# Notice (Oct 19/05): So ends my stay here on Blogger. This morning Google implemented an anti-spam 'feature' that forces me to answer a challenge phrase when I want to post to my own blog. No notice of the change, nothing. Worse is that it doesn't even work! I type the phrase, submit, "An error occured", post deleted. Damn you, Google. Chances are I will revive my blog somewhere else, sometime soon. I'll post the new coordinates here as soon as they become available. (BTW, I'm unable to post anything to my RSS stream, so I'd appreciate it if readers could spread the word and ask people to take a look at this notice)

Update (Oct 19/05, ~noon): After a frustrating few hours (and not just trying out alternatives to Blogger), I've decided that this is a good time to take a break from all this. A day? A week? Who knows. But I need to step away from it before I pass a heavy magnet over the whole mess.

Update 2: According to this post, the reason I'm seeing the CAPTCHA (challenge phrase) is that Blogger has classified my blog as spam. Thanks. User for five years and now I'm spam. I searched the Blogger site, but there is no mention of how to get the spam flag turned off. There is also no way of contacting anyone at Blogger. Wow. Spam they say I am, so spam I must be. Maybe it is time to take a break.

"Instead of facing competition from high-quality Japanese manufacturers, companies in industrialized countries face tough competition from low-wage countries and high price-cutting pressure from global retailers. Even when producers do promote quality, far fewer consumers seem to care. In this environment, many firms now seem to perceive the production of inferior products as an effective bottom-line strategy. But giving in to this increasingly irresistible temptation can put a company's future market share and profits at risk."

Chinese and other low-cost manufacturers have shown that you don't have to offer quality to compete if you can slash prices enough. "I see no evidence of the managers and workers at these facilities having the slightest concept of quality'" says John Dowd, an American quality expert who has visited dozens of Chinese factories. "They will comply with customer requirements when they are monitored closely, but left alone, it's strictly 'Get it out the door.'"

The search giant started testing a version of its contextual ads that would help advertisers tap into new inventory on RSS or Atom feeds, and potentially help publishers monetize content distributed through that channel. Though Google declined to comment on the new implementation, word spread via its publisher partners.

"Hey, let me show you something interesting!"
"Hey, let me show you something interesting!"
"Hey, let me show you something interesting!"
"Hey, let me sell you something interesting!"
"Hey, let me show you something interesting!"

Critics, however, say XBRL's developers bungled what could have been a great idea with a needlessly complicated design that virtually ensures the need for consulting services offered up by the same companies that created XBRL.

'It was developed by accountants and technologists with little to no input from the financial analyst community,' said Eric Linder, a hedge fund manager who calls himself XBRL's most involved outsider. 'Nobody can understand it except for the six guys who wrote it.'

"St-Laurent Boulevard is marking its 100th anniversary by becoming a hotspot - a wireless hotspot, where anyone with a portable computer can surf the web from anywhere on the street."

Consider Six Apart as an example of what I'm talking about. 6A is like a black hole for creative people. Folks who, a year or two ago, were among the leading voices in the discussion of how weblogs were changing our culture, were coding all sorts of useful plug-ins for Movable Type, or were pushing the edges of web design are now focused on making software that generates revenue and aren't saying a whole lot about it. (Sort of ironic that working for 6A kills the weblogs of their employees, isn't it?) That's great for them, for Six Apart, their customers, and their partners, but it kinda sucks for the community as a whole.

At many institutions, there is little to no integration between an administrative system, like SCT Banner, and a learning management system, like WebCT. This lack of integration requires faculty to perform duplicate administrative tasks in both systems. To address this issue, we implemented the SCT Luminis Data Integration for e-Learning solution. This solution provides real-time, standards-based data integration between learning management systems and SunGard SCT administrative systems. The integration simplifies administrative tasks for faculty and reduces data entry redundancies.

Concordia wants a 22-storey building, and city councillors for the downtown borough have approved the plan, but the building is too tall and too large to meet city standards.

The 10.6' widescreen display has a default resolution of 1280x768 (WXGA) pixels, and is easily the best aspect of this notebook. Assuming you have the eyes for it, this resolution offers plenty of screen real-estate, even on this tiny screen.

