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Perhaps some budding Michael Moore might want to contrast the technology available to the President's kids at the $35,288-a-year Sidwell Friends School ("The number one blessing for this [iMovie] project was the delivery of noise-cancelling headphones for each child") to the tech available at rural Appalachia schools (avg. family income $40,000). Sidwell Friends is also living-the-cyberlife as a charter member of the elite Global Online Academy, which boasts that "classmates in Washington, D.C. $35,288, and San Francisco $38,900 work on projects with peers in Madaba-Manja, Jordan $38,272, and Portland, Oregon $25,850. Students in Hawaii $19,950 (President Obama's alma mater) and Chicago $29,985 discuss global health issues with students in New York $40,220, Seattle $28,500 (Bill Gates' alma mater), Boston $46,700, and Jakarta, Indonesia $30,200."

And what would the message of this movie be? "America has expensive but fancy private schools"? I think we already knew that. Yeah, if you're willing to shell out some coin, you can indeed buy a great education for your kid. So what? With more money you can also buy better healthcare, go to better colleges, eat at better restaurants, drive safer cars and live in better houses located in better neighborhoods.

Perhaps some budding Michael Moore might want to contrast the technology available to the President's kids at the $35,288-a-year Sidwell Friends School ("The number one blessing for this [iMovie] project was the delivery of noise-cancelling headphones for each child") to the tech available at rural Appalachia schools (avg. family income $40,000). Sidwell Friends is also living-the-cyberlife as a charter member of the elite Global Online Academy, which boasts that "classmates in Washington, D.C. $35,288, and San Francisco $38,900 work on projects with peers in Madaba-Manja, Jordan $38,272, and Portland, Oregon $25,850. Students in Hawaii $19,950 (President Obama's alma mater) and Chicago $29,985 discuss global health issues with students in New York $40,220, Seattle $28,500 (Bill Gates' alma mater), Boston $46,700, and Jakarta, Indonesia $30,200."

It's not clear whether the 'donations' are cash money, software,etc. BTW, not to dismiss $100K (split five ways), but that's less than what a Microsoft exec spends to put one kid through high school at Lakeside School (BillG's alma mater).

Regardless of the (questionable) reliability of such dating methods, just how large a portion of fossils are dated that way? Not enough to really be sure. (Very expensive.)

Oh, and the fossil evidence: not all that grand (pg. 1-2).

I'm a dumbass.
forgot the URL

The Lakeside School.

Check it out.

Better yet... email 'em and offer to donate a free linux based PC!

Allen-Gates Hall, at Bill's high school (see the lower-left corner).

Well, I guess it depends on whether you are using that money appropriately or not. But as I see it, the real issue here is the failure of the public education system in the US as a whole. Inability to properly use technology in the classroom is only a symptom. In other words there are a lot of teachers and school systems that won't be capable of using the results of your study. I don't know whether it'll be because of lack of money, talent, or both. But that's the way it currently is.

There's a beautiful example of how computers in the schools can work (though I don't know how long before classes were worked around them). A significant fraction of the early Microsoft employees including the two founders, Bill Gates, and Paul Allen came from a private school (Lakeside School) that had acquired remote access to a PDP 10 back in the early 70's (see "Hard Drive", James Wallace and Jim Eirckson).

As far as I can tell, the school didn't have (at first) formal courses around this but merely provided access to interested students. That turned out to be sufficient. In the right environment (and frankly in the hands of very good students given some serious leeway), the mere presence of a remote terminal was enough to eventually spark the creation of Microsoft.

oh, and thanks for the nice picture on the school's website ;)