Category: News

[JURIST] The Hawaii House of Representatives voted 31-20 Thursday to approve legislation allowing same-sex civil unions. The act would confer upon homosexual and heterosexual couples rights and benefits equal to those afforded married couples in the state. The bill was approved by the Senate in January, but the House vote was postponed indefinitely. The bill will now go before Governor Linda Lingle (R), who has not yet indicated whether she will sign it into law. She has until July 6 to reach a decision.
The state of Hawaii has been at the forefront of the gay rights movement since the 1990s. In 1993, the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled that the state must show a compelling reason to deny same-sex marriage, but, in 1998, Hawaiian voters approved an amendment to the state constitution to reserve for the state legislature the authority to define marriage. Same-sex marriage is currently legal in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont, and New Hampshire, and Washington DC, pending Congressional inaction. Same-sex civil unions are currently recognized in Washington, New Jersey, Oregon, and Nevada.

Looks like there are still a few people modding the good ole G1. This time, a user has modded a gamepad controller to work with the first Android device to hit the market. It looks like it works very well also, video after the break.

Unlike the gamepad that we have seen for the Droid, not much is known about this mod. There’s no information around the web that shows you how to do this yourself. But if your tech savvy enough you should be able to pull this off as well. All you need is a G1, a European Atari 7800 Joypad and a whole lot of skill.

Click here to view the embedded video.

[via makezineblog]

by Kenneth Anderson

I’ve been lite blogging and will be for a bit longer, due to travel and some deadline pressures.  I will try to get something up about the latest drone hearing in Congress, the ACLU’s letter, and that stuff.  Let us not neglect the EU debt crisis, either.  Kudos to Northwestern University law school’s Searle Center, for the conference I am currently attending on ATS issues – great conference, great papers, great folks.  But most important, this meeting has finally given Roger and me the chance to meet in person!  During all this time, Roger and I have never actually met.  I can report to our faithful readers that Professor Alford is as gracious, charming and intellectually acute as everything you have read from him on this blog attests.

Adobe has announced that the latest version of its flagship product, the Creative Suite 5, is now shipping after having been launched earlier this month. The product should be hitting stores and online outlets, so you can finally get your hands on the anticipated release. Adobe CS5 is available in several flavors, depending on the bundled product. The Master… (read more)

On The Oprah Winfrey Show on Thursday, John Edwards’ former mistress Rielle Hunter said that she doesn’t believe she destroyed the former presidential candidate’s marriage — this despite the fact that she gave birth to the Southerner’s illegitimate child as his unassuming wife battled cancer.

(Delusional much?)

“It is not my experience that a third party wrecks a home,” Hunter told The Queen of Talk as the women discussed Rielle’s two year romance with Edwards. “I believe the problems exist before a third party comes into the picture….I do not believe I wrecked his home.”

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Adobe responded to Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ attack on Flash yesterday by dropping a fair big (and well-directed) bombshell of its own: A public preview will be given in a few weeks at Google IO (we’ll be there for it), and Flash will see general release for Android in June. Said Adobe CTO Kevin Lunch in his "Moving Forward" post:

We look forward to delivering Flash Player 10.1 for Android smartphones as a public preview at Google I/O in May, and then a general release in June. From that point on, an ever increasing number and variety of powerful, Flash-enabled devices will be arriving which we hope will provide a great landscape of choice.

Now all Adobe has to do is deliver. And it damn well better work well out of the box, or the pitchforks are going to be raised pretty quick. [Adobe] Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

The following resources can help in teaching fractions to elementary students. The books and the other resources are a good way to help make learning math fun.

Give Me Half

by Stuart Murphy

Iillustrated by G. Brian Karas

Splitting things in half may seem like an easy thing to do, but when two siblings and a pizza are involved, things can get messy. Children learn about fractions at school but fractions are also an important part of everyday life outside the classroom.

Fraction Action

by Loreen Liddy

 

This picture book presents math concepts through five brief chapters. Leedy makes it easy for children to visualize what is meant by the various amounts. Subjects tackled include basic fractions, sets, dividing objects into equal parts and subtracting and comparing the value of fractions. With mini math problems and answers and large doses of humor worked into the text, this classroom-oriented book adds up to a lot of instructional fun.

Fraction Fun

By David Adler

Illustrated by Nancy Tobin

This simple, hands-on concept book is clear and concise. The simple definition of a fraction, that it is a part of something, introduces a pizza pie that is divided, studied, compared, and, of course, eaten. Weighing coins determines how many make one ounce, and what the fractional value of each coin is. The cartoon illustrations are colorful, whimsical, and humorous; they also make the concepts clear.

