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Quantic Dream’s boss David Cage is a bit skeptical of the upcoming motion-sensing peripheral from Microsoft, claiming that the company lied on it’s Natal presentation at last year’s E3 conference.
 
 

Among the many oddities of writing proposals is that most RFPs require that the applicant demonstrate extensive collaborations or form partnerships. I don’t know why RFPs demand this, because it is unlikely that a collaboration between McDonald’s and Burger King would result in a better burger (McWhopper?). The feds specially preclude businesses from “collaborating” through a host of laws designed to protect competition. But in the world of nonprofits and public agencies, alleged collaborations and partnerships are demanded.

A case in point is the Department of Labor Community-Based Job Training Program, for which we are writing a proposal on behalf of a very large community college district. This SGA (“Solicitation of Grant Availability,” since DOL disdains the pedestrian term, “RFP”) has a long-winded section on required “partnerships and strategic planning” for a competitive proposal. What makes this funny is that the primary applicants for this program are community colleges, which are key local training providers and presumably have the capacity to simply operate yet another training effort all by themselves.

Our client, for example, has over 100,000 students in dozens of certificate and degree programs. Why would a community college district like this need to collaborate with any other entity, especially considered the administrative overhead necessary, unless it was in a mood to do so? All colleges and universities compete constantly with one another for students, endowments, star faculty, state and private operating funds, grants and, for that matter, high quality basketball players. In preparation for tonight’s NCAA Championship Game, I don’t think Duke’s crusty and cagey Coach K will have met with Butler’s young phenom coach Brad Stevens to discuss a collaborative game plan or share recruiting ideas for the incoming class.

In the proposal world where Seliger + Associates lives, collaborations are omnipresent in our drafts, and we spin elaborate tales of strategic planning and intensive involvement in development of project concepts, most of which are woven out of whole cloth to match the collaborative mythology that funders expect (remember: your grant story needs to get the money). In many ways, grant writers are myth makers, or maybe more appropriately myth tellers, sort of like West African “griot” who pass on ancestral knowledge, albeit in written rather than verbal form. At some point, I’ll write a long post on grant writer as myth teller, but in the context of collaboration, this particular myth only goes back about 20 years or so.

I don’t recall any interest among funders in having nonprofits collaborate with each other when I first started writing human services proposals in the early 1970s. The first whiff of collaboration I encountered was something called the “A-95 Review Process” when I was the Grants Coordinator for the City of Lynwood, CA in the late 70’s. This Carter-era gem required local governments to circulate their draft grant proposals to other government agencies for review and comment before submission, which made pre-computer grant writing deadlines really hard to meet. In LA, this function was handled by the wonderfully named SCAG (Southern California Association of Governments), which published a weekly compendium of proposed grant applications. A-95 was supposed to encourage cities to collaborate with each other. At Lynnwood, we reviewed the SCAG A-95 bulletin closely to see if we could screw up a competing city’s proposal by commenting and forcing them to respond in hopes of getting them to blow the deadline, while we got ours in on time. Competing cities responded in kind, so this attempt at intergovernmental cooperation quickly devolved into a farce.

In 1982, the profoundly dumb A-95 process was junked by the Reagan Administration in favor of Executive Order 12372, which let the states decide which proposals to review and how to do the review, while making both public agencies and nonprofits participate. I’m fairly confident that virtually all of the thousands of EO 12372 notifications we sent to states on behalf of clients since 1993 were simply thrown out. I can only recall one incident, about 12 years ago, in which our client actually received an inquiry from the EO 12372 notice we sent in. Over the years, all but 10 states have abandoned EO 12372, though you’ll still see it immortalized on every SF-424, which is the cover sheet for most federal proposals. So much for forced planning and collaboration at the federal and state level.

