But a movement growing in schools today says taking away a student’s access to technology is akin to denying that student valuable learning opportunities–and so many school leaders are now searching for better alternatives.
As opposed to banning a kid from the internet and forcing teachers to create new lessons for them that don’t require internet access. I would say most schools still ban kids from the internet or otherwise suspend or expel them for AUP violations, demonstrating that you can’t force someone to learn.
I still recommend Vericept for schools that want to monitor online behavior beyond what the typical filter will do.
Still, behavior problems in schools are systemic. If you abolish compulsory education and child labor laws, they would more or less disappear.
A school district just told me about this anonymizer proxy that uses Flash. This URL is in the Websense database (I didn’t test it against any others) but I’m wondering if any vendors can detect this technique without blocking Flash altogether.
Sophos intends to buy Utimaco. Until then, Sophos will resell SafeGuard Enterprise and they now have a mutual referral agreement for all products from both companies. Utimaco will become a new business unit focused on data security and the SafeGuard brand will be retained.
From the customer announcement email:
Our future direction integrates information control and security compliance with existing anti-malware infrastructure to make security more manageable, and merging with the market leader in mobile data security provides a strong foundation for growth and leadership.
This afternoon on my MacBook Pro, Mail and Safari were acting screwy. Safari would give me a beach ball when I tried to fill out a form on Amazon and Mail would give me a beach ball when it did an address look up when I typed someone’s name in the To: field. I tried to open Address Book, but it wouldn’t open, instead giving me a “not responding” status immediately in the Force Quit Applications window.
Not having the skills or time to really find out what was going on, I popped open Cocktail and repaired the disk permissions and left to run some errands. I came back 3 hours later, glanced at the Cocktail log and opened a new email. When I typed a name into the address field, it did the look up (I could see the spinner working) and then stopped, not having found the name. This time I was able to open Address Book to see that everything was gone. All my contacts. Thousands of them. Gone. I visited the MobileMe page, naturally, the contacts were gone there too. I then opened my iPhone to turn off syncing before it got wiped - too late. Since I didn’t find the problem before SuperDuper made my daily backup, it looks I have lost my most recent changes, but luckily nearly everything is saved in my Daylite database so this isn’t critical - just a huge pain in the ass.
I had been reading headlines about the MobileMe problems, but never suffered any until this afternoon. I was a .Mac customer before solely for the convenience of the iDisk to backup a small amount of critical data so Apple won’t lose any of my money, but I have turned off over-the-air sync and don’t plan to turn it on until 2010 or so. If my contacts got wiped from my phone while I was on the road I would be crippled. Nope, can’t take that chance.
When a scientist doesn’t know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty darn sure of what the result is going to be, he is still in some doubt. We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress we must recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty — some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain.
Some distrust science because it seems to overturn itself and prove itself wrong. This is really a manifestation of its strength. Science is a free market of ideas and observations. Anything that doesn’t reflect reality is eliminated while the real stuff gets refined and improved (moving toward the center of this diagram) but never becomes dogma. There is always room for doubt.
Richard Feynman gave this talk on the value of science over 50 years ago. It’s full of wisdom from a brilliant man.
If we take everything into account — not only what the ancients knew, but all of what we know today that they didn’t know — then I think we must frankly admit that we do not know.
All scientific progress came as a result of doubting existing “knowledge”. To make progress, we have to “recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt”.
