Woz to educators: "be brave, use the new technology"
Computers have certainly aided learning in recent years, but they haven't yet fostered the promised revolution in education that has been discussed for over 40 years, according to Apple cofounder, educator, and all-around geek Steve Wozniak. Woz made the comments during a keynote discussion at Abilene Christian University's Connected Summit last week, discussing his views on the use of technology in education and the need to adapt teaching and learning to be more effective. According to Woz, we need to focus more attention on younger students before they begin to adopt a perception that they are "failures."
"Education has always been a big part of my life," Wozniak told the assembled crowd, which included Connected Summit attendees from nine different countries and a large contingent of ACU students and faculty. Woz discussed his early fascination with computers and logic circuits, which led to his participation in the Homebrew Computer Club at Stanford in the 1970s.
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The enemy gate is down: 5th Cell debuts innovative shooter Hybrid
"What did you think when you found out we were making a shooter?" 5th Cell's cofounder and creative director Jeremiah Slaczka asked me at the Game Developers Conference. I had recently heard the company talk about the need to innovate and create new genres and ideas in each game it makes, so I was aware the new title wasn't just going to be a shooter—the other shoe was about to drop in their upcoming Xbox Live Arcade release.And drop it did, as Hybrid is the best Ender's Game game that has nothing to do with the books. Here's how 5th Cell turned the third-person shooter genre on its head.
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Feature: Made in America: small businesses buck the offshoring trend
In early 2010, somewhere high above the northern hemisphere, Mark Krywko decided he’d had enough. The CEO of Sleek Audio, a purveyor of high-end earphones, Krywko was flying home to Florida after yet another frustrating visit to Dongguan, China, where a contract factory assembled the majority of his company’s products. He and his son, Jason, Sleek Audio’s cofounder, made the long trip every few months to troubleshoot quality flaws. Every time the Krywkos visited Dongguan, their Chinese partners assured them everything was under control. Those promises almost always proved empty.As he whiled away the airborne hours, Krywko made a mental list of all the manufacturing glitches that had nearly wrecked his company. There was the entire shipment of 10,000 earphones that Sleek Audio had to discard because they were improperly welded, a mistake that cost the company millions. Then there were the delivery delays caused by the factory’s lackadaisical approach to deadlines, which forced the Krywkos to spend a fortune air-freighting products to the US. Even when orders were produced on schedule, Krywko wasn’t too pleased with the situation: The company always had precious cash tied up in inventory that took months to arrive after the prototypes had been approved.
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Public radio decides it's time to chase trolls away
NPR says that its editors and staff have reached their limit with some of the user comments that appear on NPR.org's printed stories and blogs. "We've recently observed a significant increase in the amount of spam in the comments as well as comments from some individuals who participate simply to anger or insult other community members," the Inside NPR blog noted on Wednesday.Hence the organization "will more aggressively" moderate subscriber responses on the site. New registrants who wish to post comments on the radio service's webpages will go through a vetting process, conducted by a team of community managers. The latter will enforce NPR's Community Discussion Rules, the short version of which can be summarized as follows:
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Feature: Ars reviews the Motorola Xoom
Motorola's Xoom tablet is the first device to ship with Android 3.0, codenamed Honeycomb, a highly anticipated new version of Google's mobile operating system. Honeycomb introduces a sophisticated new user interface that was designed for the tablet form factor—a major step forward for Android. Motorola has matched Google's software with a compelling piece of hardware that delivers great performance and reasonable battery life.Although the Xoom has a lot to offer, the product feels very incomplete. A surprising number of promised hardware and software features are not functional at launch and will have to be enabled in future updates. The Xoom's quality is also diminished by some of the early technical issues and limitations that we encountered in Honeycomb. Google's nascent tablet software has a ton of potential, but it also has some feature gaps and rough edges that reflect its lack of maturity.
In this review, we will take a close look at the Xoom hardware, the Honeycomb user experience, and the Android platform's potential as a tablet operating system.
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Google using remote kill switch to swat Android malware apps
Google removed a number of malicious applications from the Android Market last week. The programs exploited a vulnerability in the platform that allows attackers to gain root access and apparently create a backdoor for deploying further malware. In a statement posted on the official Google Mobile blog this weekend by Android security lead Rich Cannings, the company has clarified the situation and described the steps it is taking to address the problem.In addition to preventing further infection by removing the malicious applications from the Android Market, Google will also be using its remote kill switch to forcibly uninstall the application from infected handsets. The company is also pushing out an update to the Android Market that can reverse the exploit, thus preventing the attackers from using it to cause further damage. Google has already started to send out e-mails to affected users in order to explain the situation.
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Judge allows Sony to see IPs of those visiting PS3 jailbreak site
A federal magistrate is granting Sony the right to acquire the internet IP addresses of anybody who has visited PlayStation 3 hacker George Hotz’s website from January of 2009 to the present.Thursday’s decision by Magistrate Joseph Spero to allow Sony to subpoena Hotz’s Web provider (PDF) raises a host of web-privacy concerns.
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Google frags fragmentation with Fragments API for older Android versions
In a post on the Android developer blog, Google has announced the availability of a new static library for Android developers that provides a more portable implementation of the Fragments API. This will allow third-party Android application developers to take advantage of Fragments without having to sacrifice backwards compatibility with existing Android handsets.Google recently launched Android 3.0, codenamed Honeycomb, a significant new tablet-optimized version of its Linux-based mobile operating system. Among the major features introduced in the update is an assortment of new APIs that aim to make it easier for third-party application developers to build Android applications that work seamlessly across multiple form factors—such as tablets and smartphones.
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Weird Science avoids the toilet before any important decisions
Exercising self-control is contagious: Within a person's brain, that is. The study hasn't made it out yet, so we're stuck with a press release on this one, but it's too good to pass up. The finding itself isn't a huge shock: if people are asked to avoid using the toilet, their exercise in self-control makes them less likely to make other impulsive decisions, and take a larger reward that requires a bit of waiting. So, if you want to avoid acting impulsively, hold it in. That's a bit odd on its own, but the motivation for the study is superb. One of the authors of the study, Mirjam Tuk, felt like she was going to doze off at an upcoming seminar, and chugged some coffee to avoid this fate. That may have kept her awake, but the urge to eliminate that coffee apparently distracted her enough to come up with the idea for the new work. Maybe they're just sad because they know they throw like a girl: The second half of this title sounds like standard behavioral science: "Emotion affects sex-decoding of biological motion displays." It's the first bit—"He throws like a girl (but only when he’s sad)"—that sends this paper into Weird Science territory. The authors indicate that gender stereotypes seem to be inferred from a person's emotional state, but it's difficult to display a person's emotional state without revealing gender information. So, they chose a "biological motion display," namely how a person threw a ball. Male and female actors were filmed throwing baseballs in anger and sadness, and then had their gender hidden by video editing. Test subjects rated the videos, and generally felt that angry throwing motions were masculine.
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