William (Bill) H. Gates is chairman of Microsoft Corporation, the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential. Microsoft had revenues of US$51.12 billion for the fiscal year ending June 2007, and employs more than 78,000 people in 105 countries and regions.
On June 15, 2006, Microsoft announced that effective July 2008 Gates will transition out of a day-to-day role in the company to spend more time on his global health and education work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. After July 2008 Gates will continue to serve as Microsoft’s chairman and an advisor on key development projects.
In his junior year, Gates left Harvard University to devote his energies to Microsoft, a company he had begun in 1975 with his childhood friend Paul Allen. Guided by a belief that the computer would be a valuable tool on every office desktop and in every home, they began developing software for personal computers. Gates' foresight and his vision for personal computing have been central to the success of Microsoft and the software industry.
Under Gates' leadership, Microsoft's mission has been to continually advance and improve software technology, and to make it easier, more cost-effective and more enjoyable for people to use computers. The company is committed to a long-term view, reflected in its investment of approximately $7.1 billion on research and development in the 2007 fiscal year.

Education for the future

by Bill Gates

Historically, if we wanted to understand what someone's income level was, all we had to do was ask what country they were from.

In the future, this will no longer be true. Instead, we'll ask what level of education they have achieved. This is because information and communications technology is opening up enormous opportunities for many more people to participate in the global economy, no matter where they may live. Soon, the prospects of a highly educated young person in India or almost any other emerging economy will match those of a young person in Europe or the United States, and opportunity will depend not on where you live, but what you know.

This change means education is the most important investment that governments make. To thrive in this new world, developed and developing countries alike need to focus on building the creative and productive capacities of their workforce. In an increasingly globalised economy, knowledge and skills are the key differentiators of nations as well as individuals. India is a great example of the power of this approach. An emphasis on education has been the catalyst for the rise of an information technology industry that has created new opportunities for hundreds of thousands of people and established India as an important global centre for innovation.

Today, powerful new tools are making it easier than ever to disseminate knowledge and expand educational opportunities. I applied to study at Harvard University nearly 35 years ago. I was attracted partly by the chance to hear great lectures from Harvard's brilliant faculty. Now, universities offer online lectures, discussion groups, examinations, and degrees to students all over the world. Technology is making higher education - and economic opportunity - available to more people, regard-less of their location.

Likewise in primary and secondary schools, educators are integrating technology tools into the curriculum so they can access classroom materials that will enable them to improve educational quality and teach the relevant skills that are the foundation for success in today's world.

I have seen how software can help millions of people be more productive and creative. I believe that software can also play a critical role in helping societies address their most difficult challenges. Software and technology innovation can help strengthen healthcare, protect the environment, improve education, and extend social and economic opportunities. Because information technology and education are so critical to creating economic opportunities, Microsoft is deeply committed to improving technology access and fostering innovative teaching and learning methods. In developing countries and in less prosperous communities where we do business, we believe in equipping students with the practical skills they need to thrive in today's knowledge economy.

To achieve these goals, in 2003 we launched a five-year, $250 million initiative called Microsoft Partners in Learning. Since then, we've worked closely with educators, government policymakers and community leaders in more than 100 countries. To date, Partners in Learning programmes have reached more than 3.6 million teachers and school leaders, and more than 76 million students.

In India, Partners in Learning has supported Project Shiksha, a programme designed to increase computer literacy by providing training for students and teachers, supporting the development of IT curriculum, and offering scholarships to top teachers and students.

Working with government officials and educators across India, we have helped provide training for more than 200,000 teachers and over 10 million students since Project Shiksha was launched in 2003.

Currently, an information technology curri-culum developed by us is being introduced in teacher training colleges across the state of Maharashtra with a goal of providing technology skills training to more than 100,000 student teachers. In the next three years or so they'll have the skills and knowledge to incorporate technology into their classrooms in meaningful ways after they graduate.

We are deeply committed to supporting programmes like Project Shiksha that can help deliver the benefits and opportunities that technology and quality education can provide to ever-greater numbers of young people. As a result, in late January, we have renewed Partners in Learning by making a second five-year investment that will bring total spending in the programme to nearly $500 million globally. Our plan is to intensify our focus on the needs, interests and dreams of young people, who hold the keys to the economic and social future of every nation. Our goal is to expand programmes to help transform education in order to reach more than 250 million students and teachers across the world during the next five years.

Computers and the internet have changed our world, but their ultimate impact will be far greater than anything we have seen so far. In the future, as technology continues to advance, it will play even more important roles in education, business, government, the economy and society. By working with educators to help improve student learning, we seek to make sure that more of the world's people have opportunities to enjoy the full benefits of technology, regardless of where they were born.

courtesy The Times of India and Daily Times, Lahore

Steve Jobs has revolutionized the computer, hardware, software, animation and music industries. Steve Jobs’ insistence of innovating always has cost him millions of dollars but has created a cult like following for his products.

Looking for love

by Steve Jobs

I was lucky. I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents’ garage when I was twenty. We worked hard and in ten years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We’d just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I’d just turned thirty, and then I got fired.

How can you get fired from a company you started?

Well, as Apple grew, we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so, things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge, and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our board of directors sided with him, and so at thirty, I was out, and very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down, that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologise for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure and I even thought about running away from the Valley.

But something slowly began to dawn on me. I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I’d been rejected but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods in my life. During the next five years I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world’s first computer-animated feature film, “Toy Story”, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.

In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT and I returned to Apple and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance, and Lorene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life’s going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking, and don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it, and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as the years roll on.

So keep looking. Don’t settle.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Steve Jobs is the co-founder, chairman and CEO of Apple Inc., which he co-founded in 1976, and industry leader in innovation. Jobs also co-founded Pixar Animation Studios, which has created eight of the most successful animated films of all time winning 20 Academy Awards. Jobs’ history in business has contributed greatly to the myths of the quirky, individualistic Silicon Valley entrepreneur, emphasising the importance of design while understanding the crucial role aesthetics play in public appeal. His work driving forward the development of products that are both functional and elegant has earned him a devoted following. Considered a leading figure in both the computer and entertainment industries, Jobs was listed by Forbes magazine as the Most Powerful Businessman of 2007. Above is an excerpt from Jobs’ 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University

Jimmy Wales

Internet entrepreneur. Born Jimmy Donal Wales on August 24, 1966 in Huntsville, Alabama. Educated by his mother and grandmother in their “one-room schoolhouse,” Wales attended the private Randolph School before receiving his Bachelor's degree in finance from Auburn University, his Master's in finance from the University of Alabama and taking Ph.D. finance courses at Indiana University.From 1994 to 2000, Wales worked as the Research Director at Chicago Options Associates, a futures and options trader in Chicago. During this time, he also became interested in the Internet and founded an adult-oriented search portal called Bomis.

In 2001, Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia, a peer-reviewed, open-content encyclopedia in 2001. The name Wikipedia is a combination of “encyclopedia” and “wiki,” which is an online tool for collaborative authoring. Two years later, Wales set up the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization to support Wikipedia and other wiki projects. Though Wales initially used his own money to fund Wikimedia, by the end of 2005 it was run entirely on grants and donations. By the end of 2006, Wikipedia had more than 5 million articles in many languages, including more than 1.4 million in the English-language version.

Richard Baraniuk

Richard G. Baraniuk grew up in Winnipeg, Canada and received the B.Sc. degree in 1987 from the University of Manitoba, the M.Sc. degree in 1988 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the Ph.D. degree in 1992 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, all in Electrical Engineering. In 1986, he was a research engineer with Omron Tateisi Electronics in Kyoto, Japan. While at the University of Illinois, he held a joint appointment with the CERL Sound Group and the Coordinated Science Laboratory. After spending 1992-1993 at Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyon, France, he joined Rice University in Houston, Texas, where he is currently the Victor E. Cameron Professor of Engineering and a sporadic DJ for KTRU. He spent sabbaticals at Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Télécommunications in Paris in 2001 and Ecole Fédérale Polytechnique de Lausanne in Switzerland in 2002.

Signal processing

Dr. Baraniuk's research interests lie in the areas of signal and image processing and include compressive sensing (compressed sensing), sensor networks, and pattern recognition and learning. In a bygone era he has worked in multiscale natural image modeling using hidden Markov models and time-frequency analysis. Some recent press on the single-pixel, compressive sensing camera is available here. His research has been funded by NSF, DARPA, ONR, AFOSR, AFRL, ARO, DOE, EPA, NATO, the Texas Instruments Leadership University Program, and several companies.
He has been a Guest Editor of special issues for the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine on "Signal Processing and Networks" in 2002 and "Compressive Sampling" in 2008 and for the Proceedings of the IEEE on "Educational Technology" in 2008. He is currently an Associate Editor for the ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks and Applied and Computational Harmonic Analysis. He served as Co-Technical Program Chair for IEEE Statistical Signal Processing Workshop in 2007 and has served on several other conference technical program committees including IPSN, ICIP, ICASSP, and SPIE.

Connexions

In 1999, Dr. Baraniuk launched Connexions, a non-profit publishing project that aims to bring textbooks and learning materials into the Internet Age. Connexions makes high-quality educational content available to anyone, anywhere, anytime for free on the web and at very low cost in print by inviting authors, educators, and learners worldwide to "create, rip, mix, and burn" textbooks, courses, and learning materials from its global open-access repository. Each month, Connexions' free educational materials are used by over 850,000 people from over 200 countries. Connexions is also the open-access content engine for the newly revived Rice University Press. His career apogee was probably opening for Peter Gabriel at TED 2006 (talk). His signal processing materials in Connexions have been viewed over 2.7 million times (as of May 2008). Since 2002, Connexions has been supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, NSF, Rice University, and several friends of Rice. Some recent press on Connexions is available here, including a CNN.com article, NY Times Editorial, and op-ed piece

