The founders are happy to share insights and ideas!
From the website: Teach me to make provides science workshops and classes for all ages. Our popular electronics and mechanics workshops for children encourage tinkering: taking things apart; building whimsical comtraptions using salvaged components, recycled objects and inexpensive supplies; and repurposing contraptions to different needs. Using both an artistic and technical approach, each child is guided and encouraged in the way best suited to their way of thinking. Our bilingual instructors are further able to engage and mentor children of varied backgrounds.
I wrote them a note like this, and you can copy it/use it/change it. Whatever you like.
I support the Open College Textbook Act of 2009!
Open formats for education works derived from taxpayer dollars is essential for the longevity of information. Non-open formats such as.doc (MSWord) are subject to software changes and incompatibility issues. Open formats like.odf (Open Office) and.pdf (Adobe) allow the data to be accessed for countless decades.
Information paid for with taxpayer money should be made freely available to the taxpayers!
I think the entire development team should have to watch! There are often developers who don't care about the end-user experience, and then wonder why their bills don't be paid when the software flops.
I would spend my time and my money researching, creating and standardizing open media codecs. There should be enough prior art to invalidate many existing codec patents, but it takes time and money. Researching prior art, engineering workarounds, and persistent litigation might ensure that our children have access to the digital content we create today.
A decade ago, my friend wrote poetry and saved it in Word. Now, he could only access it through Open Office. It's completely ridiculous that we save documents in a proprietary format and then lose the ability to retrieve the files. Paper has the grace to be read after hundreds of years--why doesn't code?
Pain is not my problem with eating animals. Inhumane conditions are the problem! Removing the "pain" part of it would open up even more excuses for factory farming. Seeing that an animal is in pain when it's killed is essential to respecting its life and purpose--and to preventing over-abundance of killing. A hunter should kill out of need and learns that when he sees and animal suffer (read the story of the Rainbow Warrior). Factory farms and lack of pain remove us from this natural cycle. ugh. Don't get me started...
I'll have to disagree here. There were many plot holes in District 9. Moon, OTOH, was incredible. It was sci-fi for truists. The kind of movie I want to see a sequel *and* a prequel to.
I've used mobile broadband (Verizon) for about 4 years as my "home internet provider". Your connection will likely be dropped a few times a day, and if you have it connected to a wireless router, that might have to be powercycled a few times a week. I would never consider running a web server off of this!
As for streaming video, it depends on where and what time you are viewing. In NYC around 9:30am, your connection speed slows to almost that of dial-up. I can watch streaming TV at night, though, and seldom have to wait long for it to buffer.
In the end, it's great for home use, but not for a "major internet user" like yourself.
When we all got laid-off from the Gnash project, work on it came to a screeching crawl. When we raised money, we took hardworking volunteers and asked them to work harder--for money! That they did. Now, every one of us has had to find another job and, with that taking up most of our focus, there is less time to contribute to a FLOSS project. Most people are still contributing, but it's certainly not at the same rate.
http://easterbridge.com/http://easterbridge.com/files/free-software-in-education.pdf
Anne's been presenting on this stuff for quite some time and her work is great. She's got a large compilation of studies and anecdotes from around the world and, if you email her, she'll prove to be a great resource.
The Skolelinux guys have been great to work with as well: skolelinux.org
One of the hardest challenges is Flash Animations. Lots but lots of educational materials are written in flash and that's often been a limit for educational systems like the OLPC. This is something Gnash has been working diligently to support, but there is a lot of material out there!
umm...at a previous company our equipment used to cost $500k-$2M
The equipment here is usually expensive and usually a large institute like Broad or Baylor would inevitably purchase it and then be able to charge people to run their sequences.
A $5k pricetag would be per sequence run, so it would not necessarily be done for patients. Most of the work one on these systems is for research purposes--trying to find correlations amongst populations with disease to discover the genetic component, etc.
A primary issue with the data that comes from this is where and how to store the data. 454 sequencers produce a terabyte of data (at full compression) for each run. When last I heard, they were only storing data for 2-3 weeks, as it cost less to re-sequence the data then it did to store it. There is an extreme need for a viable compression and storage solution and with a system that can sequence the entire genome, this will come to a serious head.
On the contrary, what the specs provide was something Gnash devs figured out 5 years ago. Gnash devs still have to reverse engineer swf in a clean-room environment, and still can't install any of the Adobe tools.
Here's an article by Bruce Byfield regarding the Open Screen Initiative:
http://openmedianow.org/?q=node/21
Below is the release announcement. Gnash has worked to synch cyles with Ubuntu and others, and is now on a 3-mo release cycle.
The third beta release of Gnash has just been made at version 0.8.4. Gnash is a GPL'd SWF movie player and browser plugin for Firefox, Mozilla, and Konqueror. Gnash supports many SWF v7 features and ActionScript 2 classes. with growing support for SWF v8 and v9. Gnash also runs on many GNU/Linux distributions, embedded GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, non x86 processors, and 64 bit architectures. Ports to Darwin and Windows are in progress for a future release. The plugin works best with Firefox 1.0.4 or newer, and should work in any Mozilla based browser using NPAPI. There is also a standalone player for GNOME or KDE based desktops.
Improvements since 0.8.3 release are:
* Keep Adobe happy with our users and our users happy with us by
changing "Flash player" into "SWF player" everywhere. Adobe
claims "Flash" as a trademark and had asked a Linux distributor
to fix it.
* The popular SWF Twitter badge now renders correctly.
* Fix parsing of urls containing multiple question marks
* Fix support for movies embedding multiple sound streams
* Support for loading PNG and GIF images added.
* Improved rendering of SWF movies because of the less visible
changes listed below.
* Support for writing RGB/RGBA PNG images and JPEG images.
* Works with Potlatch OpenStreetMap editor
* New 'flvdumper' utility for analyzing FLV video files.
* XPI packaging support for Mozilla & Firefox.
See the NEWS file for more improvements.
Gnash supports the majority of Flash opcodes up to SWF version 7, and a wide sampling of ActionScript 2 classes for SWF version 8.5. Flash version 9 and ActionScript 3 support is being worked on. All the core ones are implemented, and many of the newer ones work, but may be missing some of their methods. If the browser only displays a blank window, it is likely because of an unimplemented feature. All unimplemented opcodes and ActionScript classes and methods print a warning when using -v with gnash or gprocessor. Using gprocessor -v is a quick way to see why a movie isn't playing correctly.
You can grab the Gnash sources from ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/gnash/0.8.4, or from Gnash Bzr from the branch.../gnas-0.8.4 . Binary packages for Debian or RPM based systems will be available from your GNU/Linux distribution, and from whatever BSD variant you are using. Experimental binary packages built by the Gnash team are also available at http://www.getgnash.org/ along with source snapshots. Please report packaging bugs upstream to your distribution. If you think you have found a bug in Gnash, then you should file as complete a report as possible at https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=gnash. Patches are always preferred to bug reports, as this is a community project. You can submit patches at https://savannah.gnu.org/patch/?group=gnash, or email them
Please include the operating system name and version, compiler version, and which gnash version you are using, in your bug reports. For bugs in the plugin, please also add the browser and it's version. Gnash does not support Firefox versions below 1.0.4.
I had the same thought. I've always been taught that adult stem cells can me manipulated to behave like embryonic, but with certain limitations that embryonic cells don't have. What is the major difference here and do they mean by safer?
I'm not sure about the AC, but folks at Planetmind run their servers on solar power. Perhaps this could free up some of your funds to put toward AC.
http://www.planetmind.net/
IMNSHO, Jim's doing a great job advocating Linux to companies and persons who might not have known there were alternatives to closed systems. And they support solid engineering as well. Someone commented earlier on patents, and The Linux Foundation is doing its part to support prior art research, the Patent Commons project and legal defense. They are doing what a great FOSS Foundation should do--support legislative research, sponsor development, build/support the community, and inform the masses.
Preliminary investigation of Ogg for prior art or patents in the USA shows that it is indeed free, but the research to make sure it stays that way is an on-going effort. Volunteers for such research internationally would be of great help, as each country has its own patents and enforcements. Open Media Now (openmedianow.org) is doing some such research.
As for me, I put myself through college with loans and Pell Grants. Low-income grants make total sense to me--you earn the grades, get the reward and can attend the same schools as the privileged. And sometimes I can justify demographic scholarships---some people just don't get good schooling and deserve a leg-up. But in the end, a quota is hurtful. My foray into science began with my parents and was furthered by teachers who took a unique interest in me. Girls don't need the field to be "dumbed down" for them; they need motivation and exposure, opening the doors to engineering possibilities.
Since I was young, I have always participated in arts and sciences. I wanted to be a ballerina and an archaeologist; I graduated with degrees in Biology and Theatre. I contemplated another major in AstroPhysics, but realized there weren't enough jobs in the "real world". I wasn't as into engineering because it was too narrow-minded--I preferred a multi-disciplinary approach to developing a "Unified Field Theory", and found that hard science had become too fragmented to get any real work done.
Upon graduation, I learned that I could work from home, get paid to travel, and make twice as much just by doing sales and marketing for science and biotech firms. For me, hard science was more like hard life. Now, I enjoy my job, have complete autonomy, and can get paid more than I ever would in academia. And to me, that's an intelligent decision!
Cygnal is another project from the Gnash / OpenMediaNow team. Multi-channel video conferencing is the #1 goal right now. It should be ready for outside developers now. From their dev site http://wiki.gnashdev.org/Cygnal :
"This is a Flash media server compatible audio and video server. It handles negotiating the copyright metadata exchange, as well as streaming the content. It will need to handle many thousands of simultaneous network connection, and support running on large GNU/Linux clusters. It should support handling multiple streams with differing content, as well as a multicast stream with a single data source.
There are several other streaming servers that handle streaming audio and video. Some handle multiple formats, but most have a protocol supported only by that one project (like shoutcast). None but Red5 support Flash, and that feature isn't working yet anyway.
Due to the patent issues surrounding MP3, and the fact that FLV and ON2 are closed formats, one of the main goals of this project is to support free codes and free protocols as the primary way of doing things. Optionally there will be support for MP3, FLV, and ON2 (VP6 and VP7) when playing existing Flash content. Both FLV and the VP6 & VP7 codecs are included in ffmpeg. Users can use the ffmpeg plugin for Gstreamer to use these proprietary codecs."
Slashdot Mirror
An excellent resource is here:
http://www.teachmetomake.com/
The founders are happy to share insights and ideas!
From the website:
Teach me to make provides science workshops and classes for all ages. Our popular electronics and mechanics workshops for children encourage tinkering: taking things apart; building whimsical comtraptions using salvaged components, recycled objects and inexpensive supplies; and repurposing contraptions to different needs. Using both an artistic and technical approach, each child is guided and encouraged in the way best suited to their way of thinking. Our bilingual instructors are further able to engage and mentor children of varied backgrounds.
You can find your Senator here:
http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
And your Congressman here:
https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtml
I wrote them a note like this, and you can copy it/use it/change it. Whatever you like.
I support the Open College Textbook Act of 2009!
Open formats for education works derived from taxpayer dollars is essential for the longevity of information. Non-open formats such as .doc (MSWord) are subject to software changes and incompatibility issues. Open formats like .odf (Open Office) and .pdf (Adobe) allow the data to be accessed for countless decades.
Information paid for with taxpayer money should be made freely available to the taxpayers!
I think the entire development team should have to watch! There are often developers who don't care about the end-user experience, and then wonder why their bills don't be paid when the software flops.
I would spend my time and my money researching, creating and standardizing open media codecs. There should be enough prior art to invalidate many existing codec patents, but it takes time and money. Researching prior art, engineering workarounds, and persistent litigation might ensure that our children have access to the digital content we create today. A decade ago, my friend wrote poetry and saved it in Word. Now, he could only access it through Open Office. It's completely ridiculous that we save documents in a proprietary format and then lose the ability to retrieve the files. Paper has the grace to be read after hundreds of years--why doesn't code?
Pain is not my problem with eating animals. Inhumane conditions are the problem! Removing the "pain" part of it would open up even more excuses for factory farming. Seeing that an animal is in pain when it's killed is essential to respecting its life and purpose--and to preventing over-abundance of killing. A hunter should kill out of need and learns that when he sees and animal suffer (read the story of the Rainbow Warrior). Factory farms and lack of pain remove us from this natural cycle. ugh. Don't get me started...
Thank you! When I first went on to usaspending.gov (granted this was just after Obama came into office), there was nothing of the sort.
Might I add, there's little "transparent" about a pie chart. How about a spreadsheet listing exact vendors and amounts?
I'll have to disagree here. There were many plot holes in District 9. Moon, OTOH, was incredible. It was sci-fi for truists. The kind of movie I want to see a sequel *and* a prequel to.
