The Daily Dozen

1. Lecture hall physics classes at MIT replaced with smaller classes in high-tech classrooms where students sit in groups with networked computers and the profs have lots of whiteboards and huge display screens. The result? Attendence is way up and failure rates are way down. Is innovation coming to education at last? Now if only it would find its way into law schools.
2. Law and Economics: "First, from the first author’s web site, here’s a link to a full-text pdf (25 Mb) of Robert Cooter and Thomas Ulen’s (third edition) 477-page primer on law and economics. Second, here’s an online encyclopedia of law and economics."
3. Blockbuster to start offering streaming video. Let's hope this competition with Netflix eventually leads to being able to pay a flat monthly rate to stream unlimited viewing out of the entire content of their digital libraries. That will be a great day for entertainment and a terrible day for my productivity.
4. Twitter, Flickr, Facebook make blogs look so 2004? I take their point, but am not convinced. It seems like the article's conclusion is that when blogs started, all blogs were small. Now there are some big blogs, therefore the little blogs are dead. I'm assuming the author never read The Long Tail or An Army of Davids? This is a suprising read coming out of Wired.
   
5. Religion Cluase: A blog about religious freedom.
   
6. The power law of scientific dismissiveness.
   
7. Will one legacy of the current recession be that women become a majority of the workforce for the first time in American history?
   
8. What do a billion pennies look like?
   
9. Afghan girls, scarred by acid, defy terror to go to school. A tragic and inspiring story of courageous girls braving death and disfigurement so they can have a chance of going to school.
10. 'I do solemnly swear...' An interactive graphic of the inaugural Bibles and verses, President by President.
    
11. 6 reasons why the Palm Pre is special. I've never been overly enticed by the iPhone -- in part becasue of the lack of a physical keyboard, the restrictions of iTunes, and the lack of cut and paste. The Palm Pre fixes all of these problems and then some. It's the first smartphone that is tempting me to abandon my Treo. I'm hoping it will keep an IR port so I can interface it with my Alphasmart Neo, but am not optimistic on this front.
    
12. Steve Jobs takes medical leave of absence until the end of June.