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Improving literacy through arts education and advocacy by providing
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Greetings,

Hope you enjoy the following bits and bytes.

best,

<Karen>

1)
What does a house cost?
Compare apples to apples
National Comparison
http://tinyurl.com/jkpuh

The market turn down
http://tinyurl.com/ymog8p


2)
Web 2.0
http://tinyurl.com/yhk3sr

Social activism on social networks.
Social networks as agents for change and humanitarianism.
Projects  YouthNoise.com, Stand Against Violence
No. 1 site for teen social networkers is PLyrics.com, providing punk
and punk-related lyrics they can paste into their pages.
No. 2 site is Snapvine.com which lets social networkers send voice
messages via phone to their Web page so friends can hit "play" and listen.
No. 3 is WhateverLife.com, providing custom layouts for their
social-networking pages.

Teens spending more time online 27% increase over the past three years.
Average now online 26 hours, 48 minutes up from 21 hours and 4 minutes
in September 2003.
MySpace more than 100 million people and 3 million bands registered

YouTube's purchase price is $1.65 billion,
YouTube's traffic grew "nearly 2,500% from August 2005 to August 2006,
from 2.8 million visitors to 72 million," according to comScore Media
Metrix. Google and YouTube together "had a combined worldwide reach of
477 million visitors" aged 15 and up in August, the latest figures available.


3)
Women In The Arts
http://tinyurl.com/yawlze
The partnership seeks to heighten the awareness and understanding of
the achievements of women creators while reinforcing each
organization's core mission and providing audiences with new and
historical examples of the work of women writers and poets, composers,
visual artists, choreographers, photographers and artists in all areas.

4)
Teaching Intelligent Design vs Evolution in the classroom.
Is intelligent design religion or science?
http://tinyurl.com/snrrn

5)
Hackers Will Break Vista's PatchGuard
http://tinyurl.com/yb4oqu
A computer security expert is predicting that hackers will
crack the controversial PatchGuard kernel anti-tampering technology
coming in Windows Vista within one year of its release.
Alexander Czarnowski, chief executive of Avet, in Warsaw, Poland, said
he believes it's inevitable that the technology will be broken once the
final version of Windows Vista is released to manufacturing.
"A lot of things get changed from beta to beta, so people are waiting
for a final version. It might get broken immediately but it might be a
year before it's made public," Czarnowski said during a presentation at
the Virus Bulletin conference here.

6)
Technology Time vs. Tech Free Time
http://tinyurl.com/msn9d
Balance between scheduled / unscheduled,
indoor / outdoor,  tech-enabled / tech-free time  is needed.
Kids are missing out on childhood bonds to nature. Studies
show that exposure to nature boosts attention spans,
reduces stress, and could be an antidote
to the rising problem of childhood obesity.

Research Proves Why Play Is Important
http://tinyurl.com/y45dav

NCFR Project will Integrate Free Time Play and Technology
National Children's Folksong Repository Project
http://tinyurl.com/vguul
Adults and Kids are invited to participate:
An historic electronic online archive of children's folk songs.
A public folklore project built by the citizens of the United States
and territories. Watch the streaming video.
Pick up the Phone and SING OR CHANT (SAY) YOUR SONG.

Rescue Recess WSJ.com (October 10, 2006; Page D1)
http://tinyurl.com/yad68q
about a pushing back by parents and kids to keep or restore recess
time at school. This whole foolishly implemented NCLB thing has really
pressed schools to do nothing but academics all day long. Some have
caved, some have not.
According to the U.S. Department of Education,
21% to 30% of children in grades one to six get 15 minutes or less of
recess a day.
Last spring, a survey of 25,000 PTA presidents showed that more than
half think their daily recess is at risk because of a need to focus on
academics or because of insufficient supervisory staff.

15 minutes or less a DAY. That's nothing.

How insufficient is too insufficient? I don't remember recess as
having more than the teacher of the class being outside to supervise.
Two classes playing = two teachers. Is that not good enough now? Are
teachers refusing to supervise recess?
Along with stopping kids from being kids (kids play, for goodness'
sake!), cutting out physical activity can only add to the childhood
obesity problem that is growing very large in the US.