I've used mobile broadband (Verizon) for about 4 years as my "home internet provider". Your connection will likely be dropped a few times a day, and if you have it connected to a wireless router, that might have to be powercycled a few times a week. I would never consider running a web server off of this! As for streaming video, it depends on where and what time you are viewing. In NYC around 9:30am, your connection speed slows to almost that of dial-up. I can watch streaming TV at night, though, and seldom have to wait long for it to buffer. In the end, it's great for home use, but not for a "major internet user" like yourself.
When we all got laid-off from the Gnash project, work on it came to a screeching crawl. When we raised money, we took hardworking volunteers and asked them to work harder--for money! That they did. Now, every one of us has had to find another job and, with that taking up most of our focus, there is less time to contribute to a FLOSS project. Most people are still contributing, but it's certainly not at the same rate.
http://easterbridge.com/ http://easterbridge.com/files/free-software-in-education.pdf Anne's been presenting on this stuff for quite some time and her work is great. She's got a large compilation of studies and anecdotes from around the world and, if you email her, she'll prove to be a great resource. The Skolelinux guys have been great to work with as well: skolelinux.org One of the hardest challenges is Flash Animations. Lots but lots of educational materials are written in flash and that's often been a limit for educational systems like the OLPC. This is something Gnash has been working diligently to support, but there is a lot of material out there!
umm...at a previous company our equipment used to cost $500k-$2M The equipment here is usually expensive and usually a large institute like Broad or Baylor would inevitably purchase it and then be able to charge people to run their sequences. A $5k pricetag would be per sequence run, so it would not necessarily be done for patients. Most of the work one on these systems is for research purposes--trying to find correlations amongst populations with disease to discover the genetic component, etc. A primary issue with the data that comes from this is where and how to store the data. 454 sequencers produce a terabyte of data (at full compression) for each run. When last I heard, they were only storing data for 2-3 weeks, as it cost less to re-sequence the data then it did to store it. There is an extreme need for a viable compression and storage solution and with a system that can sequence the entire genome, this will come to a serious head.
On the contrary, what the specs provide was something Gnash devs figured out 5 years ago. Gnash devs still have to reverse engineer swf in a clean-room environment, and still can't install any of the Adobe tools. Here's an article by Bruce Byfield regarding the Open Screen Initiative: http://openmedianow.org/?q=node/21
Wow, 13th book? And to think I was holding my breath for a 12th...
Below is the release announcement. Gnash has worked to synch cyles with Ubuntu and others, and is now on a 3-mo release cycle.
The third beta release of Gnash has just been made at version
0.8.4. Gnash is a GPL'd SWF movie player and browser plugin for
Firefox, Mozilla, and Konqueror. Gnash supports many SWF v7 features
and ActionScript 2 classes. with growing support for SWF v8 and
v9. Gnash also runs on many GNU/Linux distributions, embedded
GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, non x86 processors, and 64 bit
architectures. Ports to Darwin and Windows are in progress for a
future release. The plugin works best with Firefox 1.0.4 or newer, and
should work in any Mozilla based browser using NPAPI. There is also a
standalone player for GNOME or KDE based desktops.
Improvements since 0.8.3 release are:
* Keep Adobe happy with our users and our users happy with us by
changing "Flash player" into "SWF player" everywhere. Adobe
claims "Flash" as a trademark and had asked a Linux distributor
to fix it.
* The popular SWF Twitter badge now renders correctly.
* Fix parsing of urls containing multiple question marks
* Fix support for movies embedding multiple sound streams
* Support for loading PNG and GIF images added.
* Improved rendering of SWF movies because of the less visible
changes listed below.
* Support for writing RGB/RGBA PNG images and JPEG images.
* Works with Potlatch OpenStreetMap editor
* New 'flvdumper' utility for analyzing FLV video files.
* XPI packaging support for Mozilla & Firefox.
See the NEWS file for more improvements.
Gnash supports the majority of Flash opcodes up to SWF version 7, and
a wide sampling of ActionScript 2 classes for SWF version 8.5. Flash
version 9 and ActionScript 3 support is being worked on. All the
core ones are implemented, and many of the newer ones work, but may be
missing some of their methods. If the browser only displays a blank
window, it is likely because of an unimplemented feature. All
unimplemented opcodes and ActionScript classes and methods print a
warning when using -v with gnash or gprocessor. Using gprocessor -v is
a quick way to see why a movie isn't playing correctly.
