Have a 4-foot pumpkin globe on your lawn yet? As the decorations get bigger and bolder and the neighbors compete for the most gaudy lawn ornament or string lights for Halloween, take a quick look at the roots of Halloween, which extend way back before the latest Walmart sale. The history of Halloween may date to the ancient Celts more than 2000 years ago and ancient Romans of the first century A.D..
If the sugar high is too much for absorbing history right now, grab some candy and take a peak at the worst Halloween costumes of all time and the list of 50 worst Halloween costumes (pretty funny).
The story hit the Boston Globe yesterday with the headline "Deal reported close for Houghton Mifflin." No new information really reported other than the figure changed from $5 Billion as originally reported in the UK Times to $3.5 Billion. According to the article, "Industry analysts said such a merger could make sense. Riverdeep is the largest publisher of K-12 educational software in the United States, and Houghton Mifflin is the fourth largest publisher of K-12 textbooks, supplements, and standardized tests, according to Simba Information, a publishing industry market research firm in Stamford, Conn.
The merger would provide Riverdeep with extensive sales channels to US schools and state education departments, while giving Houghton Mifflin the chance to expand its digital products, industry analysts said."
Full article…
I left Houghton Mifflin about 3 months ago and was shocked this morning to hear the news that there is a potential merger in the works between Houghton Mifflin (Boston-based publisher) and the Irish company Riverdeep. The story still seems to be developing as the Times Online in the UK is the only place reporting it so far. No press release from Houghton Mifflin yet or news in the Boston Globe or Herald. Stay tuned for more…
October 22: Ireland: Riverdeep takes US giant
October 23: Rumour of the day
October 24: Riverdeep plans reverse takeover of Houghton Mifflin
Time to skate! I’m currently in training for the 2006-2007 adult skating competitve season and have two new programs in the works. It’s been a long year filled with injuries, surgeries, and one foot is in need of ligament repair now but still feeling strong overall. Both the freestyle and interpretive costumes will be homemade but of course the colors, style, and program music will be a secret for a little while still!
Another election approaches and the U.S. is really not much further along in its use of technology to develop safe, secure, and easy-to-use voting machines. Take a look at WIRED’s article on recommendations for building better voting devices. They spoke to two computer scientists who proposed alternatives through a combined touch screen and optical scan reader
I first read this article on Yahoo’s site this morning about a 10,000-year-old meteorite whose discovery will be talked about by anthropologists, scientists, and astronomers. The technology located the meteorite 4 feet under heavy soils of a Kansas wheat field, made an accurate 3-D representation of it, and most importantly, validates a technique targeted for investigating the terrain on Mars. GPR (sonar) systems used in Antartica to locate meteorites are capable of penetraing the ice but aren’t as useful in dense soil and rocky areas. What’s fascinating about this meteorite’s Pleistocene epoch date of 10,000 years ago is that the early North Americans that crossed the land bridge from Siberia into Alaska then into the Plains inhabited the land at that point and could have been witness to this meteor shower. The article mentions that the remnants of other meteorites across the plains and into the Indian Mounds of Ohio apparently were traded as "pieces of jewelry and ceremonial artifacts."
From WIRED magazine, "Palm and pumpkin seed oil could soon be generating electricity to help power cell phone networks across Africa under a plan to replace fossil fuels with sustainable biofuels made from crops grown by local farmers…..Ericsson estimates around 0.5 square kilometers of palm oil crops are needed to generate the fuel for 20 base stations, the equivalent of 83 football fields." The work is expected to begin in Nigeria where the fuel will be processed from palm, groundnut, pumpkin seeds and jatropha. The article mentions that this approach is also likely expand to Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya and possibly India.
10/14/06) - Team USA swept the gold medals in all four events at JGP Taipei City in the Junior Grand Prix event this weekend. 10/15/06 The Campbell’s Cup will be held in Ohio and aired on ABC at 1 PM EST.
Check out this cool technology used for the visual thesaurus. I’ve seen this type of 3-D mapping technology demonstrated before at conferences but it’s encouraging to see it in use on the web in a practical application like a thesaurus. Several years ago it was believed that this approach to linking would aid in revolutionary navigational designs for web sites but it hasn’t quite taken off just yet!
What’s the next generation of the Web? At a panel discussion scheduled to take place at the third annual Web 2.0 conference next month, questions will be posed to a handful of teenagers who represent the fastest growing users of the Internet today–37 million 18- to 24-year-olds. According to the conference web site, "The Web 2.0 Conference focuses on emerging business and technology developments that utilize the Web as a platform and defines how the Web will drive business in the future. Now that the Web has become a robust platform with countless innovations driving its ongoing development, widespread disruptions in traditional business models are well underway."
