Stephen’s Untold Stories

Is it 2007 already?

The biggest change for me will be starting work on my doctorate. Who knows? Maybe I’ll even find a woman desperate enough to want to date me. I’m not one to make major resolutions, but trying to develop some sort of social life would be a good thing.

I wish you all a wonderful 2007!

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31-24 over the Hokies of Virginia Tech in the Chick-fil-A Bowl! It looked bleak at halftime, but UGA played an amazing 2nd half.

Woof! Woof!

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UCLA has announced that it will begin using Moodle as its online learning platform. I hope this means that more major universities will follow suit, as I think that Moodle is a great piece of software.

I started working with Moodle back in August, and our center has developed online version of the Georgia Performance Standards training for teachers.  If you work for a school district, these online courses are free for you to use to train your staff. You can preview some of the courses by using the “Login as Guest” option if you will go to http://moodle.ksuettc.org

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Dubai has changed quite a bit since 1990.

And here is the same area in 2003.

More pictures are here

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Reuters chimes in with one.

So, why are so few people using it?

Only 2 percent of online consumers bother, according to Forrester, and more than half of that group is 40 years old or younger.

For starters, the name is deadly for attracting “average” Internet users — people who use the Web and handle e-mail, but quail at inscrutabilities like “service-oriented architecture” and “robust enterprise solutions.”

Then there are the orange buttons you find on Web pages. Clicking one produces a jumble of computer codes. It’s hardly the path to popularity.

“RSS is a horrible name,” said Li. “And those little orange buttons don’t do anybody any favors.”

People often do not realize that the computer code is useless. What they must do is copy the Web address in their browser, and insert it into their RSS reader. The lack of clear instructions on many Web sites dooms the service to obscurity.

Untangle the World Wide Web with RSS

From the BBC. Some of these are pretty amazing.

• More than one in eight people in the United States show signs of addiction to the internet, says a study. (ouch!)
• The Mona Lisa used to hang on the wall of Napoleon’s bedroom.
• Forty-one percent of English women have punched or kicked their partners, according to a study.
• A domestic cat can frighten a black bear to climb a tree. (I posted about this!)
• The Himalayas cover one-tenth of the Earth’s surface.

Here is the complete list.

Good news from Europe!

Italy is to join the growing number of countries embracing super-fast wireless broadband after the government said it will start selling licenses for WiMAX-capable frequencies by June 2007.

WiMAX, short for wireless interoperability for microwave access, is a medium-range sibling of the popular Wi-Fi technology which can be beamed over kilometers rather than meters.

Like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, WiMAX uses radio frequency rather than conventional wires to beam the Internet and data to laptops and mobile gadgets but its main attraction lies in the low number of base stations required to create a network.

The technology uses a prime sliver of frequency which can support mobile Internet because it can hold relatively large amounts data but can also travel relatively long distances.

Link to article

Pretty impressive. Maybe they’ll build enough to walk to California.

From this:

To this:

Link to more photos 

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Even though he was never elected President or Vice-President, he did help the country heal after Watergate. He was also likely our most athletic President, having started at center for the 1932 and 1933 National Champs at Michigan.

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I keep thinking that RSS is finally to make it to “prime time” with most web users, and this survey gives me a glimpse of hope.

This is the first question:

I was a Bloglines user until a couple of months ago when Google updated its reader. I’ve been using Google Reader ever since.

This site has some interesting analysis along with some cool graphs.

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Yes, a gifted teacher can still make a difference.

When Lisa Suben took a job last year as the fifth-grade math teacher at the AIM Academy in Southeast D.C., she was told her lessons had already been prepared for her. AIM was the second charter school founded for low-income D.C. students by KIPP, the Knowledge Is Power Program. KIPP had gained a national reputation for math instruction. The KIPP leaders in D.C. had good reason to think, as they told Suben, that “we have math pretty much figured out.”

Suben, 23 at the time, still thought she could do better. She told her supervisors she was going to produce her own fifth-grade math curriculum. A year later, her students achieved the largest one-year math score jump ever seen at a KIPP school (or any other school that I know of), from the 16th to the 77th percentile.

Link to full article

Sad news for Christmas Day, but he deserves a mention.

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This is just great!

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Looks like they’ve got another little skit they’re working on. Cool!

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I can’t say that I am terribly excited, but perhaps the better word is intrigued by this news.

Like pulling a shadow from the darkness, researchers in Japan have captured and filmed a live giant squid—likely for the first time—shedding new light on the famously elusive creatures.

Tsunemi Kubodera, a scientist with Japan’s National Science Museum, caught the 24-foot (7-meter) animal earlier this month near the island of Chichijima, some 600 miles (960 kilometers) southeast of Tokyo.

His team snared the animal using a line baited with small squid and shot video of the russet-colored giant as it was hauled to the surface.

Giant squid, the world’s largest invertebrates, are thought to reach sizes up to 60 feet (18 meters), but because they live at such great ocean depths they have never been studied in the wild.

Link to article

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Here is an interesting article showing how organized UPS is with its delivery process. Of course, technology plays a key role.

The back of his UPS truck is stacked floor to ceiling, but neatly, with boxes sticking an inch or so over the edge of their shelves - lip loaded, in UPS jargon. That makes it easy for Alles to grab the packages. They’re also slanting downward toward the truck’s outer wall - the better to stay put when Alles takes a corner.

And thanks to technology on which UPS is spending $600 million company-wide, Alles, a driver out of the firm’s distribution center in Elm Grove, feels confident that the 500-odd packages, which he will deliver to 344 stops, have been loaded in the correct order.

His handheld computer, meanwhile, will tell him the sequence for his route, one of 179 running out of Elm Grove on this day. All told, Alles and his fellow drivers here will deliver about 65,000 packages over the next several hours.

Not only does Alles’ handheld computer contain his route sequence - with as few time- and fuel-wasting left-hand turns as possible - it alerts him if he is about to deliver a package to the wrong customer, or is forgetting to drop off packages that he should.

Link to article

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According to the MSBLOG. I don’t have all of these, but I will be trying out a few more.

Here is compiled a full list of software which must be downloaded. Yep, every one of them. All of these are brilliant in every way, shape and form and are just plain brilliance. OK you don’t have to download them, but all of these are free except where stated, and are just great. Download ahoy!

Here is the list.

Another nice holiday logo.