Technology

Listening to battery enthusiasts wax poetic about the Tesla recently - - and seeing a few of them appearing on the streets of west Los Angeles - - I began thinking about the old Tony Curtis film "The Great Race" (remember every time he smiled, there was a shiny sparkle of superiority that gleamed from his teeth?). The roads and Holiday Inns have improved dramatically since the period depicted in the movie, but the idea of testing the claims of exciting new technology at the dawn of a new transportation age is very much the same. So let's have a 21^st Century "Great Race" and pit the Tesla against the other electric car on the market today, the Honda Clarity.

The Tesla is an electric sports car powered by batteries, while the Clarity is an electric sedan powered by hydrogen (a fuel cell converts the hydrogen to electricity). The range of each is rated by USEPA-approved testing at about 230 miles. The similarities end there however - - the Tesla is the fastest production car ever built at zero to 60 mph, giving the little hot rod a distinct advantage that would seem to make a race with a Clarity anything but "great". Or would it?

A recent article about the 4th grade reading slump, in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, features a blueprint for change built on a provocative premise. The authors argue that instead of banning, disdaining or simply ignoring digital media in the classroom, educators should be emboldened -- and supported -- to use as much of it as they can.

The article, "TV Guidance," was written by James Paul Gee, a literacy professor at Arizona State University and Michael Levine, executive director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop and a senior associate at Yale University's Zigler Center. They write:

"Current literacy practices and policies have cost tens of billions of dollars over the past decade with almost no integration of the new digital tools and teaching practices that have the potential to build the skills and knowledge demanded by universities and employers in the twenty-first century."

 Fred Vogelstein and I just published a Wired story titled The Plot to Kill Google. It's long --- but apparently not long enough! Fred and I also gathered plenty of material in the reporting that we couldn't fit in the magazine story but that we're going to publish online now.

The first post is about something I've gotten several emails about: Should Tom Barnett, the assistant attorney general for anti-trust who led the investigation into the proposed Google-Yahoo business partnership this summer, have recused himself?...

Friday, June 27, 2008

FEDERAL POLICY: Court says no deadline for EPA on global warming. A federal appeals court refused Thursday to make a resistant Bush administration speed up a decision on whether greenhouse gases and global warming threaten public health and welfare. Associated Press. 27 June 2008.

STATE POLICY (CA): State renews climate battle. California's next great experiment starts today. The state Air Resources Board will outline this morning a plan to slash greenhouse gas emissions 30 percent by 2020 and prepare the state for much deeper cuts in the years beyond. Sacramento Bee, California. 27 June 2008.

CANADA - TARGETS: Greenhouse gas reductions within reach, B. C. premier says. British Columbia is well on its way to achieving its goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions and if world oil prices remain as high as they are, the province will have no trouble hitting that target, says Premier Gordon Campbell. Canadian Press. 27 June 2008.

FEDERAL POLICY - SOLAR: Citing need for assessments, U.S. freezes solar energy projects. Faced with a surge in the number of proposed solar power plants, the federal government has placed a moratorium on new solar projects on public land until it studies their environmental impact, expected to take two years. New York Times. 27 June 2008. [Registration Required]

When today's forms of taxes were created decades ago, there wasn't any technology to consider in making computations and collection easy. But that is not true today. While some states are slowly modernizing their laws to address new ways of living an doing business that are partly due to changes in technology, the technology as a tool of tax compliance and administration is often overlooked.

Tennessee enacted various tax law changes which the governor signed on June 5, 2008, including expanding its sales tax to include most digital goods provided the tangible equivalent is something already subject to sales tax. [SB 4173 enacted as Public Chapter Number 1006]

"The retail sale, lease, licensing, or use of specified digital products transferred to or accessed by subscribers or consumers in this state shall be subject to the tax levied by this chapter on the sales price or purchase price thereof at a rate equal to the rate of tax levied on the sale of tangible personal property at retail by the provisions of § 67-6-202."

The law defines various types of digital goods and notes a few exemptions. To determine where the buyer resides, the new law provides:

Cutting edge technological innovation isn’t typically the first thing that comes to mind when we think about early education. Many of the things we associate with young children’s learning—caring adult-child interactions, alphabet blocks, the caterpillar-in-the-jar—are decidedly low-tech. For better or for worse, early education seems like one area unlikely to be revolutionized by the kind of technology-driven productivity increases that are transforming modern life.

But things aren’t always as they seem—and that’s certainly true of technology and early education. A new generation of technology-driven innovations in professional development, assessment, and curriculum and instructional materials have real potential to improve the quality of early education teaching and learning.