Slatterz writes "Every once in a while, a product comes along that everyone from the executives to the analysts to even the crusty old reporters thinks will change the IT world. Sadly, they are often misguided. This article lists some of the top ten technology disappointments that failed to change the world, from the ludicrously priced Apple Lisa, to voice recognition, to Intel's ill-fated Itanium chip, and virtual reality, this article lists some of the top ten technology disappointments that failed to change the world." But wait! Don't give up too quickly on the Itanium, says the Register.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "The Canadian government has admitted sending cease and desist letters to YouTube demanding that it remove videos of Parliamentary hearings. Lawyers for the House of Commons argue that using videos of elected representatives without permission constitutes copyright infringement and a contempt of Parliament."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

1. In our world we call it net neutrality. It means that all packets are treated equally on the Internet.

2. Among journos, it's the distinction betw editorial and publishing functions, what's often referred to as a Chinese Wall.

In the tech press, back when there was such a thing, they'd sometimes send an ad sales person to visit along with the editor in chief. The editor excuses himself to go to the bathroom, the sales guy says "If you buy an ad he'll review the product." Even if they don't come out and say it, it's often understood. It also becomes obvious to the readers that this is going on, so they stop believing the reviews. It's likely it happens in areas businesses, like movie reviews.

3. In government, it's the separation of church and state. This is one of the ways freedom of religion is guaranteed. If there was a state religion, one which was part of the government, people of different faiths, or ones who don't practice any religion, would have less rights. When someone says the US is a "Christian nation" they're saying they don't believe in this separation.

4. At Microsoft they claimed to keep the systems and apps divisions separate. This became a farce when they claimed that the web browser was part of the system software, when it was clearly an app. This is how they justified their plan to suck the web into Windows.

5. You don't want your Internet Service Provider to also provide your cable TV because they might screw around with BitTorrent to keep you from getting your entertainment on the net, protecting their revenue from cable TV. So they make a promise to keep the two functions separate, and there's a scandal every time they fail to.

6. With Google it means that the search engineers don't talk to the advertising people about fine-tuning their algorithms so the biggest customers get the best results. It's because we believe that Google doesn't screw around that we trust their search.

7. I feel very strongly that this kind of neutrality should be the rule on Twitter, and I also know that it's not the rule. They make no attempt to separate operational and editorial functions. In a way this is very honest of them, but it's also long-term going to be bad for business, as people they don't favor look for other outlets for their creative work.

8. Halliburton got some sweet deals from the Bush Administration because the VP was their CEO until he became VP. Did the VP ever explicitly tell DoD employees to favor Halliburton? He didn't have to, the theory goes, everyone knew where he came from.

This idea that you should keep certain functions separate from others permeates all human activities. It's so important we should have a theory for it, and a name that applies everywhere, so when a new thing comes along, no one need debate whether such separation is necessary or good. Unless somehow humans reinvented human nature, it's always both necessary and good.

This is something I hope to discuss with Jay in this evening's Rebooting The News podcast.

This week on the CRAFT Blog we saw:

Lasercut Stretchy Conductive Fabric Traces

Removing Firescale/Patina from Copper

CRAFT Demo Schedule for Maker Faire Bay Area

Custom Map Quilts

Credit Card Bracelet

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XaN-ASMoDi writes with an interesting historical piece at the BBC on the early history of packet switching, excerpting: "It has often been said that change is the only constant in the 21st Century. And there is little doubt that the restless tone of these times is something that the web has helped to accelerate, but the only reason that [...] the web can cope with that punishing pace is thanks to work done four decades ago by British mathematician Donald Davies at the UK's National Physica Laboratory (NPL). On 5 August 1968 Dr Davies gave the first public presentation of work he had been doing on a method of moving data around computer networks called 'packet switching.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

jammag writes "For Seinfeld's George Constanza, his dream of the ideal moment was having sex while watching TV and eating a pastrami sandwich. He called this Nirvana state 'The Trifecta.' Developer Eric Spiegel adapts this concept of Nirvana to the act of writing your best possible code. He examines all (or most) of the possible things that might contribute to the 'The Trifecta' for developers — food, beverages, time of day. Spiegel also describes his personal Trifecta."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[Photo from Connors934 on Flickr]

This speaker project was part of the electricity and electronics class at DHS. The parts were mostly junk except for the magnet wire. We made headphones from bottle caps, speakers from shipping tubes, lights, pvc, coffee cups and italian ice cups. Packing tape or regular adhesive tape works well for the membrane attach the coil of magnet wire directly to the membrane and mount the magnet a bit away from it.

