Reflections by danah boyd on her first visit to the World Economic Forum in Davos:

Comparing WEF to any other event is hard, but I cracked a smile when Nick Bilton remarked that WEF is a lot like Burning Man. In so many ways, he's right. A lot of people overwhelm one extreme weather location and battle non-normative conditions (Davos is crowded, covered in ice, and extremely difficult to navigate) to interact with others. In both events, there are so many different kinds of communities colliding – sometimes interacting and sometimes not. And both cost gobs of money to attend, thereby excluding all sorts of people.

Back in 2005 I did an evil, evil thing.

[Via Waxy.org Links]

Theodore W. Gray of Wolfram Research, Inc. on technology:

Technology's greatest contribution is to permit people to be incompetent at a larger and larger range of things.  Only by embracing such incompetence is the human race able to progress.

[Via Memex 1.1]

From the Department of What Could Go Wrong:

Police in Montgomery County, Texas reportedly plan to deploy drones capable of carrying "less lethal" weapons:

[Michael Buscher, CEO of Vanguard Defense Industries said that their drones ...] are designed to carry weapons for local law enforcement. "The aircraft has the capability to have a number of different systems on board. Mostly, for law enforcement, we focus on what we call less lethal systems," he said, including Tazers that can send a jolt to a criminal on the ground or a gun that fires bean bags known as a "stun baton."

From the Department of Cargo Cults:

Nicholas Negroponte appears to have decided that the way to revive the One Laptop Per Child project is to resort to desperate measures:

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project has devised a bizarre plan for deploying its new XO-3 tablet. The organization plans to drop the touchscreen computers from helicopters near remote villages in developing countries. The devices will then be abandoned and left for the villagers to find, distribute, support, and use on their own.

OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte is optimistic that the portable devices – which will be stocked with electronic books – will empower children to learn to read without any external support or instruction.

[Drone story via Bruce Schneier, OLPC story via MetaFilter]

Fraser Speirs' ongoing series of posts on his iPad Project – a 1:1 deployment of iPads to pupils in the independent school where he teaches IT – has made for fascinating reading for some time now.¹ Not just for the techie stuff about how to manage, configure and backup all the pupil data and all those applications, but for the insights into the way that supplying enough tablet computers is changing how teachers teach and how pupils learn.

The latest post in the series is a good example. With a little help from a simple drawing application, the iPad – when plugged in to an external display via the VGA port – doubles as a digital whiteboard that is much more versatile than a regular whiteboard.

The point isn't that schools should replace their whiteboards with iPads, but that once you have a school where every teacher and pupil has access to a lightweight, flexible tablet computer there are all sorts of things you'll end up being able to use the tablet for that you might not have envisaged beforehand.

1. Of course, this sort of experiment is easier to carry off when the school in question is a smallish fee-paying institution rather than a state-funded comprehensive. Scaling this sort of project up is a very different challenge, but that doesn't in any sense invalidate the lessons learned from the project about the uses to which you can apply a tablet computer. ↩

Vassar College, 1951: A student 'studies' in her dorm room.

[Via Black and WTF]

It's Sexy A-Levels!

It gives me no pleasure to say this, Southern Daily Echo, but this is more like a low rent recreation of the Raft Of The Medusa than it is a celebration of Sexy A-Levels Day.

As seen taped to the door of a Burger King.

[Via The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century]

To: The Editor, The Times:

Sir, Your article on degree classification (report, June 8) was by my computation the 20th successive article about higher or secondary education to be illustrated with pictures of attractive female students.

As the time for GCSE and A-level results approaches, with the no doubt inevitable record-breaking pass rates, I would welcome your assurance that the results will be illustrated by utterly spontaneous and unposed photographs of attractive girls opening envelopes, hugging effusively, jumping for joy, forming human pyramids etc, and that no exam success whatsoever is predicted for girls who are fat, spotty or plain, and certainly for no boys at all.

C. Osborne
Hadfield, Derbyshire

Just try to guess what featured prominently in the photograph the newspaper chose to accompany this letter.¹

[Via Qwghlm]

1. Copy preserved here, just in case they change the picture. ↩