the cool hunter – GOING TO SCHOOL IN DENMARK:
We thought we’d covered the best in our Kool Kids Spaces, but out come the Danes with a school that makes us (almost) want to go back to elementary school. In Lego-bright contrast to the gloomy fate H.C. Andersen prescribed to his original Little Mermaid (that would be death, no less), today’s blond little school-going Danes are encouraged to do the sort of things for which some of us got spanked.

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How schools should be built…. for kids.

The $100 laptop: What went wrong – MSN Money:

Anyway, in general a free computer to everyone on the planet it interesting. The tool is cool. And there are many massively problematic issues involved. But that’s interesting is that this article is publishe din MSN Money. MSN isn’t part of this. I’ve read the M$ does not like open source. I wonder how much big computing, like big oil and big tobacco is willing to thumb the nose at doing something good (Gate’s work on aids in africa is not part of this debate of course) useful when it might get in the way of a little well planned out hegemony. But that’s just my personal opinion on it.

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This is one place where i disagree with Jason. The ‘cool tool’ is not a solution, it is a distraction from more serious infrastructural and educational issues and the ‘leapfrog’ of those infrastructures that it ‘represents’ actually will be impossible. I don’t think big computing is actually against this, in fact, most of them have bought in. You see, you don’t sell these things to people… You sell them to governments and the money that comes from governments will be be backed by other governments, so there is no real possibility of profit/loss . The economics of this project looks great, I think, for companies. The future of these objects as computers… is not great. The design is completely wrong for any use outside of a clean, classroom environment. It has too many moving parts and it is ‘american cool’ instead of globally useful. If you look at army troop laptops, designs that actually work in diverse environments…. they do not look like this and there is a good reason for that….. Design is one issue with OLPC, but there are certainly major socio-political implications… I’ve written on that before here. I think… OLPC is a bad program and mainly exists as a promotional tool. Putting the same money into the Million-book project’s bookmobiles would be far more productive.

CLIR Report:
This report summarizes a review of 12 e-journal archiving programs from the perspective of concerns expressed by directors of academic libraries in North America. It uses a methodology comparable to the art of surveying land by “metes and bounds” in the era before precise measures and calibrated instruments were available. It argues that current license arrangements are inadequate to protect a library’s long-term interest in electronic journals, that individual libraries cannot address the preservation needs of e-journals on their own, that much scholarly e-literature is not covered by archiving arrangements, and that while e-journal archiving programs are becoming available, no comprehensive solution has emerged and large parts of e-literature go unprotected.

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I’ve not finished reading this yet, but it looks like it could be fairly interesting.

What’s an Encyclopedia?:
John Pederson asks:

You do understand that Wikipedia is less about building an encyclopedia and more about “collecting the sum of all human knowledge and making it available for free to everybody on earth”, right?

Um… aren’t those pretty much the same thing?

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yes… and no… an encyclopedia generally is about perspectives on knowledge, one of those perspectives is sort of this ‘objective framing’ of knowledge as existent outside of human minds. I think wikipedia closes some of that gap… It is very clear, much more clear to me than from a heavily edited print encyc, that wikipedia is closer to knowledge presented as a plurality of subjective processes of coming to know and its expression in the world Even if people are being projective in that way, I do not think that wikipedia objectifies the same way as print encycs and that is important.

OpinionJournal – Taste:
This fall, the nation’s art museum directors have been in a state of near panic over a surprise change in the tax laws that, they say, has curtailed their ability to build their collections.
Until the Pension Protection Act of Aug. 17, museums could entice donors with a fractional gift. A collector could give his Rembrandt a little at a time, say 20% each year, then take a tax deduction based on that percentage of its value every year for five years. The museum could show the painting for 73 days—20% of 365. If the value of the artwork went up from one year to the next, so would the deduction.
But the new law has changed the rules. Deductions no longer increase with value, but they do decline when value goes down. Also, the museum must take “substantial possession” of the object within 10 years. Otherwise the donor must refund his deductions, with interest, and pay a 10% penalty.
Dean Zerbe, senior counsel for the Senate Finance Committee, told the New York Sun in September that the law was changed to stop abuses. “Very wealthy people were taking huge deductions and keeping the art at their homes.”
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personally, i think museums should avoid selling their collections… but they do need operating capital sometimes….

2blowhards.com: 1000 Words — Gold Medal Books:
What if you could trace the French New Wave, Sam Peckinpah, cyberpunk, “Pulp Fiction,” “Mulholland Drive,” and “Sin City” back to one business gamble taken by a third-tier publisher in 1949? In fact, you can, and without being guilty of too much overstatement. A little, sure, but not that much.

The publisher was Roscoe Kent Fawcett of Fawcett Publications, and his gamble was to try something no one else had tried before. He decided to publish original novels in paperback. In 1950, his new line of paperback originals was launched. It was called Gold Medal Books, and it became not just a tremendous commercial success but a culture-shaping one too.

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and i learn something new every day….