Mobile, social learning

Technology-in-education expert Dr. William Rankin also believes digital books will expand with tools that will enable social interactions among textbook users. Rankin, who serves as Director of Educational Innovation of Abilene Christian University and has extensively researched the use of mobile devices in the classroom, was one of three authors of a white paper on the effects of digital convergence on learning titled "Code/X," published in 2009.In that document, Rankin and his colleagues laid out their vision for the future of learning, which included an always-on, always-networked digital device called a "Talos." That device turned out to be very similar to the iPad that Apple announced just six months later."What we saw coming was a change in the kinds of places that learning would happen," Rankin told Ars. Since the device would always be with the student, it would give her access to information anytime and anywhere. "For that, you need a different kind of book."Such digital texts would let students interact with information in visual ways, such as 3D models, graphs, and videos. Classic Short Ugg Boots They would also allow students to create links to additional texts, audio, and other supporting materials. Furthermore, students could share those connections with classmates and colleagues."What we really believe is important is the role of social networking in a converged learning environment," Rankin told Ars. "We're already seeing that in Inkling's platform, and Kno's journaling feature. Future digital texts should allow students to layer all kind of other data, such as pictures, and notes, and then share that with the class or, ideally, anyone."Exactly how what Apple announces on Thursday will impact digital publishing isn't certain, however."Think about how meaningful simply authoring and publishing to an iPad will be for K-12," MacInnis said. "However, it might not be great for molecular biology."MacInnis sees Apple as possibly up-ending the traditional print publishing model for the low-end, where basic information has for many years remained locked behind high textbook prices. Apple can "kick up dust with the education market," which could then create visibility for platforms like Inkling. This could then serve as a sort of professional Logic-type tool for interactive textbook creation complement to Apple's "GarageBand for e-books.""There will be a spectrum of tools and consumers, and we will continue to fit on that spectrum," MacInnis opined. "I don't know if the publishing industry will react to it with fear or enthusiasm."

‘Inadequate’ Proposal

Harris in September called a proposed settlement with the banks “inadequate” and said California was being asked “to excuse conduct that has not been adequately investigated.”One person familiar with the matter said more such meetings among attorneys general will probably be held.Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller is leading talks for the states. UGG Bailey Button Boots Geoff Greenwood, his spokesman, said in an e-mailed statement that Miller and other representatives of the negotiating team “encourage input from their colleagues.”“Through frequent conference calls, they have kept state attorneys general apprised of developments and have received helpful feedback and constructive input,” Greenwood said. “They look forward to continuing to working with their colleagues as they work hard toward reaching a solid settlement agreement.”

