Audio: What Will School Look Like in 10 Years?

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/03/what-will-school-look-like-in-10-years/?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2

 - NYTimes.com

By JOSHUA BRUSTEIN

Computers, electronic whiteboards and other interactive technologies arefundamentally changing American education . That's the view of the experts whom The Times spoke with about what the classroom will look like ten years from now. Listen to excerpts from their predictions below, and share your own thoughts in the comments section.

美国教育: 高科技设备

http://www.usa101.cn/edu/edu004.asp

克赖姆斯 华盛顿报导

维吉尼亚州阿灵顿县跟美国首都华盛顿仅一河之隔，这个地处维州郊区的社区面积不大，但是人口稠密。该县公立学校学生人数超过1万8千人，学生来自127个国家，讲100多种语言。 阿灵顿县公立学校大约三分之一的学生来自低收入家庭，他们享受学校的免费或者减价午餐，但同时阿灵顿县又是非常富有，他们刚刚斥资9500万美元建造了一所现代化高中。 这所学校里有不少电脑，这并不稀奇，让人感到意外的是，学校用一种高科技、多用途的显示装置代替了每间教室的传统黑板。 华盛顿-李高中科技协调人桑迪·芒内尔说："这种产品叫做智能板，是一种交互式白板。老师站在白板前面，通过触摸控制电脑。老师可以用这种奇妙的办法跟全班同学共用一台电脑。" 芒内尔讲解智能板各种功能时颇费了一些工夫，因为它能做的事情可真不少。智能板看上去跟墙上的普通白墙没什么两样，但是它的表面是触摸式的，在智能板的顶部，探出一根操纵杆，外端装有一台视频投影机。 学校小型电视演播室播出的早间通知可以通过教室的智能板让学生看到。你可以在万维网上浏览，用一种特制的电子笔把网页的某个部分重点画出来。这种特制电子笔外加一个书写识别软件之后，还可以跟粉笔一样写字。 生物老师杰森·布罗多夫斯基借助智能板向学生讲述如何使用显微镜。 布罗多夫斯基说："只需把显微镜跟数码照相机连接上，就能在智能板上显示，这样全班就能看到显微镜工作的全部过程。这样一旦我把图像聚焦之后，学生们就会说，噢，我知道你刚才讲得是什么了。接着，他们可以操作自己的显微镜，亲自做试验。这样就有趣多了。" 华盛顿-李高中有差不多600台电脑供学生们使用，相当于每三个学生至少有一台电脑。整个教学楼有好几个电脑机房，宽敞、明亮的图书馆不仅有图书，还配备了电脑。 华盛顿-李高中订阅在线参考书，这些参考书频繁更新。学生们在校外也可以上网使用这些网上参考书。 互联网上有大量有价值的资料，但是也有不少内容不适宜青少年。因此，学校安装了软件，专门封锁以色情等内容为特色的网站。不过，图书管理员林内特·康斯坦丁内兹认为，阿灵顿县公立学校学生的多元化，使得学校难以保护青少年免受互联网不良影响。 康斯坦丁内兹说："学校可能有学生来自蒙古，不错，阿灵顿这个地方来自蒙古的人口虽然不多，但是却不容忽视。来自中东的移民也属于这种情况。我们在他们后面，看着他们登上他们母语的网站，但是根本不知道他们在干些什么。" 那么，学校的网络过滤器能否过滤乌尔都语或者普什图语吗？ 康斯坦丁内兹说，"不能。即使是过滤英语网站过滤器也不特别管用。" 华盛顿-李高中图书馆放学后还要继续开放两、三个小时。来自伊朗移民家庭的学生萨翰德·米纳耶正利用这几个小时，在图书馆的电脑上网。 他说："我在为吉他班在网上找乐谱。我想为吉他班找到几首乐谱，为我们在网络咖啡馆演奏做准备。我们在所有的网站上搜索，尽量多搜集些古典音乐、民间音乐和现代音乐。" 楼下的网络咖啡馆有28台电脑，那里舒适、诱人，但不卖咖啡。科技协调人桑迪·芒内尔说，开设这个网吧主要是方便学生，特别是家里没有电脑的学生使用电脑。 他说："阿灵顿县对这个网吧投入了大量资金，尽可能让它舒适，因为我们知道，信息技术带来了经济鸿沟，我们要缩小这个差距。在学生正常上课时间，整个教学楼有许多电脑可供使用，可是放学后学生们上网的机会就没有那么多了。" 芒内尔说，即使他们使用了所有的最新科技，仍然不能保证这个新的现代化教学楼不会过时。华盛顿-李高中目前大容量的线缆还可以再使用几年，但是未来几代学生很可能会无线上网。

The end of the OS is nigh

http://mybroadband.co.za/news/columns/32768-the-end-of-the-os-is-nigh.html

 « Columns « MyBroadband Tech and IT News

Alastair Otter

August 30, 2011

It's been coming for years but the operating system as we know it could heading for virtual extinction

Windows, Linux, Mac OS X – the three protagonists in a long-running battle for the hearts and minds of computer users.