Polar Bear Math

By Ann Whitehead Nagda and Cindy Bickel

In this book children learn about fractions while following the Denver Zoo’s baby polar bears, Klondike and Snow. The right-hand pages tell the story of Snow and Klondike, with full-color photos showing how zoo personnel raised them from newborns until their first birthday. On each left-hand page, a lesson on fractions incorporates data about the animals. The explanations, which combine text with pictographs, are clear and well formulated. The first lesson, for example, defines fractions and their parts, and compares the one-third of polar bear mothers that have twins with the two-thirds that have single births. Other lessons deal with preparing formula for the cubs, milk consumption, hours in a day, and polar bear weight.

The Doorbell Rang

by Pat Hutchins

As Victoria and Sam are sitting down to a plateful of a dozen of Ma’s cookies the doorbell rings, and two of their friends arrive to share. Just as they have the cookies all divided, the doorbell rings again and again and each time the number of cookies per person dwindles until at last there is only one cookie per person and . . . the doorbell rings again! (Luckily, it’s Grandma arriving with reinforcements.)

Web Sites for Kids on Fractions

Fishy Fractions

Just hit “start activity” to begin helping Ulani the hungry pelican. Help her catch some fish by selecting the correct answer and watch her swoop into the water to eat the fish. You have to be careful to make sure Ulani doesn’t fly into one of the obstacles or you will lose points.

Bug Splat

In this game you must add the fractions together, if you get the incorrect answer the bugs will splat on the windshield.

Who Wants Pizza?

This site is a good place to go to refresh your memory on fractions or to learn about them for the first time. After an idea is taught there are a few questions to test your knowledge.

Cool Math 4 Kids

Here you can find 17 different lessons on fractions. Each lesson is full of bright colors and fun ways to learn. Cool Math for kids has pages for all of your math subjects. Don’t forget to move your mouse around and watch the numbers dance.

Math is Fun

Here is a good way to compare unit fractions. You will have a choice to use <=> to finish the problem,

Additional Resources

Teachers’ Domain
Teachers’ Domain is an online library of more than 1,000 free media resources from the best in public television. These classroom resources, featuring media from NOVA, Frontline, Design Squad, American Experience, and other public broadcasting and content partners are easy to use and correlate to state and national standards. Resources include video and audio segments, Flash interactives, images, documents, lesson plans for teachers, and student-oriented activities. Once you register for free, you can personalize the site using “My Folders” and “My Groups” to save your favorite resources into a folder and share them with your colleagues or students.

Math Forum: Elementary School Teachers’ Place

The Math Forum is an online community of teachers, researchers, parents, educators, and citizens at all levels who have an interest in mathematics and math education. The Math Forum provides high quality content and useful features. You will find lesson plans, fun sites for kids, activities and projects, teacher to teacher ideas on how to teach mathematics, and so much more.

Super Teacher Worksheets

FREE Math Worksheets, Grammar Worksheets, Word Problems, Creative Writing Prompts, Holiday Word Search Puzzles, and More! This site has it all. There is also a link to other teacher resources that are wonderful too.

The wait is over Dante’s Inferno fans will be enjoying another bloody dive into the depths of hell. Are you ready to face the Trials of St. Lucia? Today would be a good day to find

Today, April 30, is the last day for the Obama administration’s tax-credit programs for homebuyers. Purchasers need to have signed a binding agreement by the end of the day and have closed on the home by June 30 in order to receive the credits — $8,000 if it is their first home and $6,500 if they are trading up. Reportedly, the sunset of the valuable credit has caused realtors and homebuyers to “go nuts“: many realtors are staying open until midnight, partially vacant housing units are hosting lush open houses and properties are being snatched up in bidding wars.

The question is the extent to which the tax credits are the life in the market. By Feb. 20, $1.8 million people had claimed the credit at a cost of $12.6 billion, the Treasury Department said, but many of those buyers would have purchased a home anyway. But anecdotally, at least, the tax credits have been driving the market over the past 60 days, as it became clear that Congress would not renew the costly program. (“I think that’s pretty much it,” Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) said.)

And everyone is holding their breath for a crash — or, really, silence — come Saturday morning. The fundamentals are just not good. Unemployment is high. Foreclosures are peaking. Unemployment benefits for more than a million people might expire, pushing foreclosures even higher. The Obama administration’s housing programs have been broadly ineffective. The amount of shadow inventory is extraordinary. And the amount of governmental intervention was massive.  In many parts of the country, the market seems to have stabilized. In others, the downward pressures seem too great.

