We're familiar with that type of game here in the Fox Valley area west of Chicago. We had three communities try to pull together to get municipal broadband through and it was fought tooth and nail by SBC. It is pretty pathetic that we are still waiting for complete broadband services out here given that Fermilab is in Batavia (one of the three cities). SBC resorted to scary, misleading ads and other dirty tricks and managed to keep the plan suppressed.
I guess I had in mind something that would be in newspaper machines in cities -- and it is delivered to many hotel rooms gratis.
But you made me think, out town's chamber of commerce was always looking for advertising in their monthly newsletter, I wonder if they could come up with an 8.5 x 11 version that people could pay to insert in things like chamber newsletters. That would probably the the same price or less than a full page newspaper ad, and would get in front of a lot of small and medium business leaders.
To make you all feel a little bit better (or a little bit more paranoid) there already exists a non-governmental organization called the National Student Clearinghouse. Higher education institutions alredy voluntarily submit student information (in keeping with FERPA) -- it looks like the main difference is performance oriented. No classes and grades, and not even complete major information until you receive your degree. It is actually quite useful for institutional researchers -- but those are not the sorts of people that you need to worry about.
We're familiar with that type of game here in the Fox Valley area west of Chicago. We had three communities try to pull together to get municipal broadband through and it was fought tooth and nail by SBC. It is pretty pathetic that we are still waiting for complete broadband services out here given that Fermilab is in Batavia (one of the three cities). SBC resorted to scary, misleading ads and other dirty tricks and managed to keep the plan suppressed.
No offence, but the concession is not leagally binding, just the vote of the electoral college based on the final certified vote counts. Anyone interested in fixing things (assuming that things need to be fixed) can still get the job done. No idea why everyone is so eager to move on just yet.
I have been using spamnix for filtering my Eudora mail and have had a great experience (it is spamassassin + bayes). Does anyone know if there is a project/plan to looking into a spamassassin extension for Mozilla/Thunderbird that would augment the built-in bays filtering? I am not at all impressed with the current mozilla performance. Cheers.
I was just wondering myself what the likelihood was of there being some usable amount of DNA material somewhere on or inside the spacecraft (how clean are the clean rooms). I would hate to think that we were shipping off instructions on making a biological weapon that would be particularly effective against us.
Well put. I was scanning the responses for someone who had a bit of a clue on this one. A quick reflection on what I have seen here is a lot of stuff that people are planning with their girlfriends a few years off, or stories about "a friend."
I think that few people who are actually parents could actually take this seriously unless they are already drifting around the social fringes and are looking for some sort of clever prop instead of an actual living person as a child. On the positive, most people with stupid ideas of this nature lose them really quickly once the child is actually born and all of the clever theoretical parent BS gets chucked aside in light of the recognition of the responsibility ahead.
I just love these high school big brother issues. So the big problem is that a large school district that has really big problems (probation, if you read the article) is going to take existing data and actually do something useful with it? Sheesh, people should be jumping up and down trying to get everyone else to do the same. Schools are gearing up to collect more assessment data then ever with the NCLB stuff coming out of Washington, and they already have all of the attendance, demographic, grade, and other data mentioned. But instead of putting out bogus school report cards or trying to spin aggregate information in the local paper, they are actually going to apply that data against Real Student Problems, yes, affecting real students directly.
This should be a slashdotters dream. Student data is already protected by federal and state laws, and they have the data already: they are just going to apply some data mining and six-sigma practices. Hey kids, if they actually start looking at their own data they might even figure out what it is that make you think that school sucks.:) --chris
Nobody is interested in your success, but then the big problem that you are posting about is that you might get called into the office by someone who wants to check up on you? --chris
Not to mention the fact that such distressed districts have high staff turnover rates. And it is not just the troubled districts, many of the suburban school systems in Chicago, for example, are growing and building schools so fast that there is a high staff churn rate. This would be an effective way of trying to flag students whose particular combination of issues may not be known by a single individual who would put together the pieces and try to help. --chris
I would guess that in Houston there are a lot of migrant worker kids or childern of immigrants. Tracking immigration status would help the schools know if there is an issue that may wind up causing the student to eventually "disappear" from the school. One of the districts in our town has a large migrant worker population, some of the kids may disappear for a month without notice and reappear when their parents are back in town after a particular job is over. They have special programs to help these kids, and knowing immigration status and other family background information would help them from falling between the cracks. Just an example. --chris
I am in total agreement. The only thing that is keeping me from totally switching to Ooo is the fact that I have a large number of references to manage and I need to be able to be flexible with them. I am using Word/Endnote -- I know that is evil, but the fact that it interefaces over the net with the library system and can pull in the references sold me.
