Try traveling somewhere in off-season … we’re in Provence over Christmas – not exactly high season. It’s wonderful: cool, uncrowded, relaxed. We’ve visited the local markets, bargained for truffles, climbed the roman ruins – and, of course, eaten croissants!
Top 100 Products of 2008 – ReadWriteWeb
The ultimate 100 list was compiled from these posts:
* Best LittleCo of 2008 & Most Promising for 2009
* Best BigCo of 2008: Apple
* Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008
* Top 10 International Products of 2008
* Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2008
* Top 10 RSS and Syndication Products of 2008
* Top 10 Mobile Web Products of 2008
* Top 10 Enterprise Web Products of 2008
* Top 10 Real World Web Apps of 2008
* Top 10 Digital Lifestyle Products of 2008
* Top 10 Alternative Search Engines of 2008
* Top 10 Web Platforms of 2008
Designed around a set of intuitive visualizations, Slife 2.0 helps you stay on top of your activities and productivity automatically. Create activity groups, set goals and discover how you spend your time.
Melbourne University Up Close is a fortnightly audio talk show of research, personalities and cultural offerings at the University of Melbourne. Up Close is created and produced by Eric van Bemmel and Kelvin Param.
Mobile Expense Tracking and Management – Expense Tracking and Management From Any Device
The Paper Case project allows you to print a fold-able piece of paper into a CD or DVD case, using the content of the internet as your album art or movie cover. This solves the issue of your DVD collection taking up 20 times more space than the size of the disc. Or when you buy an album online, and are left on your own to store and label your burned CD. You can also give your friends and family burned photo CDs and DVDs in style with a personalized case. No longer are expensive CDs and DVDs left to chance to get scratched beyond recognition.
NiceTranslator is a fast, easy to use online translator designed with simplicity and functionality in mind.
Comparison Shopping, Online Shopping, Product Reviews
Dealnews is a popular deal finder “where every day is Black Friday.” In contrast to the blog-like style of Slickdeals, the Dealnews front page organizes deals by category. While Dealnews has a clear emphasis on tech, it’s no slouch when it comes to covering other categories, like clothing, home, and toys. Friendly interface—complete with large pictures of featured product deals—makes it a fun and easy scan for the casual deal-searcher.
Relative newcomer DealsPlus is much like the other popular deal finders listed but with a twist: It integrates social bookmarking features à la Digg or Delicious to help the most popular deals rise to the top. DealsPlus users submit deals and vote on the submitted deals they like; popular deals make the DealsPlus home page.
The most frequently updated and complete deal site on the web! We provide you with the day’s hottest deals every day. We also have over 800 coupons for all your favorite online stores.
Mojo is music sharing done right. With just two clicks, you are ready to browse, select, and download music from any Mojo user. Plus, subscribe to the playlists of other users, and Mojo will update those playlists anytime they are online. Finally, all downloaded songs will automatically be added to your iTunes library.
Online Collaborative Flow Chart Application
Produce Professional Flow Charts
Creating crisp, attractive flow charts for the web or print has never been so fast and easy.
Collaborate & Publish
Everyone works on a document at the same time. Collaborators get your changes immediately when you save.
Share your flow charts as a web page, PDF, or image.
Publish an always-updated image of your work.
Access Everywhere
Any computer with Internet Explorer 6+, FireFox, Safari, or Chrome works with LucidChart without requiring Flash.
Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories – Vector Snowflake Application
The 100 Best Restaurants in the Top 50 U.S. Cities
Track flight status, airport delays, and other flight and airport information
Interesting move in academia:
Every day, hundreds of articles appear in academic journals and very little of this information is available to the public. Now, RNA Biology has decided to ask every author who submits an article to a newly created section of the journal about families of RNA molecules to also submit a Wikipedia page that summarizes the work. As Nature reports, this is the first time an academic journal has forced its authors to disseminate information this way.
Will this mean another push toward “credibility” for Wikipedia? Let’s hope so … the arguments against using Wikipedia in K-12 schools are becoming increasingly irrelevant.
via Read Write Web
I think I have a pretty good relationship with my 13-year-old daughter, despite being separated by an ocean at the moment. Between phone calls, e-mails, skype, and frequent flyer miles, we’re still in close contact – and facebook is now yet another way we connect.
So imagine my delight when I knew all about her impending break-up with the boyfriend and saw this comment posted by one of her “best” friends:
And that brings up another question … how can you have 88 friends in less than a month?!
“There were red faces on the editorial board of one of Germany’s top scientific institutions, the Max Planck Institute, after it ran the text of a handbill for a Macau strip club on the front page of its latest journal. Editors had hoped to find an elegant Chinese poem to grace the cover of a special issue, focusing on China, of the MaxPlanckForschung journal, but instead of poetry they ran a text effectively proclaiming “Hot Housewives in action!” on the front of the third-quarter edition.”
Via The Independent
From this week’s address:
…my economic recovery plan will launch the most sweeping effort to modernize and upgrade school buildings that this country has ever seen. We will repair broken schools, make them energy-efficient, and put new computers in our classrooms. Because to help our children compete in a 21st century economy, we need to send them to 21st century schools.
Why not have students participate in the modernization effort? The redesign of their schools to be energy-efficient and desirable learning environments would be a real-life problem for students that is both inter-disciplinary and contributes to the community. Not to mention engaging …
More aspects of the recovery plan here. Share your opinions here.