When the coil is charged by the audio circuit, the coil either attracts or repels the magnet. We used an old stereo and drive the home made speakers off the speaker outputs, which was moderately successful, because some kids found a little too much joy from destroying the speaker by turning the volume way up until the wire heated through the plastic cone material. An old radio, cd player or mp3 player might be a better device to drive them from because of the decreased output from the headphone jacks.

The magnets we started with were mostly ceramic disks that I bought for the mendocino motor project. They turn out to be not very powerful. The rare earth magnets in hard drives, or the ones found in busted speakers work much better.

[Photo from Connors934 on Flickr]

These speakers did work, but they were anything but high fidelity. The real value in the project is seeing and showing kids that it can be done. Kids should see that they can make their own stuff like speakers rather than believe that everything comes from factories. A number of the students in the class went on to study engineering in college, others are just more curious as they move through the world.

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There's still time to start making or just watch this week's Weekend Project: Mooftronic Mini Synth. You can view the video here, or subscribe in iTunes to get all our Weekend Projects and PDFs delivered each week.

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Make Blog has a little piece on Jimmie's "uglified" camera: "He said that it was done in preparation for a trip overseas, where he wanted to make sure he kept his camera. After taping it up and otherwise camouflaging it, he developed a shooting technique where he folded our the screen, set the shots up, then held it up to his eye while shooting to make it look like a film camera. Film cameras, he figured would be of little or no interest to those with sticky fingers."

Jimmie's uglified camera

(Image: Jimmie's ugly camera, from connors934 on Flickr)

My Ugly Camera

(Photo: prensalibre.com/Hugo Navarro)

* "¡Esta revolución será tuiteada!," they're saying -- "This revolution will be tweeted." Massive demonstrations are taking place in Guatemala today, organized, amplified, and documented by social media networks -- namely, Ustream, Twitter, and Facebook.

* The independent Guatemalan online media organization Libertopolis is streaming live video of the massive pro- and anti-government demonstrations taking place in Guatemala. The Guatemalan newspaper Prensa Libre also has a live video stream (both on Ustream.tv). All of this media is in Spanish.

* Twitter is exploding with on-the-scene reports. As of 9am PT, some 5,000 10am PT, 50,000 people gathered in the Plaza Italia area of the capital (photo/via washwash, another here.) Most of the demonstrators wore white to symbolize peace.

* Where to find on-the-scene reports via twitter: El Periodico, Noticias Guatemala, Prensa Libre. Also, follow #escandalogt. Some Guatemalan twitterers were saying last night they planned to print out "V for Vendetta" masks and wear them en masse to the demonstrations today. Organizers on Twitter urged all who planned to participate to report anomalies or rights abuses by authorities, and observe cautionary guidelines to avoid violence.

* Online reports are coming in that governors, under duress from the state, have used public funds to ship busloads of primarily poor, indigenous citizens from the interior and north of the country to participate in government-planned pro-Colom demonstrations. Twitterers on the scene say the government-organized, pro-Colom demonstrations number about 2,500 participants as of 10am PT and include a patriotic musical performance.

* Last night, the Constitutional Court of Guatemala ruled that law enforcement must not take sides in today's demonstrations, and must preserve and uphold the citizens' right to free expression. Police in the capital are on "maximum alert" today.

* President Colom: "They don't know who they're messing with."

