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Bi-weekly update on U.S. Department of Education activities relevant to the Intergovernmental and Corporate community and other stakeholders.On November 15, the non-partisan National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) released results of the 2007 Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA), which provides comparable data on fourth- and eighth-grade reading and mathematics achievement in 11 of the nation's urban school districts.

Children And The Internet, Internet, Internet Governance Forum, Internet Security, Law Of The Internet, Breaking Media News, Media Literacy only about 1 billion, or 20% of the world's population have Net access

More than 150 friends?!

The Wall Street Journal's "numbers guy," Carl Bialik <http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB119518271549595364.html>, zoomed in on that number - 150 - which many reporters have cited as the limit to the number of personal contacts any human being could possibly sustain. This is when they're writing stories about the lengthy friends lists some teens have amassed in social sites. The 150 comes from the research of Robin Dunbar at Oxford University, "extrapolating from social groups in nonhuman primates and then crediting people with greater capacity because of our larger neocortex, the part of the brain used for conscious thought and language." Ah, got it. So we definitely can sustain more friendships than primates. But, actually, Dunbar himself, Bialik reports, believes that social sites "could 'in principle' allow users to push past the limit." To the professor, the real question is "whether those who keep ties to hundreds of people do so to the detriment of their closest
relationships - defined by Prof. Dunbar as those formed with people you turn to when in severe distress." Bialik cites another recent UK survey that found - no huge surprise - friendships really start offline, but "less-close friendships and acquaintanceships, however, also die offline, while the Web can help sustain them" [read the article for examples].

A massive security breach involving the personal information of "virtually every child in Britain" has occurred in the United Kingdom. This is a clear illustration of risky it would be to have a national database of children's personal information in the US, which is what would be required in order to establish children's age verification online.

Google buys and collects everything - it's frightening!

Over the past several years I've been playing with Linux to get an idea of what it's all about and how it can be used. It wasn't until recently that I felt comfortable telling my non-techie friends to jump in.

* Japan is now fingerprinting all foreigners. Fingerprinted foreigners now will have the distinction of having the same status as former Korean slaves.

Comments, thoughts, and suggestions requested. Botnets (also called zombie armies or drone armies) are networks of compromised computers infected with viruses or malware to turn them into “zombies” or “robots” – computers that can be controlled without the owners’ knowledge. Criminals use the collective computing power and connected bandwidth of these externally-controlled networks for malicious purposes and criminal activities, including, inter alia, generation of spam e-mails, launching of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, alteration or destruction of data, and identity theft.

Bunhill Cemetery is just down the road from my flat in London. It’s a handsome old boneyard, a former plague pit (“Bone hill” -- as in, there are so many bones under there that the ground is actually kind of humped up into a hill). There are plenty of luminaries buried there -- John “Pilgrim’s Progress” Bunyan, William Blake, Daniel Defoe, and assorted Cromwells. But my favorite tomb is that of Thomas Bayes, the 18th-century statistician for whom Bayesian filtering is named.