Over decades of computer development these operating systems (and others) have battled for dominance, adding new features, tricks, capabilities. All in the hope of attracting new fans.

Now, the era of operating system as we know it is fast coming to a close. At least it is for me and, I suspect, many other computer users.

Although I am still a dedicated Linux user with probably more than the average mental buy-in to its success than most other OS users, I can see the signs of the decline of the OS; the small changes that are making Linux less important to me and my browser ever more important. Not because Linux is not good enough or Windows is more appealing – simply because I now value an OS that gets out of my way and lets me get on with what I want to get done.

Until about a year ago every new iteration of Ubuntu was a source of excitement. The new features, the shiny new icons, the ever-improving user experience was a thing of beauty, one to be looked forward to eagerly. In most cases I jumped on the bandwagon as soon as the first beta of any new Ubuntu release hit the web, mostly rewarded with six hours of frustration with not-yet-complete features, but addicted to the promise of something new. I was hooked into OpenOffice.org for documents, wedded to Evolution for e-mail, manacled to Ubuntu for all of my computing needs.

Then at some point in the past year, I started drifting away. Perhaps it was the first Galaxy Tab, or the HTC Desire phone I had started using. Suddenly I was checking my e-mail on my phone, tablet PC and on my desktop. The idea of having my e-mail locked into one application on my desktop was ludicrous and counter-productive. The idea of storing my documents on a hard disk tied to one computer was unthinkable. Indeed, even having to rely on a any particular application for word processing or basic spreadsheets was becoming unthinkable.

Fortunately, today it's possible to use a range of online services to replace many, if not all, of the applications on the standard desktop, and with many hardware makers now moving towards system-on-a-chip processors, the centrality of the operating system is being undermined.

Of course the operating system will never completely disappear but it will be reduced over time to the status of "plumbing"; the bits that make all the others bits work. In many ways the operating system will simply be the first application to load when booting up. All the the other applications will use it to launch, and from there on they will run the show (and many of the applications).

Already the likes of Google's Chrome browser are doing this with HTML5-based applications as well as its new Native Client framework. Native Client allows programs developed in C and C+ to be run directly from the Chrome browser. It's still in early development but the objective is clear: by making it possible to develop rich C+ applications once and run those in any Chrome browser, on any platform it becomes possible to service all platforms in one go. It also potentially sidelines the operating system and makes the browser the hub of our world. So long as users have a browser they can use an application on a desktop, a laptop, a tablet PC or even a smartphone.

Chrome is not the only example of this strategy but is among the most active. As a user I am increasingly uninterested in how it all works and more concerned that my e-mail, my documents, my photos are available to me, wherever I am. It's becoming less about the operating system and more about how I ensure this access across all platforms.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the columnist and do not represent those of MyBroadband.

How To: HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photography

http://www.digital-photography-school.com/how-to-hdr-photography?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+DigitalPhotographySchool+%28Digital+Photography+School%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

by Darren Rowse

HDR Photography has been around since the days of film, but has become extremely popular in recent years. High Dynamic Range, or HDR, is essentially a way of processing photos that allows for a wider and deeper range of colors. This type of processing makes an image appear much closer to what the human eye sees as opposed to what your camera's sensor allows. In example, the photograph above shows the natural rich colors of the building as well as the natural rich colors of the sky. Without HDR, the sky could either be well exposed and the building silhouetted, or the building well exposed and the sky blown out. Creating an HDR photo however will allows both elements to appear natural and rich in color.

One method of making an HDR photograph is to combine multiple images with different exposures together. This tutorial will explain how this photo was created and in using the same process, how you can create your own HDR photos.

