All those topics that i wish i had time to pursue more earnestly.

Thailand Nixes One Laptop Per Child:
A September coup effectively ended the career of Thaksin Shinawatra, the Thai prime minister whose cabinet had pledged to buy 250,000 of Mr. Negroponte’s $100 laptops, according to The Nation, a Bangkok newspaper. Thailand’s new administration now says it has no interest in the project, which would have provided all of the nation’s primary-school students with the low-cost machines.

“We will not focus too much on technology and materials,” said Wijit Srisaarn, Thailand’s education minister, this week. “We will focus on substance.”

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Personally, I think they need some technology and materials too. Substance is a problem because it is almost always political. Access to knowledge, at least cosmopolitan knowledge, requires some infrastructure and materials. It does not require OLPC though.

Spotlight News – Carnegie Mellon University:
Despite the portability of laptops, only a minority of students used them off campus, accounting for only 2 percent of the overall time spent on assignments. The exception was the strong tendency to work at home. Students reported preferring the comfort of working at home even though they recognized the greater educational value of working with other students on campus.

Working at home was also associated with negative social and psychological effects, such as loneliness and the erosion of a sense of community. Even when students did get help from peers, it was often online rather than face-to-face. This is something for educators to consider when designing optimal workspaces for learning, which should include features that provide physical comfort, such as comfortable furniture, access to food and lighting control. Researchers say comfortable, functional learning spaces can foster the sense of community that students reported they lost when using their laptops.

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well there is more to it than that, but i’m not sure if their findings are actually representative of laptop use of subcultural differences amongst students.

The IFLA Internet Manifesto:
The IFLA Internet Manifesto

Unhindered access to information is essential to freedom, equality, global understanding and peace. Therefore, the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) asserts that:

Intellectual freedom is the right of every individual both to hold and express opinions and to seek and receive information; it is the basis of democracy; and it is at the core of library service.

Freedom of access to information, regardless of medium and frontiers, is a central responsibility of the library and information profession.

The provision of unhindered access to the Internet by libraries and information services supports communities and individuals to attain freedom, prosperity and development.
Barriers to the flow of information should be removed, especially those that promote inequality, poverty, and despair.

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Oh there’s more, but this is a start.

Virginia Tech | Invent the Future :
Virginia Tech ranks #1 (again) in college and university vanity license plates
Hokie Nation has taken to Virginia’s highways. . . and they have the license plates to prove it.

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this is sort of like “we’ll always have paris” where… you’ve never been to paris.

The Claremont Institute: The Era of Big Ideas is Over:
Do liberals think that conservatives’ fundamental ideas are wrong? Or do they think that having fundamental ideas is wrong? In the intramural debate over liberalism’s meaning and future these questions have become contentious. But whether this is a real debate between distinct alternatives or just much ado about nothing remains to be seen.

Certainly, the liberal world is abuzz with the idea that it needs Big Ideas. Kenneth Baer and Andrei Cherny, the editors of the new quarterly Democracy, seek to revive liberalism by “grappling with essential questions about how the world works and how it should work.” According to Michael Tomasky, writing in The American Prospect, “What the Democrats still don’t have is a philosophy, a big idea that unites their proposals and converts them from a hodgepodge of narrow and specific fixes into a vision for society.” He calls this “the crucial ingredient of politics, the factor that helps unite a party (always a coalition of warring interests), create majorities, and force the sort of paradigm shifts that happened in 1932 and 1980.”

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of course, one of the problems is that rhetoric has pushed politics back into an either-or situation. people think you need to vote or you don’t have democracy, you can be free or not free, etc. all of those binary structures limit the compositional freedom of thought.

RIAA wants the Internet shut down:
RIAA wants the Internet shut down

ONE OF THE lawyers involved in defending cases bought against people by the RIAA claims that if the music industry wins a crucial case, the Internet will have to be switched off.

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switched off? hah!

Reforming U.S. Patent Policy – Council on Foreign Relations:
The conversation on American competitiveness is often intertwined with the conversation on innovation. The liberalization of trade and the increasing influence of emerging markets such as China and India have meant that U.S. innovation is now competing globally. This global competition has raised awareness and concerns not only that our trading partners are lax on patent enforcement, but also that our patent system may not be optimally suited to compete on the global economic stage.

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This is one of the most important debates going on in our world and this report makes a substantive contribution.

Doom on the $100 Laptop:
Who needs textbooks when it’ll run Doom? Engineers from the One Laptop Per Child Project have posted videos of themselves playing the videogame Doom on the new children’s laptop.

Up next: the Darfur game?
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had to see this coming…. from education project to edutainment project to…..

Ride that Line:
There’s cool little app that seems to have invaded office cubicles everywhere – Linerider. It’s incredibly simple to use but the results can get as complicated as the limits of your imagination – and the physics of the thing is what really makes it a fun toy.

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I’ve posted it before, but now I’m reposting it from gga, line rider is nifty.

games1.org has other cool games.