You can grab the Gnash sources from ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/gnash/0.8.4, .../gnas-0.8.4 . Binary packages for
or from Gnash Bzr from the branch
Debian or RPM based systems will be available from your GNU/Linux
distribution, and from whatever BSD variant you are using. Experimental
binary packages built by the Gnash team are also available at
http://www.getgnash.org/ along with source snapshots. Please
report packaging bugs upstream to your distribution. If you think you
have found a bug in Gnash, then you should file as complete a report
as possible at https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=gnash. Patches are
always preferred to bug reports, as this is a community project. You
can submit patches at https://savannah.gnu.org/patch/?group=gnash, or
email them
Please include the operating system name and version, compiler
version, and which gnash version you are using, in your bug
reports. For bugs in the plugin, please also add the browser and
it's version. Gnash does not support Firefox versions below 1.0.4.
gnashdev.org
I had the same thought. I've always been taught that adult stem cells can me manipulated to behave like embryonic, but with certain limitations that embryonic cells don't have. What is the major difference here and do they mean by safer?
I'm not sure about the AC, but folks at Planetmind run their servers on solar power. Perhaps this could free up some of your funds to put toward AC. http://www.planetmind.net/
IMNSHO, Jim's doing a great job advocating Linux to companies and persons who might not have known there were alternatives to closed systems. And they support solid engineering as well. Someone commented earlier on patents, and The Linux Foundation is doing its part to support prior art research, the Patent Commons project and legal defense. They are doing what a great FOSS Foundation should do--support legislative research, sponsor development, build/support the community, and inform the masses.
Preliminary investigation of Ogg for prior art or patents in the USA shows that it is indeed free, but the research to make sure it stays that way is an on-going effort. Volunteers for such research internationally would be of great help, as each country has its own patents and enforcements. Open Media Now (openmedianow.org) is doing some such research.
As for me, I put myself through college with loans and Pell Grants. Low-income grants make total sense to me--you earn the grades, get the reward and can attend the same schools as the privileged. And sometimes I can justify demographic scholarships---some people just don't get good schooling and deserve a leg-up. But in the end, a quota is hurtful. My foray into science began with my parents and was furthered by teachers who took a unique interest in me. Girls don't need the field to be "dumbed down" for them; they need motivation and exposure, opening the doors to engineering possibilities.
Since I was young, I have always participated in arts and sciences. I wanted to be a ballerina and an archaeologist; I graduated with degrees in Biology and Theatre. I contemplated another major in AstroPhysics, but realized there weren't enough jobs in the "real world". I wasn't as into engineering because it was too narrow-minded--I preferred a multi-disciplinary approach to developing a "Unified Field Theory", and found that hard science had become too fragmented to get any real work done. Upon graduation, I learned that I could work from home, get paid to travel, and make twice as much just by doing sales and marketing for science and biotech firms. For me, hard science was more like hard life. Now, I enjoy my job, have complete autonomy, and can get paid more than I ever would in academia. And to me, that's an intelligent decision!
you can get the latest snapshots at getgnash.org
Cygnal is another project from the Gnash / OpenMediaNow team. Multi-channel video conferencing is the #1 goal right now. It should be ready for outside developers now. From their dev site http://wiki.gnashdev.org/Cygnal : "This is a Flash media server compatible audio and video server. It handles negotiating the copyright metadata exchange, as well as streaming the content. It will need to handle many thousands of simultaneous network connection, and support running on large GNU/Linux clusters. It should support handling multiple streams with differing content, as well as a multicast stream with a single data source. There are several other streaming servers that handle streaming audio and video. Some handle multiple formats, but most have a protocol supported only by that one project (like shoutcast). None but Red5 support Flash, and that feature isn't working yet anyway. Due to the patent issues surrounding MP3, and the fact that FLV and ON2 are closed formats, one of the main goals of this project is to support free codes and free protocols as the primary way of doing things. Optionally there will be support for MP3, FLV, and ON2 (VP6 and VP7) when playing existing Flash content. Both FLV and the VP6 & VP7 codecs are included in ffmpeg. Users can use the ffmpeg plugin for Gstreamer to use these proprietary codecs."