http://blog.monstuff.com/ Julien Couvreur's programming blog and more en-us 2010-02-21T20:52:25-08:00 http://blog.monstuff.com/archives/000366.html from youtube.com Professor James Tooley, interviewed in this segment, studied how the very poor get education in India, Africa and China. The majority of those families, who earn just a few dollars a week, choose low-cost private schools over free government-run schools. He reports that their kids get better education from the less-qualified and less-paid private teachers than from their government counterparts, for about a dollar a week. In Why millions of the world's poor still choose to go private, economist Tim Harford also mentions Tooley and points to similar studies on private healthcare for the very poor. He... Economics Julien 2010-02-21T20:52:25-08:00 http://blog.monstuff.com/archives/000365.html Kirill Osenkov's pet project, Live Geometry, is a cool Silverlight application which lets you build geometric constructions and interact with them. In his words, it's an "interactive designer for ruler-and-compass constructions". Watch the 5 minute screencast and try the application on livegeometry.com. Also, check out the class diagram illustrating the design (dependency tracking and change propagation, similar to a spreadsheet software and reminiscent of reactive programming). PS: I wish more screencasts were that condensed. Video on the web is too slow ;-)... Seen on the web Julien 2009-10-21T11:04:24-08:00 http://blog.monstuff.com/archives/000364.html Every week Wired Science (on Hulu) covers a wide variety of scientific and technologic topics. The episodes I watched so far are pretty impressive and educative, especially when it comes to recent advances in medicine. Episode 9 (seeing through the tongue) Based on the work of Dr Paul Bach-y-Rita on brain plasticity (the ability to adapt and re-configure itself), researchers are now able to give blind patients some limited ability to "see". Although the signal is input through a device on their tongue (like a matrix of pixel) it actually goes across senses and triggers the visual cortex. As he... Not computer related Julien 2009-10-08T16:45:36-08:00