I was the project manager / developer of a federally funded project to experiment in how IT can improve community development. We were working in an affordable housing complex in Washington, DC (which the cops referred to as 'Little Beirut'). We partnered up with MS, Data General (who says you can't get hardware manufacturers to donate gear), and Netier to wire all 355 apartments in the complex. We used thin clients in the apartments and WinNT Terminal Server Edition (now Win2000) to offer Office, Money, and a host of edutainment apps.
This was all supported by an active computer training facility (5 classrooms with 10-20 PCs per). Classes were offered in basic computing, Office, Web Dev, and a couple of IT employment training fields.
It was not a perfect solution, but the impact it made was incredible. An example: a former welfare mother is now on the WebDev team at National Geographic. She still maintains correspondence with Steve Balmer (who she met at the groundbreaking).
This was developed starting in 1995, and is an ongoing project. Knowing what I do now (and having made the spiritual conversion to Linux), I would do things differently. Same architecture, but different platform.
Anyway, the non-profit running the project is Community Preservation and Development Corporation. The project has been slow to adopt the web, both to support the community and to publicize the successes and failures, but you can visit what they do have here.
Philosophy and Religion should be added into this fusion as well. Principals one the exclusive domain of philosophers (whether religious or secular), such as duality, instantaneity, and uncertainty are now being fully embraced by science and technology. These once ephemeral, "unknowable" aspects are now being described with mathematics and harnessed in the lab to produce work or informational results.
How different is the Taoist concept of yin and yang (the dual nature of all things) to the wave / particle duality of light? How different is the Judeo-Christian notion that god exists but is unknowable from Heisenberg's uncertainty principal (which states that, while electrons exist, you can not know both the particles velocity and position), or the cornerstone notion in quantum physics that a particle occupies all possible realities until it is observed or measures.
This fusion too expands the notions of technology, science and art encroaching upon each other's territory.
Slashdot Mirror
I think some one at NASA is having fun:
Commercial Crew/Cargo Project Office = 3CPO (at least acronymicly)
I was the project manager / developer of a federally funded project to experiment in how IT can improve community development. We were working in an affordable housing complex in Washington, DC (which the cops referred to as 'Little Beirut'). We partnered up with MS, Data General (who says you can't get hardware manufacturers to donate gear), and Netier to wire all 355 apartments in the complex. We used thin clients in the apartments and WinNT Terminal Server Edition (now Win2000) to offer Office, Money, and a host of edutainment apps.
This was all supported by an active computer training facility (5 classrooms with 10-20 PCs per). Classes were offered in basic computing, Office, Web Dev, and a couple of IT employment training fields.
It was not a perfect solution, but the impact it made was incredible. An example: a former welfare mother is now on the WebDev team at National Geographic. She still maintains correspondence with Steve Balmer (who she met at the groundbreaking).
This was developed starting in 1995, and is an ongoing project. Knowing what I do now (and having made the spiritual conversion to Linux), I would do things differently. Same architecture, but different platform.
Anyway, the non-profit running the project is Community Preservation and Development Corporation. The project has been slow to adopt the web, both to support the community and to publicize the successes and failures, but you can visit what they do have here.
Philosophy and Religion should be added into this fusion as well. Principals one the exclusive domain of philosophers (whether religious or secular), such as duality, instantaneity, and uncertainty are now being fully embraced by science and technology. These once ephemeral, "unknowable" aspects are now being described with mathematics and harnessed in the lab to produce work or informational results.
How different is the Taoist concept of yin and yang (the dual nature of all things) to the wave / particle duality of light? How different is the Judeo-Christian notion that god exists but is unknowable from Heisenberg's uncertainty principal (which states that, while electrons exist, you can not know both the particles velocity and position), or the cornerstone notion in quantum physics that a particle occupies all possible realities until it is observed or measures.
This fusion too expands the notions of technology, science and art encroaching upon each other's territory.