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I'll weigh in on two different thoughts.

First thought: iPads vs. Chromebooks vs. Microsoft. At a recent technology director's conference, there's nothing but moaning & groaning about managing iPads. It's four year's running now, and Apple just does not get Enterprise management. No central management of Apple IDs, App management is terrible (Apple Configurator is lousy, buggy, and doesn't push apps, and 3rd party management tools keep breaking w/ every new version of iOS), the list keeps going on. And there's nothing but good things being said about Chromebooks. Affordable, simple, easy enterprise management, no more need for file servers...the only criticism is that they eat bandwidth. And Microsoft? Yesterday's news.

Second thought: regarding the criticisms about 1-1 and flooding schools with digital devices. I in much part agree that there's not a direct -need- for student digital devices. But digital devices do enhance learning by providing greater opportunities to communicate, manage classroom content digitally and make it accessible outside school, create video lessons and "flip" the classroom, and provide formative assessments (i.e. frequent quizzing that is used to guide instruction & provide mnemonic enhancement) that have been proven to be a very effective learning tool. But these are all -instructional- changes that need to start and continue with the teacher. It's foolish for a district to follow a blind "build-it-and-they-will-come" strategy of flooding a school with digital devices and utterly failing at supporting instructional changes. If districts aren't willing to provide both continual funding for a 1-1 program as well as instructional support to teachers, then they're wasting their money. But we all need to recognize that schools are responsible for teaching students how to effectively use the internet in the pursuit of knowledge. The internet is the new information paradigm of our society, making it a necessary part of the curriculum.

Learning to Teach Mathematics for Social Justice: Negotiating Social Justice and Mathematical Goals

http://www.nctm.org/publications/article.aspx?id=31244

Learning to Teach Mathematics for Social Justice: Negotiating Social Justice and Mathematical Goals

Tonya Gau Bartell

June 2010, Volume 41, Issue 0, Page 5

Abstract: This article describes teachersâ(TM) collective work aimed at learning to teach mathematics for social justice. Teacher interviews, discussions, lessons, and written reflections were analyzed using grounded theory methodology, and teachersâ(TM) conversations were examined concerning the relationship between mathematical goals and social justice goals. Analysis revealed that early tensions arose around balancing these goals, that teachers focused more attention on the social justice component, and that the instantiation of these goals in practice proved difficult.

In case you don't remember, stuff traveling at orbital velocities is positively lethal to spacecraft. The extreme energies involved in these kinds of impacts is enough to send very high velocity fragments in all directions. Sure, some of it will de-orbit, but most will end up in fairly stable orbits that will EVENTUALLY intersect all the other satellites up there. So blowing up one rogue satellite makes one very annoying but eminently predictable problem into a thousand lethal and unpredictable problems.

Last February, a Russian satellite hit a commercial Iridium satellite, and the resulting debris cloud (estimated near 600 pieces in various orbits) has been a HUGE headache for everyone in similar orbital altitudes.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123438921888374497.html
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29147679/

In 2008, the US got criticized around the world for blowing up a falling satellite because of the health threats of hydrazine if it landed in a populated area. Aside from complaints about military showboating, there were many scientists who complained about the resulting orbital debris; however, in reality it was a very low-altitude explosion and the debris cloud did de-orbit very quickly (unlike a geosynchronous orbit explosion, which would leave practically permanent debris due to the orbit well above any appreciable atmospheric drag).
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_6712/is_35_237/ai_n29417848/

Read here for some details on the general problems with orbital debris.
http://illuminations.nctm.org/LessonDetail.aspx?id=L376

So no more helpful suggestions like this, please.

I found a source. See the middle of the first column on page 25 (the first page is page 23) here. It's indirect; the original source appears to be a textbook, and I doubt I'll find a free online copy suitable to post.

Well, I'll hopefully release the test software as soon as I get some spare time.

My intent was to produce some stats on the very basics of user interfaces so that they could be used to evaluate more complex interfaces. The first test was designed to look at how long it took people to click on something.

I started out fairly basic, just a box with that appeared randomly on the screen, and then moved up to having boxes that appeared in ordered patterns and at given locations on the screen (including points in the corners), the given location tests where mixed up with random locations to make it a little more realistic.

I was looking to measure a learning curve as the user 'learnt' the location of the fixed boxes but didn't get enough data for proper analysis.

For all tests I recorded the time of the mouse click and the location of the mouse click.

I looked at things like the change in time over time, and looked to any patterns that related to the ordering of the boxes etc...

In the end, after a little practice all the results were showing a straight line (least squares fit) with reasonable t test results for the correlation between the line and the data. Removing points that had exceptionally large times (where the operator had paused) gave an even better fit.

More detailed analysis of the corners of the screen showed that they were no better than anywhere else (for a small box)

So, unless your UI is only made up of points (I never got around to looking at critical sizes of elements) the corners will probably be faster, but if it's made up of anything else then there's no difference.

The tests could have been a bit more scientific, but I was running the project at home with the help of a few friends before looking to take it to a wider audience and expand it further.

Tell me about lazy kids and schools not being accountable. I just came today from a meeting with my son's school teachers about his math program. My son wants to do more advanced math work, has been ready for it for some time. The school's response was to claim that the ability to perform arithmetic on paper has little to do with mathematics and then deny him access to ability appropriate mathematics. So a child who has been doing full multi-digit addition and subtraction with carrying and borrowing is asked to do single digit addition with answers no higher than 15 as the most advanced math they will offer him.

