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Shaw « Deep Packet Inspection.

I do believe that DPI and related technologies will be abused by ISPs and media conglomerates if they are allowed to do so – and also that they should not have the option to arbitrarily favour one technology over another (as eg when Shaw says that internet delivery is “not a substitute” for cableTV). But technologies like bittorrent and skype do create speed by using extra bandwidth, and this does give the ISPs an opening to claim that they sometimes need to throttle certain kinds of traffic. However that claim is only valid becuse their chosen pricing model does not increase the cost for high bandwidth users. If we do not want to give the ISPs the authority to manage traffic volumes based on content-type (which they will certainly abuse) then we need to accept that bandwidth is a commodity in limited supply and should be paid for on a usage basis. This would have the effect of allowing market pressure to favour technologies which have less impact without giving anyone the power to arbitrarily favour their own technology or content.

Michael Geist – Angus Defends iPod Levy Proposal.

IF the “Canadian solution” of a media levy is valid (and I think it is), then there is no logical reason to distinguish in any way between different types of digital memory. In particular, the memory in an ipod is much more likely to be used for music storage than a randomly chosen CD (which is just as likely to be being used for backup of business records or private photo albums as it is for mp3 storage). I favour the ipod levy as it is totally unacceptable that the CDs used to store my personal photographs be subject to a levy when an ipod used almost entitely to store commercial music tracks is not.

In fact, EVERY bit of digital memory should be taxed at the same rate regardless of whether it is a CD, DVD, ipod or computer hard drive, UNLESS its owner has specifically undertaken not to record copyright content on it. But the proviso is essential and must be equally available on all memory types.

This could be achieved by selling specially marked media and devices (much like the coloured tax-free gas that is often sold for agricultural purposes) -  and if this was available, I for one wouldn’t mind if the penalty for abusing it was quite substantial.

Scott Leslie may be on the right track with another 1/4-baked idea – OER “virtual reference librarian” at EdTechPost, but I suspect that it may be less with the idea itself than with the doubt he expresses as follows:

<<Is “discoverability” even actually the problem with resources getting reused, or is it possible that the whole model is so flawed, so disconnected from how educators construct course materials, that it wouldn’t make any difference..?>>

Commenter Mike Caulfield followed up on this with

<<the really interesting thing is how many people said they wanted that, and how few people contact us for help>>

Some educators want a complete package provided by a publisher while others want to develop their own way of engaging students with the material.

In the space between those two extremes it would seem that there was ample room for a style of preparation which involved searching for and combining the best of what is available, and many of us think that is where we belong – but when push comes to shove we bifurcate and either go with a complete package or “roll our own” completely.

As variously a creator, organizer, and user of OERs I think I may have gained some insight into why this is the case.
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The Stanford Study of Writing provides a welcome counterpoint to some of the nonsense that has been put about regarding impact of the internet on literacy.

This year’s Blog Action Day is devoted to the theme of Climate Change and an understanding of mathematics is certainly essential for anyone involved in making making decisions about how to respond to this issue (which in a democracy is presumably all of us).

The choice of Math and Climate as the theme of this year’s Math Awareness Month emphasized this connection, and Murray Bourne at squareCircleZ  today points to a number of articles in which he has used related topics as a source of examples for teaching mathematics.

A good source of background on the science of CO2 related climate change is this excellent history prepared by Spencer Weart at the American Institute of Physics, as is also the RealClimate site managed by a team of well-reputed climate scientists, and the question of how to compare the effectiveness of different policy choices is addressed in this on-line book by UK physicist David McKay (reviewed by theRegister).

The fact that no amount of restraint or conservation can counterbalance the harmful effects of increasing population is not often noted in the CO2 debate so I was a bit disappointed that Murray did not include his discussion of that topic in his list.

Recently Facebook has been running very slow for me and even just hanging completely on page reload. I wasted a lot of time trying things within Facebook and after reading of many others with similar problems was even considered abandoning Firefox as my preferred browser, but as soon as I disabled the  Skype Firefox extension everything returned to normal. So if you are having similar problems, this may be the solution. (The extension is not necessary for the normal use of Skype – just for having phone numbers on web pages all become clickable.)