Reflecting on the experience of attending this session brings me back to one of my favorite topics - the automation of the delivery of instruction and the provision of feedback. As I interact with an intelligent tutoring system, what will be the source of my inspiration? Who will be the teacher I remember forever, with whom I form a transformative bond of trust, who I know cares and worries about me? Where is my connection to an other? Where is the modeling of competent, passionate living? Where is the enculturation into a community of meaningful practice?

Recent research on student learning has given close attention to how student's experiences and actions are mediated by the whole university learning-teaching environment in which they find themselves. The current article pursues this focus on learning-teaching environments in two stages. Guided by socio-cultural perspectives on learning, the first part:
* examines issues surrounding how best to conceptualise university learning-teaching environments,
* highlights the need to take account of central disciplinary purposes and
* presents a framework for representing disciplinary practices within higher education.

"This concern exists at any school where students have iPods, whether they were gifts or not. Professors should be aware, Mr. Albright says, of how easy it is today for students to record lectures or any downloadable class materials and broadcast them over the Internet."

[A] Canadian researcher has calculated the location of Mars' ancient poles, based upon the location of five giant impact basins on the planet's surface. Jafar Arkani-Hamed of McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, has determined that these five basins, named Argyre, Hellas, Isidis, Thaumasia, and Utopia, all lie along the arc of a great circle. This suggests that the projectiles that caused the basins originated with a single source and that the impacts trace the Martian equator at the time of impact, which was prior to the development of the Tharsis bulge, he says.

"At present, the UKOU spends on average $3 million dollars (US) per course on content development, and they have over 200 undergraduate courses in their inventory, which comes to a total investment of over $600 million. They also keep their content updated on a regular basis, which, among other things, means replacing each course from scratch after eight years. In other words, the UKOU currently spends around $75 million per year on content development, which amounts to around forty percent of their budget."

Types of organizational knowledge and their value for organizations, analyzing knowledge processes, and assessing tools and technologies for managing knowledge.

Readers can suggest edits or additions to entries, although the changes are vetted by editors before they reach the page.

"The truth of the matter is, we have 42,000 articles in Encarta and somewhere around 60 million words, so even if I had a staff of 1,000 editors we wouldn't be able to look at all of the content all the time," [Encarta's editorial director] said.

'Yahoo has been Wikipedia's longest-standing corporate supporter, and with this dedication of resources we will be able to offer Wikipedia content to a growing worldwide audience, while maintaining full flexibility in our ability to expand relationships and freely distribute our works.'

Wales said in a Yahoo blog that Yahoo's donation was 'purely charitable,' adding that it came with no advertising requirement and 'no ownership or control of our work by Yahoo of any kind.'

"To become a journalist, you have to go to school, go to college, intern at some crap paper, work for crap wages, write whatever dreck the established writers don't want, put up with ego-maniacal, power-mad, amateur Napoleon editors who will freak out if you put a capital letter in the wroNg place, and do this all for years and years before they let you near a story that matters.

To become a blogger you have to register for a free account, slam your index fingers into a keyboard a few times, and click POST.

Tell me again how those things are the same. Tell me again how they both deserve equal protections. I mean, with a straight face."

"Fewer people in poor countries than in rich ones own computers and have access to the internet simply because they are too poor, are illiterate, or have other more pressing concerns, such as food, health care and security. So even if it were possible to wave a magic wand and cause a computer to appear in every household on earth, it would not achieve very much: a computer is not useful if you have no food or electricity and cannot read."

"About 48% of the Canadian online buying population are information seekers who had an idea of a product they wanted to buy, yet needed more information through comparison shopping to make their decision, the survey found. About 41% of online buyers are shoppers on a mission who know what they want to buy and where to buy it. And 11% of online buyers are impulse shoppers who did not have an intended purchase but came across something they saw online and bought it."

"Problems arise because the Federation of Medical Specialists works with the province to come up with the number of specialist positions needed, but the total is deliberately underestimated. The reason is that experience has shown not every graduate immediately steps into a job."