Well, sort of. . . . One of our proposed Mozilla education activities for 2009 is creating a central web site for Mozilla educational resources and related content and activities. We don’t have a standalone site yet, but we do have the education.mozilla.org domain now up and redirecting to the Mozilla Education section of the Mozilla wiki. Keep an eye on the site as we continue to add more content over the coming weeks. Also, please feel free to add relevant content yourself; follow the site naming conventions so that we can keep consistency in our URLs. ...

As is evident from Mark Surman’s recent “Why Mozilla Education?” post and all the stuff we’ve been adding to the Mozilla Education planning page, we’re getting involved with a lot of activities around the general theme of Mozilla and education. In order to coordinate all these activities we’ve decided to hold a weekly Mozilla Education teleconference call among Mark, Dave Humphrey, myself, and others working in this area. Because Mozilla is a public project we’re inviting anyone to participate (or just listen in) who has an interest in Mozilla and education. ...

I’m not that fond of the Internet equivalent of chain letters, but I’ll make an exception this time because two people (Mark and Marco) tagged me on this. The rules once more: Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post. (Done.) Share seven facts about yourself in the post. (Almost.) Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs. (I’ll break this one.) Let them know they’ve been tagged. (And this one too.) The things: ...

In the latest of his Lefsetz Letters” (not yet online) Bob Lefsetz touches on the strategy behind Radiohead’s “pay what you want” album release: How do acts establish a direct connection with their fanbase? How do they entice listeners to join their e-mail list, with authentic e-mail addresses? That’s the number one lesson of Radiohead’s “In Rainbows.” Give away something desirable and you get the right to make contact with your fans thereafter. At MIDEM the co-manager of Radiohead said the “In Rainbows” release allowed the band to collect 3 million e-mail addresses, and ultimately play to 60,000 in San Francisco as opposed to 25,000 the previous time through. And isn’t live where it’s at? ...

Some of you may recall that about a year ago the Mozilla Foundation provided a grant to NV Access, an Australia-based nonprofit organization dedicated to developing NVDA, an open source screen reader designed for blind users of Windows applications like Firefox. This grant went to support NV Access hiring a developer (James Teh) to work full-time on NVDA. (The Mozilla Foundation had previously provided a smaller grant as well.) I’m happy to pass on the news that NV Access has now received financial support from Microsoft sufficient to allow Mick Curran (the original developer of NVDA) to also work full-time on NVDA. From my point of view this is a significant development for both NV Access itself, which has taken another step towards sustaining itself and the NVDA project for the long term, and for blind users of Windows. ...

Continuing a tradition from last year, here’s what you can find on eMusic from the list of recommended 2008 recordings published by Alex Ross. (Note that CaptWhiffle also has Alex Ross picks for 2007 and 2008 as a user list on eMusic, something I didn’t notice until I’d almost finished this post.) “Crystal Tears”: songs of Dowland, Robert Johnson, Byrd, and others; Andreas Scholl, countertenor, Julian Behr, lute and Concerto di viole (Harmonia Mundi). This is 21 tracks (about half of my monthly allotment), but I like early music and the samples sound good, so this is a likely download for me. ...

A departure from my usual topics, in remembrance of my college math classes (and with a nod to Mozilla folks working on related areas like automated testing and software verification): Via Eric Drexler via Emergent Chaos comes this interesting review paper on formal proofs in mathematics and software to verify them. As a dual math/physics major I was well acquainted with jokes about the lack of mathematical rigor on the part of physicists, who often engaged in rather slapdash simplifications in their drive to get formulas they could use to explain experimental data and make further predictions. However physicists who cut corners are ultimately saved by the fact that nature will check their work and let them know if they’ve made bonehead mistakes. ...

On the eMusic message boards I just saw a post from rednano74 about Amazon offering “50 albums for $5”. Silly me, I thought this meant for $5 I could buy 50 albums, or $0.10 an album. This of course was just a fever dream; Amazon is simply continuing its standard practice of discounting selected MP3 albums from $9.99 to $5 or less. It’s interesting though: I looked through these 50 albums and didn’t see anything that was attractive to me at a $5 price point. This seems to be my general experience with Amazon’s discounted albums. (I subscribe to the @AmazonMP3 Twitter feed, so I see pretty much everything that appears.) When offered an essentially random collection of discounted albums, a $5, $3, or even $2 price is typically not sufficient to motivate me to purchase something I’m not already seeking out; only at the $0.99 per album level do I tend to make an impulse purchase from Amazon. ...

(In the spirit of Twitter, I’ll keep this post brief.) eMusic folks are now twittering as @17dots (but folks, register @emusic too before it’s taken) @17dots following more (94) than follow it (61), should promote on the message boards Suggest @17dots do 1-3 posts per day, highlight new arrivals, always include links @17dots “competition”: @amazonmp3 daily deals, 6,849 followers (OK but drop in bucket, Twitter over-hyped?)

(This is part 2 of a two-part post; for background on the Gini coefficient see part 1.) I previously discussed use of the Gini coefficient as a way to measure income inequality (or equality, as the case may be), and promised to discuss why Howard County is noteworthy in this regard. In brief, Howard County is one of only seven counties in the US (out of 800 counties and other geographic areas) that rank in the top 5% (positions 1-40) for both median household income and income equality (as measured by the Gini coefficient): ...