FWIW I think that you should look at the Ooo bibliographic project that I ran across. It looks like it is all way in the future (2005), but at least it is being addressed.
Your best bet would be to comply with the human subjects regulations of your old institution and get the parents to sign off on a generic human subjects form. I've been involved in work similar to what you mention (music education with kids outside of an academic/research institution) and that is how it is handled. If in doubt, I am sure that you could post to some more research oriented USENET groups or mail lists and solicit advice on the specifics of the work that you are trying to do. --chris
Re:People ought to realize...
on
Googling For Dates?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
You can say that again. I'm not sure if I am happy that scores of old USENET postings from a different era are availble online, back before the X-NO-ARCHIVE days.
One thing that is particularly interesting is the web archiving of mail list postings. It is highly unlikely that anyone would use their mail client to add a no-archive header, but via gating to USENET or through archiving on a web-based repository an awful lot of email is being indexed, in many cases without list members even being aware.
I would be careful on this one and ask carefully about the development roadmap and release dates. I work with an organization that was heavily into planning a PS migration but the plug was pulled on the new release by Apple so we were back to square one.
I work for a Department of Ed project that develops information literacy tools and training for librarians and teachers. We have an online web site evaluation form that offers a structured approach to web site evaluation (great to use with students). We also have information on more general strategies in our FAQ.
There is a bit of information out there about some things that started on PLATO that are now pretty much familiar to everyone. IMB/Lotus credit PLATO's "notes" as being an inspiration for Notes/Domino. There is a nice summary of innovations on the system including personal notes (email), multiplayer games, and most importantly "online community," by David Wooley. Brian Dear is also writing a book on PLATO people that also has some good history.
Learning about PLATO makes a nice history lesson for both online gaming fans as well as people working in online education.
It is not often I can sign a note as chris/mfl and an Orion Captain
I'll take a hack at this one. Having been a.us registrar (aurora.il.us) for 7 years everyone needs to realize that, for localities, delegation is distributed. While you would fill out a form at the old isi web site, it would look up the local hostmaster and simply pass it along. So if you go fill out the form asking for slashdot.aurora.il.us it will get sent to me.
When Neustar took over they, first off, sent us pages and pages of documents to fill out. The big technical change is that they required us to allow zone updates to be pushed from their servers. My guess is that they want to be able to bill people for an aurora.il.us registration and have it entered automatically that way, bypassing the possible human failure point that is introduced under the old system when a request was mailed. That pretty much would have prevented anyone from billing for changes because the "registrar" would not be able to guarantee that the changes were entered. This thought is backed up by a lot of the questions in the aforementioned paperwork asking indirectly about if we would expect a cut if someone started changing for registrations.
So the problems reported may be that the person running the nameserver simply did not change the ACL allowing Neustar to push down changes. Now remember that there were two types of.us locality registrars in the old days. People like me who run it for the community and, usually, don't charge, and compaines that could become the registrars for up to 200 (I think that was the cap) localities that then changed $10/change trying to hit it big off of billing for domain management. The latter were usually a couple of people living in Florida with two 486s running the nameservers and an old tape answering machine. It would usually take a month for them to make a change, and they would usually do it wrong anyway, and it would take another month -- then you would get a bill for $10.
Just thought I would share this lest anyone think that Neustar were the first to screw up the.us space looking for a buck.
One of the difficulties with getting a successful community network off the ground is the amount of buy-in that you could get from the general population. Many projects were started by early technology adopters who "knew" that widespread capacity and the early development of resouces would benefit the community, but if a broad base of support did not come together then it would be difficult for those individuals to sustain. I co-authored an early study of the expression of community networks through the web and directed a community-funded project as well, Aurora Online.
While we had buy-in from community leaders and early adopters, the rate of technology adoption by "real people" was always too slow to help us build critical mass outside of certain key segments (education, government, but not business in this manufacturing town). Involvement at the state level pretty much mirrored this: the community network initiatives that did well did so in communities with either a rapid rate of adoption (pure numbers) or a broad adoption pattern (depth).