Step 1. Bracketing Your Subject

Bracketing is done when several shots of the same subject are taken with varying exposures. This can be used for almost any occasion or type of photography and is a good way to ensure that you've gotten the shot you wanted when you sit down to edit. For example, you will set your camera on a tripod and take one shot at 1/200 another at 1/400 and another at 1/80. Now you have 3 different shots of the same image, but each shot will have a different exposure. Each setting and subject will vary obviously when it comes to bracketing, but many cameras have a built in bracketing feature that will do the work for you.

For this photo there are only two key elements, the building and the sky. So the first shot that will be taken will be to get a proper exposure of the sky:

As was mentioned above, the sky is well exposed but the building is silhouetted. This was taken with a faster exposure to ensure the colors of the sky would be rich and deep as opposed to blown out.

Now the second shot will be taken to get a proper exposure of the building:

The building is well exposed in this shot, but again, the sky is blown out. This was taken at a slower shutter speed in order to reduce the silhouette effect the bright sky gives.

Now that we have our two images, we will combine them to get the best of both.

Step 2. Combing the Photos

Photoshop is a great tool to use in HDR photography because it is fairly easy to combine photos. So let's bring both images into Photoshop.

The photo with the correct exposure for the building (left) will be moved on top of the photo with the correct exposure for the sky (right).

Now that the photos are layered on top of each other we will combine the two. Our top layer has a well-exposed building and a blown out sky, so let's remove the sky of this image. In order to remove the sky we will first select the top layer, and then choose the magnetic lasso tool. With the magnetic lasso tool we will select the entire sky. This is where an ok HDR photo can turn into an awesome HDR photo. The more time you put into being exact and making sure that you don't miss any pieces, the better and more natural your photo will look.

Then we simply hit the delete key and viola! Our well exposed sky replaces the blown out sky.

The photo is then put into Lightroom and edited a bit more…

HDR photography can have some amazing results if done correctly. The key is to not go to the extreme and combine dozens of photos leaving every pixel of the photo well exposed. Leave room for natural shadows and use moderation when combining images.

Nicholas Moeggenberg is a photographer from Cincinnati, OH and runs the photography contest – May the Best Photo Win.

Read more: http://www.digital-photography-school.com/how-to-hdr-photography#ixzz1WLob1Oej

Disney Inks Deal with Greenbox, Chinese eCommerce Is Taking Off

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/disney-inks-deal-with-greenbox-chinese-ecommerce-is-taking-off/2011/08/29/gIQAMffpmJ_story.html

