Friday, January 30, 2009

Former Brattleboro teacher surrenders license

Former Brattleboro teacher surrenders license
Facing a child pornography charge, a former Brattleboro Union High School teacher has surrendered his teaching license.

A little ice? That's nothing, Obama says

After his daughters' school cancels classes following a storm, the president says the capital could use a little 'Chicago toughness.'

President Obama and his two young daughters have a message for Washington, based on years of Chicago winters: Toughen up.

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Peter Johnson on "The inflexible constitution"

It's possible to be hopeful. First, the sovereignty of Parliament is strictly speaking the sovereignty of the Crown and both Houses conjoined. It is clear from the debates over matters from 42-days to ID cards to Iraq that Parliament as a whole still sees itself as a bulwark against unjust or ill-conceived government acts. Secondly, whatever the doctrine, the executive has in fact bound its successors in all sorts of ways and Parliamentary sovereignty is in some respects merely formal. The Huma Read the rest ...

Web Science

This article in the Online Newsletter of the Association for Learning Technology reports on the initiative to establish a new concentration of science and scholarship focused on how the Web functions and how to improve Web operations. ___JH (Thanks to TL Infobits for this reference.)

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"To promote Web Science and explore its emerging agenda, a joint endeavour between the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, was set up in 2006, called the Web Science Research Initiative (webscience.org). WSRI’s mission is to foster the fundamental advances required for the Web’s continued growth. In particular, WSRI is focusing on steering the development of the Web Science discipline, running a series of workshops and looking at the lines of an academic curriculum for teaching Web Science. There will be an International Web Science Conference held in Athens, Greece, in 2009 – hopefully the first of many – as well as a new journal Foundations and Trends in Web Science."

"Web Science is not just modelling the current Web. It is about engineering new infrastructure protocols by using scientific and technological tools from many disciplines to understand the human society that uses them, to create beneficial new systems – which may involve extremely radical thinking about both technology and society (Shneiderman 2007). Such new engineering must respect the invariants of the Web experience: decentralisation to avoid bottlenecks and allow increases of scale; serendipitous reuse of information; fairness, openness and trust. In this way, the Web will remain a technology that enhances human society, and supports human aspiration."

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