Yesterday Baja, California had a 6.9/7.2 earthquake. Friends of mine in the Los Angeles area said on Facebook it was one of the longest ones they had experienced.

In my house in Arizona we felt the quake.

At first I thought I was just queasy from over-eating at lunch. I then saw a picture frame in my living room swaying back and forth. I heard a rumble and wondered if a large truck was idling in the alley. My brain finally clicked that an earthquake was under way. I sent out a status update to Twitter.

Once the motion stopped, my phone got an influx of text messages. Other friends in the Valley were also messaging about the quake.

Within five minutes of the quake I was able to visit the US Geological Survey site and get an update on the magnitude and location, down to the GPS coordinates.

Traditional news outlets on regular air TV updated a few hours later.

We just felt tremors – imagine if we were in the epicenter and it had been more violent. It’s another sign of why we need a worldwide network of mobile devices.

The USGS site has a place to sign up for their earthquake newsletter. We’d like to get the e-mails before the quakes happen.

When I taught Language Arts we had a chart where you cross-referenced the grade level score from the STAR test with how many points a student’s goal should be.

The calculator found here does that. It also factors in how much practice time a student has for independent reading in addition to how long the goal period is.

You can create a roster from the web page. The nicer feature would be to include the source code for this directly in your Reading Renaissance account where your rosters were already created.

On June 14 the DS will have a “game” called 100 Classic Books that will let you read public domain classic books. The $19 price tag is cheap when compared to other DS games but expensive when compared to Kindle-ish apps for phones. A plus, though, is the ability to download new content via the Nintendo WFC.

Have you seen the IEP Checklist iPhone App?

It provides a listing of required and optional items to include on a student’s IEP. This could prove very handy, both for parents to know their rights and for teachers to speed up their workflows.

Yet another reason why we should all have iPod Touches on campus, like this school.

I had watched a demo video at wave.google.com over the summer debuting Wave. As with any tech thing, my thoughts started racing with how to use it in an educational community setting. Over the weekend I got an invitation to be a part of the limited preview. (Happy Thanksgiving, right?) I’ve been chatting with people about Wave and here are some general questions (before we tackle how to use it in a school setting) I can answer after having used it.

What is Wave?
The best way I can think to describe it is that Wave is what e-mail would look like if it was invented today instead of decades ago.

But I already do e-mail. Why would I use this?
E-mail is extremely linear. When you are e-mailing a simple message to one person, that works. If you start e-mailing back and forth in a conversation, that’s where stuff starts to get cluttered and it’s tough to see the progression of ideas. GMail started the whole “conversation” idea, making it easier to follow who said what. Wave takes it further.

I was able to embed a map, a YouTube video, and a picture into the Wave very easily. That’s a definite plus. In e-mail those resources sometimes don’t come across.

How could it make my life easier?
For me, e-mail gets confusing the more recipients that I have per message. Before replying, I have to sift through what everyone else said. Many times that entails opening up multiple messages and checking when they were sent. With Wave, it’s one message and the responses are shown more like threads or comments at the bottom of a blog post.

How could it make my life more difficult?
First, there’s the “Great. One more account to manage; one more thing to check” problem. I’m hoping that Google will incorporate other services, specifically mail coming in from already-created e-mail accounts.

Next, you can reply to any portion of a Wave. The Wave’s status will show how many replies are unread. You need to scroll through the whole Wave to see the unread replies.

How could it give me a headache?
My friend are I were chatting (Google calls it “ping”…think Scott Westerfeld’s Tally Youngblood series.) and we had to scroll quite a bit. Just like in a main Wave, you can reply to any section of a ping. Think about how fast an online chat goes. Now picture someone posting a reply at the very top of the chat where the ping started an hour ago. My friend and I are decently tech savvy and we were lost. For friends chatting, it’s funny. But I picture a professor I had that did online chats. His idea of a chat was to have everyone type up their responses days in advance and then paste them into the chat all at once. That hurt to read. This will not improve that.

Where could it offend people?
I choose my words carefully. When it’s a really important e-mail, I’ll revise it a couple of times before sending it out. With Wave, my friend jumped in before I knew it and was watching me type my reply, letter by letter, so that before I was done he was already saying, “I thought so.”

Very disorienting. I like to spell things correctly. Typos become even more annoying as someone is virtually watching over your shoulder.

My friend was able to edit what I had said. Google changed it to read that we were co-authors of the reply. I’m glad he can spell well, because you can’t tell who said what after the specific reply becomes co-authored. I didn’t want someone to look through the archives of the Internet to see that I had misspelled a word when in fact it was someone else.

You know, because those things are important.

I also think about how many people write an e-mail angrily just to delete it as a way of venting. Wave records what you’re messaging, so someone could watch the playback and see what you initially said. For people who carefully choose their words when writing to others, you have to do a rough draft in your head. It slows things down and makes it more stressful.

Is it worth it?
Google is known for constantly changing, constantly growing. I think that the tech will change to meet the need and we’ll see more features show up once it’s out of preview mode. Just like any new tech, we’ll see it come out for a year as the people who use tech for gadget’s sake enjoy it. Some time after that we’ll then see the general populous join on IF it incorporates e-mail better.

Justin Bieber got his start broadcasting videos of himself singing on YouTube, getting the attention of a record label. Now Web 2.0 stuff is creating some trouble for that record label. James Roppo of Island Def Jam Records is being charged with a couple of misdemeanors, such as endangering the welfare of children. A riot of fans broke out at a mall appearance on Friday; five people had to go to the hospital.
James Roppo is accused of not helping out the police in handling the angry crowd. Here’s what one officer had to say about it, from the Associated Press article:

“We asked for his help in getting the crowd to go away by sending out a Twitter message,” said Nassau County Police Det. Lt. Kevin Smith. “By not cooperating with us, we feel he put lives in danger and the public at risk.”

You want to do what you can to keep the fans safe. Those are the people that make a star famous. But I’ll admit it’s an interesting step in technology ethics by requiring someone to write a message on Twitter. Is that covered under the first amendment? Is this like yelling fire in a movie theater?

Thanks to author Scott Westerfeld for highlighting this article.
When trying to determine just how old the paper is, they’re using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (basically, a chemical process to see what components are in a mixture). Through this process, they’re also determining which chemicals are responsible for that smell that books give off.

Check out the abstract for the full research at ACS Publications:

We successfully transferred and applied -omics concepts to the study of material degradation, in particular historic paper. The main volatile degradation products of paper, constituting the particular “smell of old books”, were determined using headspace analysis after a 24 h predegradation procedure. Using supervised and unsupervised methods of multivariate data analysis, we were able to quantitatively correlate volatile degradation products with properties important for the preservation of historic paper: rosin, lignin and carbonyl group content, degree of polymerization of cellulose, and paper acidity. On the basis of volatile degradic footprinting, we identified degradation markers for rosin and lignin in paper and investigated their effect on degradation. Apart from the known volatile paper degradation products acetic acid and furfural, we also put forward a number of other compounds of potential interest, most notably lipid peroxidation products. The nondestructive approach can be used for rapid identification of degraded historic objects on the basis of the volatile degradation products emitted by degrading paper.