevelt

[Curiouser and curiouser!]

this is a good quote, for a long time, t.r. has been my favorite president.

Museum of the History of Science. The Museum of the History of Science , Oxford, has an impressive collection of online exhibits – from medieval scientific instruments and the history of cameras to images of Tycho Brahe and 'the geometry of war' – mathematics and the early modern European battlefield. [MetaFilter]

lots of interesting work here, it'd be great to use in a class.

Cheese 'can be as addictive as morphine' [Ananova: Quirkies]

this gives new meaning to aardman movies.