S&P downgrades France and Austria

The eurozone debt crisis returned with a vengeance on Friday as Standard & Poor’s, the credit rating agency, downgraded France and Austria – two of the currency zone’s six triple A rated countries – as well as seven nations not in that top tier, among them Italy and Spain.S&P, under political fire since it announced a review or eurozone debt in December, gave 14 of 16 countries – including France, Italy and Spain – a negative outlook, which it said meant a one-in-three chance for each country of a further downgrade this year or next.“It is not good news ... but it is not a catastrophe,” said François Baroin, France’s finance minister. “It is not the ratings agencies that dictate the policies of France.”The downgrades reignited fears about the fiscal sustainability of the eurozone and the knock-on effect on its rescue fund, which could now lose its own triple A rating, reducing its firepower or forcing eurozone nations to increase contributions yet again. S&P said last month’s European Union summit, which saw eurozone leaders agree steps towards fiscal union, had “not produced a breakthrough of sufficient size” to overcome a crisis which had already forced bail-outs of Greece, Ireland and Portugal.Nonetheless, Germany kept its triple A rating, along with the Netherlands, Finland and Luxembourg. Classic Short Ugg Boots Germany and Slovakia, downgraded from A plus to A, were the only countries who were not deemed in danger of a further downgrade by the end of 2013.The agency’s move prompted an immediate political backlash.Olli Rehn, EU monetary affairs commissioner, called S&P’s decisions “inconsistent” and suggested they ignored the “decisive action” taken by the eurozone to commit to budget, structural and banking-sector reforms, and to a more powerful rescue fund.In words echoed by other countries, the German government said the eurozone’s determination to overcome the debt crisis stood “beyond question”, noting that markets had recently calmed “in appreciation” of the fact that this goal was realistic.Earlier, financial markets slid as news of the downgrade leaked and investors sold the euro, eurozone equities and sovereign bonds, especially from Italy and Spain – the latter move pushing down yields for German Bunds and US Treasuries, held to be havens. The downgrades came in lockstep with new problems for the eurozone on other fronts – debt-restructuring talks between Greece and holders of its debt broke down over how large bondholders’ losses should be, raising the spectre of a Greek default in March. In Frankfurt, the European Central Bank criticised the draft of a new fiscal discipline treaty for the euro area, saying that the latest version amounted to “a substantial watering-down” of tough deficit levels that could allow “easy circumvention of the [deficit] rule” by struggling governments. ECB endorsement of the pact had been seen as crucial, since one of the main purposes of enshrining tough new debt and deficit rules was to give the central bank more leeway to purchase the bonds of Italy and Spain more aggressively, lowering their unsustainably high borrowing costs. “These revisions in my view clearly run against the spirit of the initial general agreement on an ambitious fiscal compact,” Jörg Asmussen, an ECB executive board member, wrote in the letter obtained by the Financial Times. The downgrades – announced after US markets closed on Friday – come after the S&P in December warned the six triple A nations and nine others in the eurozone that it had put their creditworthiness on review as a result of the debt crisis and the worsening economic outlook. Cyprus, also downgraded on Friday night, was already on review, and Greece not under consideration.Ahead of the statement confirming the downgrades, the euro fell more than 1 per cent to a 17-month low against the dollar and early gains on European stock markets were erased. Sovereign bond markets were also rattled, with Italy and Spain’s borrowing costs creeping up again after several days of sharp drops. France’s 10-year bond yields edged up, to 3.05 per cent, while Germany’s 10-year bond saw its yield drop to 1.75 per cent as investors returned to safer assets. Italy was hit with additional charges for the trading of the country’s government bonds by clearing houses. LCH.Clearnet SA raised margin payments for conventional bonds of maturities ranging between 3.25 years and 30 years, and 2 per cent on all Italian index-linked bonds.