What disappoints me about Skype as a result of this is not the fact of the problem per se (making different programs interact is often difficult and it is not surprising that things go wrong), but rather the fact that there has been no loud public warning from Skype of a problem which has been around for some time (in fact the extension is still loaded automatically without warning during Skype upgrades).  If Skype had acted appropriately there would have been a high ranking Google hit which resolved the issue but in fact on Googling Facebook and Firefox I found many discussions which did not identify Skype as the source of the problem, and there has been no warning transmitted during several recent Skype upgrades.

This interview with a recent convert to teaching math using interactive white boards includes a lot of good ideas for using the computer display but  leaves me wondering what the IWB adds over what could be done with a tablet PC and projector.

One weakness of the WB is that it forces the presenter to face away from the audience for writing – something we are all used to and try to mitigate, but which could be avoided with the old style projector.

A possibly distinctive use of the IWB might be to have students come up and interact with it themselves, but the interviewee actually seemed to be saying that she tried that but found the benefits outweighed by the distraction of having people moving about so much.

I have always been a bit intimidated by bloggers’ talk of “Trackback” and “Pingback”, and am still unsure of whether they really do anything that isn’t just as easy to do “by hand”.

I recently came across a Tutorial written a couple of years ago by Teli Adlam which helped me to what I think is a bot better understanding but still leaves me wondering whether I am missing something.
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This article shares some of my own reaction to the “internet is making us dumber” nonsense, as well as commenting on other possible sources of increasing global intelligence.

Howard Knopf doesn’t like The SAC Double Negative Option Celestial Jukebox, but I have to quarrel with a number of his reasons.

Many of these have to do with defending the existing media levy schemes which unfairly extract funds from people who have no intent of copying copyrighted work and who are provided no option for declaring and committing to avoiding such activity when making the purchase.
Until there is provision for specially marked exempt media, the existing levy scheme is just legalized theft and like any other manifestly unfair law it undermines public respect for the law in general.

Also particularly galling is #6 “It’s inherently socialistic” – not because I have socialist tendencies myself (though I do), but because (a) it’s not, and (b) whether it is or not has no relevance to the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism, so (c) the accusation is just presented as name-calling.

EXCESS COPYRIGHT: More Myths about Myths about File Sharing

Wikis, GoogleDocs, and now Buzzword Documents all provide ways to share the editing of an online document (as do a number of other options). …more »

Many of these Top 10 Myths about Sustainability are mythical in the sense that they are just elementary misconceptions that don’t qualify as myths because they are not widely held by intelligent adults, but “Myth 6: Sustainability means lowering our standard of living” is an exception because it is, I think, widely believed by intelligent adults. …more »

that Sir Timmy taught the world to play

AlterNet Article by Chris Hedges

Rebuttal by Betsy Hartmann
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Telecom Public Notice CRTC 2008-19, is the CRTC’s notice of proceedings and call for comments re forthcoming hearings on ‘Net Neutrality’.

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From BBC – Radio Labs – How we make websites comes this quote:

It’s nice if URIs are human readable. It’s also nice if they’re hackable. It’s an absolute prerequisite that they’re persistent.

Don’t sacrifice persistence for the sake of prettiness or misguided SEO. URIs are your promise to the web and your users – if you change them or change their meaning you break that promise – links break, bookmarks break, citations break and your search engine juice is lost.

As long ago as 1998 and 1999 the W3C and Jakob Nielsen were giving the same advice, so this isn’t exactly breaking news. But the BBC story shows that the command is taken seriously by the creators of one of the best reputed dynamic web sites on the internet. So why do lesser entities feel the need to intermittently destroy all the value created by their employees in the form of established web presence?

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Open Culture is a website developed by Dan Colman (who moonlights as the director of Stanford’s Continuing Studies program). It focuses on educational video offerings such as the Leonard Susskind
Physics Lectures, and includes
a page of links to other academic YouTube video collections.

In Sustainable Energy – without the hot air UK physicist David MacKay presents plausible back-of-the-envelope estimates of the scales of action needed under various strategies for reduction of global carbon fuel combustion. The numbers he uses are easily checked and his analysis can be re-run with revised parameters if needed. Only when a significant fraction of humanity is capable of actually doing both those things will we have any chance of making the right decisions.

In contrast to this study (which I came to via Stephen Downes)showing that the internet just isn’t the danger to children it is often portrayed to be, we have Alec Couros reporting on Open Thinking & Digital Pedagogy » Blog Archive » Flickr Perversion, which is about the unpleasant experience of finding some of his family photos identified as ‘favourites’ by a couple of apparent perverts.
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