Ingredients:
1 soccer ball; 1 baseball; 2 fourth graders
Recipe:
give one 4th grade the soccer ball, and the another the baseball. Put one at one end of a classroom, put the other at the other end of the classroom (about 30 feet away)…..
Some time ago I wrote a little bit about the Harlem Children’s Zone — a pioneering youth education program, founded by Geoffrey Canada that seemed to be reshaping everything we knew about inner city school programs. Today, New York Times columnist David Brooks has published an essay which updates readers on the incredible results of that this landmark program has achieved.
Simply put, we are finally getting a chance to look at quantitative comparisons of the performance of the students entering the Zone’s Promise Academy Middle School, one of the series of schools created in partnership with the Harlem Children’s Zone. The results are staggering. Read the rest of this entry »
On Tuesday I went on a tour of a maple sugaring farm with my daughter’s elementary school class. We saw how the trees are carefully tended and tapped, how the sap is boiled off to remove the water, and how syrups are graded. It takes over 80 gallons of maple sap to create one gallon of pure maple sugar!
Before my day there, I had not understood the motivation behind the effort to distill the syrup from the sap. It is really very simple – during colonial times and for a long time after, sugar, the sugar that today is so easily purchased at the supermarket, was then very rare and very expensive. As a result, the huge effort to cultivate maple sugar made sense.
Then, around the back of one building, we saw this solar array, which provided power for the facility. It’s about 80-feet long and about 12-feet wide. It’s not fancy, it doesn’t rotate or spin. It just sits there, facing south, generating power when the sun shines. The power is used by the farm and when there is excess power generation, it is sold back to the grid. Read the rest of this entry »
I am designing the lights for a community theatre production called Blood Brothers. It is a musical play by Willy Russell. Though I didn’t know this show before I started working on it, I am glad I know it now… it is a really good piece of theatre. Read the rest of this entry »
What do Twin Falls, Utah, Wachusett, Massachusetts and East Toba River, British Columbia have in common? They are three new hydroelectric projects that are in the planning or execution stage across North America.
About five years ago, when I was speaking at an open source conference in Denmark, I was asked what the Linux desktop would look like in the future. I replied then that I wasn’t sure, I thought then that we were approaching an inflection point for desktops. I remembered that I glibly pulled out my phone and remarked that that in 5-10 years, phones might just be the preferred input device and internet access point for most non-business users. Today from my phone, I access the web, get my email, search on google, take and upload photos, do my banking, make flight reservations and get driving directions when I am lost. I even make phone calls! (even a blind squirrel…)
Business desktops are different. There, effective application standardization, centralized software maintenance and robust data backup are the mainstays of IT requirements. To achieve these goals easily you have to change your desktop paradigm. Recent statements by Canonical and Red Hat really illustrate how old desktop metaphors for business are being replaced by new centralized models. No surprise that each of these companies is approaching the desktop from their relative strengths — Canonical from cloud computing and Red Hat from the server. Throw in virtualized desktops and you have a rich solution environment for business desktops. I don’t really know what the right answer is or will be — all the models have merit — but I do know the days of deploying thousands of disconnected desktops across an enterprise are numbered. Business desktops will start looking (again!) like extensions of the central IT infrastructure.
Matt Asay is right when he says: “The point isn’t to replicate the Windows desktop. The point is to completely change the way desktops are delivered and their services consumed.”
For most business desktops, I couldn’t agree more.
In his InformationWeek blog, Serdar Yegulalp makes good points about open source adoption today. Open source is not an exclusively Linux issue. Open source is about a better way of doing business. And at the end of the day the business value of applications is the most important consideration for today’s enterprises. Increasingly open source solutions are delivering the best business value.
And why wouldn’t you want to use an operating system that was open source, too. It just makes sense.
Every little bit helps. When I switch to OpenOffice, when I switch to openSUSE, Red Hat or Ubuntu, I’m looking ahead, not behind.
Elektra sailing to windward, Labor Day 2008
By definition, sailing to windward isn’t taking the shortest path between two points. You can’t sail directly into the wind. Instead you sail in a zig zag pattern, pointing your boat across the wind slightly and sailing diagonally first one way and then the other. You approach your destination slowly and steadily. But it is not a direct approach. When the wind shifts, depending upon the geometry of where you on on your journey, it can help you make faster progress, or it can set you back. Good sailors see the wind shifts coming and position their boats to gain the maximum advantage. Other sailors are content to wait.