From 1978 to 1993, I worked for cities and, to the extent I wrote proposals, I wrote them mostly for economic development and affordable housing programs. When I started Seliger + Associates in 1993 and returned to writing human services proposals, about the only thing that surprised me was that government and foundation funders had discovered the wonders of collaboration during my 15-year hiatus. We’ve developed lots of ways of conforming to the mythology of collaboration through clever and obfuscating proposalese, because our clients typically compete tooth and nail with other providers for grants, donations, volunteers, and, in some cases, clients, particularly those with third-party payers (think substance abuse treatment and primary health care). The alleged “collaborations” we conjure up last just long enough to get the grant and are usually confirmed by “letters of commitment” attached to the proposal. I hate to break it to the funders, but agencies trade these letters with one another like the Magic: The Gathering cards that Jake collected when he was about 10.

The only folks who do not seem to be in on the collaboration joke are funders, who earnestly believe in the myth that nonprofits should collaborate, like kindergartners told to share. I even recently spotted a reference about “administrative collaboration” in The Grantsmanship Center’s “Centered” newsletter, quoting The Nonprofit Times, as follows: “As the recession saps their grantmaking capacity, many funders are directly or indirectly urging their grantees to cooperate or collaborate more.” I have news for The Grantsmanship Center and The Nonprofit Times: funders were just as in love with collaboration before the Great Recession and will likely remain so when good times return. Keep in mind that it is vastly easier to form new nonprofits than it is to find millionaires and corporations to set up foundations to fund the avalanche of new nonprofits. So why would an average nonprofit want to help the agency down the street?

Adding to the humorous aspect of the faux foundation concern for collaboration is that foundations actually compete one another for prestige, telegenic grantees and the like. Or have you ever wondered why it is necessary for a foundation like the MacArthur Foundation to “advertise” their support for PBS programming at the start and the end of the program?

Funders are just as interested in playing the status and competitions game as any other kind of organization. But if they want to pretend that nonprofit and public agencies collaborate, then nonprofit and public agencies will happily maintain the facade to get funded.

Discover the Planets, a Kids Can book written by Cynthia Pratt Nicolson and illustrated by Bill Slavin, introduces kids to the planets in our solar system.  This book is written at a level for kids to be able to read on their own.  Therefore, it is not as in depth as other books but it is a great resource for introduce students to the basic facts about our solar system and the planets.  The beginning answers questions like “What is a planet?” and “How can we compare the sizes of the planets?”  Then the book spotlights each planet giving facts like how long it takes to orbit around the sun and information about any moons.  A mix of photos and illustrations keeps the pages visually interesting and informative.

Curriculum Connections

Discover the planets can be used to teach students about the organization of the solar system (4.7) including details about the planets (4.7a), their order from the sun (4.7b), and their relative sizes (4.7c).  This book also covers information about Earth in relation to the the sun and moon (4.8).

Additional Resource

Go to the Head of the Solar System – a fun trivia game sponsored by NASA.

Make a mobile as a model of the Solar System.

Make your own Planet at KidsAstronomy.

Listen to kids’ interviews with NASA scientists to find out more about space and working for NASA.

General Information

Book: Discover the Planets
Author: Cynthia Pratt Nicolson
Illustrator: Bill Slavin
Publisher: Kids Can Press
Publication date: 2005
Pages: 32
Grade Range: K-5
ISBN: 1553378261

EMDB is a small application to keep track of your DVD collection. Some of the features include automatic import from the database of IMDB, cover preview, a loan tracker, search function and multi-language user interface. EMDB is Written in Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 and doesn´t need a .NET framework or any other external libraries.

What’s New in version 0.98:

• System: Fixed several settings of the Options Dialog were sometimes resetted.
• System: Fixed crash when closing application on Windows XP.
• User Interface: Added scrollwheel support to Bookshelf Viewing mode.
• IMDB Update All Movies: thumbnails were not saved correctly.
• Add Movie Dialog: Browse HDD did not use the correct path to query IMDB for DVD folders.
• Add Movie Dialog: Added a button to rotate the thumbnail.
• User Interface: Removed Ctrl-X as shortcut key for closing EMDB as it broke the default Windows cut selected text functionality.
• Movie Properties: Added BluRay Regions and Sound properties.
• User Interface: Fixed sorting of the Comments column.

