newspeak

Indian IT/Software Sector Statistics: 1980-2015 Time Series Data | ICTs for Development.

Apple IBM announce 9 more apps – Business Insider.

Still, I wonder what, exactly, will they use for document editing, collaboration…. and whether it will fully support the ODF. From the linked 9-5mac.com article, the apps are industry specific and not generic “office productivity.”

Canada Quietly Announces It Will Lengthen Copyright Terms for Sound Recordings by 20 Years With No Public Consultation » infojustice.

It’s instructive to look, too, at location. At a guess, I’d think that the farther apart and away from Libertarian geek culture (which tends to be masculinist albeit exceptions abound), the more one will encounter discursive communities more interested in the process of property as sharing than as possessing. But, as ought to be clear, this is hardly a novel observation and it was made long before this latest modern age. That is, our current modernity is unique probably only in that we generally can’t remember all those modernities that came before.

100 Women Co-Creating the P2P Society: Ana Von Teschenhausen | P2P Foundation.

Toronto has a two-tiered education system | Toronto Star.

Which is more plausible and conforms more closely to what I’ve been told than Dennis Fisher’s optimism.

Editorial by Dennis Shirley, the Boston College professor of Education whose work, alone and with collaborator Andy Hargreaves, has examined Ontario and Alberta and seen in these provinces better ways of negotiating the path of teaching without programmatically turning all coursework into test preparation (or its obverse). Collaborative networks—teams—and local autonomy are endorsed. Think: Agile processes, open source methodology.

..::Worlds of Education::...

J-Source is the Canadian Journalism Project, a meta-organisation examining the (more or less lamentable) state of journalism in Canada. The article on the Québec protests against the raising of post-secondary schooling fees is interesting, though narrow: there is no deep investigation of the Whys mobilising the students–nor of the logic that enables the police, particularly in Montréal, to act so brutishly and as if they had been trained in Ferguson, USA. (There’s a history of Montréal police violence against visible minorities, for one. But Montréal is hardly unique; all the big Canadian cities have shown themselves to be…. big cities.)

But to return to the issue here, the student protest and journalism on it. The Québec protests are not unique. This spring saw protests by graduate student employees and contract staff at the major Toronto universities, York University and the University of Toronto. Both these are very large, very complex (with overlapping department areas) and compromised by their embrace of a tiered faculty system that has succeeded in codifying a veritable faculty caste system.

The issues were as complex as the universities’ layered histories could make them. Yet there was little deep investigation, little analysis of the dynamics in play, of the personalities, of the actualities. Instead, there was stale narrative.

The challenges of reporting on Quebec student protests | J-Source.

From the article, by Nathaniel Mott, staff writer, PandoDaily:

Besides, it’s not like students needed iPads in the first place. As 13-year-old Aidan Chandra explained in a guest post for Pando, students need laptops that can handle everything thrown at them, not tablets with limited functionality:

Looking ahead, I think it will be hard for iPads and their sister tablet devices to keep up with larger apps and cutting edge technologies that may enter the classroom. They likely won’t be able to handle larger files or possess enough power and storage to efficiently use a 3D printer and create 3D models. Just as soon as many schools finish spending their budget on iPads, they are likely to find these iPads to be insufficient for keeping up with newly developing educational technology trends.

Let that sink in for a moment. An eighth grader was able to see that tablets — let alone iPads, which are more expensive than their counterparts — aren’t the best investment for schools looking to offer students better access to technology. Yet an LA school district couldn’t figure this out until after the contract was signed?

via LA school district, shocked that iPad program didn’t magically fix everything, demands money back | PandoDaily.

Mott is hardly unbiased. Just as laptops have evolved and become vastly more powerful than even 5, 6 years ago and also lighter, so too will the “tablet” evolve, though probably not quite in the direction most think. The advantage over the laptop is that the “tablet” form factor makes modularity easier. You can add elements, and not just a keyboard. And these need not detract from the form’s signal advantage for the rich, its portability.

New Nations – About New Nations.

Mexico loves Android and globally (as measured by Google Play), education apps have overtaken entertainment and now are only second to games. Keep in mind these data reflect apps downloaded for smartphones.

Why Mexico should so love Android is not that hard to figure out if you’ve ever walked into a store selling Apple wares. Good luck finding an Apple store, a technician employed by Slim’s monopoly, and so on.

Revenue Gap Between iOS And Android Apps Grows, Thanks To China | TechCrunch.