As the term "community" has come to have a broader application I think that the same observations apply. Fan sites, communities of interest, &c. generally do not do well if they are imposed top-down by a few individuals, but can thrive if they allow the broader base of potential participants to express themselves through the medium, while also feeling that they are served/informed or that they otherwise learn of grow via participation and contribution. Anyway, if you want to follow up with Seattle and all of the things that they did right then take a look at Douglas Schuler, particularly his book on community networking. There is a lot of good history out there, starting with the FreeNet movement and NPTN, and you can get a good idea of how technology has changed over the years as CN issues have moved from access to hardware, to access to bandwidth and email (I am retiring the free email accounts on AOCN this summer, it was a big deal to offer them in the pre-hotmail days), to community technology centers and job training. Glad to see this get a thread. --chris
I have tested the AOL 7 + Gecko and it is pretty nice, my sites get a lot of traffic from AOL users and I am glad (politically) that they will be onboard with Mozilla code.
I am really wondering why AOL doesn't go all of the way and junk their curddy mail (and for that matter usenet) clients and just integrate Mozilla mail/news. I have tested mail using NS 6.2.1 to read AOL through their goofy IMAP service but it is orders of magantude better.
Just wondering why this is not part of the discussion, it seems like it would have been a bit less painful that what is dscribed in this story.
While most slashdot readers probably already know this, I think that this could be helpful when trying to orient people when you are trying to introduce linux in an organization. Once old-timer IS people see how well it works within our larger network services infrastructure, they are always asking about all of the different distros and which one they should be trying. This type of overview is good to have around to give to those people.
I am not sure what you are talking about. This is really just a way of trying to automate the posting of class announcements, assignments, and the like. The main point of departure is that they are going to be adding attendance information, but if a kid is cutting classes the school would normally be contacting the home anyway. This is really just CRM applied to K-12.
I guess that you and the poster would rather that everyone have some kind of peacefire-approved reaction. Well just about everything that they say is right, and we should all be using our energy fighting off things like n2h2's selling off of student data or attempts by schools to overreach their authority in policing personal web sites. But this one is a non-issue for everyone except for that set of kids that don't believe that their parents should actually act like parents.
Slashdot Mirror
We're familiar with that type of game here in the Fox Valley area west of Chicago. We had three communities try to pull together to get municipal broadband through and it was fought tooth and nail by SBC. It is pretty pathetic that we are still waiting for complete broadband services out here given that Fermilab is in Batavia (one of the three cities). SBC resorted to scary, misleading ads and other dirty tricks and managed to keep the plan suppressed.
I guess I had in mind something that would be in newspaper machines in cities -- and it is delivered to many hotel rooms gratis.
But you made me think, out town's chamber of commerce was always looking for advertising in their monthly newsletter, I wonder if they could come up with an 8.5 x 11 version that people could pay to insert in things like chamber newsletters. That would probably the the same price or less than a full page newspaper ad, and would get in front of a lot of small and medium business leaders.
Better yet, why not USA Today. That is more accessable and populist, without the trouble of having to arrange the ad placement 2000 times.
To make you all feel a little bit better (or a little bit more paranoid) there already exists a non-governmental organization called the National Student Clearinghouse. Higher education institutions alredy voluntarily submit student information (in keeping with FERPA) -- it looks like the main difference is performance oriented. No classes and grades, and not even complete major information until you receive your degree. It is actually quite useful for institutional researchers -- but those are not the sorts of people that you need to worry about.
We're familiar with that type of game here in the Fox Valley area west of Chicago. We had three communities try to pull together to get municipal broadband through and it was fought tooth and nail by SBC. It is pretty pathetic that we are still waiting for complete broadband services out here given that Fermilab is in Batavia (one of the three cities). SBC resorted to scary, misleading ads and other dirty tricks and managed to keep the plan suppressed.
No offence, but the concession is not leagally binding, just the vote of the electoral college based on the final certified vote counts. Anyone interested in fixing things (assuming that things need to be fixed) can still get the job done. No idea why everyone is so eager to move on just yet.
I have been using spamnix for filtering my Eudora mail and have had a great experience (it is spamassassin + bayes). Does anyone know if there is a project/plan to looking into a spamassassin extension for Mozilla/Thunderbird that would augment the built-in bays filtering? I am not at all impressed with the current mozilla performance. Cheers.