Homepage: http://www.emdb.tk/
Download: emdb.zip
File Size: 967KB

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Fresh Fed minutes are coming out tomorrow, and for the first time in a while, Bernanke may not simply cut & paste what he wrote last time.

BTIG’s Mike O’Rourke warns you:

Tomorrow the FOMC minutes from the March 16^th meeting will be released.  At the time of that meeting, we noted we expected now to be an appropriate time for the Fed to begin to lay the groundwork to change the “exceptionally and extended” language.  In doing so, it will put the FOMC in a position to make a formal language change at this month’s meeting on April 28^th.  In altering the language, the FOMC will still not be expected to tighten monetary policy until October or November at the earliest.  As economic data improves, if the members want to leave themselves the room to move in 2010 if necessary, the language will need to change soon.  A very first gradual shift may have already occurred.  Last Thursday, New York Fed President and FOMC Vice Chair Bill Dudley invoked the “exceptionally and extended” language in reference to the March minutes, but more importantly, he referred to the recovery as sustainable.  “We have been very aggressive in providing support to the economy, and it now appears that a sustainable recovery is underway.”  Dudley is squarely in the dove camp, and is quick to rattle off the litany of headwinds to the recovery.  Therefore, such a notable statement could signal this early transition is occurring.  We will be looking to tomorrow’s release for additional signs.

If this happens, there’s a good chance the dollar will go nuts.

Another reason to think Bernanke will get in the raising mood soon: All those industrial commodities going nuts >

Join the conversation about this story »

River Dvina at Arkhangelsk City, on the coast of White Sea. In places like this, they need giant, floating chain saws to cut through miles of ice. In places like this, vampires fight with zombies at night. More »

Drew Mackie has posted an item about this not very appetizing-sounding Chinese dish on his personal blog.  He writes:  “A bit of searching has led me only to find out that this food is not, in fact, enema content that is fried, but I don’t know exactly what it is or how it might have gotten its name.”

Here’s the unsavory-sounding dish in the context of the original menu:

Drew asked for help from Language Log.   Luckily this puzzle is particularly easy to solve.

The Chinese name of the dish in question is zhá guànchang 炸灌腸, which is a kind of sausage made of wheat flour stuffed into hog casings and fried.  The last two characters, pronounced guàncháng,  also have a completely different meaning, viz., “enema” or “give an enema” (literally, “to irrigate the intestine”).

This is a good example of the spoken language being clearer than the written language — at least when one is relying on not-very-good machine translation.

Google Translate renders 炸灌腸 correctly as “fried sausage”.  Unfortunately, restaurants in China can no longer use that method to improve the lexicographical appeal of their English-language menus.

So here’s the deal. MobileCrunch is doing well. Like really, really well. February was our biggest month ever, and then March went and made February look silly.

That makes the people upstairs happy – and when they’re happy, we’re all happy, because we get to make improvements.

So we turn to you, dear reader, and ask: What do you want from us?

We think we’ve got a pretty good idea of what you guys like at this point, but we wanted to take a minute to lend an open ear and let you all know that we’re always open to suggestions. Will we go and make all of them a reality right this second? No. Last time we tried to do that someone suggested “Free Cookie Friday” and that just got expensive and overwhelming and I burned myself. But we’ll do our damnedest to take it all to heart.

Some of the stuff we’re looking to roll out with haste:

• More content! You guys seem to like reading our non-sense for some reason or another, so we want to bring you more of it. We’re bringing on a new writer really soon to help keep the posts a-flowin’, and we’re shifting our schedules a bit to keep things constant throughout the day. Stay tuned.
• A brand new section of the site that reaches outside of the news side of things. This may take a few weeks, but it’ll make your life easier. I hope. Or, at least, I hope it won’t make it harder.
• Contests! We used to do waaay more contests – then we got distracted with, you know, actually working and getting stuff done and all that. You guys like free stuff and we like rewarding you for being super rad, so we’ll try to get you guys some hook-ups soon.
• Proper tagging system. It’s not a big change, but its something we should have done ages ago.
• Ways to better connect the writers and the readers. We’re good people. You guys seem like good people. Lets be friends and slay dragons. Or at least geek out on cell phones.