* Update, 1230pm PT: The demonstrations ended peacefully. Organizers collected approximately 30,000 signatures on-site, demanding Guatemalan president Álvaro Colom temporarily step down so that a judicial inquiry into his alleged involvement in the assassination of attorney Rodrigo Rosenberg may proceed without interference. Many who texted updates from the streets spoke of a moment during the anti-Colom demonstration when the entire crowd spontaneously sang Guatemala's national anthem in unison. "Over 50,000 people singing the anthem was epic," tweeted one participant.

Anonymous Coward writes "Local newspaper talks to Linux International's Jon 'maddog' Hall, who lives in New Hampshire, and who since 1989 has had a 'Live Free or Die' UNIX license plate — a real one, not a conference hand-out — on his Jeep. From the story: 'The day he installed the UNIX plates, he went early to work at DEC's office on Spit Brook Road in Nashua, to be sure to get the parking space right next to the door used by all the Unix engineers. He watched them come in and, one after another, do a double take at seeing the real-world version of the famous fake plate. "People would race in and yell, 'Who is it? Whose plate is it?!?'" Hall said. It was his then and it is his now. After 20 years, one suspects you will have to pry it from his cold, dead fingers.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier this year, I had the privilege of participating in the closing panel at the Convention on Modern Liberty with Billy Bragg, Lisa Appignanesi, Feargal Sharkey, Paul Gilroy and Henry Porter. The Convention was a whole-day event in which activists, scholars, Parliamentarians, regulators, teachers, cryptographers and others. On the closing panel, we were asked to give closing thoughts on the event -- I talked about the fact that British authoritarians have promised us security in exchange for taking away our liberty, but have not delivered; we've lost our freedom and been made less secure.

The Convention's just uploaded the videos from the event, and I really enjoyed watching it from the other side of the stage, especially Billy Bragg's talk. The last question -- "What has moved our rights forward?" -- was especially good.

Evening Plenary: Pen Session

Cory Doctorow at Convention on Modern Liberty

Final thoughts at Convention on Modern Liberty

Sci-fi author Charlie Stross gave a keynote address at the recent LOGIN 2009 conference about what we can reasonably expect from games and game-related technology over the next 10 to 20 years. He takes a realistic look at the limitations we'll face with regard to processing power and bandwidth, and goes on to talk about how augmented reality software and aging gamers will affect future titles. Quoting: "But the sixty-something gamers of 2020 are not the same as the sixty-somethings you know today. They're you, only twenty years older. By then, you'll have a forty year history of gaming; you won't take kindly to being patronised, or given in-game tasks calibrated for today's sixty-somethings. The codgergamers of 2030 will be comfortable with the narrative flow of games. They're much more likely to be bored by trite plotting and cliched dialog than todays gamers. They're going to need less twitchy user interfaces — ones compatible with aging reflexes and presbyopic eyes — but better plot, character, and narrative development. And they're going to be playing on these exotic gizmos descended from the iPhone and its clones: gadgets that don't so much provide access to the internet as smear the internet all over the meatspace world around their owners."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[Photo from Feurig on Flickr]

[Image from Feurig on Flickr]

Photo from Feurig on Flickr
Looks like we've got a nice BassMod project coming up in the MAKE Flickr pool. Stay tuned for more!

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An anonymous reader writes "The Business Software Alliance released their annual global piracy report earlier this week. In addition to the usual claims of software piracy (PDF) and the grudging acknowledgment of open source software, Michael Geist noted that the report ultimately undermined one of the BSA's core arguments — that countries which enact DMCA-style legislation experience significantly reduced piracy rates. Questions have also been raised over the BSA's methodology, as has happened in the past."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Douglas Rushkoff was a guest blogger.

In Make: Talk 08, the conversation circled briefly around to the New Alchemy Institute or NAI, an ambitious center dedicated to developing sustainable living techniques. In college, I recall going on a trip to the institute. Unfortunately, those were the days of analog, so alas, no pictures, video or blog entries to look back upon, geeze, no notebook either...