I was just wondering myself what the likelihood was of there being some usable amount of DNA material somewhere on or inside the spacecraft (how clean are the clean rooms). I would hate to think that we were shipping off instructions on making a biological weapon that would be particularly effective against us.
Well put. I was scanning the responses for someone who had a bit of a clue on this one. A quick reflection on what I have seen here is a lot of stuff that people are planning with their girlfriends a few years off, or stories about "a friend."
I think that few people who are actually parents could actually take this seriously unless they are already drifting around the social fringes and are looking for some sort of clever prop instead of an actual living person as a child. On the positive, most people with stupid ideas of this nature lose them really quickly once the child is actually born and all of the clever theoretical parent BS gets chucked aside in light of the recognition of the responsibility ahead.
Rough parent day for me I guess. --ck
This really exists, www.spammimic.com. I'd swear that /. did a story on it when it came out. --ck
I just love these high school big brother issues. So the big problem is that a large school district that has really big problems (probation, if you read the article) is going to take existing data and actually do something useful with it? Sheesh, people should be jumping up and down trying to get everyone else to do the same. Schools are gearing up to collect more assessment data then ever with the NCLB stuff coming out of Washington, and they already have all of the attendance, demographic, grade, and other data mentioned. But instead of putting out bogus school report cards or trying to spin aggregate information in the local paper, they are actually going to apply that data against Real Student Problems, yes, affecting real students directly.
:) --chris
This should be a slashdotters dream. Student data is already protected by federal and state laws, and they have the data already: they are just going to apply some data mining and six-sigma practices. Hey kids, if they actually start looking at their own data they might even figure out what it is that make you think that school sucks.
Nobody is interested in your success, but then the big problem that you are posting about is that you might get called into the office by someone who wants to check up on you? --chris
Not to mention the fact that such distressed districts have high staff turnover rates. And it is not just the troubled districts, many of the suburban school systems in Chicago, for example, are growing and building schools so fast that there is a high staff churn rate. This would be an effective way of trying to flag students whose particular combination of issues may not be known by a single individual who would put together the pieces and try to help. --chris
I would guess that in Houston there are a lot of migrant worker kids or childern of immigrants. Tracking immigration status would help the schools know if there is an issue that may wind up causing the student to eventually "disappear" from the school. One of the districts in our town has a large migrant worker population, some of the kids may disappear for a month without notice and reappear when their parents are back in town after a particular job is over. They have special programs to help these kids, and knowing immigration status and other family background information would help them from falling between the cracks. Just an example. --chris
FWIW I think that you should look at the Ooo bibliographic project that I ran across. It looks like it is all way in the future (2005), but at least it is being addressed.
Cheers,
--chris
Your best bet would be to comply with the human subjects regulations of your old institution and get the parents to sign off on a generic human subjects form. I've been involved in work similar to what you mention (music education with kids outside of an academic/research institution) and that is how it is handled. If in doubt, I am sure that you could post to some more research oriented USENET groups or mail lists and solicit advice on the specifics of the work that you are trying to do. --chris
You can say that again. I'm not sure if I am happy that scores of old USENET postings from a different era are availble online, back before the X-NO-ARCHIVE days.
One thing that is particularly interesting is the web archiving of mail list postings. It is highly unlikely that anyone would use their mail client to add a no-archive header, but via gating to USENET or through archiving on a web-based repository an awful lot of email is being indexed, in many cases without list members even being aware.
--chris
I would be careful on this one and ask carefully about the development roadmap and release dates. I work with an organization that was heavily into planning a PS migration but the plug was pulled on the new release by Apple so we were back to square one.
Hope that this is of some interest. --chris
There is a bit of information out there about some things that started on PLATO that are now pretty much familiar to everyone. IMB/Lotus credit PLATO's "notes" as being an inspiration for Notes/Domino. There is a nice summary of innovations on the system including personal notes (email), multiplayer games, and most importantly "online community," by David Wooley. Brian Dear is also writing a book on PLATO people that also has some good history.
Learning about PLATO makes a nice history lesson for both online gaming fans as well as people working in online education.
