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If you look at the graphs of atmospheric CO2 vs global temperature (whatever that may be) there is not much correlation

Let me guess, you've looked at carefully cherry-picked time windows...

Well actually I looked at the graph with a time window of a few million years, or was it hundreds of millions?

let alone causation.

Helllo? The 1800s called. It's Tyndall and Arrhenius on the line. They want some words with you about the thing called 'greenhouse effect' they discovered.

You forget to mention Fourier.
And yes, a greenhouse effect exists... in a greenhouse.
Greenhouses are those boxes with a transparent lid on top.
The earth's atmosphere has no lid somewhere in the middle. Convection rules up to 10 km height where it ceases to exist due to the low pressure (less than 0.1 bar).

It really follows straightforwardly from basic physics.

I've never seen a reputable physics textbook, like Feynman, mentioning (and supporting and explaining) a greenhouse effect on earth's atmosphere.
On the contrary, thermodynamics (Feynman lectures, lecture 40), in the absence of convection, predicts a negative temperature gradient (with reference to height) caused by the difference in kinetic energy of the air's molecules. However, convection in the lower part (below 10 km) of the atmosphere makes the effect unmeasurable.

Even coal industry shill Richard Lindzen called people who dispute that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas 'a bit nutty'.

I don't need a group of miners decide for me what is physics and what is not, thank you very much.

So let's see, a recently created account by the name of "slazy Rio" that contributed little of value to this community starts executing a Gish gallop of complete bullshit denialist talking points. Are you even trying to not look like a shill/troll ?

I really don't mind whether you consider me a shill, troll or what not. I'm just giving you my formed opinion. I'm not a 'climate denier'. Climate warms up. It always does after an ice age when the sun gets active sun spots again. But after a period, determined by the solar cycles, not the CO2 that we produce, it cools down again, and if you watch the solar activity recently (barely there is) you'd realise that we're heading toward a cool period again.

And, oh, by the way, did I already mention that human contribution to CO2 is undetectable?
Climatologist (99.7%? Yeah, right) Murray Lewis Salby pointed out this out in one of his lectures. If you look at the atmospheric CO2 graphs of the last century and correlate them with the anthropogenic CO2 emissions, you'll see that even in the 1920's-30's, where the global economy--and with that the carbon emissions--literally tanked, but the rate of rise of atmospheric CO2 didn't bulge. Also in the late 1900's, where emissions really took off, the rate of rise in atmospheric CO2 didn't bulge either.
This isn't really a confirmation of the AGW theory but can be explained with Henry's law, which edicts the vapor/liquid equilibrium of gases (CO2 is a gas) and liquids (like deep-sea water).
Due to our earth still coming out of the latest ice age, and the very slow,

Oh wonderful, yet another post with a generous grab from the top-50 long-debunked climate myths. A bit like a Gish gallop by the looks of things, so I'm not going to give you a lot of my time. I'll just respond to a few of the more egregious talking points you bring up, and people can look up the rest at http://wikipedia.org/ and http://skepticalscience.com/ .

If you look at the graphs of atmospheric CO2 vs global temperature (whatever that may be) there is not much correlation

Let me guess, you've looked at carefully cherry-picked time windows in order to ignore the blatantly obvious fact that both are steadily going up.
Sure, there's no year-to-year correlation; the temperature data is so (inherently) noisy that only an idiot would expect to see that. But over a relevant time span, yes, yes, it's going up.

let alone causation.

Helllo? The 1800s called. It's Tyndall and Arrhenius on the line. They want some words with you about the thing called 'greenhouse effect' they discovered. It really follows straightforwardly from basic physics.

Even coal industry shill Richard Lindzen called people who dispute that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas 'a bit nutty'.
So let's see, a recently created account by the name of "slazy Rio" that contributed little of value to this community starts executing a Gish gallop of complete bullshit denialist talking points. Are you even trying to not look like a shill/troll ?