TreeHugger has a review of A Safe and Sustainable World by Nancy Jack Todd about the NAI, which had a run from 1971 to 1991.

The story of the growth and groundbreaking research and development of the group is compelling, but ultimately plays a secondary role to their discovery and execution of innovative ways to sustain the human population in harmony with the natural world.

Perhaps the most important lesson in the book regarding ecological design is simply that "It works!" Their early experiences farming vegetables and fish to building windmills led to the consolidation of all of their ecological design experience into the construction of two "Arks" -- large greenhouse-like shelters built to sustain those living inside (including their shelter, food and energy needs) independent of the power grid or the rest of the world.

The land is obviously still there, but I sometimes wonder what became of the people, ideas, structures, and systems of the New Alchemy Institute. The Green Center seems to have something of an archival relationship to the institute, and there is a collection of their articles. Back when land was cheap and the living was easy, there were a number of examples like the New Alchemy Institute of people living together sharing resources and working with the land to meet their needs. It would be great to hear of people's experiences in those communities and to find out more about the ways people are getting creative ReMaking the world in our current economic restructuring.

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An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft was planning on giving out the Office 2010 Technical Preview to select testers in July on an invite-only basis. Office 2010 will be available in 32-bit and 64-bit versions, and both flavors have been leaked to torrent sites and the like. Multiple screenshots of each application are available. '... some applications have changed a lot more than others. The ribbon seems to be on every application now, which is great for consistency's sake. ... The biggest change, in my opinion, is that the no file/orb menu is no longer a menu. When you click the colored office button, you get a screen that is shown in the second screenshot for each application.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I've got a new way to view Twitter these days, looking at the collected tweets of people who work at two companies: The NY Times and at Twitter itself. I hoped to see cohesion, discussion between people working on projects together. Not yet.

Last night I added an aggregation of the tweets of the Gillmor Gang, a weekly talk-show podcast about the tech industry. And of course there's the first one, the Top 100 most subscribed to twitterers.

Now it's still really early in all of these feeds, but then that's how we think of Twitter itself. It's still early. It hasn't happened yet, whatever it is we feel is going to happen.

If you look at the tweets, dispassionately, what you'll see is a lot of people broadcasting. There is some shared wisdom, but not much of it is all that useful. One twitterer says you can walk into the wrong gender's bathroom by accident if you're reading tweets while leaving the correct bathroom. Another says he used a line from a movie in a meeting but no one knew what he meant. People wait for taxis, get them or don't get them. Yesterday I went to a ballgame and uploaded a picture.

What will it take for Twitter to advance beyond its potential to be great, to realize its potential? It's been in a holding place, in my experience, for a long time. Last summer we thought first Twitter had to stabilize, stop fail-whaling in order for it to realize its potential. I suppose some thought it would get real when the low-level politicos showed up, then the reporters, then mainstream users, celebs, Oprah.

At some point the potential must be realized. What will it look like then?

Meanwhile, even though some have said blogging was killed by Twitter, or RSS -- I still blog (you're reading a blog post right now) and I get most news from my aggregator. If I depended on Twitter for news it would be very haphazard, completely non-systematic. Today the only real use Twitter has is to explore the potential of a new medium. So far that exploration hasn't turned up much gold. There's the potential of value, that we see.

At some point we will finish this sentence: Twitter is... ?

Jason sez, "The Swedish artist Montt Mardié thought The Pirate Bay needed an theme song, an anthem. So he created one! We like it a lot and hope you like it too. You can download the torrent here, and watch the video as well. We also got the audio files so all you TPB fans can make your own version, your own remix! It would also be cool if you did your own version of the video and post as a video response on youtube. As Montt Mardié put it: 'To show the world, that we're all The Pirate Bay...'"

WE'RE ALL THE PIRATE BAY (Thanks, Jason!)

A Montreal/Laval cop cuffed and dragged a university student away, throwing her in a holding cell and writing her a ticket for CDN$420 ...for failing to hold the handrail while she dug in her bag for her subway fare.

Bela Kosoian, a 38-year-old mother of two, says when she didn't hold the handrail Wednesday she was cuffed, dragged into a small holding cell and fined.

"It was horrible, disgusting behaviour [by police]," said Ms. Kosoian, a 38-year-old student of international law. "I did nothing wrong. They should go find the guys who stole my tires off the balcony."

Ms. Kosoian, who studies at the Université du Québec à Montreal, was riding an escalator down to catch a 5:30 p.m. subway from the suburb of Laval to an evening class downtown when she started rifling through her backpack looking for a fare.

Ms. Kosoian, who grew up in Georgia when it was still part of the Soviet Union, says she didn't catch the officer's instruction to hold the rail when he first approached.

When he told her again to hang on, she says she replied, "I don't have three hands." Besides, she had been sick and feared catching a new bug.

Woman cuffed for not holding escalator handrail (Thanks, Roy!)

(Image: John Morstad/For The Globe and Mail)

The Guardian's John Naughton isn't looking to micro-transactions or licensing fees from search services to solve the online news business model problems that have come to a head recently. Instead, he's simply waiting for capitalism to do its job in killing off the providers who can't cut it. Once that happens, he says, the remaining organizations will be in a far better position to see what web-goers will pay for online news, and he doesn't think it will inhibit the growth of an increasingly information-rich news ecosystem. "Things have got so bad that Rupert Murdoch has tasked a team with finding a way of charging for News Corp content. This is the 'make the bastards pay' school of thought. Another group of fantasists speculate about ways of extorting money from Google, which they portray as a parasitic feeder on their hallowed produce. ... But what will journalism be like in the perfectly competitive online world? One clue is provided by the novelist William Gibson's celebrated maxim that 'the future is already here; it's just not evenly distributed.' In a recent lecture, the writer Steven Johnson took Gibson's insight to heart and argued that if we want to know what the networked journalism of the future might be like, we should look now at how the reporting of technology has evolved over the past few decades."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Douglas Rushkoff is a guest blogger.

With nine months since the beginning of the meltdown to think about it, The New York Times Magazine could have come up with a more original and insightful set of articles for their Money Issue, entitled "Dilemmas of Debt." A cover feature on Suze Orman (expertly executed by Sue Dominus, but nonetheless a subject who has been amply covered by everyone else), the obligatory piece on whether China will still bankroll us, an interesting but unrelated look at the way credit cards gather information about us to model our behaviors and, perhaps worst of all, a piece by a NYTimes economics reporter (who really should have known better) about how he ended up buying a house he couldn't afford (not along with alimony) in order to have room for his teenage sons when they visited, and ended up taking on a completely ridiculous loan product and now hasn't made payments in eight months so he can qualify for government-sponsored restructuring.

It's not that the irony of an economics reporter - "the chief eyes and ears on the Federal Reserve for the past six years" - falling prey to the very phenomena he was reporting on was lost on the Times; that's what the article was about. Rather, it's the way the magazine has chosen to embrace the values of the population it failed: instead of reporting accurately on what happened while it was happening, the magazine (and the papers') reporters simply excuse everyone's short-sighted greed by admitting they did it themselves. Hell, if it can happen to the economics guy at the Times, then it really is excusable, and the government should restructure or repackage and let us stay in these giant houses we couldn't afford. At the expense of those who made smarter, non-NY decisions.

But the missed opportunity here was that by dedicating an entire issue to Dilemmas of Debt, the NYTimes put itself in a position to explain debt. To help people understand what really happened, and to think about it more deeply. They could have done a piece on central bank-issued currency, on the bias of currency, on the workings of a debt-driven economy, or on the hundreds of alternative value-driven currencies now on the horizon. They could have looked at how debt itself functions, or how it influences societies who use it as the basis for their economy. They could have at least help readers consider the possibility that debt itself is not a pre-existing condition of the universe. It is an invention.

And while the Times is choosing to use its pages to make New Yorkers feel a bit better about their bad decisions, Rupert Murdoch is reconfiguring the Wall Street Journal to become the new paper of record. While I don't relish the idea of the creator of FoxNews bringing us the next respected national paper, so far the Journal's coverage of debt, the money supply, and the landscape of central-bank-dominated commerce and lending has been more penetrating and dimensionalized than that of the NYTimes.

Maybe human-based stories about real people having problems have been judged more readable and subscriber-friendly (or certainly advertiser-friendly) in these troubled days for print publications. But by competing with Parade and the NYPost instead of the Wall Street Journal or New York Review of Books, the NYTimes magazine may have entered a race to the bottom that leads exactly there.

theodp writes "On Tuesday, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation will examine the nomination of Aneesh Chopra as the first-ever federal Chief Technology Officer. Senate sources said they were not aware of any debate surrounding his nomination. You'd think the hack-for-$10-million-ransom of Virginia's Prescription Monitoring Program might be good for a question or two. Or the wisdom of appointing a CTO who's no technologist. It might also be worth bringing up Chopra's membership in TiE-DC, a group which promises 'exclusive peer networking events' with government officials and Federal contractors, including TiE-DC sponsor Microsoft. Are there any other issues that might make the Confirmation Hearing more than a rubber-stamping?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "A Piezoelectric Sound Level Meter was demoed at MIT's Battle of the Bands last month, borrowing its display from the do-it-yourself USB LED marquee that was the subject of a previous Slashdot story. This video tutorial describes in detail both the analog electronics plus the C code that runs the system. If this is your first experience at the intersection of digital and analog systems, don't be scared!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[Photo from 4volt.com]

Over the past few months I've been watching the amazing and festive work by Jeremy at 4volt.com. Today's find was a diy laser cut caliper.

Here are plans for a simple caliper, handy to have around the shop for measuring thickness and diameters. Anytime I can build something that helps me build something else I am always pleased.

The plans should be as accurate as your cutter or printer is, I actually used this project as a collaboration for my laser.

Don't have a laser? Then print your own!

If you don't have a laser you can print the PDF and glue the paper down to any flat material and cut it by hand.

[Photo from 4volt.com]
Another clever idea is his geek coins, since laser cut acrylic seems to be the currency of the early adopter realm these days:

He writes in is concise explanation:

...I posted about a coin that I laser engraved and enhanced with some paint, but did not post step by step instructions. With a recent project for Midnight Research Labs, I had a chance to take some more pictures.

I engraved the coin in the regular way and then painted over the whole sheet with a standard acrylic spray-paint.

His technique of bringing out the etching on the acrylic is a handy process. I tried to get my phone's barcode scanner to read the QR chip, but the photo was not clear enough.

The first project I noticed from 4volt was the incredible open source Jansen walker which was posted into the MAKE Flickr pool. Gareth beat me to it, but here is a little more of a great project:

4volt Jansen Walker Beta 1 from a3o Studios on Vimeo.
From the MAKE Flickr pool

The Jansen Walker is based on the work of Theo Jansen who did an excellent Ted Talk. This mechanism is also the basis for the Cajun Crawler.

Gareth mentioned this project and the Strandbeest it is inspired by on MAKE: Talk. Plans for the Jansen walker have been recently updated on the 4volt site.

By keeping an ongoing record of his work, Jeremy is helping his own project development and keeping us a part of his community of making. Thanks for sharing, Jeremy, keep up the inspiration!

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The Record Organ is an air compressor flute organ built by Hagai Cohen and prof. Mel Rosenberg. The organ uses single tone soprano recorders as the pipes.

The Record Organ

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John Naughton's talking sense about economics, news and the Web today in the Observer:

Things have got so bad that Rupert Murdoch has tasked a team with finding a way of charging for News Corp content. This is the "make the bastards pay" school of thought. Another group of fantasists speculate about ways of extorting money from Google, which they portray as a parasitic feeder on their hallowed produce. And recently a few desperadoes have made the pilgrimage to Capitol Hill seeking legislative assistance and/or federal bailouts for newspapers

It's difficult to keep one's head when all about one people are losing theirs, but let us have a go. First of all, some historical perspective might help. When broadcast radio arrived in the US in the 1920s, nobody could figure out a business model for it. How could one generate revenue from something that could be listened to by anyone for free? Dozens of companies were founded to exploit the new medium, and most of them folded. The problem was solved by a detergent manufacturer named Procter & Gamble, which came up with the idea of sponsoring dramatic serials: the soap opera - and the mass market - was born.

