What we can Learn from Finland’s Education System

Role of Teachers

1)Well-trained teachers who create lessons to fit their students.
2)Teachers must hold master’s degrees, and the profession is highly competitive: More than 40 people may apply for a single job. Their salaries are similar to those of U.S. teachers, but they generally have more freedom.
3)They have a very relaxed, back-to-basics approach. Schools have no sports teams, marching bands or prom.
4)Teachers pick books and customize lessons as they shape students to national standards. in contrast to other countries where education is like like a car factory. In Finland, the teachers are like entrepreneurs

Reading and No language Barrier

1)One explanation for the Finns’ success is their love of reading. Parents of newborns receive a government-paid gift pack that includes a picture book. Some libraries are attached to shopping malls, and a book bus travels to more remote neighborhoods like a Good Humor truck.

2)Finland shares its language with no other country, and even the most popular English-language books are translated here long after they are first published.Movies and TV shows have Finnish subtitles instead of dubbing.

Lesser Disparties

1)FinLand has homogeneous population, teachers have few students who don’t speak Finnish.
2)There are fewer disparities in education and income levels among Finns.

Free Education

1)Finns spend $7,500 per student and government provides education for free.
2)Finland’s high-tax government provides roughly equal per-pupil funding.The gap between Finland’s best- and worst-performing schools is the smallest of any country

No Peer Pressure

1)Finnish students have little angstata — or teen angst — about getting into the best university, and no worries about paying for it. College is free.
2)There is competition for college based on academic specialties — medical school, for instance. But even the best universities don’t have the elite status of a Harvard.
3)Taking away the competition of getting into the “right schools” allows Finnish children to enjoy a less-pressured childhood.
4)Finns don’t begin school until age 7

Self -Reliance at Young Age
1)Once school starts, the Finns are more self-reliant.At lunch, they pick out their own meals, which all schools give free, and carry the trays to lunch tables.
3)There is no Internet filter in the school library. They can walk in their socks during class, but at home even the very young are expected to lace up their own skates or put on their own skis.

more here

Life of A Loner

Open Source Innovation Challenge by Director of National Intelligence (DNI)

Office of Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has announced an exciting opportunity in conjunction with the DNI Open Source Conference 2008: ‘The Open Source Innovation Challenge.This is a unique occasion for representatives from academia; think tanks; industry; the media; federal, state, local, and tribal government; and other diverse sectors to use open source information to address real intelligence challenges.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has provided two Challenge questions (below) and instructions to all conference registrants. Those who choose to accept the Challenge can submit a answer for one of the two challenge questions posed.The Challenge is open to all conference registrants, including those who are not able to attend due to overwhelming registration demand.

Challenge Questions

1. Using the best open sources to inform your answer, is Al Qaeda a cohesive organization with strong and centralized control, intent and direction?
2. According to open sources, who will be the global leader in alternative fuels and why?

More info can be found here

Daily Links

According to this report and video Atrivo, a Concord, Calif., based network provider is major source of spyware, adware, viruses and fake anti-virus products.See Emil Kacperski, Atrivo’s founder, response in comments section @ Briansblog

Tetris meets Rubik’s Cube a fun filled 3-d game

Michael Nielsen writes a insightful eassy on how to explain Quantum Computation to your MAMA

Google fun

OpenCV is a computer vision library originally developed by Intel. It is free for commercial and research use under a BSD license. The library is cross-platform, and runs on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. It focuses mainly on real-time image processing, as such, if it finds Intel’s Integrated Performance Primitives on the system, it will use these commercial optimized routines to accelerate itself.

Narcissistic Blog Disorder and Other Conditions of Online Kookery

Macfee Released a WhitePaper on security problems related to online games and some possible solutions to address them

Economy:China Vs India

India and china economic systems stifled growth and left both countries poor. In 1980, real per capita income stood at $556 in China and $917 in India.

To jump-start their economies, China and India shifted strategies, letting private enterprise flourish and opening markets to trade and investment. The new policies have led to rapid economic development. China’s real per capita income has grown an average of 8.4 percent a year since 1995, climbing to $4,766. India’s 5 percent average annual growth has raised per capita income to $2,534.

China has followed the traditional route, becoming a center for low-wage manufacturing and exporting clothing, toys, electronics and other goods. India has emphasized services, using its large English-speaking labor force for call centers, data-processing operations and the like.

