Category — Programming

A. A Thinking WorldTM task is a challenge that will take place in a 3D world. For example you may be answering multiple choice questions about how blood gets around the body, whilst exploring a 3D set of lungs. Or you may be bringing different characters information about bullying in a 3D classroom.

[From Serious Educational Games Online | Game Based Learning | Games]

more on thinking worlds

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seems like it would be interesting, but it is pc only. now i have my old linux box…

Public access group challenges Smithsonian over copyrights:
Grabbing pictures of iconic Smithsonian Institution artifacts just got a whole lot easier.

Before, if you wanted to get a picture of the Wright Brothers’ plane, you could go to the Smithsonian Images Web site and pay for a print or high-resolution image after clicking through several warnings about copyrights and other restrictions — and only if you were a student, teacher or someone pledging not to use it to make money.

Now, you can just go to the free photo-sharing Web site flickr.com.

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Carl Malamud and his group are doing some good work on freeing and sustaining the freedom of access to public resources

On Coda:
On Coda

it looks great!

The Living Edge:
David Sifry has just put up The State of the Live Web, April 2007. To explain the Live Web, he points to a pair of pieces I wrote in 2005. If you’d like a more visual explanation, follow the slides from this talk I gave at OSCON last summer, starting here.

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Doc points toward Dave’s use of some of his work in the live web and more important the communal or collective web as compared to what might be thought of as the individualistic web. Of course, in my view, the www is a policy regime, a device that constrains and constructs relationships, not merely among data, but primarily among humans. The current transformation of the web into user-generation and user-integration is fascinating because it is making possible a much broader mode of awareness, communication, and community construction.

» 25 Code Snippets for Web Designers (Part2):
25 Code Snippets for Web Designers (Part2)

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handy

thePeoplesToolbox – Programming Tools :

this site has thousands of tools of use to all kinds of programming tasks from the beginner to expert. it also has useful tools like this tool to represent how a large segment of the population might be seeing the colors that you choose differently. check it out, you might find something useful

ONLamp.com — What Is OpenDocument:
The OpenDocument Format (ODF) is an emerging file format standard for electronic office documents. Representing a triumph of common sense over the methods conceived before the rise of the Internet, ODF’s goals are both exciting and controversial. Early adopters of the format include state and municipal governments in some near- and far-flung places, and this makes the format’s progress a thing to watch. Yet innovation theory tells us there are some hurdles we all must overcome before ODF becomes a regular topic of conversation at the ballpark. Those in the know, however, recognize that we’re in about the second inning of a barn-burner. So, grab a hot dog and a beer, and settle in for a classic.

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Here’s something infrastructural that could change several business models….

FREE SOFTWARE, FREE SOCIETY
The Thiruvananthapuram Declaration
May 29, 2005

We are currently living in a world that is increasingly gettinginterconnected and the issues of our concern are becoming global.Along the way, new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs)transformed the process of knowledge construction and dissemination inour society. This process is transforming other fields of humancreativity as well — including music, painting or writing. Humanhistory is calling us to take note of this change. Creative workstoday live in a digital world, travel at the speed of light, gettransformed in seconds, become part of several other creations, andgrow in a number of other ways.

As society transforms drastically, we — students, engineers, ITprofessionals, social activists, lawyers, elected publicrepresentatives, media persons, film-makers and concerned citizens —urge our world to take note of the immense potential opening up forhumanity, and to ensure that technology is harnessed in the needs ofthe time to tackle the wider concerns of our planet.

Free Software has convincingly demonstrated to the world we know thatknowledge building is enhanced by freedom, openness and socialconsciousness; and that such features are very effective in creating afairer society and enhance the cause of the social good.
In the new networked and digitized society, the intangible(non-materialistic) aspects of reality are becoming more important incomparison with the material ones. Several years of material-centereddevelopment has not helped humanity to create a better world for all;or even for the majority on this planet.

To face the challenges of the day, we need a new model of developmentcentered around non material aspects of life — includingcollaboration, sharing, and compassion. Such a society is evolvingtoday on the foundations of freedom, collaboration and sharedknowledge.

We call it the gnowledge society (see http://www.gnowledge.org).
In our view, the gnowledge society will and must prefer:

freedom over bondage; sharing over monopoly; public good over privateprofit; participation over exclusion; cooperation over competition;diversity over uniformity.

We find that patent, copyright and other legal and institutionalsystems related to human knowledge are not suitable for thedevelopment of the gnowledge society. These systems were createdduring the industrial revolution, and then continued in spite of majorchanges in how technology shapes our lives. These systems were notdesigned for, and therefore cannot cater to, the emerging gnowledgesociety. For the development of human society, it is imperative thatwe promote the collaborative development and free sharing ofknowledge.
Such principles are not only consistent with, but even mandated by,the spirit of human rights as defined by the present legal system.

We, the participants at the Free Software, Free Society conference inThiruvananthapuram underline the following:

We call upon the social and political institutions to eliminatesystems that hinder the development of the gnowledge society.

We demand that every human being works for a more fair distribution ofknowledge for all, and for a world based on knowledge sharing andcollaboration.

Agreed upon in Thiruvananthapuram, South India, amongst theparticipants at the Free Software, Free Society Conference, byparticipants from the countries of:Bangladesh,Brazil,India,Italy,NorwayUruguayVenezuela.

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Declaration: http://fsfs.hipatia.net/wiki
FSFS: http://fsfs.hipatia.net

Save search results in 10.3:
I don’t know if everyone knows this, but it wasn’t documented as a shortcut in the Finder menu bar … pressing Command-T while doing a search from the Finder’s toolbar, or after finishing a search, the Finder will create a f…
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wow… i wish i knew this before.

Development Gateway Launches Software Tool For International Relief and Development Coordination:
January 11, 2005 – The Development Gateway Foundation has launched an open source software tool that organizations can use to coordinate international relief and development efforts. Called the Local Projects Database (LPD), this tool can be downloaded from the web. See http://lpd.sourceforge.net/

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this could be useful…