Pixar Animation Studios: Did Pixar accidentally delete Toy Story 2 during production?
And here you can read more about it:
http://www.quora.com/Pixar-Animation-Studios/Did-Pixar-accidentally-delete-Toy-Story-2-during-production/answer/Oren-Jacob
Facebook: Employer Fires Aide Over Refusal to Give Up Facebook Password
Privacy experts have said over and over this is a BAD idea. (The fictional “I hearby (fictionally) resign” makes a great point of shoulder-surfing during interviewing opens up possibility for discrimination cases.)
In this case, the woman already worked for the school and a parent complained about a photo. When she refused to hand over her password, the corp stated it would “assume the worst and act accordingly.”
Seriously: Facebook shoulder-surfing is turning into a modern day witch hunt.
(via girlwithalessonplan)
This is exactly why I will not have a Facebook when I get a job in education
Bendable E-Reader Going Into Production
E-readers are a great tool, but the one big disadvantage is that they’re made of breakable glass and sensitive electronics that can get damaged when dropped. Books, by contrast, are pretty durable.
LG Display has brought flexible, light and tough e-readers a little closer to reality. The company announced that it is mass-producing a flexible electronic paper display, or EPD.
This American Life retracts Mike Daily episode regarding Apple + Foxconn, said it was “partially fabricated”
What I do is not journalism. The tools of the theater are not the same as the tools of journalism. For this reason, I regret that I allowed THIS AMERICAN LIFE to air an excerpt from my monologue. THIS AMERICAN LIFE is essentially a journalistic - not a theatrical - enterprise, and as such it operates under a different set of rules and expectations. But this is my only regret. I am proud that my work seems to have sparked a growing storm of attention and concern over the often appalling conditions under which many of the high-tech products we love so much are assembled in China.
TED, the conference dedicated to “Ideas Worth Spreading,” took a step forward in its educational mission today by launching a TEDEd video channel on YouTube. Shorter than the 18-minute TED talks that have racked up 500 million views, these videos feature a combination of talking heads from TED stages and animation (artwork by Fast Company Most Creative Person Sunni Brown, among others) tackling topics like neuroscience and evolution for a high-school-aged audience.
Exciting!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
First Test-Tube Hamburger Ready This Fall
The world’s first “test-tube” meat, a hamburger made from a cow’s stem cells, will be produced this fall, Dutch scientist Mark Post told a major science conference on Sunday.
Post’s aim is to invent an efficient way to produce skeletal muscle tissue in a laboratory that exactly mimics meat, and eventually replace the entire meat-animal industry.
THE GIST
Why the iPhone Isn’t Building a New U.S. Middle Class
Short answer: it’s not just wages. The vastly different wages paid to American workers, compared to contemporaries in Taiwan or China, is a significant factor in the shift of massive supply chain operations in the tech industry over to Asia, The New York Times says in its in-depth examination of Apple and its suppliers.
Takeaway factoid someone will repeat in your earshot this week: manufacturing the iPhone in the United States would add about $65 to the cost of each unit. Is that worth it?
But it’s not just about the wages. The biggest shocks of the paper’s examination of Foxconn, one of Apple’s major suppliers for the iPhone, are about physical scale, not payscale. The plant known as Foxconn City employes some 230,000 workers, with more than one quarter of them living on-site in company-built dormitories, The Times reports. The kitchens that feed the workers churn out 13 tons of rice per day, and guards work the hallways to prevent workers from trampling one another.
And the most chilling assessments of the U.S. labor market’s inability to share in some of this new manufacturing activity speak to simple inability to compete. Read more.
iBooks has always struggled to find a unique market to help Apple turn it into a unique product. After today’s announcement, I think Apple’s finally found such a market in education.
Education checks all the boxes: it’s a market that feeds Apple’s funnel (students have been very good to Apple in the past, especially between Jobs), is sufficiently valuable (worth billions), and uniquely benefits from digital technology. The last point is especially important, so let’s break it down:
- Textbooks require frequent updates. In most fields print publishing is too slow. My physical anthropology courses had to heavily supplement textbooks as new discoveries refigured evolutionary charts every month. In the computer science field, publishers like O’Reilly have already switched to print-on-demand models to offset these effects. Electronic versions can be updated with relatively little effort, with no additional costs to the student.
- Education is interactive by definition. If you aren’t participating with a textbook in some way, you’re probably not learning. Lectures, quizzes, flashcards, study groups, and walkthroughs both surround and are embedded within textbooks. Novels may slightly slightly benefit from interactivity (a real world map to trace Ulysses, perhaps), but textbooks will benefit hugely as they’ve been demanding interactivity since before the computer. Further, they already rely on different ‘modes’ of engagement (reading, quizzing, reviewing, and indexing) better handled on a screen than on a page.
- Textbooks are expensive and yet their market is cash strapped. To me, the biggest announcements today were that Apple has partnered with 90% of the textbook industry, iBook textbooks start at $14.99 or less, and textbooks can be purchased by chapters. The iTunes equivalent to this would have been launching with every major label and charging $1.60 per album (iTunes did sell albums by tracks, like the chapters of textbooks, but the labels were not happy about it). When the iBooks textbook pricing was announced the auditorium audibly gasped. Do not underestimate the importance of these price points. Textbook purchasing is incredibly bureaucratic, political, and lobbied. Wooing professors is hard and courting the state governments whom purchase high school texts is near impossible. Only at an absurd price point, one which allows governments to significantly cut costs, could Apple succeed. But how did Apple convince a textbook old-school industry (pardon the pun) to hand them the keys to their business???
- Textbooks currently live within confined marketplaces. I think the reason textbook publishers embrace Apple is because iTunes U expands their marketplace beyond pricey college walls. Currently, a coup for textbook publishers is being listed in a 500 person seminar syllabus. iTunes U, with its 700 million downloads, changes the scale. Suddenly, every publisher will be creating content for popular, freely available classes with the hopes that tens of thousands of iTunes subscribers will purchase their wares without having to pay a $30,000 tuition entry fee. Further, such an ecosystem will lessen Apple’s dependence on these publishers: it’s not hard to imagine colleges creating their own textbooks for popular, free online classes to create a new flow of income.
This last point is major. Apple’s educational ecosystem, if successful, could redefine our college system. Free classes will be offered for free in hopes that students will pay $15 for an ebook. Personally, I can’t wait to audit a course from home with materials designed for the experience.
Sidenote: Remember Amazon’s tepid foray into textbooks, the Kindle DX? Heh.
