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Congratulations. You rediscovered the political spectrum.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Political_spectrum

http://www.markville.ss.yrdsb.edu.on.ca/politics/Political-Spectrum_MM.gif

I'm losing a mod point but this needs to be said.

> Meanwhile Canada admits far more immigrants per capita than the United States,
> and they're sitting twenty-one places ahead of the U.S. in these rankings.

Take a look at the names of our top students.
It's the immigrants that achieve the highest results.

Examples:
http://www.yrdsb.edu.on.ca/page.cfm?id=NW0407221
http://www.yrdsb.edu.on.ca/page.cfm?id=NW0307162

I'm losing a mod point but this needs to be said.

> Meanwhile Canada admits far more immigrants per capita than the United States,
> and they're sitting twenty-one places ahead of the U.S. in these rankings.

Take a look at the names of our top students.
It's the immigrants that achieve the highest results.

Examples:
http://www.yrdsb.edu.on.ca/page.cfm?id=NW0407221
http://www.yrdsb.edu.on.ca/page.cfm?id=NW0307162

Micrsoft Office is 'taught' in the Business classes. Everywhere else in the board, it is Wordperfect, though.

From what I've seen around here (in the Kawartha Pine Ridge Board), the IT department consists of a few vastly under-qualified MCSEs...

It would be nice though..

That's just a list of other classification systems. Look here

I saw a documentary about it on BBC a couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately I can't remember the title. They gave two groups (men and women) a series of tasks and compared the results. Most women were much better at reading other people's faces and body language, they had better visual memory and they were able to do more tasks at the same time without getting confused. Most men were better at orientation (going through mazes, reading maps, moving around with their eyes closed) and abstraction (using machines and tools without having to concentrate so much on what they were doing). Brains scans also showed that the actual brain tissue is different between both sexes.

One of the funniest tests was when they asked the men and women to draw a bicycle, from memory. Most women drew the right parts, but in the wrong places (ie, the bikes wouldn't work). In men's drawings, all the parts were in the right places. Basically this shows that most women tend to keep visual mental images (ie, they are remembering a specific bicycle) while most men have functional, or conceptual mental images (ie, they are remembering the characteristics that make a bike work, and creating the image from that).

A quick search on Google produced a few interesting pages such as this one, this one or this one.

RMN
~~~

Wang experienced a 20% growth rate in the late 70's - early 80's, mainly selling pre PC, proprietary word processing boxes and subsequent, competitively priced mini-computers.

Kind of ironic that An Wang (founder of Wang Labs) got ripped off in the licensing deal with IBM over his core memory patents.

1955
May 17: Wang is issued Patent Number 2,708,722, including 34 claims for the magnetic memory core
June 30: Wang Laboratories becomes a corporation

1956
March 6: Dr. A. Wang assigns Patent Number 2,708,722 to IBM in exchange for a payment of $500,000 which included eight conditions under which the final $100,000 would be withheld. IBM is 10,000 times larger than Wang

I'm Two years out of high-school; and there's a couple things I'd just like to mention about my experiences, in Canada at least.

First things first though, "One commenter pointed out that a specially designed red-and-blue laptop adorned with a NYC logo or something similar would be the perfect theft protection -- since you couldn't sell it to anyone, it's not likely to be stolen.". What reasons would I have to not buy a stolen red & blue NYC laptop on E-Bay? If you're going to wire everyone, I'm sure the thieves will get high-tech too, I know I would. Second of all, what are the odds that these laptops have specially designed software running on them. Odds are they are going to be made for MicroSoft software (I mean, who else in the world develops software right?). If they can work under MS Specs, I know a Linux OS will work on them too. At the very least they will require a floppy drive, and any type of drive access can be hacked. With millions of these devices in production and widely available on the black market, I know there will be hacks available even if they're a $200.00US hack.

Secondly, I've been using computers in school since kindergarden. My mother taught me Basic programming at home on a CalecoVision computer in grade 1, and I've coded in Basic on a home-made Apple 2c, TRS-80, IBM PC, and some entirely graphical workstation introduced to canadian schools around 1988 (ICONs); to name a few. I still remember watching the computer reps discuss the incredible possibilities of a wired generation in front of my teachers and my whole class.

The result of all this? I learned basic programming from my mother. No file reading/writing though, just INPUT A$ and PRINT. I tried to find books on ASM and at the very least file reading and writing in BASIC. To this day, I don't know if any of those old version of BASIC even support it. My teachers definately didn't know anything about it, and BASIC was even removed from the computers. My mother freaked on one of the worst teachers I've ever had because she Had accused me of being a slacker. When my mother asked her if she was challenging me and informed her that I programmed computers, BASIC went back on immediately (she wasn't aware). So 4 more years of elementary school basic were at my disposal. Whoopie. That was when I was finished drawing pictures on the computers for class assignments (All the way through school!).

When I was 14 I taught myself C, and took a course at a local college a year later. In high school my C teacher borrowed my notes in gr. 12 & OAC. A year earlier, in grade eleven I begged to take a C++ course because I was under the impression I was ready for it. Unfortunately my teacher didn't even know TURING, the required gr. 11 course - which was what he was teaching, and I ended up teaching the class when they felt like doing assignments.

I spent my years in high-school troubleshooting network problems in the computer labs and recovering teachers personal files when they brought there PCs in for me to take a look at.

In OAC I was accused of being a "hacker" because after a co-op at the school board computer tech dept. one technician had it out for me. He did some hardcore investigating and discovered I visited www.2600.com and www.l0pht.com regularly (Though I used to show him the sites, the advisories, and check his NEW Win98 systems for security flaws). My Vice Principal heard I was doing something evil, and assumed I had been looking at pr0n, so I got a half-hour lecture on why Pornography is immoral and almost lost about 3 credits for that on top of the implications that I was a "malicious" computer user, though only the term "Hacker" was ever used.

I believe introducing computers in schools is the first step, and that was taken many years ago. Now I think we need to introduce users to the computers; I know things have not changed since I've left. In fact, my two favourite teachers left the school, one become a software developer, the other as far as I know dropped teaching computers though he's the only one in the whole area I know of that can.

College instructors and Certification programs need to be introduced to schools. Certifications that are standards and are not given out by teachers who have a vested interest in the pass/fail rate of there classes. Such as an A+ course or MCSE group of courses taught in high-school which leave students with the opportunity to call Sylvan or other testing centers to receive certification; and make the certifications count towards there marks in later courses.