Yes, I second Concord.org, especially as the put what they develop under free license (the LGPL):
    http://www.concord.org/

Not free (except to demo):
    http://www.explorelearning.com/

Other random:
    http://www.miniclip.com/games/chasm/en/
    http://www.missiontolearn.com/2008/03/more-than-50-web-widgets-for-your-learning-mix/
    http://simulation.northwestern.edu/

Look for physics simulators; example:
    http://dan-ball.jp/en/javagame/dust/

There is a lot of exploration people can do with Google Maps and Google Earth.

We've collected lots of links from homeschooling; I should put them up somewhere.

Stuff by me with links about education in general:
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread/e59c368c3734a926
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.html

ITSI-SU It's a non-profit group paid for out of H1B visa funds.

It says somewhere on the CIA public website (or used to) essentially that if you are applying for a job there, you should not tell anyone. I guess, the first rule of the CIA is no one works there, except Valery Plame. :-) But the CIA suggests that in part for the reasons you imply, as it can presumably make people a target (although it also would complicated covert things). Of course, who is not a target in some way in this world? Things become an issue of "risk management", like so much in life. It's unfortunate that the US has such an organization that mixes up sensemaking, spying, and covert operations. I think a "COIA" (Central Open Intelligence Agency?) that just worked in public would be much more effective for US security. :-) Maybe to complement the "Department of Peace" Dennis Kucinich and others have worked towards? :-) Although various different agencies and parts of agencies all do part of that task, but there may be poor integration of all that. And, of course, nothing is going to work right as long as our economic religion is so messed up (and a top priority has to be rethinking economics for the 21st century so it stops being primarily a faith-based dogmatic religion that denies it is a religion. :-) Related:
"The Market as God"
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/99mar/marketgod.htm

As to me and my funding, under our current socioeconomic paradigm, I'm right now mostly one step above Kryten as a toilet-scrubbing homeschooling stay-at-home Dad, supported by a wife doing data-analysis consulting for "civilian" corporations these days, where my hobbies include developing FOSS software, writing long essays like this that hardly anyone reads, taking care of three elderly chickens, and taking part in a global "Blessed Unrest" http://www.blessedunrest.com/ towards saving a world that, way more often than not, is uninterested in being saved from its own internal contradictions and ironies. A world going mad from simple things like vitamin D deficiency and not eating enough vegetables, fruits, and legumes:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/mentalIllness.shtml
http://www.alternativeratreatments.com/eat-to-live.html

Best job I ever had. :-)

But if the CIA came along and offered me a big grant to do publicly available FOSS Intelligence software and related content, would I ask my wife to do even more of the homeschooling and chicken care than she does already, or maybe even hire a multilingual tutor for some of the time and/or buy a toilet scrubbing robot? Probably. :-) How's that for ethics? :-) Would I rather such work was funded some other way? Sure. We tried a bit and failed with the NSF and NASA:
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/nsfprop.htm
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

Maybe we did not try hard enough perhaps... I have to admire these Concord people for their success and doing stuff mostly the right way (at least, as right as you can be if focused mostly on the needs of compulsory schools):
http://www.concord.org/

Politics and FOSS can make strange bedfellows. A few years ago there was a slashdot story on someone doing FOSS who lost a military-related contract after he said he took military money because it meant one less cruise missile or something. But he was right in a way. Imagine what some FOSS developers could do with the time otherwise made available by the money tied up in just one Tomahawk cruise missile (US$6

http://www.radiantdata.com/
Radiant Data has a product called PeerFS which is a replicated filesystem (rw/rw, active/active) which allows you to also hold MySQL databases on it. You run 2 seperate MySQL servers pointing to the same data folder, and have it use POSIX locks for writes. The data is physicaly held on each server, and synced across the network.
  I am testing it at work ( http://www.concord.org/ ) now for our websites. VERY easy to setup, but it supports MyISAM tables, and NOT InnoDB (or the other way around).
  This does not solve IP failover, but there are other solutions out there for that. As a bonus we're holding our php webpages and MySQL databases files on the replicated PeerFS Filesystem.
  -Ben

"That's because traditionally, with a few notable exceptions, client-side Java apps suck. They're clunky, slow, and they look like arse."

Talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth.

Guess I better stop downloading F/OSS software like these.

http://argouml.tigris.org/files/documents/4/0/argo uml-0.16.1/jws/argouml-en.jnlp

http://www.johnmunsch.com/projects/HotSheet/HotShe et.jnlp

http://my.unidata.ucar.edu/content/software/idv/we bstart/IDV/idv.jnlp

http://www.crosswire.org/bibledesktop/stable/bible desktop.jnlp

http://www.geovistastudio.psu.edu/autobuild/gvstud io-full.jnlp

http://molo.concord.org/software/

[There's a LOT of java software out there]
http://community.java.net/projects/alpha.csp?only= hosted

And the fun thing is that on SuSE, Java Web Start is already set up. Click on the JNLP links and it'll automatically download, and set up (Warning some are large downloads).

The company I work for creates open source educational software from federal grants. Most of our software is Physics or Chemistry based, but most of it is Java and written and tested on MacOSX, Linux, and Windows. Some of our software is written more for classroom use (with tests and all) but some is standalone. Here is a link to our download center.

The company I work for creates open source educational software from federal grants. Most of our software is Physics or Chemistry based, but most of it is Java and written and tested on MacOSX, Linux, and Windows. Some of our software is written more for classroom use (with tests and all) but some is standalone. Here is a link to our download center.

There are many groups out there looking for ways to integrate technology into the classroom to grab the students attention. I work for The Concord Consortium, a non profit company that supports a number of NSF and DOE projects that find different ways to help students learn. We have written opensource java software to help students visualize genetics, molecules, and math; we study HOW students learn; we spawned off an OnLine Virtaul HighSchool which is now it's own organization with 6000 students; and we are always looking forward for new ways to keep students interested and learning.
We are working with PBS on a professional development project aimed at improving Algebra content knowledge and teaching practices.

On a different note, Maine a few years back initiated the Maine Laptop program, where every year every school in Maine gets laptop's for all of its 7th grade students. Technicaly in 5 years time all Middle and High School students will have computers.

-Ben

In response to one of the key issues of the World Summit on Sustainable Development, the future of our planet's waters, we have created a comprehensive and highly interactive curriculum Common Water, Common Ground: An Exploration Into Watershed Sustainability and Stewardship and are making it available here on our website see it at: Common Waters, Common Ground.

As Alan Kay once said, The best way to predict the future is to invent it. By encouraging young people to ask What kind of world do I want to create? and giving them good tools and support to find their answers - we offer the next generation a real opportunity to lead.

USight is a website dedicated to promoting ubiquitous computing in education. There is a curriculum page offerring curriculum ideas at:

http://usight.concord.org/curriculum/

You can also find more information about handhelds in education on the Concord Consortium site at:

http://www.concord.org/themes/handhelds.html

USight is a website dedicated to promoting ubiquitous computing in education. There is a curriculum page offerring curriculum ideas at:

http://usight.concord.org/curriculum/

You can also find more information about handhelds in education on the Concord Consortium site at:

http://www.concord.org/themes/handhelds.html

We've been working for the last year developing a handheld application to support student science investigation in schools. The idea is to have students do experiments, collect and analyze data using sensors connected to the handheld, and to be able to share the data among themselves and the teacher.

The computer is used to display, analyze, organize, and communicate data collected from the physical world around the student. A real-time display of sensor data in graphical form is an excellent science learning tool.

Here are some of the advantages of handhelds in this situation.

1) Portability. Many investigations do not take place on a lab bench but may instead be on the floor, out in the hallway, in the gym or outdoors. It is inconvenient to move a laptop around and completely impractical to move a desktop. It is tremendously powerful to have the display and analysis capacities of a computer while doing an investigation.

2) Cost. It is much cheaper to buy 15 handhelds rather than 15 laptops. It is also cheaper to replace a handheld when it is broken.