Seventeen percent of American children are overweight, and increasing numbers
of children are developing high blood pressure, high cholesterol
and Type 2 diabetes, which, until a few years ago, was a condition
seen almost only in adults. The obesity rate of adolescents has
tripled since 1980 and shows no sign of slowing down. Todays
children have the dubious honor of belonging to the first cohort in
history that may have a lower life expectancy than their parents.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has predicted that
30 to 40 percent of todays children will have diabetes in their
lifetimes if current trends continue.


7)
Hackers Steal More Than $500,000 from V.I. Government Account
http://tinyurl.com/yla9up
Oct. 13, 2006 -- A St. Croix resident hacked into a V.I. government's
Banco Popular bank account to make off with more than $500,000,
Finance Commissioner Bernice Turnbull said Friday. "I am appalled,"
she said, then adding, "I'm surprised."
According to Turnbull's estimation, banking isn't as safe as it used to be.
She had no other details about the hacker but said the matter now
rested with the U.S. Justice Department because wire fraud was involved.
Justice Department spokesman James Carroll said the department had no
comment on the matter.
Turnbull said the hacker made several forays into the government's
account at Banco Popular during June, July and August.

8)
Exploit code hiding in cache servers
http://tinyurl.com/yhjtbj
Malicious code is living on weeks after it has been removed from
websites thanks to an unexpected culprit - cache servers.
According to Finjan Software, which has just released its latest Web
trends report, caching technology used by search engines, ISPs and large
companies has been discovered to harbour certain kinds of malicious code
even after the website that hosted it has been taken down.
Such "infection-by-proxy" code can remain in caches for as long as two
weeks, giving it a "life after death" at a time it would conventionally
be assumed to have been neutralised. Although caching does not always
save copies of everything on a website, it will still store code
embedded in html, including programming formats such as Javascript.

9)
2006 Metlife Survey of the American Teacher
http://tinyurl.com/ybfxar
The 2006 MetLife "Survey of the American Teacher: Experiences and
Expectations" examines what deans and chairpersons of schools of
education, principals and teachers each think is most critical in
preparing teachers to meet classroom demands. The report also analyzes
data collected since the 1980s to understand the challenges facing
teachers, their likelihood of remaining in the profession, and
recommended strategies to recruit and retain high-quality teachers.
Over the past two decades, teachers' satisfaction with their careers
has increased. One-quarter of teachers (27%) say they are likely to
leave teaching. Despite the fact that teachers' career satisfaction
has increased by over 20 points since 1986, the number of teachers
at-risk for changing careers has stayed the same.

10)
Gender Gap
http://tinyurl.com/ycka3z
Colleges graduate 133 females for every 100 males. Yet, women's
earnings remain little more than 75% of men's. During the K-12 school
years, girls have long tested better in reading and writing on
national exams. However, boys outperform girls in math and science
tests, though the gap between the sexes is narrowing in these subject areas.

12)
 Petabytes of Personal Data in Microsoft's Hands?
http://rdvlivefromtokyo.blogspot.com/2006/10/petabytes-of-personal-data.html
Microsoft's beta program for Vista.  NYT article said they have 5.5 petabytes
of crash dumps of the Vista release candidate, collected presumably
from all around the world from members of their beta test program.  If
each crash dump is a gigabyte, that's 5.5 million individual crash
dumps.
My first reaction, as an engineer, was to be impressed and a little
envious.  Even as we near a terabyte per spindle, building a
multi-petabyte archive, collected over the Internet in half a year or
so, and processing it is quite an accomplishment.  It's an incredible
engineering resource, and it must be fascinating to write tools that
accelerate debugging by leaping from dump to dump, looking for data
that will confirm or disprove a hypothesis about a particular
problem.  Certainly a problem related to a specific hardware
configuration must stick out like a sore thumb.
My second thought, as a smug Linux user, was that it would take a
<i>really</i> long time to get 5.5 million crashes, even if everybody
in the world switched tomorrow.
Then this evening it occurred to me that Microsoft now has the memory
contents of millions of people's PCs.  I wonder what's in there?  Bank
account info?  IM from a congressman?  Crypto keys?  It seems likely
that Intel and Oracle have extensive beta test programs; perhaps part
or all of a chip design or database product strategy?
You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist, or even loathe Bill Gates,
to think that any one organization collecting the memory contents of
millions of computers is a questionable idea.  It has to be a tempting
target for hackers, ambitious Justice Department folks, or even
curious Microsoft employees.

