Founder of Scientology (more)

follower of Scientology (more)

Curtis White on Dealing With Terrorism, quoting heavily from Paul Virilio's Pure War: These technological "prostheses" are, for Virilio, completely alienating. And yet they are at the heart of what our involvement in the Middle East is really about. The relation of past, present and future wars in the area are all too clearly related to our automobiles. But the car is only part of what our "sacred Life Style" involves. I've been wondering lately what would happen if you could call these issues to consciousness and resolve them through a democratic and political process... At that point it became luminously clear to me that this machine was training me (Program Or Be Programmed). And so I concluded by thinking, "What habits of mind are required in order to live in accord with my car, my television, and my computer? And are these new habits of mind good or bad things?... Fortunately, Virilio does offer an alternative and a way of confronting the present madness, but it is a strategy of resistance that is addressed not only to the Taliban but also to our own techno-military state. What he offers is this: a pacifism that works religiously in that it returns us to our "identity as mortal beings." One of the most revealing news clips I've heard since September 11 was an analysis of "ConsumEr confidence" that pointed out that one of the hindrances to a return to normal by American consumers was precisely that the destruction and death involved in the World Trade Center had turned people away from the superficial Happiness of consumption and had made them all too aware of their human vulnerability. The destruction of the World Trade Center turned people toward marriage, church and commitment to others. That turn, oddly enough, is what Virilio sees as the beginning of the internal dissolution of the empire of Pure War and the religious fanaticism it has empowered. The Soviet Union was not confronted and defeated; it was dissolved internally by its failure to provide for the human needs of its own citizens (and I'm not talking about the need for television sets and satellite hookups). Perhaps it is such a spiritual turn that can undo the grip of the military, the technocrats and the multinational vision of the New World Order.

Hernando De Soto on Dealing With Terrorism (from Jan'03). Yet Mr de Soto is not one of those economists who thinks that the key to capitalism's success is to protect existing, legally established Property Rights, come what may. On the contrary, he argues that Capitalism will thrive, and overcome threats such as terrorism, only if legal systems change so that most of the people feel that the law is on their side. Creating this sense of inclusion requires many things, including marketing the idea aggressively to the poor. But one of the best symbols of change is a mass programme of giving full legal protection to the de facto property rights that are observed informally by the (typically poor) people now living beyond the formal law... His then boss, the then-president, Alberto Fujimori, and the army agreed to recognise the farmers' informal Militia-s, grant them land titles and decriminalise the growing of coca; Mr de Soto even got the elder George H W Bush to support this strategy, in exchange only for a signed pledge from farmers that they would begin a programme of crop conversion away from coca. This certainly undermined support for the Shining Path.

Bruce Hoffman on Dealing With Terrorism through love/sex/marriage. *Systematically identifying the most attractive young Palestinian women they could find, they put before these women what they hoped would be an irresistible proposition: Your fatherland needs you... So approximately a hundred of these beautiful young women were brought to Beirut. There, in a sort of PLO version of a college mixer, boy met girl, boy fell in love with girl, boy would, it was hoped, marry girl. There was an additional incentive, designed to facilitate not just amorous connections but long-lasting relationships. The hundred or so Black Septemberists were told that if they married these women, they would be paid $3,000; given an apartment in Beirut with a gas stove, a refrigerator, and a television; and employed by the PLO in some nonviolent capacity. Any of these couples that had a baby within a year would be rewarded with an additional $5,000... without exception the Black Septemberists fell in love, got married, settled down, and in most cases started a family... not one of them would agree to travel abroad, for fear of being arrested and losing all that they had—that is, being deprived of their wives and children. (more)

EHealth standards, related to InterOp (more)

Educational Technology, mainless Mobile testing (focus on PalmOS handhelds) (more)

Universally Unique Identifier (more)

see 2009-11-30-NodeJs (more)

see Project Based Learning and/or Problem Based Learning

applying SmallWorld thinking to Educating Kids (more)

Founded in 2013, Reclaim Hosting provides hosting support for individuals and institutions that want to build out spaces online for personal portfolios, digital projects, and more. (more)

*Today, Grock It introduces Learnist which it describes as “a way for anyone to share what they know” and which I’m sure every tech blogger, myself included, will use the “PInterest for education” comparison. (more)

Adaptive learning is an educational method which uses computers as interactive teaching devices, and to orchestrate the allocation of human and mediated resources according to the unique needs of each learner. Computers adapt the presentation of educational material according to students' learning needs, as indicated by their responses to questions, tasks and experiences. The technology encompasses aspects derived from various fields of study including computer science, education, psychology, and brain science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_learning (more)

co-author with Clayton Christensen of Disrupting Class (more)

Knewton is an Adaptive Learning company that has developed a platform to personalize educational content. The company was founded in 2008 by Jose Ferreira, a former executive at Kaplan, Inc. The Knewton platform allows schools, publishers, and developers to provide adaptive learning for any student. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knewton (more)

Country bordering the Persian Gulf. (more)

Joshua Green on the challenges of building a Green Economy. (Learning from Jimmy Carter's failures.) Shortly after the inauguration, a friend up for several jobs in the new administration confessed that he yearned to wind up at the Department Of Energy. "It's like NASA in the '60s," he told me. "All the best and brightest want to be there." Barack Obama's choice of Steven Chu, the Nobel laureate physicist, as Secretary Of Energy only heightened the allure. In the early Obama era, romantic notions about making one's mark on history tend to take the form of helping recast America's economy, and by extension the world's, in a way that will head off global catastrophe. So we're back at the old crossroads, only with less time and more urgency to act. (more)

Saudi Arabia[c] (Listeni/ˌsɔːdiː əˈreɪbiə/, Listeni/ˌsaʊ-/), officially known as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA),[d] is an Arab state in Western Asia constituting the bulk of the Arabian Peninsula. With a land area of approximately 2,150,000 km2 (830,000 sq mi), Saudi Arabia is geographically the second-largest state in the Arab world after Algeria. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_Arabia (more)

*The Persian Gulf is a mediterranean sea in WesternAsia (Middle East). An extension of the Indian Ocean (Gulf of Oman) through the Strait of Hormuz, it lies between Iran to the northeast and the Arabian Peninsula to the southwest.[1] The Shatt al-Arab river delta forms the northwest shoreline... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_Gulf (more)