The problem is that regardless of how many times it’s reported that the car accident didn’t happen and the 15 year old Hannah Montana star is still alive and well, people are still believing that it happened.

It doesn’t matter where they come from, it just says a lot about the state of our educational system

“Imagine you’re out in the middle of nowhere and you want to be able to diagnose malaria,” says Daniel Fletcher, holding up what looks like a cellphone sprouting a kaleidoscope. All you have to do is aim the phone at a patient’s wan-looking skin or a drop of blood squeezed onto a microscope slide, he explains. Then you point, click, and hit “send.” The digital image zips to an off-site lab, where a technician scans it for signs of disease and e-mails back an initial diagnosis—all in less than 10 minutes. “In developing countries, patients wouldn’t have to go to a clinic,” he says. “You could make a diagnosis right in the field.” Although many impoverished patients lack access to clinics, 80 percent of the world’s population lives near a cellphone tower.

With mobile devices like this, home health aides could start to provide diagnostic services, and they could also take pictures over time to show doctors whether a patient is getting better. We’ve got an opportunity to leapfrog some of the costs of health care.”—

Late last month, American authors and publishers reached an agreement with Google to settle lawsuits over Google’s Book Search program, which scans millions of books and makes their contents available on the Internet. The deal lets Google sell electronic versions of copyrighted works that have gone out of print.

“The book business model is under siege, just as the music industry earlier came under siege,”

Windows 7 has a new system-wide service that will offer very easily accessible geographical location services for all devices and programs. Unfortunately, their implementation seems half-baked in the security front, opening the door to privacy problems that even Microsoft program manager Alec Berntson didn't have a convincing answer for. What is worse: They don't plan to fix them for the final release.

The TELEPORT environment is designed to overcome disadvantages of desktop videoconferencing and to establish life-like conference sessions that bring people together as if face-to-face. The system consists of a real room with one wall entirely covered b a display surface. Onto that surface a virtual extension of the real room is projected. As the local participant moves, his location is tracked ­ thus allowing the synthetic scene to be rendered with the correct perspective.

If I was someone who gave lots of talks at ed-tech conferences about "Web 2.0" and such, I'd definitely add a piece about the success of FiveThirtyEight.com. Since over three and a half million people visited the site last month (beating out established blogs like Talking Points Memo, for example), there is a pretty good chance you've already seen it.

Microsoft announced this morning at its PDC conference that the next release of Microsoft Office will include browser-based versions of some of its main office software products - Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.