Food for Thought

Not hearing much about One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)? They are going strong with major support from AMD, Brightstar, Chi Lin, eBay, Google, Marvell, NewsCorp, Nortel, Quanta, Red Hat, SES Astra. Hundreds of thousands of laptops have already been provided and the second iteration of “Give One Get One” program is underway through Amazon. The OLPC XS server has just been released with Moodle (KATIE) providing core services for education, collaboration, communication and publishing.

Cedar Rapid’s restaurant’s ‘Twitter Tuesday’ draws social networking fans.
http://gazetteonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2008711119929

The settlement announced yesterday between Google and the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers (http://books.google.com/googlebooks/agreement/) is a potentially major event for libraries and academic research in the U.S.

Luther is mentioned in this Chronicle article about the decline in land-line use.

Iowa State U. Will Make Students Pay to Set Up Land Lines

The Gazette, a newspaper serving the area around Cedar Rapids and Iowa City, recently ran a story about a new policy at Iowa State University: The institution will make students pay to have land-line telephones hooked up in their rooms. Given the triumph of cellphones, we would have thought that this was old news.

Practicing Peace

Sunday, September 21, is the annual International Day of Peace established by the United Nations in 1981 to commemorate and strengthen the ideals of peace both within and among all nations and peoples.

Something to think about…

The past few days I’ve found myself grumbling about why a couple of websites weren’t showing information in the way I wanted to see it. After some digging around, I discovered that the information I wanted was buried in the code of both of these pages, in one way or another, but wasn’t visible from the browser!

So, in a fit of frustration, I decided I was going to teach myself how to write a Greasemonkey script.

The following press release was released last week. This is a well-funded initiative with some big names … it will be something to watch develop …

A $475,700 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to the Duke
University Libraries will lead to the design of a next-generation,
open-source library system that is flexible, customizable and nimble
enough to meet the changing and complex needs of 21st-century libraries
and library users.

In this week’s New Yorker (the one with the infamous Obama as Muslim cover), there is a wonderful article entitled “The Lion and the Mouse” which provides a brief history of children’s literature and children’s libraries. As the summer winds down and we are reminded about going “Back to School,” it is interesting to read the article, especially while thinking about the development of our own Curriculum Library.

While I'm away from campus this week you can check in our the activities of the Luther College Habitat for Humanity spring break.

We'll be blogging at http://lutherhabitat.wordpress.com

I won't mention that it's in the mid 70s and sunny.

While arguably making all our (computing) lives better, faster, and cheaper and providing Microsoft a means by which to continue filling up more computational power with software glut, Intel has done some other ventures targeted at third world countries. From Ars Technica a review of their long-distance WiFi: