If KRudd (or state governments) wanted to improve educational use of computers in schools (and kindergartens), and wanted to DECREASE the government spend on IT in schools, all he’d have to do is point schools to the pages where Google offers a near-enterprise-level service free of charge: Google Applications for Education and Google Apps for Kindergartens through Secondary.

Then, there’d be no need to fund laptops – just low-end "diskless" (actually a flash disk) netbooks and a means-tested basic internet connection (enough to be ok for google apps, wiki pages, etc, but a bit painful for music/video).

By near-enterprise-level, providing the school joins before July 2010, I mean things like fine-grained filtering of email, along with not just email, but the other goodies like word processing, website creation, team assignments (via groups), lesson plan creation, integration with other schools… Read more »

By the look of a recent paper in Nature Neuropsychopharmacology, the problems of psychosis caused (in the small number of people that are susceptible) by smoking too much cannabis could possibly be cured by…. smoking cannabis!  It’s the strain that makes the difference, suggesting that a "government approved labelling standard" and a different legal status for each strain might be worthwhile – or even that the government should give away seeds from good strains!

There are two major cannabinoids in Cannabis sativa, Δ-9-Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and Cannabidiol (CBD), both of which are psychoactive (especially for medicinal purposes like painkilling), but with THC being the most intoxicating.

It seems that for those few that can be pushing towards psychosis, it’s the THC that causes the problems, while CBD not only doesn’t cause the problem, but protects against the dangers of THC. Read more »