3) Collaboration. It is easy to beam data and text directly from one system to another.

There are many for advantages for using computers in these types of learning environments but since they are true for both handhelds and larger system I won't list them here.

To be more practical for kids and in schools handhelds need to be much more robust and synching a group of palms needs to be much easier. There are many practical classroom management issues.

I've played with two Palms with bluetooth cards and they communicated easily out to about 20 feet. When this is either built-in or a cheap add-on collaboration and synching will be much easier.

Our application CCProbe supports sensor-based visualization and analysis along with a Lab Notebook for saving and communicating probe data and views. Written in Waba and available under the GPL it runs on PalmOS, WinCE, PocketPC, Windows, MacOS Classic, MacOS X, and Linux. For more information about our software, interface and probes check out CCProbeware.

Page through the following site if you are interested in a middle school curriculum using handhelds for middle-school science investigations into force and motion and energy transformations Technology Enhanced Elementary and Middles School Science.

We've been working for the last year developing a handheld application to support student science investigation in schools. The idea is to have students do experiments, collect and analyze data using sensors connected to the handheld, and to be able to share the data among themselves and the teacher.

The computer is used to display, analyze, organize, and communicate data collected from the physical world around the student. A real-time display of sensor data in graphical form is an excellent science learning tool.

Here are some of the advantages of handhelds in this situation.

1) Portability. Many investigations do not take place on a lab bench but may instead be on the floor, out in the hallway, in the gym or outdoors. It is inconvenient to move a laptop around and completely impractical to move a desktop. It is tremendously powerful to have the display and analysis capacities of a computer while doing an investigation.

2) Cost. It is much cheaper to buy 15 handhelds rather than 15 laptops. It is also cheaper to replace a handheld when it is broken.

3) Collaboration. It is easy to beam data and text directly from one system to another.

There are many for advantages for using computers in these types of learning environments but since they are true for both handhelds and larger system I won't list them here.

To be more practical for kids and in schools handhelds need to be much more robust and synching a group of palms needs to be much easier. There are many practical classroom management issues.

I've played with two Palms with bluetooth cards and they communicated easily out to about 20 feet. When this is either built-in or a cheap add-on collaboration and synching will be much easier.

Our application CCProbe supports sensor-based visualization and analysis along with a Lab Notebook for saving and communicating probe data and views. Written in Waba and available under the GPL it runs on PalmOS, WinCE, PocketPC, Windows, MacOS Classic, MacOS X, and Linux. For more information about our software, interface and probes check out CCProbeware.

Page through the following site if you are interested in a middle school curriculum using handhelds for middle-school science investigations into force and motion and energy transformations Technology Enhanced Elementary and Middles School Science.

We are developing an open source application we call CCProbe which combines tools for collecting and analyzing sensor data with the capability to display these and other objects (images, drawings, notes, etc ...) in a compound document structure similar to a html page. Our application is written in Waba, an open-source java-like language specifically developed for handhelds.

We have CCProbe running on PalmOS, PocketPC, Windows, MacOS, MacOSX, and Linux.

On the Palm we compile the waba class files to 68000 machine code with WabaJump. The speed is suprizingly good, as fast as the interpreted version running on an iPaq. Our application is 750k on the Palm. On full-size OSes we run the waba classes on top of a Java VM.

You can find out more about CCProbe and download the software at: http://concord.org/ccprobeware/ccprobe.

Find out more about Waba at: http://www.wabasoft.com.

Find out more about WabaJump here: http://www.wabajump.org/.

Canada isn't the only place with virtual High Schools.

I'm in Massachusetts, USA, and happen to be taking a history course online. This is only the second year the program's been in place (at least here), but it's already gaining popularity. The courses aren't necessarily easier, but they run at a more relaxed pace, and as an added bonus, you have full access to it from home as well as school.

Of course, while the Canadian program seems to be more of a home-schooling thing, this program is meant to supplement regular HS courses. If you want to check it out and see what the courses look like, go to http://vhs.concord.org