<![CDATA[Gawker: valleywag, education]]> http://tags.gawker.com/assets/base/img/thumbs140x140/gawker.com.png <![CDATA[Gawker: valleywag, education]]> http://gawker.com/tag/valleywag/education http://gawker.com/tag/valleywag/education <![CDATA[Where Did the Web Touch You?]]> Online artist Casetteboy created this funny/brilliant mashup of experts explaining "the Web." In short, the global computer network is an anti-social creep that "nailed some feces to the door," according actor Stephen Fry, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and other digerati.

Our favorite fake answer is tech investor Peter Thiel's theory that the interent is a harmless network of FAX machines. Always running PR for our future robot overlords, that one.

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<![CDATA[Will Sluts Be the End of Twitter?]]> It's an age-old tale: site becomes popular, slags and hags use it for financial gain, the olds get mad. And Twitter is not immune. Thus, Business Week's Sarah Lacy warns the company to clean up its act.

Though she once praised Twitter, Lacy has since become disillusioned by the amount of skin-centric span that's clogging her and her friends' feeds. Yes, there are ways to block the site's cabal of sluts, but Lacy argues it's far too hard, so she's offering Twitter her own advice — and knocks Tila Tequila in the process:

There's no reason why Twitter shouldn't be catching spam, or at least making it easier to report.

Unless, of course, Twitter wants to be the new MySpace (NWS). After all, a lot of that site's early growth came from call girls, strippers, and purveyors of porn. Tila Tequila, who has been pictured in Playboy, Penthouse, and other publications, even got an MTV show out of MySpace.... If Twitter wants growth for the sake of growth, porn will do that.

But knowing the founders, my guess is that the site doesn't want that kind of success. Lewd content helped hobble MySpace's advertising efforts.

With The Olds leading the Twitter revolution, Lacy insists the site do something about this madness or face the consequences. But we say there's a far easier solution: don't "follow" or click on links to people you don't know, especially if they have whorish names like "Kiki" or "Cocoa" or feature pictures of bikini-covered breasts.

Even if Lacy and other worried people do leave the site, it shows no signs of slowing down, especially since a federal judge just launched a page that educates kids on civics and DePaul University is offering a class all about the site. If anything, Lacy's arguments will only help the site: you're nobody until somebody tries to stir up a frenzy of "family values" outrage.

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<![CDATA[India, not satisified with $100 laptop, announces $10 laptop]]> The government whose Ministry of Education dismissed Nick Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child computer as "pedagogically suspect" in 2006 is now backing a plan to design, build and sell a model priced at 400 rupees, or about ten bucks. The project was discussed at a conference in New Delhi by D. Purandeshwari, Minister of State for Human Resources Development. It goes without saying that the price will be held down by a government subsidy. As former OLPC engineer Mary Lou Jepsen explains in a Big Think interview, countries might look to subsidize laptop costs with money intended for textbooks. Here's an idea for you Objectivists: Instead of criticizing India's nanny state, ask every Obama supporter you know when he's going to announce a One MacBook Per Child plan.

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