 - The Washington Post

By TechCrunch.com, Monday, August 29, 3:37 AM

A lot of Americans desperately want to believe that China is full of poor people who can't innovate, and the only goods they make are cheap, toxic rip-offs our Western brands. They want to believe the only reason the Chinese economy is surging is because the West wants cheap goods and China knows how to make them that way.
These people will hate this post because it's about a company called Greenbox that flies in the face of those preconceived notions.
Greenbox makes high-end, super-styled kids clothes in and for the Chinese market. It caught the eye of Disney, which reached out to the company to ask if it wanted to manufacture some of their lines. "No thanks," the company replied. "We're not interested in just being an OEM."
Wait, isn't this China we're talking about? It's a country of OEMs.
The mouse house came back with a sweeter offer that's being announced at a ceremony in China tonight: It has licensed the rights for the princess collection, Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse and Winnie the Pooh to Greenbox. The company will design a high-end online collection to be sold online in China, as part of a broad plan to help build hype for the upcoming themepark in Shanghai.
Greenbox was founded more than ten years ago by a designer named Fangfang Wu who started to make clothes for her kids because she was so unhappy with the cheap, boring ones being sold in the country at the time. She obsessed over fabrics, fashion and design and a hobby quickly turned into a business, as she opened a chain of stores, and later closed those stores to sell on Taobao for better margins.
She was one of the top grossing sellers on Taobao as her designs struck a chord as with other young, working women in China who wanted to flaunt their increasingly hip and unique tastes. (I mean, look at that outfit above. It's like a little Chinese Natalie Wood playing Red Riding Hood. How is that not adorable?) In 2010, DCM's China office sought her out, investing just over $10 million to help scale the business.
Today Greenbox is bringing in about $50 million in annual revenues on decent margins. She charges between $30-$40 for items— not absurd, but certainly on the higher end for kids' clothes. "It's a classic case for venture capital: High gross margins, but takes money to build it to scale," says Hurst Lin of DCM.
Note I didn't describe Greenbox as the fill-in-the-blank of China. In fact, I'm hard-pressed to come up with an ecommerce model she's ripping off from the US. Kids clothes hasn't been a natural vertical for etailers here, save being an offshoot of a site like Amazon.
The reason Greenbox has worked so well for China is cultural. Because there are so many only children, there are at least six people wanting to lavish them with cute things: The parents, and two sets of grandparents. This was the same insight Tencent tapped into to monetize its virtual goods early on.
So, Greenbox: Not a copy cat, and not the invisible cheap assembly partner for the West either. Welcome to the next stage of Chinese entrepreneurship.
Greenbox is part of a crop of booming ecommerce companies in China. For years, the market has been held back due to the typical challenges of shipping, infrastructure and payment platforms. Jack Ma, of Alibaba, has long said ecommerce would be bigger in China than here, and that's not just because there are more people. In the US, he calls ecommerce "dessert," but in China there are so many people underserved by brick-and-mortar retail that ecommerce will be the "main course."
DCM and other firms have been aggressive backing many new ecommerce players, and they aren't as simple as just being the Amazon of China. (Although, to be fair, DCM backed one of those too.) Many of these companies, like Greenbox, show a sophistication in appealing to what the Chinese market wants, not simply what's worked elsewhere.
A surprising vertical Lin seized upon that has never proved lucrative in the US is wine. As incomes soar, many Chinese are developing a taste for Western wine, but have trouble finding interesting vintages and even navigating the language barriers, he says. His bet, YesMyWine, isn't just an ecommerce play, it's a content and media play.
He was delighted the PR contact on the call brought up another hot DCM ecommerce company: La Miu, which makes sexy lingerie. I could hear him squirming as he tried to explain– delicately– why Victoria's Secret failed miserably in China, while more recently La Miu has succeeded.
Victoria's Secret tried to market to women in their 30s who wanted to be comfortable not sexy. It was a bit too early in China's consumer revolution and husbands weren't demanding sexier underwear so ever-practical Chinese women just didn't see the appeal.
Victoria's Secret made another mistake that Lin tries to explain as tactfully as possible: Asian women have… different bodies….than Western women.
But La Miu has taken a totally different tact: Marketing underwear designed for the Asian body type to teens. "Born in the late 1990s they are much more a global consumer, they are open-minded and more rebellious," Lin says. "It's been a huge success."
As I've written before, China's ability to be the assembly line to the world wasn't where its role in the global economy ended; it was where it began. An ability to make products cheaper than anywhere else gave way to an ability to make high end products more nimbly than anywhere else. And increasingly, entrepreneurs like Wu are adding design and brand on top of that to create products the broader world will want.
The first generation of Chinese entrepreneurs was about picking the low-hanging fruit in a massive country just opening up to capitalism. Now the real fun is starting.
(Shameless plug: Join TechCrunch at Disrupt Beijing in October to learn more.)

Ubuntu LTS vs Normal

There have been some misconceptions about LTS vs Normal Ubuntu releases at
Free Geek. Let's clarify. Both are *very* stable releases but have their ups
and downs.

"LTS is enterprise focused"
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LTS

This means that it's ideal for large corporations as little changes. Why do
they like this?
1. Because customized (or proprietary) applications keep working, or are
only built against older versions in LTS
2. Because work related tasks are generally very narrow and well defined
(don't require more esoteric software).

More reasons for LTS
3. You have certain software (some statistical software comes to mind) that
only works in 10.04
4. You only want to do very basic web browsing and don't care for things
like performance of flash video, new features in software, or enhancements.

"Neither LTS or normal release are inherently more stable"
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/GettingUbuntu

With that out of the way, why would you use a normal release?

1. You want new(er) software (Ubuntu normal releases don't have the *very*
latest, they still only contain stable versions of packages)
2. You have hardware that was released within the last three years (LTS uses
an older kernel and newer wifi cards rarely work as well. Note that Ubuntu
does do "point updates" to try and get support for newer hardware, but often
this doesn't include everything and wifi cards usually require newer
modules/firmware than LTS includes)
3. You want to try Ubuntu's new interface (though it's *very* easy to go
back to classic gnome, I've taught many "computer illiterate" people to do
this).
4. You want the performance improvements of a newer kernel.
5. LOTS of bug fixes. Though Canonical does try to fix bugs in LTS, many
userland packages are bug ridden and a year and half of more work tends to
result in many improvements.

If you would like more detail/citations on any of these points, please feel
free to ask. It's been my experience with OHN for the last year that the
Ubuntu normal releases fix many strange bugs users encounter under LTS. From
audio issues, to firefox rendering better, things just tend to be better (we
can debate about Unity however newer users often love the sleek interface)!
With a user who is comfortable using update-manager, I would whole-heartedly
recommend the normal releases.

Robot teaches English as Second Language

http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/news/ci_18767575

 - Pasadena Star-News

Janette Williams, Staff Writer

Posted: 08/26/2011 06:33:10 PM PDT

PASADENA - Say "How do you do" to Mike and Michelle, face-to-face tutors for English learners. They'll correct your grammar, answer questions, converse on a variety of topics, be there 24/7, and won't charge a dime. And they're doing very well, thank-you. The on-screen "English Tutor" interactive robots and their creator, adjunct Professor Ron Chang Lee of Pasadena City College, are heading to England's Exeter University in October as one of four finalists in the 2011 Loebner Prize for Artificial Intelligence. "I always wanted to create something to help students, like a tutor," said Lee, who has taught English as a Second Language at PCC since 1991. "It's a talking robot, so (students) are not afraid of asking anything," Lee said. Interacting with a robot is less intimidating for ESL students than conversing with a professor, he said. "A community college like PCC has many international students, and first they have to listen to English, to communicate with their professors," he said. "So the first year they have to take ESL." Just 15 minutes a day with Mike or Michelle can really help, he said. "It's just like having a native speaker - they correct mistakes, spelling and grammatical errors. You type in `You is a good teacher,' and the robot corrects you. `Say you are, never say you is."' Lee's ESL site started out as a class project in 1994 at the University of Illinois, where he began studyingin 1992 after a career teaching English in China. He followed a master's in ESL with a Ph.D. in educational technology in 1998.Over the years, the program has grown more sophisticated, he said, now with robots able to chat on 25 topics in 2,000 available conversations. "You can ask `What is the capital of any countries, any states of the U.S.?' `Who is the president or king of each country?"' Lee said. "It knows how many countries in the world, the population of major countries, the longest river, and the highest mountain." The robots can detect the 800 most common errors learning English-speakers make, Lee said, and know all the irregular verbs, provide different tenses, explain grammatical terms and give advice on how to learn English. They can get personal, too. "Are you married?" Lee typed in. "Not at the moment," Michelle replied, maybe inviting more questions. He's steadily improving the program, Lee said. "The robots are learning from their mistakes. People are chatting with them, and I can see all the questions they asked," he said. "I am training the robots." Miranda Yousef, director of a planned "Untitled Smartbot Project" documentary about the Loebner Prize, said Lee brings something different to the table. "Dr. Lee's a very intriguing character because, unlike most people who enter, who are computer programers or developers, he's an ESL teacher," she said. "His goal for the `chatbot' is to eventually develop a free on-line tutoring system that can be used world-wide - it's a wonderfully different approach." Lee said he used artificial intelligence software to develop his site and in 1996 got a $30,000 grant from the William and Flora Hewitt Foundation. He won $250 for making it to the Loebner's top four, and a chance to win the $4,000 top award. The financial reward isn't huge, Lee said, but the prestige could give a boost to his efforts to raise funding. "There's not a lot of investment these days" in artificial intelligence, Lee said. "Yes, I'm disappointed, I've found (raising money) hard to do." He'd like to work on fixing Mike and Michelle's limitations, Lee said. Users still have to type in their questions, rather than speak, although he said users with speech recognition software can talk into the microphone. "But again, speech recognition is not perfect," he said. "It sometimes makes mistakes, especially when the user has a foreign accent." The computer-synthesized voices Mike and Michelle use are "getting closer" to actual human voices, Lee said, but they still sound artificial. And, except for welcoming users to the site, he has turned the voices off to save money, he said. "Later on, if I get a grant that's big enough, I'm going to do an upgrade makes it possible to hear the voice," he said. "Students really like to hear the voice." Lee said his rong-chang.com site has become the top ESL destination on the web; combined with his eslfast.com, Lee said, he gets about 11,500,000 monthly hits and 800,000 unique visitors. His next step is finding a way to make the robots "think" before answering a question, tailoring the response to the user. It won't cost as much as people might think, Lee said. "It will not require as much investment as IBM has put into their `Watson,"' he said, referring to the super-robot who beat out the human champions on "Jeopardy" in February. "But it can certainly compete in a general knowledge test on TV." janette.williams@sgvn.com 626-578-6300, ext. 4482 Read more:http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/news/ci_18767575#ixzz1WFaw6zh