Some stuff I’m curious about:

• Video: I like video, but shooting one video takes a whole lot more time than writing one post does. Is it worth it? Do you guys want to see my sweet, pasty face all up on MobileCrunch? Maybe a weekend video podcast summarizing the weeks mobile news with a dash of banter and a pinch of snark?
• Feature phones: How many of you care about them? I try to keep feature phone coverage to a minimum and stick to mostly the smartphone side of things, primarily because I assume (from the post view numbers) that our audience doesn’t really give a hoot about LG’s latest messaging phone.
• How are the lengths of our posts? Too wordy? Too short?

That’s all. Feel free to answer all, some, or none of these — just spill whatever is on your mind. “Holler at your boy”, or what have you.

President Obama’s new health care reforms will help millions more people in the U.S. get access to modern medical care and preventive health services, just like every other country in the developed world.  All things being equal, that would lead to a rapid surge in greenhouse gas emissions attributed to the health care industry, which is already notorious for its resource-gobbling ways.  However, things never are actually equal.

In terms of greenhouse gas emissions and waste reduction the health care industry has already been laying the groundwork for dealing with a potentially huge surge in demand for its services.  That will not only come from Presidents Obama’s new health care reforms.  It will also come from a rise in the population of older (and very older) people in the U.S., and from new energy demands by emerging high tech health care equipment.

(more…)

Imagine if the tens of millions who give time and money to tending their Farmville game were instead working for social change. A team of Hollywood’s elite talent has been working with an army of advisors for six years to create a game building infrastructure that will make it so.

Armchair Revolutionary is a social gaming and strategic crowdsourcing concept that’s based on real life social needs. The games are designed to connect the real-time Web to real-time social change.

Sponsor

Social Change Innovators is a non-profit that wholly-owns Armchair Revolutionary LLC. ArmRev projects are funded by $0.99 gifts by its users. These funds are donated to charities and in some cases are invested in for-profit startups in exchange for an equity position. Profits from these investments are then reinvested into other social change projects on the ArmRev site. The gifting concept is true to the recent sea change in online gaming, which is driven by virtual currency.

In a few years ArmRev will scale up to 250 games annually. These games aim to use augmented reality and Internet of Things in a way that’s more fun, more popular and more real than Farmville could ever be. The first three games to be introduced are: Make Waves, End of Darkness and Hack Your Body. Hack Your Body includes quizzes about genetic research, as well as software tools to track your body’s health. End of Darkness also has quizzes and learning activities, but this program is unique in that it funds for-profit franchises who will sell low cost solar kits to poor people in India, eventually around the world. Make Waves is a simulation game that’s augmented with data from real world sensors. It’s similar to an adopt-a-rainforest campaigns where you adopt a specific patch of the planet, but what’s unique about this game is that the player will be connected to real-time ocean sensors.

Each ArmRev user has their own social change dashboard which is modeled after a personal stock market portfolio dashboard. ArmRev’s game projects are produced by the Play4Change Lab, which is a: “…collaboration between USC’s Game Institute and The Hollywood Hill. The lab specializes in games that integrate new technologies such as sensor networks, augmented reality, simulation, and virtual goods.”

To set up your ArmRev Profile go here.
To submit your photos and art to benefit social good go here.

Discuss

“Making wind-generated electricity more steady will enable wind power to become a much larger fraction of our electric sources,” said Willett Kempton, University of Delaware professor of marine policy and author of a new paper which proposes linking wind powered generators to steady electrical production.

The paper, published in the April 5 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that by linking wind powered generation sites with a power line, the electrical output could be stabilized to avoid surges and drops.