13)
Security firms skeptical about Vista shift
http://tinyurl.com/y2wncq
Security rivals' reaction to word that Microsoft will make changes in
Windows Vista to allay competitive concerns: We'll believe it when we
see it.
On Friday, Microsoft said it will give security software makers
technology to access the kernel of 64-bit versions of Vista for
security-monitoring purposes. Additionally, the company said it will
make it possible for security companies to disable certain parts of the
Windows Security Center in Vista when a third-party security console is
installed.
Microsoft made both changes in response to antitrust concerns from the
European Commission. Led by Symantec, the world's largest antivirus
software maker, security companies had publicly criticized Microsoft
over both Vista features and also talked to European competition
officials about their gripes.

14)
Florida judge gets tough on 'Bully'
http://tinyurl.com/t7ab7
A Florida judge has ordered the maker of "Grand Theft Auto" to hand
over an unreleased video game set in a high school, a move that raises
questions about the legal protections that games enjoy.
The judge is being asked to grant a partial injunction against sales
of the forthcoming Take-Two Interactive Software game, called "Bully"
and set at a fictional private school named Bullworth Academy. "Bully"
is scheduled for release on Tuesday.

15)
James Enck of Diawa Securities London
http://tinyurl.com/g9hun
Monday, October 09, 2006
Ten things I hate about you (aka the carriers )
Euro Telecom industry

16)
North Branch school district students suspended for hacking
http://tinyurl.com/yxxf6a
The North Branch school district very recently discovered that a number
of students were able to hack the personal identification numbers (PIN)
of both staff and students, and have had access to meal and media center
accounts, as well as protected media lab information, since last
February. Now, high school students responsible for the security breach
have been suspended, others may be disciplined, and the district is
scrambling to assign new PIN numbers for students and staff.

17)
Children have Rights to Privacy.
http://tinyurl.com/vboq4
Find out who collects information about them and who sells that
information. Learn what you can do to protect yourself.


18)
Microsoft hands Vista code to security vendors
http://tinyurl.com/vnjvo

19)
To Fake a caller ID
http://tinyurl.com/3nhx5

20)
Building Wikipedia in African languages
http://tinyurl.com/y9ndxz
"At the second annual Wikimania conference, held this year at Harvard
Law School, there was what might be considered a quintessential
Wikipedian moment: as Martin Benjamin, a researcher at Yale
University, gave a talk about the Swahili dictionary he is creating
online, Ndesanjo Macha was simultaneously sitting in the audience
using a Wi-Fi connection and laptop to put the finishing touches on
his Wikipedia entry, "Martin Benjamin," in Swahili..."
Linguistics - African Languages
http://tinyurl.com/ygb7k9

21)
eEye sets out to build lagest honeypot network
http://tinyurl.com/yapox4
Enterprise security vendor eEye is preparing to unveil a free version of
Blink security software for consumers next week.
Blink offers a single application that among things protects against
buffer overflow and phishing attacks. It also offers intrusion
prevention, application white listing and location specific security
settings.

22)
WITI Congratulates the 2006 WITI Hall of Fame Inductees!
http://tinyurl.com/yh9u7w
The WITI Hall of Fame was established in 1996 by WITI to recognize,
honor, and promote the outstanding contribution women make to the
scientific and technological communities that improve and evolve our society.

23)
Halloween songs and other music holidays we celebrate
http://tinyurl.com/gk8mt
Virtually all present Halloween traditions can be traced to the
ancient Celtic day of the dead.


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