It is not often I can sign a note as chris/mfl and an Orion Captain
I'll take a hack at this one. Having been a .us registrar (aurora.il.us) for 7 years everyone needs to realize that, for localities, delegation is distributed. While you would fill out a form at the old isi web site, it would look up the local hostmaster and simply pass it along. So if you go fill out the form asking for slashdot.aurora.il.us it will get sent to me.
.us locality registrars in the old days. People like me who run it for the community and, usually, don't charge, and compaines that could become the registrars for up to 200 (I think that was the cap) localities that then changed $10/change trying to hit it big off of billing for domain management. The latter were usually a couple of people living in Florida with two 486s running the nameservers and an old tape answering machine. It would usually take a month for them to make a change, and they would usually do it wrong anyway, and it would take another month -- then you would get a bill for $10.
.us space looking for a buck.
When Neustar took over they, first off, sent us pages and pages of documents to fill out. The big technical change is that they required us to allow zone updates to be pushed from their servers. My guess is that they want to be able to bill people for an aurora.il.us registration and have it entered automatically that way, bypassing the possible human failure point that is introduced under the old system when a request was mailed. That pretty much would have prevented anyone from billing for changes because the "registrar" would not be able to guarantee that the changes were entered. This thought is backed up by a lot of the questions in the aforementioned paperwork asking indirectly about if we would expect a cut if someone started changing for registrations.
So the problems reported may be that the person running the nameserver simply did not change the ACL allowing Neustar to push down changes. Now remember that there were two types of
Just thought I would share this lest anyone think that Neustar were the first to screw up the
--chris
One of the difficulties with getting a successful community network off the ground is the amount of buy-in that you could get from the general population. Many projects were started by early technology adopters who "knew" that widespread capacity and the early development of resouces would benefit the community, but if a broad base of support did not come together then it would be difficult for those individuals to sustain. I co-authored an early study of the expression of community networks through the web and directed a community-funded project as well, Aurora Online.
While we had buy-in from community leaders and early adopters, the rate of technology adoption by "real people" was always too slow to help us build critical mass outside of certain key segments (education, government, but not business in this manufacturing town). Involvement at the state level pretty much mirrored this: the community network initiatives that did well did so in communities with either a rapid rate of adoption (pure numbers) or a broad adoption pattern (depth).
As the term "community" has come to have a broader application I think that the same observations apply. Fan sites, communities of interest, &c. generally do not do well if they are imposed top-down by a few individuals, but can thrive if they allow the broader base of potential participants to express themselves through the medium, while also feeling that they are served/informed or that they otherwise learn of grow via participation and contribution. Anyway, if you want to follow up with Seattle and all of the things that they did right then take a look at Douglas Schuler, particularly his book on community networking. There is a lot of good history out there, starting with the FreeNet movement and NPTN, and you can get a good idea of how technology has changed over the years as CN issues have moved from access to hardware, to access to bandwidth and email (I am retiring the free email accounts on AOCN this summer, it was a big deal to offer them in the pre-hotmail days), to community technology centers and job training. Glad to see this get a thread.
--chris
I have tested the AOL 7 + Gecko and it is pretty nice, my sites get a lot of traffic from AOL users and I am glad (politically) that they will be onboard with Mozilla code.
I am really wondering why AOL doesn't go all of the way and junk their curddy mail (and for that matter usenet) clients and just integrate Mozilla mail/news. I have tested mail using NS 6.2.1 to read AOL through their goofy IMAP service but it is orders of magantude better.
Just wondering why this is not part of the discussion, it seems like it would have been a bit less painful that what is dscribed in this story.
--c
While most slashdot readers probably already know this, I think that this could be helpful when trying to orient people when you are trying to introduce linux in an organization. Once old-timer IS people see how well it works within our larger network services infrastructure, they are always asking about all of the different distros and which one they should be trying. This type of overview is good to have around to give to those people.
I am not sure what you are talking about. This is really just a way of trying to automate the posting of class announcements, assignments, and the like. The main point of departure is that they are going to be adding attendance information, but if a kid is cutting classes the school would normally be contacting the home anyway. This is really just CRM applied to K-12.
I guess that you and the poster would rather that everyone have some kind of peacefire-approved reaction. Well just about everything that they say is right, and we should all be using our energy fighting off things like n2h2's selling off of student data or attempts by schools to overreach their authority in policing personal web sites. But this one is a non-issue for everyone except for that set of kids that don't believe that their parents should actually act like parents.