yeah that seems like the perfect market system to me, sarcasm….. who is taking the profit from these, we need to strip this bare and do a nice supply analysis to see where the money goes.

BlurBuilding. The Blur Building. Now you can spend your day in a literal fog. [MetaFilter]

some of the papers for the recent ICS program at OII have been put up on the web, you have to get the pdf though. I thought that Christine Hine's paper looked very interesting, as did Alesia Montgomery's paper.

Monoculture on the Potomac. My next column, which appears online tonight and in print next week, quotes from a speech given last year by now-former @Stake CTO Dan Geer. (I also referred to that speech last August in this weblog). Today my RSS feed is full of news about Geer, who was principal author of a paper that was presented on Wednesday at the 30th annual Washington Caucus sponsored by the Computer and Communication Industry Assocation (CCIA). Most reports suggest Geer was fired for his role in the report, though some some suggest he resigned.
… [Jon's Radio]

Measuring poverty.

There's an article in the New York Times today looking at the US Census Bureau's calculation of poverty rates. The article calls for an update of the figure to reflect changes in consumption patterns – which, it is envisaged would increase the number of people falling within the definition of poverty.

Regular readers will know of my interest in measures of income, poverty and cost of living – a throwback to my time in eircom where I dealt with inflation figures quite a bit. What I find fascinating here, however, is that the figure is based on an absolute level of poverty. In Ireland, and I believe in many other places, the generally quoted standard is a relative measure of poverty – such as 60% of the median household income. Of course, in the case of the US we have the interesting situation that a relative measure of poverty would quite possibly fall below the absolute poverty level – I'm not sure whether this would be the case in other countries.

According to one site there are three main ways to measure poverty:

Absolute poverty, takes into account the cost of a minimum package of goods, services and considers those who䴜s incomes are equal or below this cost, to poor. Relative poverty, takes into consideration the whole group whose income is below the determine level. Example, in some countries the poor are those whose income are below half the minimum wage. This estimate is used by societies who have eradicated absolute poverty. Social exclusion, used in Europe, considers those who have no access to services, such as employment, superior education, ownership of housing, health.

[funferal]

This philosophy page from Critical Mass shows the …. This philosophy page from Critical Mass shows the power of a great graphic. They're using the industrial metaphor in the context of individualized marketing messages, but this visual could certainly be applied to the personalization of learning. There's no question that the current education system was built around an industrial model — envision the graphic going the other way, with varied individuals going into the machine and coming out the other side standardized.

Jay Cross wrote about personalizing learning this week:

“The industrial revolution succeeded because of the specialization of labor and the substitution of machines for labor; it took most of the people out of the equation. eLearning attempted to do the same thing. In the early days, eLearning was justified by the savings in instructor salaries and airplane tickets when learning migrated from the classroom to the desktop. Of course, people aren't bales of cotton and learning is social, so most of the early eLearning programs went down in flames.”

So why don't producers of educational materials, sites and software use effective personalization? Because it's more expensive and complex. Standardizing creates cost benefits because there are fewer variables to control and single versions of each piece of content. But people aren't standardized, so they tend to detest being treated as if they were. It's easy to design a bunch of pages or tasks that are connected by a fixed or sequential navigation system — creating systems that reflect and infer a user's choices is hard because they introduce variables that increase exponentially as the number of decision points grow. [Jeremy Hiebert's headspaceJ -- Instructional Design and Technology]

Karl Rove, Hell Bound. If there was a place like Hell, Karl Rove would have a special level all to himself. He's smug, arrogant, full of hatred for those “beneath” him, and he is putting the lives of people at risk everyday. No, i… [Eat Your Vegetables]

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i wish i could believe that the justice department would follow through and prosecute the person that put our national security in jeapordy in this case, but you know they probably will not even though everyone knows that this is a felony, and the evidence seems to be very clear, and the action is reprehensible, it is still someone that you have lunch with and someone who will probably get you a job once you are out of office, etc. in short, i suspect the old boys network wins out on this one.

oh btw, yes revealing the names of cia operatives does always endanger national security.

A show of hands, please.

Sheila, Dan and others are all over the black box voting situation. My vote: open it all. Voting tech needs to be transparent, and countable. If that means paper, or cardboard, or snaf, or whatever, we just have to deal with it.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]