Gautam Shared item: 113 items
View Google Reader Shared items
1 shares
Reading First
via Pratham Books by noreply@blogger.com (Gautam) on May 16, 2008
... instructional model it is based on, isn’t working, federal officials said.“There are at least four possibilities for the results. One is that scientifically based reading instruction … doesn’t work,” said Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst, the director of the institute, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education. “Another possibility is that the instruction works, but it was...
Shared by: Gautam,
[ Back to top]
3 shares
The Promise and Peril of Ubiquitous Community
via Micro Persuasion by Steve Rubel on May 15, 2008
The following is also my column in next week's AdAge.Over the last five years I have been asked countless times: "Steve, what's the next hot online community?" It seems as though everybody is on the lookout for the successor to MySpace, Twitter or Facebook. Nobody, even in a difficult economic climate, wants to be viewed as a latecomer.Perhaps as a defense mechanism to avoid being wrong...
Shared by: Alex, Gautam, mathewi,
[ Back to top]
1 shares
Photo Essay: China’s Industrial Neo-Colonialism
via PSFK by Jeff Squires on May 15, 2008
We Make Money Not Art points us to a stunning photo essay entitled, Chinese Wild West, a collaboration between photographer Paolo Woods and journalist Serge Michel. The project documents China’s industrial neo-colonialism in African.They explain:To quench its thirst for oil, its hunger for copper, uranium and wood, Beijing has sent out its state companies and its adventurous entrepreneurs to...
Shared by: Gautam,
[ Back to top]
3 shares
Chicago sleepwalks into the surveillance society with "intelligent" networked cameras
via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow on May 15, 2008
Ryan sez, "Chicago is touting their new 'intelligent' 700+ camera network as being able to flag suspicious activity without human intervention, based on operator-defined criteria within the video frame. Video is archived for 30 days in a 60 terabyte storage vault. Great."They're everywhere. They're multiplying. Several thousand cameras are now capable of sending live pictures...
Shared by: cgsheldon, arkiver, Gautam,
[ Back to top]
1 shares
How India Can Help Myanmar
via HarvardBusiness.org by B V Krishnamurthy on May 15, 2008
Myanmar has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. The military junta has been in power for so long (even after people voted for democracy) that it wants to perpetuate its rule by forcing a farcical referendum. The crackdown on peaceful protesters last year failed to stir the conscience of the world. The cyclone that hit the country recently and which has reportedly killed over 100,000 has...
Shared by: Gautam,
[ Back to top]
1 shares
The pitfalls of an Indian Sovereign Wealth Fund
via Ajay Shah's blog by Ajay Shah on May 15, 2008
For the people manning the existing monetary policy regime, a Sovereign Wealth Fund is attractive because it alleviates one criticism: the cost of holding gigantic reserves. It helps RBI to delay RBI reform; to perpetuate the monetary policy regime of a pegged exchange rate for a wee bit longer. While this perspective is convenient for RBI, it ignores the difficulties of actually running a...
Shared by: Gautam,
[ Back to top]
1 shares
Connecting the dots between Big Tobacco and DDT
via Salon: How the World Works by Andrew Leonard on May 15, 2008
The myth that Rachel Carson, author of "Silent Spring," was responsible for the deaths of millions of people in Africa because her denunciations of DDT led to a "ban" on the use of the insecticide in developing countries has never held up under close scrutiny. Salon published a good piece on the topic last June.But I did not know until reading John Quiggin and Tim Lambert's enlightening story...
Shared by: Gautam,
[ Back to top]
2 shares
Quantum cryptography may not be as secure as we thought
via Ars Technica by laserboy@fusemail.com (Chris Lee) on May 15, 2008
Mathematicians analyze a potential weakness in quantum cryptography and find that it can be solved by adding extra qbits.Read More...
[ Back to top]
6 shares
SMS data rate is 4x more expensive than data from the Hubble
via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow on May 13, 2008
... because there are only 7 bits per character in the text messaging system, and we assume the average price for a text message is 5p. There are 1,048,576 bytes in a megabyte, so that's 1 million/140 = 7490 text messages to transmit one megabyte. At 5p each, that's £374.49 per MB - or about 4.4 times more expensive than the ‘most pessimistic’ estimate for Hubble Space Telescope t...
Shared by: Gautam, cgsheldon, Scott, Dan, Jambamkin, tarmo888,
[ Back to top]