Netbooks, The New Books

The Richardson ISD (RISD) recently announced a program of furnishing every student in certain grades at certain schools with school-owned netbook computers. The Dallas Morning News covered the news with a story on its main web site and another story on its Richardson blog. Your challenge, readers, is to guess what angle to this story was of most interest to the newspaper's readers. If you guessed tin-foil hat conspiracies and charges of government waste and fraud, you get a gold star.

After the jump, examples of why education's biggest obstacle to learning isn't the student, but his parents.

First Full Day Of Spring

From 2010 03 Snow

To see more photos, click here.

Law & Order: The Appeal

Richardson City Attorney Pete Smith

For the last several years, the City of Richardson has been defending itself from two lawsuits regarding, not eminent domain or taxes or even trash pickup, but how the city council conducts its meetings. One lawsuit charges the city with holding closed executive sessions prohibited by city charter. The city council implicitly acknowledged this (if not legally admitting to anything) by holding a charter amendment election in 2007, which passed, making the offenses alleged in the lawsuit moot today. The other lawsuit charges the city with unlawfully lobbying for passage of the charter amendment.

The lawuits have been making their way through the courts, slowly, as most such lawsuits do. In December, city attorney Pete Smith briefed the council, in open session about the status of the cases.

After the jump, an update.

Playing Us Off The Stage

As an aging Baby Boomer, I'm acutely aware of both my generation's outsized influence on American culture over the last fifty years and on its inevitable passing. It strikes home at events like the Oscar ceremonies where I found myself familiar with more faces in the "In Memoriam" tribute than with faces of the young presenters of the awards. Symbolically, I pictured the whole Baby Boom generation, standing on the stage, giving its acceptance speech for the "lifetime achievement" award, when the first faint notes of the orchestra begin to be heard, signifying our time is up, it's time to leave the stage.

After the jump, other signs of approaching obsolescence.

Wings Under Water

Jessica Cox is a normal, adventure-loving 27 year old woman with a bachelor's degree, a black belt in tae kwon do, a pilot's license, and scuba diving certification. But there's something she doesn't have -- arms. Born that way, she has demonstrated that determination and a positive attitude can result in great achievements. She carries that message around the world as a motivational speaker.

One group that she has motivated is a team of engineering students at Northwestern University who have used Jessica Cox's life as inspiration for their senior design project -- to design scuba controls that can be operated by armless divers like Jessica using their feet alone. Another group of Northwestern students, from the school of journalism, documented the engineering students' project: