School for training Small School principals, part of Educating Kids In Nyc. (more)

The Chinese capital is awash with speculation, innuendo and rumours of a coup following the most important political purge in decades, with even some of the most well-informed officials in the dark about what comes next. Since Bo Xilai, one of ChinA’s most powerful leaders, was removed from his job last Thursday, the bureaucracy and the public have been on tenterhooks, awaiting the next twist in the gripping political saga. (more)

David Brooks profiles the New American Academy, an Elementary School serving poor minority kids in Crown Heights, Brooklyn Ny. (Educating Kids In Nyc) (more)

Mark Pesce has re-architected Plexus to be less dependent on specific Python code, and more driven by protocol of passing around RFC2822 messages (the same format used for EMail). (Hmm, that RFC doesn't define a protocol, only a text-blob format.)

Learning styles are, simply put, various approaches or ways of learning. They involve educating methods, particular to an individual, that are presumed to allow that individual to learn best. It is commonly believed that most people favor some particular method of interacting with, taking in, and processing stimuli or information. Based on this concept, the idea of individualized "learning styles" originated in the 1970s, and has gained popularity in recent years. It has been proposed that teachers should assess the learning styles of their students and adapt their classroom methods to best fit each student's learning style. The alleged basis for these proposals has been extensively criticized. (more)

aka Fossil, a DVCS/Software Forge (more)

Computer Programming language. Short for "list processor". (more)

Bringing together, at least temporarily, a number of semi-related links that would normally be in their own nodes, around Privacy and the Open Social Networking Model. (more)

The Crooked Timber folks have a series of posts about David Graeber's Debt book.

a multi-paradigm programming language designed to integrate features of object-oriented programming and Functional Programming... Scala runs on the Java platform (JVM - Java Virtual Machine) and is compatible with existing Java programs. It also runs on Android smartphones.[13] An alternative implementation exists for the .NET platform. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scala_(programming_language)

Crooked Timber is exploring the work of Charlie Stross, and he's taking part.

Economics analysis of complex social reality? (more)

Another approach to improving Twitter Scalability involves using a Scala-based Message Bus instead of a Data Base for lots of interactions. (more)

Ted Neward says that "ORM is the Vietnam of Computer Science". His conclusions/options make it clear this isn't really a huge thing, it's just a warning for people who are overly simplistic (e.g. a Ruby On Rails developer who just trusts that ORM will work, without really understanding databases). But his options covering some ways of bridging the gap were interesting: (more)

Emily Oster has identified Hepatitis B to be a major reason for the "missing Women" of Asia as theorized by Amartya Sen. (more)

Apache project for Enterprise MicroBlogging. (more)

Phillip J Eby and Paul Graham are thinking about Procrastination at New Year's time (Self Improvement).

Although our understanding of what instigated the 2008 global financial crisis (Credit Crisis 2008) remains at best incomplete, there are a few widely agreed upon contributing factors. One of them is a 2004 rule change by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that allowed investment banks to load up on Leverage... There’s just one problem with this story line: It’s not true.

moving images, what a concept (more)

The Free Universal Construction Kit is a collection of adapter bricks that enable complete interoperability (InterOp) between ten popular children’s construction toys... The Free Universal Construction Kit offers adapters between Lego, Duplo, Fischertechnik, Gears! Gears! Gears!, K Nex, Krinkles (BristleBlocks), LincolnLogs, TinkerToys, Zome, and Zoob. Our adapters can be downloaded from Thingiverse.com and other sharing sites as a set of 3D models in .STL format, suitable for reproduction by personal manufacturing devices like the Makerbot (an inexpensive, open-source 3D printer). (Desktop Fab)