Segregation in Hungary doesn’t happen as a result of racist laws. It’s de facto segregation. For different reasons in different locations, all of the Roma children, or at least large majorities of them together with financially disadvantaged non-Roma, wind up in the same classrooms or schools. So says Lilla Farkas, a lawyer with the NGO [...] [Posted: 8 Jul 2010]
But the mobile Web means different things to different people. For more affluent populations, it generally means wireless access with a laptop computer. For poorer people it means a cellphone, which is not a perfect replacement for other forms of online access, said Mr. Smith and several others who study social issues related to technology. [...] [Posted: 8 Jul 2010]
The open standards won because any kid could download the rules of the game, understand how they work, and make a contribution. — It taught us that we can make government heel. That’s a quote from Carl Malamud, of Public.Resource.org in Washington’s I.T. Guy in The American Prospect. Nancy Scola does a wonderful job of [...] [Posted: 8 Jul 2010]
If the people who turn up voluntarily at the polls reinforce our worst political instincts toward conflict and obstruction, we could dilute their influence by roping absolutely everyone into the process. That’s how Miller-McCune sums up William Galston’s cure for extreme partisanship. Galston is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Galston’s idea to mandate [...] [Posted: 8 Jul 2010]
In my first post on HTML5 video and its progress event, I wrote: Only Firefox provides a means to calculate the amount of the video that has been loaded. The progress event object includes total and loaded properties that reflect the total size of the video file, and the amount the browser has retrieved from [...] [Posted: 6 Jul 2010]
Protest art always ends up being trendy precisely because the art necessarily struggles to be accepted by the very people the art should oppose. Ultimately, protest artists are, by definition, more interested in relating to the enemy than relating to the potential insurgents. This is why we have protest artists whose cutting edge work is [...] [Posted: 6 Jul 2010]
UPDATE: Thanks to zcorpan’s comments, I have posted a follow-up entry that should clarify the current status of the video element and its properties. I have been playing around with the HTML5 video interface lately, trying to understand what can be done with it, and how each browser supports its features as set forth in [...] [Posted: 5 Jul 2010]
Slaves made the rum, and rum made the slaves. That’s how author Wayne Curtis pithily sums up the role of sugar, its by-product molasses, and rum in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade in his book, “And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails.” It is a fitting book to read [...] [Posted: 4 Jul 2010]
During the 1990s, it was only the French extreme right that ridiculed the idea that multiracial sport could facilitate racial integration in France. Now the derision directed against the indiscipline of a “black” team and the implicit failure of sport’s integrative role in French society rains down from across the political spectrum. From Le Scandal [...] [Posted: 2 Jul 2010]