Let me just close with this quick thought: Tesla wasn’t an ignored god-hero. Thomas Edison wasn’t the devil. They were both brilliant, strong-willed men who helped build our modern world. They both did great things and awful things. They were both brilliantly right about some things and just as brilliantly wrong about others. They had foibles, quirks, passions, misunderstandings and moments of wonder.

In other words, they were both human.

SWORD is a lightweight protocol for depositing content from one location to another. It stands for Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit and is a profile of the Atom Publishing Protocol (known as APP or ATOMPUB).

SWORD has been funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) to develop the SWORD profile and a number of demonstration implementations.

The SWORD vision is ‘lowering the barriers to deposit‘, principally for depositing content (any content!) into repositories, but potentially for depositing into any system which wants to receive content from remote sources.

To read more about SWORD, please see the following:

SWORD: Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit Ariadne, 2008 (also deposited in CADAIR)
SWORD: Cutting Through the Red Tape to Populate Learning Materials Repositories JISC e-Learning Forum, Feb 2009

For the past 10 years, Waschbusch has been studying “callous-unemotional” children — those who exhibit a distinctive lack of affect, remorse or empathy — and who are considered at risk of becoming psychopaths as adults. To evaluate Michael, Waschbusch used a combination of psychological exams and teacher- and family-rating scales, including the Inventory of Callous-Unemotional Traits, the Child Psychopathy Scale and a modified version of the Antisocial Process Screening Device — all tools designed to measure the cold, predatory conduct most closely associated with adult psychopathy. (The terms “sociopath” and “psychopath” are essentially identical.) A research assistant interviewed Michael’s parents and teachers about his behavior at home and in school. When all the exams and reports were tabulated, Michael was almost two standard deviations outside the normal range for callous-unemotional behavior, which placed him on the severe end of the spectrum.

Currently, there is no standard test for psychopathy in children, but a growing number of psychologists believe that psychopathy, like autism, is a distinct neurological condition — one that can be identified in children as young as 5. Crucial to this diagnosis are callous-unemotional traits, which most researchers now believe distinguish “fledgling psychopaths” from children with ordinary conduct disorder, who are also impulsive and hard to control and exhibit hostile or violent behavior.

"[...] New Zealand leads the world in the use of forensic palynology, and the acceptance of this type of evidence in courts of law. To illustrate how important, and diverse, forensic palynology has become, we have briefly examined a number of actual circumstances where these types of techniques have proven useful. [...]

The term 'forensic palynology' refers to the use of pollen and spore evidence in legal cases. In its broader application, the field of forensic palynology also includes legal information derived from the analysis of a broad range of microscopic organisms - such as dinoflagellates, acritarchs, and chitinozoans - that can be found in both fresh and marine environments."

"Parenting programmes that are delivered in group settings have the potential to help parents develop parenting skills that improve the behaviour of their young children. This review provides evidence that group-based parenting programmes improve childhood behaviour problems and the development of positive parenting skills in the short-term, whilst also reducing parental anxiety, stress and depression."