Lots of fun stuff going around the net in the last few weeks. Some I found interesting:
-Glenn has passed on some good links lately. Looks like Japan is considering a project to provide GPS tracking of their kids in response to a recent kidnapping. This could do wonders for their safety, although I’m somewhat uncomfortable about the other potential applications of such a system.
-Looks like a few Austrian and german Villages, as well as the country of Liechtenstein are available for rental.
-Universities feeling the pressures of competing for students are apparently providing various new ways to attract top students.
-University of Tokyo is getting over a thousand Macintoshes. Also on the Mac front, Gen Kanai noticed the huge proportion of powerbooks at BloggerCon. See the pictures. Rush Limbaugh, whose current troubles are not getting much of my pity apparently wanted to be in an Apple switch ad. According to the story, Jobs rejected him for political reasons. A company who used images of Gandhi (think different campaign) is not likely to want an ignorant and racist man for a new campaign. Also an article on Apple’s new developer tools coming in the Panther release of the OS.
–Look for your old professors or current ones here. You can rate them online and leave comments…
–Find out what conferences and such are inviting papers through this new online service. Choose topics to watch and get notification on.
-Interesting article on homework by children in the US. 19 minutes is the average per day in 1997.
-Some good articles on blogging lately. Columbia’s Journalism review has three short articles on the technical history of blogs, a list of media blogs, and an article talking about the growth of blogs. He makes an important point on the importance of 9/11 on the explosion of the blog movement, and this also helps account for the conservative nature of many of them (which includes this writer, see his links, which include a young misguided Norwegian who I have very little taste for). There is also an interesting survey on blogging and an article at The Register. A good article at teacherlibrarian.com on the use of Blogs for educators and librarians. There is a whole corner of the Blogosphere now talking about this and it is frequently getting presented about at conferences. There is a good article here on the important “trackback” feature of blogs, which unfortunately, my own blog here at Muninn does not yet support.
-Apparently the more you watched TV, the more likely you were to be wrong about the basic facts of the war. Also, the more you watched the “Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox News channel, in particular, the more likely it is that your perceptions about the war are wrong, adds the report by the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes” The fact that 70% of Americans still believe that Saddam was involved in 9/11 is one manifestation of this. Although we can also thank Cheney’s stubborn efforts to maintain this connection.
-A quick look through some of the blogs listed on my blogroll will show how interested I am in issues of copyright and intellectual property. Some recent articles I have enjoyed is one on the“Copyright Cage” and an article on fair use in the education world. Interesting little row on the internet about an article about Hitler’s home that resurfaced. Read a Wired article and a NYT article on this.
-Old news, but check out the fun features of Google’s new calculator features.
–Blog entry and links to idea of hyperlinking philosophical texts
-Link passed on by Claire, BBC has a new history site which is very interesting.
-Some interesting ideas being thrown around about things like emergent democracy. See Joi Ito’s version of emergent democracy, he seems to be focusing a lot of energy on it of late. I haven’t looked at this closely but may blog my thoughts on this at some future point…