Educational research is profoundly flawed, and often reflected the biases of the researchers. Most education are humanities people, without the decades of training in the scientific process and statistics. Some school districts expect adolescents to begin school at before 8 am, even though real research indicates that adolescents do not function as well as adolescents at that hour. A decade ago educators started taking about how brain research could help them, even though conferences on the subject were uniformly saying that brain science was no where near at a level to make this so. In fact a recent study of Lumonsity showed that transference was almost non existent for users of the site.

This is not to say that educators and educational researches are incompetent. It is just that the standards of research are often not as high. Research standards are, as they should be, focused on protecting the student. Really, the problem is isolating variables and proving causation. If you look at most results of the data analysis, one can still predict outcomes primarily on SES of the location of the school and whether the school is comprehensive or has some level of selectiveness. This is because no matter what the studies say, most researchers do not do a good enough job controlling for these variables. The problem is that flawed data will be used used against educations and students. Lets look at an extreme example. I know a very smart kid who got kicked out of every 'good' school in his city because he had a lack of impulse control. When confronted with tougher teachers who expected him to complete the AP and dual level classes he excelled, and matured. My concern about this database is stuff this kid did when he was 14 would effect his opportunities when he is 18. In general the 14 year old kid and 18 year old kid are completely different people. The good thing that might come out of this is that the good schools that failed the 14 year old kid would lose points for the failure, and the school the succeeded in helping him might gain points, but that did not happen. On a personal note, I went to a good good school, which is different from the average bad good school. They did the work to force me mature and excel. Every teacher there treated me as an individual to push to succeed, not a entry in database. I never felt like I was less of a student, even though I was below average for the school. This is what education is about. Not tracking who gets a job or goes to the best colleges, but conning kids into learning more that they think they might.

I don't know. I like the idea of funding the city with people who choose not to know the simple rules. From a safety point of view, doing the work so the people who do no know what a fire hydrant looks like can have other clues, it a good idea. Spending the money just because people don't know what a fire hydrant looks like is not.

Is certainly why many went to Android. While I do know a few android power users, most got an Android because the did not need most of the features of a smart phone. The Android was a cheaper option. Or they were not going to have multiple devices, and the larger screen was made the phone a better compromise. This is the mistake Apple made, I think. Assuming people just wanted a cheaper phone, when what people wanted was a phone that was better at browsing the web.

When I bought a TV I bought the cheapest TV I could with a big screen. I know that for most consumers, this is what they are looking at for a phone. Anyone can go down to the corner kiosk and get a phone for $100 and $50 a month, much cheaper than Apple.

What is interesting is that Apple is extraordinarily expensive but still has almost 20% of global market share. Samsung which tends to have more expensive phones, makes up the other 30%+. So half the market is samsung and Apple, not IOS on Android.

So a lot of world consumers are spending real money on phones. It will be whichever has the current novelty factor that they will buy. If you do not buy MS, there is no lockin.

He forgot to mention that the Post Office does not charge recipients for those DVDs

No, Netflix negotiates with the Post office for a fixed fee, and the customer pays that fee both ways. Do you live in a country were private firms magically get money to pay for services they provide, or do most people live in the real world where the customer pays for services provided?

N>klcertain fee, and cannot negotiate outside of that construct. The courts have said so.

However the Comcast is a private firm, so is free to negotiate minimum service levels with customers. While this is obviously problematic, is does solve a basic problem with streaming video. That unlike broadcast which has minimal marginal costs as users increase, the marginal costs for the internet provider is pretty much linear.

One reasonable solution is to separate the data lines from those who are selling data plans over those lines. This is the way electricity is done. The challenges are that complete deregulation means that the resource can be scarce, as when some good old boys in Texas total crippled the California economy. Another problem is that in a significant event, like hurricane or earthquake, repair to the infrastructure is often paid for by additional fees to the end user. Also, there is no incentive for the firm that controls the physical infrastructure to move very quickly with repairs as they are not losing a great deal of money every hour. However, if we want free market solution that maximizes net neutrality this is probably the way to go.

This is where not understanding science makes everything wonky. The major problems with Newtonian physics is domain and history. In the later, we observe nature and sometimes see energy moving through a medium and call that a wave. We see object that we can hold an call that mass. Our experience then tells us that some things are waves and some things are mass. It is like an ancient person seeing a piece of wood catch on fire and saying that the fire was in the wood. Current experiments do support such a view, and in as much as Newton assumed that these were separate domains, the theory is wrong even if try to retcon it.