Growth rates give China’s goods-dominated strategy the better track record so far. But India’s approach may pay off better longer term. A look at per capita incomes around the world shows that the wealth of nations eventually depends more on services than industry.

Industry Goods Export Drive China’s Growth

1)Since 1978,China has made great leaps forward in producing inputs such as cloth, electricity, steel and cement and finished products as air conditioners, color televisions, microcomputers and mobile phones.
2)This development path forged an economy skewed toward producing goods, a broad category that encompasses manufacturing, construction and agriculture. China’s goods output as a share of gross domestic product exceeds the average for nations at its per capita income level by about 12 percentage points.
3)China launched their economic transformations by using abundant, low-wage labor to establish manufacturing-for-export industries, becoming the world’s low-cost producer of goods and a daunting competitor for global market share.

Services Exports Drive India’s Growth

1)Japan and South Korea provided a road map for China, but India knew it couldn’t go toe-to-toe with China in manufacturing. It had a better chance with services exports, which are often an afterthought in the early stages of economic development.

2)India possesses advantages that bolster a services strategy. Two are legacies of British rule: large numbers of English-speaking workers and familiarity with the West.

3)India also offers an ample supply of educated workers, many of them college graduates available at a fraction of what they could earn in the U.S. and other advanced economies.

4)India also had the blessing of good timing. Services trade has surged in recent decades, providing new opportunities in the global marketplace. Two factors are at work. First, the Internet and other technologies have made international communications faster and cheaper, lowering barriers to marketing and delivering services over vast distances. Second, rising incomes have shifted consumers’ spending from goods, boosting demand for services and making it an engine for economic growth.

5) India’s services sales have risen from 18 percent to 38 percent of all exports, topping the 30 percent of the U.S., the largest seller of services in the global marketplace

India/China in Indusrty Goods and Services Export

1)India made strides in goods production and trade. Its goods exports, for example, grew 11.4 percent a year from 1996 to 2006—strong but less than China’s 17.8 percent.

2)China made headway selling services on global markets, posting a healthy 13.6 percent export growth rate, compared with India’s 23.7 percent.

More Insights @ Insights from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas

Remote and Rural Banking through Biometric Verification and Cell-Phones

I really love how technology makers bridge the gap between Labs and Common people.Integra Microsystems new innovation iMFAST helps to do branch less secure banking in remote villages in India where ninety percent of rural residents lack bank accounts

Here is the real video how Karehanumaiah a 55-year-old agricultural laborer opens account with Corporation bank and deposits money.
In this video, Karehanumaiah uses a desktop terminal to deposit 150 rupees into his new account at Corporation Bank, with help from Muniyamma Ramanjanappa, a village resident who conducts these transactions in her concrete house as a bank representative.

First, a smart card and a thumbprint scan prove his identity. Next, Ramanjanappa updates the bank balance information on his smart card by connecting the terminal to the bank database with a cell phone. Finally, Karehanumaiah hands Ramanjanappa the cash and gets a receipt for his deposit (which brings his balance up to 160 rupees). To their left is Ram Sirupurapu, executive director of Integra Microsystems, the maker of the terminal. Ramanjanappa makes weekly trips to the Doddabenavengala branch with the cash. And now that Karehanumaiah has a bank account, he can borrow money from the bank at rates of between 8.5 and 13 percent annually–far less than in the informal system–and gain a toehold into the formal economy.

Kudos to Ram Sirupurapu and his team

MIT Researchers Answer to Cyber Attacks

Cyber attacks are a major problem plaguing IT infrastructure .The famous Titan Rain which named after a series of breaches of U.S. government computers that occurred between 2003 and 2005 and may have captured sensitive information about military readiness by Chinese . In response to this chronic cyber threat MIT Researchers Develop a software tool to identify potential avenues of attack in computer networks called NetSpa(PDF).

Features:

1)NetSpa uses information about networks and the individual machines and programs running on them to create a graph that shows how hackers could break the network rules.

2)Analyzes the graph and offers recommendations about how to quickly fix the most important weaknesses.

3)NetSPA relies on vulnerability scanners, such as Nessus, to identify known vulnerabilities in network accessible programs that might allow an unauthorized person access to a machine.

4)Analyze complex firewall and router rules to determine which vulnerabilities can actually be reached and exploited by attackers and how attackers can spread through a network by jumping from one vulnerable host to another.