The moral is simple: eventually someone will figure out a business model that works for online news. But it may take some time, and lots of outfits will fall by the wayside in the meantime. That's capitalism for you.

Volume and diversity: the future's bright for news online

MJackson writes "The UK Technology Strategy Board (TSB), an executive non-departmental public body (NDPB) established by the UK Government in 2007 and sponsored by the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS), has invested 1 Million GBP into over a dozen research projects for the development of ULTRA Fast up to 10Gbps broadband technologies. The ultimate aim, the development of pan-European Ultra Fast Broadband, could give EU companies a massive competitive advantage on a global scale."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Teen net-researcher danah boyd (@zephoria) has been taking parental questions about teens' use of the net on Twitter and here are her responses:

@mirroredpool: What borders to teens place of social networking sites and education? How would they react to using an SNS to do class work?

@annejonas: i'm curious if they want schools involved in social networks or if they like it as a social space outside the realm of formal edu.

This is messy. Many teens have ZERO interest in interacting with teachers on social network sites, but there are also quite a few who are interested in interacting with SOME teachers there. Still, this is primarily a social space and their interactions with teachers are primarily to get more general advice and help. In some ways, its biggest asset in the classroom is the way in which its not a classroom tool and not loaded this way. Given that teens don't Friend all of their classmates, there are major issues in terms of using this for groupwork because of boundary issues.

@shcdean: What future do they see for FB or Twitter.

They don't use Twitter. When asked, teens always say that they'll use their preferred social network site (or social media service) FOREVER as a sign of their passion for it now. If they expect that they'll "grow out of it", it's a sign that the service is waning among that group at this very moment. So they're not a good predictor of their own future usage.

@lazygal: Do they really care about/use school library websites? Twitter? Pageflakes? Libguides? or only if teacher insists?

Nope, they don't. All but Twitter are categorized as school tools and are only used when absolutely necessary and Google won't suffice.

answers to questions from Twitter on teen practices

Jackie Flaten says

Backstory: A North Dakota State University student newspaper editor thought it would be funny to promote Zap, N.D., a teeny tiny town smack dab in the middle of nowhere, as an ideal alternative to the customary spring break site of Fort Lauderdale, Fla. When the AP picked up his article, things got out of hand - high school and college students descended en masse, beer flowed freely and things pretty much went downhill from there.

The "Zap-in" happened a couple months before Woodstock -- one of the originators mused, 15 years later, perhaps something was "in the air, calling the tribes..."

North Dakota native Chris Breitling produced a documentary while he was a film student -- the film, Zap Revisited, is now available for the first time on DVD in commemoration of the 40th anniversary.

The YouTube link shows a two-minute clip of the student documentary, Zap Revisited, which looks at this event, originators and small-town quirky ND.

From the Zap Revisited Web site:

In the spring of 1969 an estimated 3,000 young people descended on the tiny prairie town of Zap, N.D., for a spring break blow-out. What started as an off-beat idea for a party ended with National Guard troops expelling the revelers from Zap and the nearby towns of Beulah and Hazen, creating a national media sensation.

Zap Revisited, a documentary by West Fargo, N.D., native Chris Breitling recalls the strange-but-true story of the "Zip to Zap", aka the "Zap-In" through the memories of people who took part in this uniquely infamous episode of North Dakota history. Breitling produced Zap Revisited as a graduate film student while at Columbia College in the early 1990s.

In conjunction with the 40th anniversary, Outcast Studios is making this DVD available to anyone interested in this unlikely High Plains tale set in the tumultuous spring of 1969.

