Trivia for Serenity (2005):

According to an interview with Alan Tudyk, this is the first movie in a three-picture Firefly contract with Universal.

goal goal goal goal goal goal goal goal goal

ScriptCenter: ATM for Drugs:

New ATM-like prescription machines are being rolled out in California and Virginia, where new changes in states’ laws allow medicines to be dispensed without a pharmacist. This new machine, called the ‘ScriptCenter,’ has been installed at a Longs Drug in Del Mar, California, and coughs up as much Furosemide and Metformin as your pharmacist has loaded into it..

A New Way to Get Refills [MedGadget]

——

this is not good. not good at all

bridges.org:

Comparison
Study of Free/Open Source and Proprietary Software in an African
Context: Implementation and Policy-making to Optimise Community Access
to ICT
The Software
Comparison research project provides
the needed background information and advice to
people who want to make
sound software choices for public computer labs in Africa.
The
final report represents the first comprehensive analysis of software
choices
in the African public-access context. The study looked at 121 computer
labs in Namibia, South Africa and Uganda, examining the range of
factors that affect software choices; the realities of the current
situation in Africa; and the long-term implications of software choices
for Africa. This
research was led by bridges.org and supported by Collaborating Partners
SchoolNet Africa, the International Development Research Centre (IDRC)
and the Open Society Institute (OSI). In addition, a number of
field-study partners provided access to computer labs for the study. A
high-level
Advisory Group, comprised of experts in the field from both sides of
the debate, was actively involved in the study on a regular
basis: reviewing project documents (methodology, report drafts etc.),
providing feedback and additional resources.

——

interesting study

The Chronicle: 6/24/2005: Teachers’ Pets:

Students who visit the turtles “light up like Christmas trees” when they see them, says Mr. Witz.

Elizabeth Clementson: Down With MFAs
:

So here’s my advice—if have any aspirations for a place in literary history, don’t attend an MFA program. It won’t inspire you to great literature and you won’t be able to pay back that enormous tuition bill unless you write the carefully crafted plot line that everyone wants, but nobody wants to read.

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most of what she says can be applied to almost any given degree program, can’t it?

AlterNet: Life Begins at ‘Want a Cigarette?’:

In Christian terms, full humanity has never been associated merely with material substance. Declaring that a human soul comes into being fully formed at the moment of conception is logically at odds with its status as an organ of informed choice and goes against the whole thrust of the born-again movement. What I find so curious about the right-to-life position on the fertilized egg is its astounding materialism: A zygote has neither brain nor mind and no ability whatever to accept or reject the existence of a supreme being. A “person” — especially a Christian person — is a being of free will. To extend that definition to a single cell is theologically absurd.

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in case you did not know.