The second issue is domain. At the time of newton nothing moved very fast, so no one apparently thought to 'for slow moving objects' to the theory. Therefore there was no limit to how fast things could go. Einstien added the limit to how fast things could go, making Newtonian mechanics a good approximation for slow moving objects, but still incorrect overall. As Newton had no concept of the speed of light as a limiting factor, and separated the concept of waves and matter, there again is no reasonable basis to retcon classical mechanics.

It is interesting that people fixate on relativity. Like any other modern theory it value is in what new phenomena is can predict that can then be verified. I am somewhat part of the class of physics people that rolls my eyes when people start taking about how great Einstein is and feel justified because after all, when they gave him the noble prize for the photoelectric effect, which was a clever experiment but proved nothing, they also included a grave insult by calling what he did epistemology, and after all it only indicated that the Photon might not be just a particle or a wave. I believe it was the Michaelson-Morley experiment did a much better job of leading us to wave-particle duality, along with the work of Max Plank.

In any case, Newton also left us with another problem. The mathematical distinction between gravitational and inertial mass. These two were never well connected even though they appeared to be the same thing. Einstein kind of circumvented the whole thing with his geometry interpretation. Again, Newton is correct in the interpretation.

I think where the teaching of Relativity fails is that it focuses too much on trains, rulers, and clock because those were things that existed in 1900 and we like to think that history will make things more concrete and acceptable to the student. But arguably Relativity is about whether it makes a difference if you are moving past the magnet or if the magnet is moving past you. Is a deeper concept, but maybe we should try to teach the deep concept instead of just focusing on the mathematical manipulations.

I think it will make the game very exciting. Seeing chairs thrown every time the refs makes a controversial call will maximize attendance.

I know this is a joke, but seriously I think our houses are much more efficient that it used to be. I have no idea how much an old tube TV cost to run, but the new 40" tvs are rated at about $10 a year. Likewise, running the mechanical devices for tapes, DVD, CDs had to be costly, they all got realy hot, while a Tivo, if you ran all 8 tuners 24 hours a day, probably cost less than $20 a year. Of course your MP3 player electricity cost is just noise, and most of no longer have amps pulling 100+ watts. Even my computer runs on a power supply that is less than 100 watts. You can get routers that use less than 10 watts. So really as we move to solid state we are going to increasingly see significant reduction in electricity usage, of course offset by more technology. We generate about 10 times as much electricity as we did in the 1950's, but that amount has not really grown for the past 10 years, as we have really moved to more efficient devices. The one thing that probably eats all the electricity is you cable box, especially if you have cable DVR.

I have a kindle. I am still trying to figure out how to use it efficiently. Except for the sunlight thing, I prefer to read on an iPad with kindle app. It is easier, for me, to navigate and keep track of things. I do not write on my books, but that is because it is easy for me to pick up a book and find the place where I remember what I am looking for. On a Kindle, this is impossible. If I do not highlight, I can find what I am looking for. So marking text serves a function on e-readers beyond a book. And so far the kindle sucks at that. And in navigation to new books and other things the kindle is horrible.

That said, the Kindle would be an excellent device if we would get away from the book motif. The kindle is not a book, and when someone figures out how reading on a tablet is different from reading a book, and puts those features together, that will be the kindle killer.

But honestly, what is going to let e-readers take off is lack of DRM. Right now the DRM mandated by publishers is allowing Amazon to control large parts of the market and reduces the incentive to innovate. I am not going to by a Apple iBook because the only thing I can read it on is an Apple product, while at least Amazon has readers for most products. I did buy songs from iTunes because I could play them anywhere. MS music was a little more restrictive so they failed.If publishers want e-book, and it far from clear that they do, but if they want Amazon to not control e-books, then the DRM has to go. That would provide an incentive for someone to create a kindle-killer.

