Educational Song, Greedy Executives and Coach Potatoes

• Cool flash movie of They Might Be Giants song - Bloodmobile
• Extravagant CEO pay is back - actually it never went away
  
• Beyond TV - anyone have experience with this?
  
• Post on dealing with overly demanding lawyers reguarding "copyright" claims.
• The growing epidemic of obesity could cause the first drop in Americans' life expectancy in modern times
• Remote physical device fingerprinting - "We introduce the area of remote physical device fingerprinting, or fingerprinting a physical device, as opposed to an operating system or class of devices, remotely, and without the fingerprinted device's known cooperation. We accomplish this goal by exploiting small, microscopic deviations in device hardware: clock skews.

NCAA Basketball Tournament

Sign up for the curiouscat.com group on ESPN to compare your picks to other Curious Cats.

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Go Badgers

Engineering, Education and more

• Science and Engineering Need to Be Cool Again, India is taking the education of its next generation much more seriously than the U.S. David Kirkpatrick , Fortune, March 2005.

• The long tail of software. Millions of Markets of Dozens. - "Whatever business your starting, think about how to serve millions of markets of dozens instead of dozens of markets of millions. Serving the head isn’t a bad strategy. You can build a great business. But, figure out how to serve the tail of your market efficiently and you’ve got a blockbuster."

• Dealing with a legacy school system - "The traditional classroom model (learners as passive listener/receiver, emphasizing memorization over thinking) violates pretty much everything we know about how learning actually happens, although kids managed to memorize and learn and graduate in spite of this."


• Schools Must Be Redesigned for All Students to Succeed - "America’s high schools are obsolete.
  
  By obsolete, I don’t just mean that our high schools are broken, flawed, and under-funded – though a case could be made for every one of those points.
  
  By obsolete, I mean that our high schools – even when they’re working exactly as designed – cannot teach our kids what they need to know today. " - Bill Gates speech text (I agree with Kathy Sierra's quote: "I don't agree with a lot of what's being said on solutions from all these folks (including Gates), but there's no question that our educational model is horribly out of date"

• The last three relate to a post from our other blog, Who Influences Your Thinking.
  

• Face recognition powered cat door - Our cat "has a habit of catching various animals, dragging them inside through the cat door, and letting them loose so they can be chased for hours. Very cruel. To put an end to this we have built a computer-controlled device that visually determines if Flo is carrying anything in her mouth when she enters, and if she does, it simply does not let her in."

• The California effect - Flush with equity, Californians are driving up home prices in markets outside the Golden State.
  

Update - also see our Science and Engineering Blog

Interesting Links

• How 3 Internet titans survived the bust - "Online auction site eBay was a premier example. It fashioned a near-perfect Internet business model. It had virtually no cost of goods, little investment in infrastructure, required little management..."


• Public domain image resources from Wikipedia

• Gmail is a well designed email application. One problem is that you could not sign in without meeting the minimum requirements that they used to provide all the features. Google has redesigned the application offering a "basic view" (missing some features) that can be used when necessary. This is a big improvement over the previous inability to use Gmail if your browser did not meet the requirements for all the features.

• Emerging Worldview - speech by Thomas Barnett.
  

Fun and Useful and Interesting Links

How to fix Mom's computer - A list of steps taken to resuscitate Windows 98, from scribbling.net.

Flash Block - Firefox extention (plug-in) that blocks all flash content so you are not distracted by poor web design. If you want to view the flash item just click and it will then play.

Institute of Backup Trauma - funny marketing piece by John Cleese.

Pandemic Influenza Response and Preparedness Plan - United States Department of Health and Human Services.

Ask Metafilter

ask.metafilter.com - an excellent source for answers to questions that are not easy to find good answers to using Google, such as:

• Are there any natural languages that allow pronouns to appear in sentential position?
• My wife got a free pen from a drug rep a few months ago, and she has completely and utterly fallen in love with it. Help me figure how I can buy her more. Does anyone recognize the model of this pen?
• What's the simplest, most universal way to add a list of vectors?
• Help me remember the name of a board/strategy game...