High times & hijinks on the High Plains circa 1969

This week's episode of Fretboard Journal's BlogTalkRadio show (a talk radio show for music and guitar geeks) has two of the Cheap Suit Serenaders .

This week's episode features two multi-instrumentalists from the acclaimed Cheap Suit Serenders, Al Dodge and Robert Armstrong. We hear about working with R. Crumb, the early days of the Cheap Suit Serenaders, just how they got started playing old-time music and their instrument collections.

Fretboard Journal Talk Radio: The Cheap Suit Serenaders

From The Guardian's Meg Pickard, a graph that "compares 'people talking about #topic' and 'people talking about talking about #topic'. Outside of Twitter, this applies to pretty much any popular newsworthy topic...the news quickly moves from 'we're telling you about Topic X' to media coverage of the media coverage of Topic X. See: Twitter's own coverage in the media currently." (Pithy description from Kottke)

Twitter trending topics

A Consumerist reader points out that you can save $300 on a $800 Virgin Atlantic fare from the US to the UK by booking it as a Continental codeshare. Consumerist explains how to search for deals like this:

So how do you find codeshares? First, find your desired flight number and punch it into a flight tracking service like Flight Stats. Look for a section breaking out specific codeshares and the flight numbers associated with the other airlines. Then, go to each airline listed and search for the codeshared flight number to compare the price. Once you've found the lowest fare, book it and start packing!

Use Codeshares To Find Cheap Summer Flights Abroad

Mike Dunford, a swim meet deck official, has some great advice for parents:

A personal best is always a major victory:
It doesn't matter if they finish first, third, ninth, thirty-eigth, or dead last. If they swam the event faster than they've ever swum the event before, it's a victory. This is still true if they've never swum it before.

Cheer for your children:
Do not yell at them. Do not tell them that they're swimming poorly. Never, ever, ever ask them what the hell they thought they were doing, particularly in the first ten seconds after they get out of the water. You're paying good money to put them on a swim team that has actual coaches who can handle all of the criticism (and who know more about how to swim and how to coach than you do). You're there to encourage them, not discourage them.

Cheer for other people's children:
If you've got a pair of lungs that can rupture eardrums at fifty feet, why is it that I only hear you during a few heats? Your kid is on a team. Support the team. If you don't know anyone who is swimming in a heat, cheer for everyone. It's a hard sport, and a little support makes everyone feel better.

Be a role-model for sportsmanship:
And when I say that, I'm talking about the good kind of role-model. Most swim meets are like most cereal box contests: many will enter, few will win. Your kids are going to get a lot of practice at not winning events. Teach them to show as much grace and class when they don't win that they do when they win.

There's more, click through.

An Open Letter For the Parents of Swimmers

Hugh Pickens writes "New Scientist reports that two decades after the world's largest nuclear disaster, life around Chernobyl continues to adapt, with Chernobyl soya containing significantly different amounts of several dozen proteins, including one protein involved in defending cells from heavy metal and radiation damage. 'One protein is known to actually protect human blood from radiation,' says Martin Hajduch of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. In a study to determine how plants might have adapted to the meltdown, Hajduch's team compared soya grown in radioactive plots near Chernobyl with plants grown about 100 km away in uncontaminated soil. Results from the study suggest that adaptation toward heavy metal stress, protection against radiation damage, and mobilization of seed storage proteins are involved in the plant adaptation mechanism to radioactivity in the Chernobyl region (abstract). Determining how plants coped with life after Chernobyl could help scientists engineer radiation-resistant plants. While few farmers are eager to cultivate radioactive plots on Earth, future interplanetary travelers may one day need to grow crops to withstand space radiation."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

GvG was one of several readers to point out this "incredible photo clearly showing the silhouette of Atlantis and the Hubble Space Telescope as they passed in front of the Sun was taken Wednesday, May 13, 2009, from west of Vero Beach, Florida. The two spaceships were at an altitude of 600 km and they zipped across the sun in only 0.8 seconds." The image is all over the Web now, for good reason.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.