From the newly launched
OpenSource.com comes
a pointer to the
Open College Textbook Act of 2009. This bill, currently stuck in committee, calls for the adoption of openly licensed and freely distributed electronic textbooks. It is hoped that this will lower costs, level the playing field and even help restore overseas confidence in the U.S. educational system.
[more inside]
posted by cedar
on Jan 26, 2010 -
26 comments
Simulated U.S. Government Agency Responses to Vampire-Americans "Every spring, [the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce] runs a policy simulation designed to illustrate the difficulty of operating an organization in the context of asymmetric and limited information. Every fall, I run a two hour mini-simulation designed to give students a sense of how the larger simulation will play out. ... Since vampires seem to be in the news lately, this year I chose a vampire oriented scenario."
posted by amber_dale
on Jan 12, 2010 -
23 comments
The Canadian Government’s
Translation Bureau recently made its French/English/Spanish technical terminology database,
Termium, free to access after over a decade as a subscription-based service. While off-the-cuff translations are often available from free services like
BabelFish, Termium focuses on technical terminology such as scientific, medical and legal terms.
[more inside]
posted by Shepherd
on Oct 22, 2009 -
35 comments
Against Transparency. "How could anyone be against transparency? Its virtues and its utilities seem so crushingly obvious. But I have increasingly come to worry that there is an error at the core of this unquestioned goodness. We are not thinking critically enough about where and when transparency works, and where and when it may lead to confusion, or to worse. And I fear that the inevitable success of this movement--if pursued alone, without any sensitivity to the full complexity of the idea of perfect openness--will inspire not reform, but disgust. The 'naked transparency movement,' as I will call it here, is not going to inspire change. It will simply push any faith in our political system over the cliff."
[Via]
posted by homunculus
on Oct 11, 2009 -
94 comments
Healthcare reform has agitated right-wing extremists and moneyed interests in the United States for some time — during the presidencies of
FDR and Truman as well as Clinton and Obama, most recently — but where do the objections originate from, and particularly those which are known to be based on complete untruths? Some of these lies start with or are repeated by
well-known right-wing media personalities, but there are other people who get the ball rolling, who are perhaps less well-known.
Elizabeth "Betsy" McCaughey originated one of the current myths more commonly known as
"death panels", but despite her attempts to market herself as a folksy voice fighting for the well-being of senior citizens, she has been an effective advocate for the interests of private health insurance companies since the early 1990s.
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posted by Blazecock Pileon
on Aug 22, 2009 -
167 comments
How American Health Care Killed My Father After the needless death of his father, the author, a business executive, began a personal exploration of a health-care industry that for years has delivered poor service and irregular quality at astonishingly high cost. It is a system, he argues, that is not worth preserving in anything like its current form. And the health-care reform now being contemplated will not fix it. Here’s a radical solution to an agonizing problem. (via
mr)
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posted by kliuless
on Aug 18, 2009 -
144 comments
Abdelrahman Zeitoun is a Syrian American businessman who spent the days after Katrina paddling around New Orleans in a canoe, saving elderly people and feeding stranded pets. His efforts were brought to a halt when he was detained by the Bush administration on suspicion of being a terrorist.
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posted by reenum
on Aug 10, 2009 -
30 comments
The
Daily Express reports on a UK Government Announcement to expand the use of
Family Intervention Projects. However, the Daily Express exaggerates the report somewhat,
the article stating (apparently wildly incorrectly) that the UK Government "plans to put 20,000 problem families under 24-hour CCTV supervision in their own homes".
Other reports in the UK press make no mention of CCTV. Nonetheless, the alarmist Express article is widely
picked up and
discussed on the internet, pushing many people past 10 on the Orwellometer. Then Mefite FfejL uses Twitter to ask Ed Balls, the minister responsible, if the CCTV aspect of the Express article is accurate.
[more inside]
posted by memebake
on Aug 4, 2009 -
34 comments
Kōfuku-no-Kagaku (幸福の科学), also called Happy Science, is a relatively new religious and spiritual movement, founded in Japan in October 1986. The organization is gaining ground world-wide, with the international headquarter office in central Tokyo, 6 local temples located in London, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seoul and Taiwan, and an additional 37 local offices around the world. The group's leader, Master Ryuho Okawa, has is not limiting the scope of the movement to politics, and in May 2009 the
Happiness Realization Party was formed, with
over 300 HRP candidates running for the coming general election. To provide background on the religion and political movement, here is
a little investigation of Happy Science by MeFi's own
shii [via
mefi projects]
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Jul 28, 2009 -
32 comments
Overly confident in the economic health of the United States? Feeling sanguine about current spending levels? Haven't yet been scared out of your wits about your financial future? No worries! The
U.S. National Debt Clock page is for you! Your one stop shop for all things financial meltdown related: Total debt, debt per citizen, budget deficits and spending year-to-date, total governmental bailouts, and much much more!
posted by Justinian
on Jun 26, 2009 -
77 comments
Prelude to Federation - Like a neocolonial
SEZ (or
TAZ)
Paul Romer,
not to be confused with
David,
posits "less developed countries contract with capitalist nations to set up Hong Kong's for them... that we rethink sovereignty (respect borders, but maybe import administrative control); rethink citizenship (support residency, but maybe import voice in political affairs); and rethink scale (instead of focusing on nations, focus on cities—on city states like Hong Kong and Singapore)." cf.
neocameralism [
1,
2,
3]
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posted by kliuless
on May 21, 2009 -
16 comments
