Here’s an interesting article by Malcolm Gladwell (of Tipping Point and Blink):  In homelessness and with many other social problems, a small number of people account for a huge proportion of cases, representing a massive cost to the whole system. ‘Solving homelessness’ may involve giving those few people free apartments and keeping them out of expensive last resort services.

“Homelessness doesn’t have a normal distribution, it turned out. It has a power-law distribution. “We found that eighty per cent of the homeless were in and out really quickly,” he said. “In Philadelphia, the most common length of time that someone is homeless is one day. And the second most common length is two days. And they never come back. Anyone who ever has to stay in a shelter involuntarily knows that all you think about is how to make sure you never come back.”

“… It was the last ten per cent—the group at the farthest edge of the curve—that interested Culhane the most. They were the chronically homeless, who lived in the shelters, sometimes for years at a time. They were older. Many were mentally ill or physically disabled, and when we think about homelessness as a social problem—the people sleeping on the sidewalk, aggressively panhandling, lying drunk in doorways, huddled on subway grates and under bridges—it’s this group that we have in mind. In the early nineteen-nineties, Culhane’s database suggested that New York City had a quarter of a million people who were homeless at some point in the previous half decade —which was a surprisingly high number. But only about twenty-five hundred were chronically homeless.

It turns out, furthermore, that this group costs the health-care and social-services systems far more than anyone had ever anticipated. Culhane estimates that in New York at least sixty-two million dollars was being spent annually to shelter just those twenty-five hundred hard-core homeless.”

The New Yorker: Fact.

In the last couple of years I have played with several audio presentation programs, trying to find a simple way to post teaching materials on the web. One example was ‘Giving effective presentations’, a 23 minute audio PowerPoint presentation which was originally recorded in 2004 for the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, based on a seminar I gave to CIAR’s New Investigators Network.  It covers the following topics:

• Finding out what your audience wants to hear
• The changing role of live presentations
• Defining the objectives of your presentation
• Defining the audience
• Developing your own style
• Customizing your presentation to various audiences – academic, policy and general public
• Using graphics wisely
• Getting comfortable with mistakes

The presentation is now posted on Ourmedia, a free and (supposedly) permanent archive of online content. Ourmedia is the distribution end of the Internet Archive, which seeks to put the entire web, including ephemeral content and old versions of web pages, on a public archive… forever. Ourmedia takes it another step by inviting the public to upload video, audio and text content directly to the archive, thereby avoiding hosting and bandwidth costs. It’s not just an archive – it’s a publisher.

I posted this presentation on Ourmedia for two reasons – to see whether audio slide presentations can be easily transferred to a video format (answer: not easily enough), and to store it in a stable location so I don’t have to keep transferring the file each time I move to a new web host. Unfortunately, Ourmedia doesn’t seem to assign persistent URLs or Digital Object Identifiers to their content. That means that it will be very difficult to track down artifacts when the URLs change, as they certainly will.

I have also posted the presentation to Google Video and it's available here.  The slides look horrible – almost too blurry to read – and the interface for uploading media is pretty bad. However, the video loads much more quickly in Google than it does in Ourmedia, and Google offers the capacity to post transcripts. Google Video is competing with Ourmedia by offering free permanent hosting, but it also offers the ability to charge fees for watching videos. It’s intended to be a distribution vehicle for paid content as well as free content.

And Google Video makes it easy to post videos on your site by cutting and pasting some code, like this:

 About Podbasket
“Podbasket is a super-simple tool that allows you to create a podcast simply by entering some basic information about each audio file, including its URL.

There are a lot of cool things you can do with this:

    * Personal audio collection: If you keep coming across cool audio files on the web, but don't like the hassle of copying them to your portable MP3 player, just paste the URL into your Podbasket and we'll take care of the rest. Subscribe to your personal podcast feed with iTunes or your favorite podcatcher, and the audio files you choose will be automatically copied whenever you update your MP3 player.
    * Quick & easy podcasting: All you have to do is copy the audio files to a web server and give us their URLs — and then you're podcasting, baby! We'll give you a custom RSS feed URL that you can give to your listeners, so they can subscribe to your hot new show.
    * Sharing data files with friends or colleagues: A podcast doesn't just have to be about audio — you can use it to notify your contacts of new PDFs, Word documents, or almost any other kind of file.”
http://www.podbasket.com/page/about

Podcasting – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“Podcasting is the distribution of audio files, such as radio programmes, over the internet using RSS syndication for listening on mobile devices and personal computers. A podcast is a web feed of audio or video files placed on the Internet for anyone to subscribe to, and also the content of that feed. Podcasters' websites also may offer direct download of their files, but the subscription feed of automatically delivered new content is what distinguishes a podcast from a simple download or real-time streaming (see below).”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcasting

(comment on wikipedia)

Education Podcast Network — The Landmark Project
“The Education Podcast Network is an effort to bring together into one place, the wide range of podcast programming that may be helpful to teachers looking for content to teach with and about, and to explore issues of teaching and learning in the 21st century.”
http://www.epnweb.org/

Education Podcast Directory
“ Our podcasts provide you with news and updates on the listings in the first UK-based podcast directory for educators. We feature selected educational podcasts in different subject areas that can be used to support learning by children and young people. We also include selected podcasts created and produced by schools to illustrate the developments in educational podcasting.
Podcast Feed URL: http://www.recap.ltd.uk/podcasts.rss “
http://www.podcastingnews.com/forum/link_6.htm 

learninginhand.com – Podcasting in Education
“Podcasting is a way to automatically download and synchronize digital audio files from the internet to iPods, Palm OS handhelds, Pocket PCs, or other devices that play digital audio files. These audio files are usually in MP3 format and can be recorded and distributed by anyone. Podcasts are free of charge, though you may need to purchase some software to make the download and synchronization process work seamlessly. There are podcasts recorded by educators for educators. There are also podcasts recorded specifically for students. And best yet—there are podcasts made by students!”
http://learninginhand.com/podcasting/

Freeconference.com offers free teleconferences of up to 100 people, but callers must pay for the long distance charges to a US number.

RealWorld Systems currently uses two tollfree phone services: Kall8 for our fax number – $2/month plus 7c/minute for faxes delivered as pdf files to any email address – and tollfreelive for our ‘virtual office’ phone system. The Virtual Office service has an auto attendant with multiple ‘follow-me’ numbers that will call any phone number in the US and Canada, and that can be changed instantly on the web. For $30/month we get 500 tollfree minutes, and each additional minute is 7.8c (all dollars are U.S.). The per-minute cost includes both legs of the tollfree call; for example, a Toronto caller phones the number and is connected to a switch in California; then the call goes back to Toronto. Clearly this service makes more financial sense for organizations that make a lot of long distance calls.

Kall8 offers cheap teleconferencing for all of its phone numbers; and both Kall8 and tollfreelive have all kinds of other useful features. For example, in tollfreelive I set up temporary extensions to clients and team members for current projects. Long distance charges to other countries are cheaper than most calling cards, so I create extensions for colleagues in Europe and Qatar. I can even set passwords on the extensions to prevent others from making unauthorized long distance calls.

A fascinating interview by Robin Good with Lance Cottrell, President and Chief Scientist of Anonymizer:

There are a lot of reasons why people would want to be concerned about their privacy online. I mean, people are unaware of just how much information is being gathered about them on a continuing basis.

So that when you’re going out to websites, almost every website you’re going to is gathering personal information about you, logging your activities, which pages you look at. Advertising networks can track you across thousands of different websites at a time. But even things like resume websites will actually take your personal information and resell it.

Anonymous Surfing: What The Benefits And Issues Of Making Yourself Invisible Online? – Robin Good's Latest News.

The business version of the Anonymizer service allows internet users to pretend to be from other countries or locations, either to disguise their identities or to see what users in those locations see. (For example, Al Jazeera streams different content to readers in the Middle East.) This would be useful for agencies working in international development or human rights. The consumer version just protects your privacy and prevents data theft from wireless networks.

There is another type of internet privacy that the Anonymizer does not protect – privacy from people who have access to the same computer. This is a serious issue for those who are threatened with domestic violence.

A New England woman planned to escape her violent husband. She secretly found a new home for herself and her 2 daughters and she sent an email to a friend asking for help moving. She thought she had deleted the email, though it sat in her email program's “deleted mail folder”. Her husband found the email, learned that she was planning to flee for safety, and he killed her. From Safety on the Internet: An educational module of the Harvard Law School

Here are some more tips for protecting privacy from threatening family members, or even co-workers who use the same computer:

American Bar Asociation Commission on Domestic Violence

Many people with disabilities would benefit from small, powerful mobile computers with long battery life. Blind users could be guided with GPS mapping software that gave spoken directions. Deaf users could communicate through voice recognition programs; speakers would talk into a microphone and their speech would be translated into written text. PDAs are not powerful enough to drive the necessary software (so far), but full computers use up batteries too quickly for mobile use.

Until now, only Xybernaut has consistently delivered wearable Windows computers. Their computers are optimized for rough outdoor use by tradespeople and children, so they are rugged but with limited processor speed.

The DualCor cPC  has just been announced, and looks promising. From the press release: “The DualCore cPC is the only all-in-one, wireless “handtop” (handheld-desktop) computer that combines the power of a desktop PC, the instant-on convenience of a PDA and the always-connected functionality of a cell phone. Measuring just 6.5” x 3.3” x 1.2”, the DualCor cPC offers unprecedented battery life for enterprise computing, Internet access, e-mail and talk time.” DualCor Technologies, Inc. :: Press Releases.

The Dualcor is coming out in spring 2006 for approximately $1500 US, and should be powerful enough to drive the latest voice recognition programs.

BBC News reports that public and university libraries are worried that DRM restrictions (Digital Rights Management embedded software that prevents ‘illegitimate use’ of copywritten materials) may be impossible to remove from library collections, even when the copyright expires.

“Libraries have warned that the rise of digital publishing may make it harder or even impossible to access items in their collections in the future. … And there are fears that restricted works may not be safe for future generations if people can no longer unlock them when technology evolves.”

BBC NEWS | Technology | Libraries fear digital lockdown.

From Bruce Schneier’s blog on security:

Here are the side-by-side search results for “tiananmen” on google.com and google.cn.

Schneier on Security: Google.cn Censorship.

UPDATE on Feb 6: The above link on Schneier's site leads to two identical pages now. I suspect that Google is reading my location from my IP address and not streaming the google.cn results anymore. See this posting on anonymous internet surfing for more on how that works.

The Harvard Family Research Project, in a special issue of its Evaluation newsletter devoted to 'Evaluation Methodology' published a description of eight different outcome models developed by the Rensselaerville Institute’s Center for Outcomes. Logic models are only one type of outcome model that can be used to improve a program or policy.

“The models described in Outcome Frameworks fall into three main categories: program planning and management, program and resource alignment, and program reporting. In addition, most models can be used as an evaluation tool. …

“Model 1: The Logic Model. Logic models, the most widely used of these models, provide a graphic overview of a program, outlining the outcomes to be accomplished along with how they are to be achieved and for what groups.2 A logic model generally includes the target group, the resources to be used, activities, and objectives. Best used for describing a program in the broadest strokes, it can be an extremely useful tool, particularly at the earliest stages of a project. …

“Model 3: Results-Based Accountability (RBA). This model starts with the desired ends and works backward toward the means to achieve them. RBA first describes what a desired result would look like, then defines that result in measurable terms, and, finally, uses those measures to gauge success or failure. RBA asks and answers three basic questions: What do we want? How will we recognize it? What will it take to get there? This model distinguishes between population accountability and program accountability. Its inclusion of the crosswalk, a tool for matching RBA with other outcome models, is a unique and useful aspect of the framework.5

From Eight Outcome Models in the Evaluation Methodology issue of The Evaluation Exchange – at the Harvard Family Research Project (HFRP).

Highly recommended article.

“The Campbell Collaboration (C2) is a nonprofit organization that aims to help people make well-informed decisions about the effects of interventions in the social, behavioral, and educational arenas. Using systematic reviews of studies of interventions (programs, practices, and policies), C2 helps policymakers, practitioners, researchers, and the public identify what works.

“Systematic reviews synthesize available high quality evidence on interventions. After a thorough search of the literature to screen available studies for quality, reviewers identify the least equivocal evidence available on an intervention, describe what the evidence says about the intervention's effectiveness, and explore how that effectiveness is influenced by variations in process, implementation, intervention components, participants, and other factors.”

Randomized Trials in the Evaluation Methodology issue of The Evaluation Exchange – at the Harvard Family Research Project (HFRP).

Also see the US-based What Works Clearinghouse (WWC), which “collects, screens, and identifies studies of the effectiveness of educational interventions (programs, products, practices, and policies). We review the studies that have the strongest design, and report on the strengths and weaknesses of those studies against the WWC Evidence Standards so that you know what the best scientific evidence has to say.

“The WWC does not endorse any interventions nor does it conduct field studies. The WWC releases study, intervention, and topic reports. A study report rates individual studies and designs to give you a sense of how much you can rely on research findings for that individual study. An intervention report provides all findings that meet WWC Evidence Standards for a particular intervention. Each topic report briefly describes the topic and each intervention that the WWC reviewed.”

Steve Krause compares two music recommendation services – Pandora and Last.fm:

Both services allow you to specify a favorite artist, based on which you immediately receive an Internet audio stream of similar music. When I tell people that this is possible—that you can have a personalized streaming radio station—most are astonished. So let's start by saying that what these and similar services do is cool. How Pandora and Last.fm do it is an interesting compare-and-contrast.

Steve Krause : Blog: Pandora and Last.fm: Nature vs. Nurture in Music Recommenders.