If you think back 40-50, one of the primary criticism of Soviet Russia was that no one in that country did any real work. In industry you sat around all day playing chess, and the governement most spent it's time surveilling itself and everyone else. While this was an exaggeration, the point should be well taken. The purpose of a governement is to govern, and if too many resources are spent spying, if the stability is so strained that constant monitoring of citizens is required, then that nation-state is not going to survive very long. It is not only the expense, it is the waste of talent, the existence of meaningless jobs. This later is really death to a country. If young people know they need no real education because they can just chill in the military or hang out and drink vodka while spying on other people, why would they bother to gain real skills?

Android is still in it's infancy. I suspect the old version might be used because new version might require more horsepower, Android is not yet at the point where newer versions are irrelevant, especially since there is no way of knowing if the tablet can be upgraded to a more stable more secure version.

I have not used Prezi that much, but I do not that local software can be used to play the files offline. Some people find it good to create links. I generally use LaTex.

There are a couple of things going on here. First, there are plenty of places a K-12 teacher can go to create content for their class. Some of these resources are pay-for sites, some are free in limited use. For instance Prezi and Pollev can be used for most of what happens in a classroom. In addition, there is nothing stopping a K-12 teacher using something like Moodle to organize content using many different tools. This just insures that MS tools get used. There is nothing wrong with that, there are other sites out there that only use google tools.

Second, is the MOOC portion. To be honest, there is simply not a compelling case for this except in certain cases for K-12. We are not going to be setting 8 year old kids alone with a computer and expect them to learn. Maybe one day, but not with MS tools.

This initiative, however, will probably provide some value to MS and k-12 teachers. For the most part K-12 teachers know how use MS products. The presentations are in powerpoint, which is why they are generally useless, and the worksheets are in word, which is why they are ugly, and the one great part of MS Office, Excel, is so misused that even it does not survive the experience.However, these are the tools that teachers have and packaging them so that students can get experience learning on the computer is valuable.

Of selling books, often below their cost, and providing a secure system(Kindle DRM) for authors to sell e books. While there is certainly a downward pressure on the price of books due to Amazon, the reality is that authors probably sell a hell of lot more books because of Amazon. I do not see how a publisher can complain. After all, if Amazon is not providing a service, they are free to sell physical books through Barnes and Noble, for instance, as well as sell unencumbered e-books through any number of online sources. They can digitally mark each e-book for each customer, and litigate those that resell or otherwise pirate.

I happily go to O'Reilly and pay $40 for a physical and unencumbered PDF copy of a book. What publishers aren't doing is moving with market forces. The value of book is not what it used to be. The average American is not making what was the previous expectation. We are in a deflationary period. Amazon is under pressure to show a better return on investment. They do not have to sell products when the supplier wants excessive value. It is like a restaurant not selling Coca Cola products. SOme don't because Pepsi cuts a better deal.

Transportation is one thing, but another is security and integrity. Australia is a rock island, so it would not be hard to find a place to keep the material sealed, but it is basically a big island. That is going to be, to some degree increasingly under water. Not to mention that western Australia appears to have an increase in tropical cyclone activity over the past five years. Even if this is a cyclical thing and not a product of climate change, one might have to protect the material from the occasional few days of heavy rain, something that does not happen in Nevada.

Agreed, but the needed to do more work. For instance, they compared the Surface to a 13" Macbook Air because they could not get the specs down to an 11" Macbook Air. In fact the 12" Surface is about halfway between the Macbook Airs. The fact it leaves the 13" Macbook in the dust, as all the ad talk has said, is not that relevant.

More often than not, the choice of machine is going to depend on workflow. If you are MS products, then this machine is a good choice. If you are on Google Drive, then an Android tablet probably works best. My days often involves Emacs, LaTex, python, openoffice, and ocassionaly the Apple office suite, so a Macbook works well for me as the GUI interfaces to these are very well worked out.

The challenge for MS is to entice people who are not dedicated to the MS products to buy Surface so they become dedicated to the MS products, as Apple did with Macbook Air and Pro.

This is not going to do it. Corporate is not going to pay double for a surface and keyboard than for a laptop. The average person is not going to pay more for a surface than an 11" Macbook Air or an iPad or the knockoffs.

MS should have the cash and supply chain to build a tablet with keyboard for $600. This is something that people would buy and would put MS back in the spotlight. Of course at this price point, all the OEM people who complain vigorously. Which is the fundamental problem. Is MS a company that sells to consumers, or is it a company that sells to OEM. As long as it focuses on the later at the expense to the former, they will never have decent hardware at a good price.