Technology Review has a cover story by Charles Ferguson:

Until now, competition in the search industry has been limited to the Web and has been conducted algorithm by algorithm, feature by feature, and site by site. This competition has resulted in a Google and Yahoo duopoly. If nothing were to change, the growth of Microsoft’s search business would only create a broader oligopoly, similar, perhaps, to those in other media markets. But the search industry will soon serve more than just a Web-based consumer market. It will also include an industrial market for enterprise software products and services, a mass market for personal productivity and communications software, and software and services for a sea of new consumer devices. Search tools will comb through not only Microsoft Office and PDF documents, but also e-mail, instant messages, music, and images; with the spread of voice recognition, Internet telephony, and broadband, it will also be possible to index and search telephone conversations, voice mail, and video files.

All these new search products and services will have to work with each other and with many other systems. This, in turn, will require standards.

The emergence of search standards would encourage tremendous growth and provide many benefits to users. But standardization would also introduce a new and destabilizing force into the industry. Instead of competing through incremental improvements in the quality and range of their search services, Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo will be forced into a winner-take-all competition for control of industry standards. Steve Jurvetson, a venture capitalist at the firm of Draper Fisher Jurvetson in Menlo Park, CA, says, “This is something of a holy war for Microsoft*, and one they can’t bear to lose.”

In short, the search industry is ready for an architecture war.

Charles Ferguson writes a lengthy and clearly considered piece on Google for Tech Review, focusing on the Microsoft angle and concluding that the only way Google can truly "win" is by controlling a new architecture of computing through the time honored approach of proprietary APIs. Ferguson argues that the search wars are about to enter a major battle for control of standards which simplify the increasingly heterogeneous world of search, and in such a battle, Microsoft is far better suited.

I enjoyed reading this piece, and I am sure I will read it again and again, to more fully consider its argument. But I find myself disagreeing with the premise - why, in this world of the web, do we need to be bound by this winner takes all approach to the world? It works in a resource constrained world of homogenous PCs - once a consumer has purchased his Windows box, he's not going to easily purchase an emerging competitor - but somehow, it really doesnt' strike me as the right metaphor for a Web 2.0 world. I do agree that Google would be well served to make its service more of a platform, and that APIs are the way to go.

WSJ writes:

Early indications suggest that many U.S. students taught with textbooks imported from Singapore do perform better in math. Some children who once found the subject frustrating say they now like it.

Faced with a worrying decline in math proficiency among U.S. kids, a growing number of educators are seeking inspiration from Asian curricula. American children are falling behind their Asian peers in science and math, a shift that could push still more white-collar jobs offshore as the next generation graduates.

"Our kids just don't seem as numerate as they should be, and we decided we needed to try whatever we can to fix that," says David Driscoll, Massachusetts' education commissioner and a former math teacher himself, who had the idea of using Singapore text books in local schools.

Critics assert that math teaching has been dumbed down in the U.S. over the past two decades. They say that too much emphasis is placed on making the subject accessible and fun and not enough on vital, if repetitive, drills such as multiplication tables. Another big criticism: U.S. math curricula tend to cover plenty of subject areas but not in sufficient depth.

Singapore and other southeast Asian countries take a different tack. Singapore's curriculum was developed over the past few decades by math experts hired by the Ministry of Education, who continually interviewed math teachers to find out what works and where kids need help. The elementary textbooks cover only one-third of the topics typically found in U.S. textbooks, but the material is taught far more thoroughly. While rote learning plays a part, kids in Singapore also learn to use visual tools to understand abstract concepts.

Om Malik points to a Technology Review article on how miniprojectors could be the antidote to handheld devices’ shrinking screens: "Chances are you can’t remember the last time you hauled a projector out of the attic to look at slides or movies. But, says Ramesh Raskar, you may soon carry one with you everywhere you go. Raskar, a research scientist at Cambridge, MA’s Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, sees tiny projectors as the solution to one of the fundamental problems with our ever shrinking cell phones, PDAs, digital cameras, and other portable devices. The gizmos carry more and more of our data, but they are running out of room to display it to us. Build a tiny projector into each of those devices, though, and the world becomes your display. Raskar’s team has developed hardware and software that can project digital images onto whatever surface is handy—the wall, say, or a desktop—and make them look good even if the impromptu screen isn’t nice and smooth. And “once you buy into this notion that people would like to have this kind of an attachment,” he asks, “what will they do beyond just looking at those images?”"