S&P downgrades France and Austria

The eurozone debt crisis returned with a vengeance on Friday as Standard & Poor’s, the credit rating agency, downgraded France and Austria – two of the currency zone’s six triple A rated countries – as well as seven nations not in that top tier, among them Italy and Spain.S&P, under political fire since it announced a review or eurozone debt in December, gave 14 of 16 countries – including France, Italy and Spain – a negative outlook, which it said meant a one-in-three chance for each country of a further downgrade this year or next.“It is not good news ... but it is not a catastrophe,” said François Baroin, France’s finance minister. “It is not the ratings agencies that dictate the policies of France.”The downgrades reignited fears about the fiscal sustainability of the eurozone and the knock-on effect on its rescue fund, which could now lose its own triple A rating, reducing its firepower or forcing eurozone nations to increase contributions yet again. S&P said last month’s European Union summit, which saw eurozone leaders agree steps towards fiscal union, had “not produced a breakthrough of sufficient size” to overcome a crisis which had already forced bail-outs of Greece, Ireland and Portugal.Nonetheless, Germany kept its triple A rating, along with the Netherlands, Finland and Luxembourg. Classic Short Ugg Boots Germany and Slovakia, downgraded from A plus to A, were the only countries who were not deemed in danger of a further downgrade by the end of 2013.The agency’s move prompted an immediate political backlash.Olli Rehn, EU monetary affairs commissioner, called S&P’s decisions “inconsistent” and suggested they ignored the “decisive action” taken by the eurozone to commit to budget, structural and banking-sector reforms, and to a more powerful rescue fund.In words echoed by other countries, the German government said the eurozone’s determination to overcome the debt crisis stood “beyond question”, noting that markets had recently calmed “in appreciation” of the fact that this goal was realistic.Earlier, financial markets slid as news of the downgrade leaked and investors sold the euro, eurozone equities and sovereign bonds, especially from Italy and Spain – the latter move pushing down yields for German Bunds and US Treasuries, held to be havens. The downgrades came in lockstep with new problems for the eurozone on other fronts – debt-restructuring talks between Greece and holders of its debt broke down over how large bondholders’ losses should be, raising the spectre of a Greek default in March. In Frankfurt, the European Central Bank criticised the draft of a new fiscal discipline treaty for the euro area, saying that the latest version amounted to “a substantial watering-down” of tough deficit levels that could allow “easy circumvention of the [deficit] rule” by struggling governments. ECB endorsement of the pact had been seen as crucial, since one of the main purposes of enshrining tough new debt and deficit rules was to give the central bank more leeway to purchase the bonds of Italy and Spain more aggressively, lowering their unsustainably high borrowing costs. “These revisions in my view clearly run against the spirit of the initial general agreement on an ambitious fiscal compact,” Jörg Asmussen, an ECB executive board member, wrote in the letter obtained by the Financial Times. The downgrades – announced after US markets closed on Friday – come after the S&P in December warned the six triple A nations and nine others in the eurozone that it had put their creditworthiness on review as a result of the debt crisis and the worsening economic outlook. Cyprus, also downgraded on Friday night, was already on review, and Greece not under consideration.Ahead of the statement confirming the downgrades, the euro fell more than 1 per cent to a 17-month low against the dollar and early gains on European stock markets were erased. Sovereign bond markets were also rattled, with Italy and Spain’s borrowing costs creeping up again after several days of sharp drops. France’s 10-year bond yields edged up, to 3.05 per cent, while Germany’s 10-year bond saw its yield drop to 1.75 per cent as investors returned to safer assets. Italy was hit with additional charges for the trading of the country’s government bonds by clearing houses. LCH.Clearnet SA raised margin payments for conventional bonds of maturities ranging between 3.25 years and 30 years, and 2 per cent on all Italian index-linked bonds.