Additionally, the researchers showed that wind installations should be set up and fine-tuned according to local meteorological data, and not just space available.

Smart thinking is what the researchers are looking for in future installations.

“Our analysis shows that when transmission systems will carry power from renewable sources, such as wind, they should be designed to consider large-scale meteorology, including the prevailing movement of high- and low-pressure systems,” said Dr. Kempton.

The study is based upon a hypothetical offshore wind farm based along the U.S. East Coast. The team analysed five years of wind observations from 11 monitoring stations stretching from Florida to Maine, and created a hypothetical power grid based on wind speeds at each location as if being powered by five-megawatt offshore turbines.

From this hypothetical power grid they were able to study the seasonal effects on power output.

“A north-south transmission geometry fits nicely with the storm track that shifts northward or southward along the U.S. East Coast on a weekly or seasonal time scale,” said Brian Colle, associate professor in the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University. “Because then at any one time a high or low pressure system is likely to be producing wind (and thus power) somewhere along the coast.”

One of the main problems foreseen by experts with environmentally powered electricity generation is the fractious nature of … nature. Sun doesn’t always shine, water doesn’t always pound and wind doesn’t always blow. But by investigating a regions weather patterns, and linking the sites with a power line, the output can be smoothed out so that maximum or minimum output is rare.

There are currently no wind turbines inhabiting US waters, despite multiple projects being proposed. This in contract to the booming wind power industry in Europe, where the stormy nature of the North Sea and similar bodies of water make for perfect wind generation.

Source: Stony Brook University

Image Credit: chaunceydavis818

Hey, all you guys and gals out there with the Samsung Moment who have been patiently (or not — we do check our Twitter replies, you know) for your phone to get the latest version of Android: It looks like things are getting closer after missing that rumored March 26 date. Above (and after the break) are shots of Android 2.1 running on the Moment, straight from KansasCityJoe in our own forums. In his own words:

Just got it early this morning and it is not for general release yet. I just started playing with it, but it seems much faster/more responsive than 1.5.

It does not appear to have pinch-to-zoom on either the Gallery or the Browser. Same backgrounds/bloatware that 1.5 has. When you launch NFL Mobile Live, it tells you it will be replaced by "Sprint Football Live".

It actually, now, has VPN built in (PPTP, L2TP, L2TP/IPSec both PSK and Certificate-based). Bluetooth is vastly improved. There is no more cutting out. Your headset will re-pair without having to put the phone into discoverable mode after you reboot.

You slide-to-answer a phone call now. It has voice input ("an experimental feature using Google’s networked speech recognition") built it and it actually works! No more texting while driving! Extremely cool!

Email will now work with any certificate (not just signed).

The update erases everything on the device, and it’s probably a good idea just to reinstall everything from scratch. Some of the 1.5 apps I’m not finding in the Market for 2.1. And some versions of apps in the Market say they don’t work with 2.0 yet.

So, you’ve got the latest and greatest Android 2.1-update1, same as the Nexus One and, now, the Droid, though with a couple of caveats. Build number is listed as ECLAIR.DC23, Kernel version is 2.6.29 and the baseband is S:M900.8.05.DC23.

What does that mean, in English? An Android 2.1 upgrade and all its bells and whistles appears to be in the works. Hang on just a little longer, folks. More pics after the break. [Android Central Forums]

read more

From Hanwha Japan Co., Ltd. comes a video camera specifically designed to be used as a black box video recording system for your car. The UMAZONe X-Vue K3 is a compact camera that can hold up to 2 hours of video footage if you use the 2 gigabyte SD memory card that comes included. When the memory card is full, the camera will continue on a continuous loop by deleting the old files and starting anew…

Tags: Car,
Loop,
Memory card,
SD,
Video,
Video Camera

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Every time I get sad I don’t have a hoverboard, I remind myself that Back to the Future II takes place in 2015. There’s still time! And as these exquisite original concept drawings show, there’s so much more to crave. More »