On April 1st, Sony’s PS3 3.21 firmware update removed the ability to run other operating systems on the device—most notably Linux. Three weeks later, they’re facing a class action suit. Good. More »

This week has been spent fighting the flu while business in Mobile Tech Manor was conducted as usual. I had the unfortunate opportunity to find out what happens when a cloud service fails, and got to experience good tech support as a result. A new phone hit the Manor and I’m trying a new technology that I’m liking so far. Come on in and I’ll share my week with you.

I have been fighting the flu (and losing) for several days this week. It came on quickly and settled in for the count. It had me waffling between feeling fine and horrible for a full three days. It’s still refusing to go away but I am beginning to feel like a human again as I write this.

Only one gadget

Given my health it’s a good thing only one new gadget appeared at the Manor, and at the end of the week at that. The folks at Verizon sent over a Droid Incredible by HTC on its release day. The Incredible is what you get when you take the Google Nexus One, update the hardware a little and add the HTC Sense interface bits. A very nice update, in other words.

I haven’t gotten into the details of the phone yet but one thing has consistently impressed me about the Droid Incredible — it is so fast. I would go on a limb and state the Incredible is the fastest smartphone I have used, and that covers a lot of ground. I haven’t used a Nexus One, a phone often praised for its responsiveness, but I have played with a few of them. The Incredible is definitely faster that the Nexus One in every way.

I am surprised how light and thin the Incredible is; it is as thin as the iPhone 3G I have, and lighter by far. This is due to the plastic case on the Incredible, and while it feels very well made in the hand, I wonder how rugged it might be over time. I can’t imagine dropping it in a concrete parking lot and having anything good come out of it.

I am impressed with the latest version of Android on the Incredible, and the latest HTC Sense interface. The HTC interface makes Android so much better, and gives them a definite advantage over other Android phone makers IMHO. I’m glad they signed that deal with Microsoft to protect them from any problems a la the Apple suit. I hope that suit gets resolved quickly, I’d hate for HTC to stop making Android phones. The Incredible shows how far HTC can take the platform, and I’d hate for legalities to wreck that.

My next phone?

I believe a phone coming soon from HTC may be the next phone I buy for full-time use. The HTC EVO coming shortly from Sprint is going to be hard for me to resist, given all the features it’s going to be packing. Back when I reviewed the HD2 from HTC, I stated that if I could have that great hardware with Android onboard it would be the near perfect smartphone. That’s the EVO in a nutshell, and I believe it’s going to be a dynamite phone.

The HD2 was saddled with Windows Mobile, a shame as it made that phone unstable. My podcast co-host Matt Miller agrees with that, as he stated on the latest episode we recorded yesterday (recording should be available soon). He bought the HD2 and has become totally frustrated with the instability that Windows Mobile brings to the device. We had a good conversation about that but basically the conclusion reached was Windows Mobile is inherently unstable on smartphones of today. Hopefully this will change when Windows Phone 7 hits late this year. It better.

I cannot remember when a webOS phone, Android phone or my iPhone 3G locked up and had to be rebooted. That just doesn’t happen with phones running those platforms, but the same can’t be said for Windows Mobile in my experience. Every single WinMo phone I’ve tried for years has occasionally locked up, requiring the phone to be either soft or even worse, hard reset. That’s not acceptable in my view, and why WinMo has never done well in the main consumer market.

The Sprint EVO hardware running Android is going to be outstanding, and I admit it’s been a while since a phone has gotten me excited like this one. That giant 4.3-inch screen in a great form factor will be great. Throw in support for Sprint’s 4G network and the EVO is a geek’s dream phone.

Break in the cloud

I have been happily using the SugarSync service to keep my important files backed up to the cloud. It automatically keeps my Mac and Windows system in sync as part of the process. The ability to use the iPad app and access my files on the iPad are a bonus. SugarSync quietly runs in the background on those two systems and when a file is created or modified on either system the update appears in the cloud and on the other system. It has worked flawlessly until this week, when it stopped on the Mac.

I noticed early in the week that the SugarSync icon had disappeared from my MacBook’s system tray. This concerned me as the MacBook can only stay in sync with the cloud if the background app is running. I manually fired up the SugarSync File Manager app and it wouldn’t run — it would start and then disappear. I uninstalled and reinstalled it to see if that would fix it but no dice.

I filed a help ticket online with the SugarSync support team and waited to hear back from them. This is that gray area with a company when you’re not sure what to expect. I am happy to report the tech support experience was outstanding. I received an email a few hours later asking me to send the log files created by SugarSync so the tech support guy could have a look.