Imagining a world without Guantanamo

Ten years after its opening, mention Guantanamo, and a thousand images emerge. Men in orange jumpsuits wearing goggles, hoods and handcuffs, hunched over in the relentless Caribbean sun; zoo-like cages, exposed to the elements, with nothing but buckets as toilets; secret areas of the prison compound where “enhanced interrogation techniques” were tested; a detainee deprived of sleep, and injected forcibly with fluids to cause swelling, until he broke; men found hanging from ropes in their cells.What would a world without Guantanamo be like? That’s two questions, really. First, one must imagine a world in which the detention facility had never opened its doors. And, less fanciful, a world in which it closed down now. To begin, it’s a good idea to remind ourselves of what Guantanamo has been and what it means today. From the start, the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was painted for the public as containing unimaginably bad inmates. White House and military officials insisted that the prisoners there were “the worst of the worst”; former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Richard Myers described the detainees as almost superhuman — able to “gnaw hydraulic lines” on the airplane bringing them to the facility.President George W. Bush insisted that there was no rendition-to-torture program, until the day he moved 14 prisoners from the program to the camp, proudly announcing the national security value of interrogating them. Members of Congress dutifully repeated the mantras set out by Bush and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and judges, national security officials, prosecutors and other officers of the law insisted that the U.S. court system was too weak to handle such terrible men.President Obama’s administration has concurred, pushing the closure of Guantanamo further away and buttressing its prognosis for a long life with the banal assertion that there are roughly 48 detainees who will be kept there in “indefinite detention.” Symbolically, Guantanamo has always had a power far beyond its harboring of captives in the war on terror. For civil libertarians, it represents the rights and liberties that the U.S. government violated in the name of that war, most glaringly the tolerance of open-ended detention. For its defenders, Guantanamo marks the United States’ willingness to take the gloves off.Internationally, it is a symbol of the humbling of America. Guantanamo is an invitation for others to say: “See? The United States is just like the rest of us, unable to resist going to the dark side when attacked.”Guantanamo represents what lies below the surface of America the civilized; it is a window into the lure of the brutal in times of confusion and hurt, and a reminder of the forgotten discipline that constitutional democracy requires.But mostly, Guantanamo is this: It is the place where the United States has decided to collect the universe of post-9/11 moral issues that confound its politicians, laws and people. When in doubt or ignorance, or when just plain challenged by the complexities of national security dilemmas, send the problems to Guantanamo. Don’t know what to do with prisoners captured on the terrorism battlefield? Send them to Guantanamo. Doubtful of the ability of the U.S. courts to try terrorists? Put them in Guantanamo. Anxious about the haunting realities of torture coming to light? Keep those who were tortured at Guantanamo. Convinced that fear is useful to motivate voters but harmful without superficial solutions? Invoke Guantanamo. So what if we erased all that?Without Guantanamo, there would be no focal point that so readily called to mind the U.S. role in the war on terror. Canada Goose There would be no one place that encapsulated the errant journey that the nation began in the wake of 9/11, the startling deviation from law and process, from the self-identity of America as law-abiding, transparent, confident and fair. The absence of Guantanamo — this one term that evokes so much — would have meant that the United States had not chosen the easy out. Had there been no Guantanamo, the nation would have had to confront the issues that continue to haunt us: the ability of the Constitution to deal with 21st-century enemies; the strengths and weaknesses of our intelligence services; the the uncertainty of who is an enemy and who is not. Without Guantanamo, the country’s leaders would have had to create aboveboard policies that would not have led us into a state of perpetual limbo, now codified by Congress and supported by a new president in the form of indefinite detention and military detention for foreign terrorism suspects.With no Guantanamo, there would still be much to haunt us: the war in Iraq and the lies that got us there, the losses in Afghanistan, the overstepping of the security state into conversations, virtual and otherwise. But there wouldn’t be a glaring badge of shame on the United States. Nor would there be a ready symbol of the country’s willingness to allow national security to trump the rule of law. Without Guantanamo, our moral compass wouldn’t have been so visibly hijacked.Obama has continued to use Guantanamo as a collection box for the most challenging national security dilemmas. If anything, he has intensified the prison’s role as a catch-all for the confusion of post-9/11 security — as if for each cell emptied of a human being, another is filled with a problem: the use of waterboarding and hearsay, the need for new categories of prisoners captured in war, the desire to arrest individuals for association with a terrorist group, the need to have a secondary system of justice, the political attraction of promising Congress that the enemies of the United States will not be allowed onto U.S. soil.But if we now close Guantanamo, the Pandora’s box of so much that went wrong after 9/11, it would bring to an end the entire era — and with it the anger, frustration, and loss of faith in government and the courts that has lasted a decade. The ignorance that persists, day after day, about who is there and what actual danger they pose to the United States would disappear. Gone would be some of the disappointment with lawmakers who use Guantanamo as a reminder that the nation is beset by threats and thus keep hatred and fear alive. Gone would be the emasculation of the U.S. courts as a viable venue for trying terrorism cases.Could shutting down Guantanamo resolve the legal and moral confusion unleashed by the global war on terror, or would its closure merely be another failed remedy? The answer lies in how it is done. Guantanamo can’t be closed quietly. Rather than just withering away, blanketed in excuses of political constraint and legal complexities, it needs to be shuttered with a clear declaration of rights and wrongs.Indefinite detention is wrong. Bypassing the courts is wrong. Succumbing to fear until it dominates the law is wrong.Ultimately, because Guantanamo is a repository not just of prisoners but of America’s confusion, its closure should mark a moment of clarity, and of renewed confidence in our country and the rule of law. Ironically, its existence as a catch-all symbol has the potential to right the country’s course. Close Guantanamo, and you close the box of sin that the war on terror unleashed, making us, rather than an exceptional nation, one like all the others. Close the box, bury the ills of the past decade, close the doors on a state of limbo and confusion, and America’s true exceptionalism can once again thrive.

UN Urges Aid to Avert South Sudan Disaster

The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, is calling for a massive humanitarian effort in South Sudan, where conflict has displaced tens of thousands of people. The high commissioner is set to wrap up a mission Tuesday to assess the refugee and displacement situation in South Sudan.Newly-independent South Sudan faces multiple displacement crises. Argyle Knit UGG Boots These include two refugee influxes due to fighting across the border in Sudan, and a number of internal conflicts between the government and rebel groups in Jonglei, Upper Nile and Unity states.The conflicts have resulted in tens of thousands of people fleeing Sudan to take refuge in the south and tens of thousands of South Sudanese becoming displaced within their own country. Guterres visited South Sudan this week to evaluate the situation.

Nicotine 'may aid memory for in early dementia'

Areas may develop the storage of older individuals suffering from the first the signs of dementia, scientists suppose.The patches appear to give a mental increase to individuals with gentle storage incapacity. The results, released in the publication Neurology, come from a small study of 67 individuals over a period of six months.Experts say the results are not definite, merely hinting of a benefit and do not mean individuals should using tobacco.Canada Goose The health problems of using tobacco extremely provide more benefits than any potential cigarette using tobacco benefits. And cigarette using tobacco is known to be addicting.Longer and bigger research are now needed to fully determine nicotine's effect on storage and whether it might point the way to new treatment options for Alzheimer's illness and other types of dementia, they say.