Part of it is the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) has allegedly endorsed a program that deemphasizes pencil and paper arithmetic to the point that some of the more extreme advocates of this program have proposed banning traditional algorithmic arithmetic until close to fourth grade.

The listed criteria that the school has identified as necessary skills are available at the NCTM website.

This list may look initially acceptable, but the application of it at least in my son's school was to claim that arithmetic is not even a significant part of math, at least not a standard algorithmic understanding of how to do the standardized problems. Instead, an emphasis on "strategies" is supreme to the point that if a problem cannot be done in one's head, it isn't worth doing.

The other issue is the "No Child Gets Ahead Act". It requires teachers to bring up to minimal standard as many students as possible and ignore those students who meet the minimum requirements without trying. This approach discourages advanced work in all too many cases that I have seen.

There are often problems with lazy students, but that is not the whole of the situation, overly rigorous school programs are just as much to blame.

In an effort to overcome our country's mathematics woes, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) put together a monumental group of standards and principles revolutionizing the way that Mathematics is taught at the High School level.

The NCTM-based curriculum is different. Some teachers and college professors believe it to be weak on mathematics because it doesn't look like the curriculum they grew up with. Traditional curriculum (teacher does a couple examples, students practice solving 30+ problems similar) has not been good enough though.

The new curriculum, based on psychology and education research from the latter half of this century, focuses on understanding in addition to the traditional acquisition of skills. It is mathematics rich with connections to other areas, and deep in content. Students start in 6th grade learning basic algebraic concepts, number theory, geometry, probability, etc. Obviously mastery of all these concepts does not happen in a single year. In fact, the curriculum spirals around the same concepts, building new understanding and making new connections with each pass so that, ideally, when students graduate their skills AND understanding will be better than that of previous generations.

Sometimes this math is called "Fuzzy Math" or the "New 'New Math'". Some educators, professionals, parents, and children feel the curriculum is weak on "real math." My concerns were similar before I started teaching the Interactive Mathematics Program (IMP).

Between 9th and 10th grade, students master basic algebra, learn the basics of the trig functions, work with standard deviation and the chi-squared measure, build and solve and maximum profit linear programming (something most math majors don't do until grad school), derive and prove the pythagorean theorem, work with exponential and logarithmic functions, do all sorts of number-theory related problems, and so much more. Still IMP and other standards-based curricula have their problems. In my opinion, although there's plenty of problem-solving and understanding-based activities, there needs to be more traditional skill work. I supplement my lessons with such work where appropriate. Any teacher worth their stuff would do the same. Additionally, the curricula is very wordy, which is fine for middle-class suburbanites, but when you're teaching in a city where 25% of the students don't speak english as their first language, and 75% are in poverty (typically correlated with smaller vocab and weaker reading/writing skills), a wordy curriculum is just one more thing making it tough to teach/learn math. In sum, there's a lot of hostility from the non-math-teacher world toward this new curriculum because it's so different. But, with the abismal performance of American mathematics when compared internationally, it can't be business as usual. The curriculum is already working well in the classes I've seen. And the research points to positive improvements after curriculum implementation (no large study has been completed as far as I'm aware). NCTM-based curricula is no panacea, but it's a definite improvement over the more archaic traditional curricula.

In an effort to overcome our country's mathematics woes, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) put together a monumental group of standards and principles revolutionizing the way that Mathematics is taught at the High School level.

The NCTM-based curriculum is different. Some teachers and college professors believe it to be weak on mathematics because it doesn't look like the curriculum they grew up with. Traditional curriculum (teacher does a couple examples, students practice solving 30+ problems similar) has not been good enough though.

The new curriculum, based on psychology and education research from the latter half of this century, focuses on understanding in addition to the traditional acquisition of skills. It is mathematics rich with connections to other areas, and deep in content. Students start in 6th grade learning basic algebraic concepts, number theory, geometry, probability, etc. Obviously mastery of all these concepts does not happen in a single year. In fact, the curriculum spirals around the same concepts, building new understanding and making new connections with each pass so that, ideally, when students graduate their skills AND understanding will be better than that of previous generations.

Sometimes this math is called "Fuzzy Math" or the "New 'New Math'". Some educators, professionals, parents, and children feel the curriculum is weak on "real math." My concerns were similar before I started teaching the Interactive Mathematics Program (IMP).

Between 9th and 10th grade, students master basic algebra, learn the basics of the trig functions, work with standard deviation and the chi-squared measure, build and solve and maximum profit linear programming (something most math majors don't do until grad school), derive and prove the pythagorean theorem, work with exponential and logarithmic functions, do all sorts of number-theory related problems, and so much more. Still IMP and other standards-based curricula have their problems. In my opinion, although there's plenty of problem-solving and understanding-based activities, there needs to be more traditional skill work. I supplement my lessons with such work where appropriate. Any teacher worth their stuff would do the same. Additionally, the curricula is very wordy, which is fine for middle-class suburbanites, but when you're teaching in a city where 25% of the students don't speak english as their first language, and 75% are in poverty (typically correlated with smaller vocab and weaker reading/writing skills), a wordy curriculum is just one more thing making it tough to teach/learn math. In sum, there's a lot of hostility from the non-math-teacher world toward this new curriculum because it's so different. But, with the abismal performance of American mathematics when compared internationally, it can't be business as usual. The curriculum is already working well in the classes I've seen. And the research points to positive improvements after curriculum implementation (no large study has been completed as far as I'm aware). NCTM-based curricula is no panacea, but it's a definite improvement over the more archaic traditional curricula.