I did that and it didn’t shed any light on the problem so he had me uninstall and reinstall the app again. He actually called me and provided one-on-one instructions on the uninstall, as OS X had put some configuration files in different places when the app was installed. I dutifully removed them and reinstalled it and sure enough it worked.

Apparently, the file index stored on the Mac was corrupted, and SugarSync couldn’t handle it. Totally removing all traces of the app from the Mac allowed the reinstall to reindex the files as part of the reinstall and all was soon good again. It’s important to note that my files were safe in the cloud, only the local index was hosed. The tech support for SugarSync was top-notch, and I was duly impressed with the experience.

Instapaper is nice

This week I finally got around to trying something I have put off for a while. I’m finding it pretty useful so I’m glad I got in gear and gave Instapaper a shot. Instapaper is basically a way to easily capture web articles for later reading. I decided to give it a try as the iPad app is a pretty good free way to interact with Instapaper.

I am finding it more useful than I thought I would. It creates a “Read Later” bookmark button in the browser and when I see something I want to read but don’t have time I simply hit the button. That stores the article in my Instapaper account where it’s accessible through any browser and a number of mobile apps (iPad, iPhone, etc.). I use it quite a bit and it’s all free so give it a try if you haven’t.

e-Books this week

This week I finished the long Under the Dome by Stephen King. It was a good story, although not quite as original as I thought going in. I read another book with the same basic premise a while back; I forget which book it was. It was still a good read.

I also read Healer by F. Paul Wilson and I enjoyed it. It’s an interesting sci-fi novel that tells the story of someone who accidentally becomes immortal. It is part of Wilson’s LaNague Federation series and I look forward to reading the other books in the series.

Wrap-up

That’s my week as it went down in Mobile Tech Manor. I enjoyed sharing it with you and hope you enjoyed it too. I know I am more than ready for this flu to leave the Manor, it’s not been fun. Until next week — be safe.

" A melhor prova de que a navegação no tempo não é possível é o fato de ainda não sermos invadidos por hordas de turistas vindos do futuro. "

Stephen Hawking

" Eu sou uma das 78,36% pessoas que não acreditam em estatística. "

Well, that was quick. It was just a couple of days ago that we first heard about the BlackBerry podcast app. It seems like a great way to access the BBGeekcast, coming up this afternoon. There was no real word of release date, and while I thought it would come some time in the near future I didn’t exactly expect this. If you’re a member of BlackBerry Beta Zone, you might be able to get your hands on it right now. It’s not available to everyone, but select users will be able to test it and provide feedback.

(more…)

While you slept, Cyanogen released his Android 2.1 ROM for the HTC Hero Dream and Magic (that’s the G1 and myTouch 3G, respectively). Most of the bells and whistles are there, save for the new launcher (app drawer) and stock live wallpapers. And while his ROMs for the Droid and Nexus One are painless (and pretty damn awesome), this one comes with a tad of caution because you have to load the "DangerSPL" to get it to work. And if an SPL flash goes wrong, your phone is pretty much bricked. Full instructions are here.

Meanwhile, it looks like Best Buy Mobile is gearing up for some sort of official update to the Hero. As for exactly what or when? Check back later.

BusinessWeek has a report on GE’s interest in the smart meter / smart grid market – GE to Tap Demand for Smart Meters in $200 Billion Global Market.

General Electric Co. is poised to tap the $200 billion smart-meter market as nations upgrade more power meters to improve electricity use and lower costs.

More than a billion electricity measuring units may be changed to “smart meters” in the next two decades, said Luke Clemente, general manager for GE Energy’s digital energy business. A smart meter system may cost $100 to $200 a unit, depending on the technology used, and the business may be worth as much as $200 billion excluding add-on systems and devices, based on calculations from GE data. …

The company is targeting U.K., Portugal, Spain, Germany and France as the European Union plans to replace 80 percent of their meters by 2020, the Atlanta-based GE official said. Smart grid installations may grow at “double digits” every year, he said, without giving details.

The U.S., which announced an $8 billion upgrade to the nation’s grid in October, plans to replace about 40 million of its 120 million meters with smart ones over three years. …

China, where GE built a smart grid demonstration center in Yangzhou, plans to replace 400 million meters in five years, Clemente said. South Korea, Asia’s fourth-largest energy user, said in January that it may spend about 27.5 trillion won ($24.5 billion) by 2030 building so-called smart power grids.

ABC Family has cancelled 10 Things I Hate About You. On Thursday, the network announced that the original comedy — which premiered to record ratings in 2009 — will end at the end of its current second season.
10 Things was based on the 1999 Shakespeare-inspired teen comedy of the same name, which starred Julia Stiles, Gabrielle Union, and the late Heath Ledger.