Brilliant post from Robert Reich:
Of Financial Capital and Human Capital: Why We’re Bailing Out Wall Street While Allowing Our Schools to Get Clobbered
Our preoccupation with the immediate crisis of financial capital is causing us to overlook the bigger crisis in America’s human capital. While we commit hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to Wall Street, we’re slashing our outlays for public education.
Where are our priorities? Isn’t it about time education be considered a necessity, rather than a budget line item always up for negotiation? Read the rest of Reich’s post …
I’m not really sure how much more I can add to the fine criticism of Time‘s latest cover story about Michelle Rhee, DC’s Chancellor of Education (read: Jim Horn, Dean Shareski, and Chris Lehmann) … but, two things stand out for me (other than being rather annoyed by the glamorization of someone who has clearly not read The No Assh0le Rule:
1) Why are we still fixated on standardized test scores as a measure of teacher capacity? Surely there is enough debate about the validity of such tests, their negative impact on student engagement, and their contribution to passionate teachers fleeing the profession, to suggest a need to find something else. I’m all for accountability measures, but we know that an aggregated summative number doesn’t give us the full picture, either about a student or about the teacher(s) who taught that student. I have first-hand experience in well-meaning teacher merit systems as well as completely flawed teacher evaluation programs. Boiling it down to an autopsy-style test given in March doesn’t tell us how good the teaching was.
Why can’t we consider valid and reliable diagnostic assessments that encourage students, families, and teachers to partner with each other and work on a child’s individual learning needs (perhaps because we would have to give them at the beginning of the school year and spoil the newspapers’ fun of bashing poor-performing schools)? How about using thoughtful teacher evaluation rubrics that encourage educators to self-assess and focus on areas that they feel need improvement (perhaps because it’s more difficult and requires reflection and effort, rather than a spreadsheet)?
2) If it’s about teacher quality, we need to shift our culture to one that appreciates, encourages, and rewards intelligent and passionate young people to enter the education profession. We need high-quality pre-service programs that do not rely on traditional methods courses that segregate disciplines and neglect using current technology to alter the learning environment. We need high-level certification programs for elementary teachers that are willing to be content-area experts; for middle school educators that truly embrace that developmental age group (not just frustrated high school teachers); for secondary teachers that don’t spout information and ask bored teenagers to regurgitate it.
Yes, there are plenty of bad teachers out there and we should get rid of them – but who will replace them?
I’ve written about Kiva before, but since it’s holiday time – I thought I’d mention it again. Since I first learned of the micro-lending concept, I have given Kiva gift certificates for birthdays and holidays. I have heard great stories from folks who have made investments, seen them returned, and are re-investing in new entrepreneurs. I learned of schools that use Kiva with students to focus their fund-raising efforts in unique ways. Kids research countries’ economic conditions, then convince their peers about who they believe to be the neediest. After reaching consensus, they donate funds.
If you haven’t checked out Kiva yet, please do. From their website:
We Let You Loan to the Working Poor
Kiva’s mission is to connect people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty.
Kiva is the world’s first person-to-person micro-lending website, empowering individuals to lend directly to unique entrepreneurs in the developing world.
The people you see on Kiva’s site are real individuals in need of funding – not marketing material. When you browse entrepreneurs’ profiles on the site, choose someone to lend to, and then make a loan, you are helping a real person make great strides towards economic independence and improve life for themselves, their family, and their community. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates and track repayments. Then, when you get your loan money back, you can relend to someone else in need.
Kiva partners with existing expert microfinance institutions. In doing so, we gain access to outstanding entrepreneurs from impoverished communities world-wide. Our partners are experts in choosing qualified entrepreneurs. That said, they are usually short on funds. Through Kiva, our partners upload their entrepreneur profiles directly to the site so you can lend to them. When you do, not only do you get a unique experience connecting to a specific entrepreneur on the other side of the planet, but our microfinance partners can do more of what they do, more efficiently.
Kiva provides a data-rich, transparent lending platform. We are constantly working to make the system more transparent to show how money flows throughout the entire cycle, and what effect it has on the people and institutions lending it, borrowing it, and managing it along the way. To do this, we are using the power of the internet to facilitate one-to-one connections that were previously prohibitively expensive. Child sponsorship has always been a high overhead business. Kiva creates a similar interpersonal connection at much lower costs due to the instant, inexpensive nature of internet delivery. The individuals featured on our website are real people who need a loan and are waiting for socially-minded individuals like you to lend them money.
How Kiva Works
Choose an Entrepreneur, Lend, Get Repaid
1) Lenders like you browse profiles of entrepreneurs in need, and choose someone to lend to. When they lend, using PayPal or their credit cards, Kiva collects the funds and then passes them along to one of our microfinance partners worldwide.
2) Kiva’s microfinance partners distribute the loan funds to the selected entrepreneur. Often, our partners also provide training and other assistance to maximize the entrepreneur’s chances of success.
3) Over time, the entrepreneur repays their loan. Repayment and other updates are posted on Kiva and emailed to lenders who wish to receive them.
4) When lenders get their money back, they can re-lend to someone else in need, donate their funds to Kiva (to cover operational expenses), or withdraw their funds.
