Twin Tech Party 023

Image by Corbett3000

Eight-Figure Gifts Benefit Tech Schools in Israel and Australia
Mr. Taub, founder of the business-services giant Automated Data Processing, is a longtime member of the American Technion Society, which raises funds for the institute.
Read more on The Chronicle of Philanthropy

Big winner of horse-race polls
Here is a fun fact for those in the political-polling orthodoxy who liken Scott Rasmussen to a conjurer of Republican-friendly numbers: He works above a paranormal bookstore crowded with Ouija boards and psychics on the Jersey Shore.
Read more on Seattle Times

Mix poor memory and a lack of tech-savvy, and you’ve got a teacher disciplining a high school student for launching “foxfire.com”. Not sure if this is real or a hoax, but here are some details:

The incident report narrates how the teacher apparently asked the class to do some work through an internet browser, only to catch a student starting a program called foxfire.exe. Said teacher meted out two warnings, but the student continued using foxfire, insisting that it was a better browser. The teacher, probably having no idea what Mozilla Firefox was and tired of challenges to his authority, handed the student two hours worth of detention.

I’m thinking that, if this were real, Mozilla should use the incident as a marketing tool. The new kind of brand evangelism apparently involves exposing the stupidity of authority figures, while taking the heat for your belief in a product or service.

The high school in question? Big Spring High School, according to the image currently making the internet rounds (above). The names of the teacher, student, and parents were redacted. All I know is that I wouldn’t want my child to be studying under such a reportedly clueless teacher!

Source

Post from: The Gadget Blog

Solar energy remains a hot topic (no pun intended) in Japan. As part of a huge economic stimulus plan, the government plans to convert all of the country’s 32,000 public elementary and middle schools to solar power by 2020. The aim: reduction of CO2 emissions and cutting long-term energy costs.

The government is expecting to pump between $650 and $980 million into the project. At the moment, just 1,200 of the schools in question use solar power. As an initial step, the government wants to increase this number by a factor of ten by 2012.

The schools will most likely be equipped with 20kw solar panels, which are enough to power lighting in between eight to ten classrooms daily. It’s estimated that if all of the 32,000 schools use solar power, the amount of electricity generated is the same of that consumed by 200,000 Japanese homes yearly.

Via Nikkei [registration required, paid subcription]