Approach :

1)Patch the critical host first instead of patching or fixing or blocking a thousand hosts.The software finds the most critical weaknesses by combining information from vulnerability scanners with firewall rules used to allow and block access and information about the physical structure of the network.

2)Firewalls may have rules that treat a number of different machines on the same network in the same way. Rather than modeling each of those machines individually, the software uses the same model for all of them, saving significant computing time. The researchers have also developed new types of attack graphs and efficient algorithms to compute these graphs.

3)In examining firewall rules, NetSPA also has the potential to discover unforeseen avenues of attack. For example, a network might have had to share data with an outside vendor several years ago, so the system administrator would have added a rule to allow access from that vendor’s IP address. That long-forgotten permission could be exploited by someone forging that address.

Drawbacks:

This insight sounds obvious, but applying it to real systems can be a huge challenge. A network comprising thousands of computers may have dozens of filtering devices such as firewalls and routers, and each device may have 200 or more different filtering rules. The multitudinous combinations of possibilities are far too many to track down by hand, and are even very complex for a computer algorithm to compute. The original version of NetSPA, in fact, could handle networks of only about 17 machines before the modeling complexities made it too slow to be useful.

Future

These guys have received one patent for the first type of attack graph they developed, called a “predictive” graph, and have one patent pending for a much more efficient and recurrent type called a “multiple prerequisite” attack graph. They’re testing NetSPA on different networks and developing ways to make it easier to use. A group of MIT students created a business plan for a proposed company called CyberAnalytix that could commercialize NetSPA (Lippmann and Ingols are technical advisors). This plan won $10,000 in the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition in May.

People Involved :

Richard Lippmann, a senior staff member in Lincoln Laboratory’s Information Systems Technology Group
Kyle Ingols, a computer scientist at MIT
Seth Webster (who is focusing on ways to make the system more automated)
Leevar Williams MIT graduate student (whose master’s thesis is on visualizing attack graph data).

Google Code Jam

I enjoy solving  Google Code Jam so here is the round 2 Problem:

Near the planet Mars, in a faraway galaxy similar to our own, there is a fight to the death between the imperial forces and the rebels. The rebel army has N ships which we will consider as points (xi, yi, zi). Each ship has a receiver with power pi. The rebel army needs to be able to send messages from the central cruiser to all the ships, but they are tight on finances, so they cannot afford a strong transmitter.

If the cruiser is placed at (x, y, z), and one of the other ships is at (xi, yi, zi) and has a receiver of power pi, then the power of the cruiser’s transmitter needs to be at least:

(|xi – x| + |yi – y| + |zi – z|) / pi
Your task is to find the position for the cruiser that minimizes the power required for its transmitter, and to output that power.

First Photograph of Tornado

Aug. 28, 1884:The weather outside is frightful, but that doesn’t stop F. N. Robinson from taking a picture of three separate funnel clouds starting to swirl above the small town of Howard City, in what was then known as Dakota Territory. That afternoon he apparently becomes the first person to photograph a tornado

More @ here

Bugged by BUG

Bug Labs‘ BUG is an open embedded Linux-based combination of a BUGbase and four BUGmodules.

The BUGbase is a Java-programmable electronic base with various I/O ports:
1)MicroUSB storage slot
2)Two-line LCD display buttons
3)Four-way joypad
4)Four large interfaces (two each on the top and bottom)

BUGmodules are individual modules that supply additional functionality to the BUGbase. Four BUGmodules currently exist:

* A color LCD screen (BUGview).
* A combined motion detector/accelerometer (BUGmotion).
* A GPS (BUGlocate).
* A 2-megapixel color camera (BUGcam2MP)

The BUG SDK is called (“Dragonfly”) is an Eclipse Perspective and runs in the same operating system environments that can host the Eclipse IDE
I could not have a chance to play around with real Hardware but I start off with the Dragon fly preseptive in my eclipse used the emulator to develop my first application. Like any other Eclipse embedded device perspectives, Dragonfly prompts for program execution in a BUGbundle emulator or on the BUGbase itself.
You can simultaneously develop and even upload your own BUG programs to the BUG community website.

A detailed Wiki helps you explore more about and how to BUG.You can also follow and post your ideas on BUGmodule on this active thread

I feel BUG is still in infancy stage,but impressed by the modular approch in the design .Looks promising in long run for creating hardware based Mashups