Sugar Labs, spun off from OLPC, is joining GNOME. Sugar UI leverages many technologies from the GNOME stack, including the GTK+ widget toolkit and the Telepathy messaging framework. Large parts of the Sugar user interface were developed in the Python programming language with the GTK+ bindings. Sugar is packaged for several distributions, including Fed Ora and Ubuntu, and is distributed under the GNU's General Public License (GPL).

HypothesIs has hired Jeremy Dean to focus on the Ed Tech opportunities for Annotation. (more)

edX is a massive open online course (MOOC) provider. It hosts online university-level courses in a wide range of disciplines to a worldwide student body, including some courses at no charge. It also conducts research into learning based on how people use its platform. EdX differs from other MOOC providers, such as Coursera and Udacity, in that it is a nonprofit organization and runs on open-source software. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EdX (more)

Jon Udell: Our mission here at HypothesIs is to enable a conversation over the world’s knowledge. So far that’s been a public conversation. But some conversations need to flourish in private spaces. You’ve always been able to create private annotations that only you can see but, until today, not annotations visible only to a group. That’s what we’re launching today.

Something startling is happening to middle-aged white Americans. Unlike every other age group, unlike every other racial and ethnic group, unlike their counterparts in other rich countries, death rates in this group have been rising, not falling. That finding was reported Monday by two Princeton economists, Angus Deaton, who last month won the 2015 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, and Anne Case. Analyzing health and mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and from other sources, they concluded that rising annual death rates among this group are being driven not by the big killers like heart disease and diabetes but by an epidemic of suicides and afflictions stemming from substance abuse: alcoholic liver disease and overdoses of heroin and prescription opioids. (more)

The cover story of News Week a couple issues ago was She Works, He Doesn't about Two Income Family-s who've become One Income Family-s due to the current recession, but now the man is home. Many such couples have simply decided that no matter how much lip service companies pay to "family friendly" policies, it's simply not possible to integrate two fast-track careers and kids without huge sacrifices. So they do a cold-eyed calculation, measuring the size and upside potential of each parent's paycheck, and opting to keep whoever's is larger. For the highest-achieving women, the trend is striking. Last fall Fortune reported that more than one third of its "50 Most Powerful Women in Business" have a stay-at-home man (it dubbed them "trophy husbands"). But this trend reaches women far below the executive-vice-president rank. (more)

Mark Widner (of LacunaStories) sees a number of problems with GeniusCom. (more)

Timothy Ferriss is a NoteBook fiend. I don't use digital Note Taking tools. Call me old-fashioned, but I've noticed that some of the most innovative techies in Silicon Valley do the same, whether with day-planner calendars, memo pads, or just simple notecards with a binder clip. It's a personal choice, and I like paper. It can be lost, but it can't be deleted, and I find it faster.

EBook designed as structured HyperText to make it easy to read at varying levels of detail. You start with a summary (Thin Book?), read a bit more from the chapters that sound promising, jump into a section that has a good case study, jump over to a related section referenced in the study, etc. (more)

Techstars is a mentorship-driven startup accelerator (Incubator) founded by David Cohen, Brad Feld, David Brown, and JaredPolis that holds 13 week programs for startups in Boulder Co, New York City, Boston, Seattle, San Antonio, Austin, Chicago and London.[1][2] It is considered one of the best startup accelerators in the world.[3][4][5][6][7] Fewer than 1% of the companies that apply to Techstars are accepted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techstars (more)

an American novelist who is also host of the Peabody-winning public radio program Studio 360, a co-production between Public Radio International and WNYC. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Andersen (more)

to change the color of something to make it stand out more for attention or retention (more)

author, speaker and startup founder. She has been called a "pioneer in online marketing and one of the most respected authorities on online communities (Virtual Community)" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tara_Hunt (more)

Joe Wikert imagines his ideal HowTo EBook Platform. It knows my history. I'm a long-time Windows user, a former programmer, an advanced Excel user, etc. How does it know this about me? By monitoring my reading and Note Taking habits... It's alive. The book isn't "finished" when the author submits a manuscript. Content can be added and modified at any time... You can't accomplish this in a printed book. It's would also be extremely challenging for one author to write something like this. I think it requires a collaborative effort led by a community manager - think Wikipedia on steroids. And because the device you'll read this on allows you to embed your own notes (Annotation), the more you read the more the book learns about you. What I'm describing isn't really a book at all. It's more of a platform, one that requires a completely new perspective. The authoring model has to change to allow for more chunkified content (Node Web) where each piece can stand on its own or be stitched together as required by that reader. Every piece would have to be rigorously tagged to enable this dynamic presentation.

Operating System built on Google Chrome. (more)

The Free Software Foundation http://www.fsf.org/ or http://www.gnu.org/ (more)

fact: College Tuition at Cornell University (non-state colleges) is $47k for 2016-17 (was $35k for 2007-2008). Add $7k for dorm, $6k for full meal-plan... Call it $240k for 4yrs (at today's prices!). (more)

Web App Framework built in Ruby (more)

TV that's a sign of the apocalypse (more)

E O Wilson wrote essays for a collection of Charles Darwin's greatest books, including his reasons for believing that the conflict between Science and Monotheism is irreconcilable. In any case, the dilemma to be solved is truly profound. On the one side the input of religion on human history has been beneficent in many ways. It has generated much of which is best in Culture, including the ideals of Altruism and Public Service. From the beginning of history it has inspired the arts. Creation myths were in a sense the beginning of science itself. Fabricating them was the best the early scribes could do to explain the universe and human existence. Yet the high risk is the ease with which alliances between religions and Tribalism are made. Then comes bigotry and the dehumanization of infidels.