Honors

Dr. Baraniuk received a NATO postdoctoral fellowship from NSERC in 1992, the National Young Investigator award from the National Science Foundation in 1994, a Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research in 1995, the Rosenbaum Fellowship from the Isaac Newton Institute of Cambridge University in 1998, the C. Holmes MacDonald National Outstanding Teaching Award from Eta Kappa Nu in 1999, the Charles Duncan Junior Faculty Achievement Award from Rice in 2000, the University of Illinois ECE Young Alumni Achievement Award in 2000, the George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching at Rice in 2001, 2003, and 2006, the Hershel M. Rich Invention Award from Rice in 2007, the Wavelet Pioneer Award from SPIE in 2008, and the Internet Pioneer Award from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School in 2008. He was selected as one of Edutopia Magazine's Daring Dozen educators in 2007. Connexions received the Tech Museum Laureate Award from the Tech Museum of Innovation in 2006. His work with Kevin Kelly on the Rice single-pixel compressive camera was selected by MIT Technology Review Magazine as a TR10 Top 10 Emerging Technology in 2007. He was co-author on a paper with Matthew Crouse and Robert Nowak that won the IEEE Signal Processing Society Junior Paper Award in 2001 and another with Vinay Ribeiro and Rolf Riedi that won the Passive and Active Measurement (PAM) Workshop Best Student Paper Award in 2003. He was elected a Fellow of the IEEE in 2001 and a Plus Member of AAA in 1986.

Open Education

Everyone has something to teach. Everyone has something to learn. Together, we can all help transform the way the world develops, disseminates, and uses knowledge

As the founders of two of the world’s largest open-source media platforms — Wikipedia and Conn-exions — we have both been accused of being dreamers. Independe-ntly, we became infected with the idea of creating a Web platform that would enable anyone to contribute their knowledge to free and open learning reso-urces. Jimmy started with his popularly generated encyclopaedia. Rich developed a platform for authors, teachers, and students to create, remix, and share courses and textbooks.
Almost everybody dismissed these dreams. Now, with the support of untold legions — from Nobel Laureates to junior high school kids from East Timor to East Los Angeles — Wikipedia and Connexions have spread around the globe and today are organic, growing information bases used by hundreds of millions of people.
We want to infect you with the dream that anyone can become part of a new movement with the potential to change the world of education. This movement can redefine forever how knowledge is created and used.
Today, some community college students have to quit school because their textbooks cost more than their tuition; and today, some third graders have to share math texts because there aren’t enough to go around. But imagine a world where textbooks and other learning materials are available to everyone for free over the Web and at low cost in print.
Today, language barriers prevent many immigrant parents from helping their children with their homework because the texts are only in English. But imagine a world where textbooks are adapted to many learning styles and translated into myriad languages.
Today, Pluto remains on the list of planets in science textbooks, and who knows how long it will take for it to be removed. But imagine a world where textbooks are continually updated and corrected by a legion of contributors.
Such a world was just a dream a decade ago. But now the puzzle pieces of the Open Education movement have come together, so that anyone, anywhere can write, assemble, customise, and publish their own open course or textbook. Open licenses make the materials legal to use and remix. Technical innovations like XML and print-on-demand make delivering the output technically feasible and inexpensive.
The new development and distribution models promoted by the Open Education movement represent a natural and inevitable evolution of the educational publishing industry. It parallels the evolution of the software industry (towards Linux and other open-source software); the music industry (recall the band Radiohead’s recent “pay what you like” digital download); and scholarly publishing (the United States government recently mandated online public access to all research funded by the National Institutes of Health — $28.9 billion this year).
The exciting thing about Open Education is that free access is just the beginning. Open Education promises to turn the current textbook production pipeline into a vast dynamic knowledge ecosystem that is in a constant state of creation, use, reuse, and improvement. Open Education promises to provide children with learning materials tailored to their individual needs, in contrast to today’s “off the rack” materials, together with quicker feedback loops that match learning outcomes more directly with content development and improvement. And Open Education promises new approaches to collaborative learning that leverage social interaction among students and teachers worldwide.
Late last year in Cape Town, we joined delegates from around the world to reach a consensus on Open Education’s ideals and approaches, and we committed ourselves to them in the Cape Town Open Education Declaration, which was officially released on January 22. (See www.capetowndeclaration.org)
Everyone has something to teach. Everyone has something to learn. Together, we can all help transform the way the world develops, disseminates, and uses knowledge. Together, we can help make the dream of Open Education a reality. —DT-PS
Jimmy Wales is founder of Wikipedia and Wikia. Richard Baraniuk, founder of Connexions, is a professor of engineering at Rice University
courtesy Dawn, Karachi

Preparing kids for life

By Chris Arnot

THE moment when Dr Peter Clough realised there’s more to performance than ability came on a bleak rugby league field. He was playing for Bradford University in northern England, and found himself up against a large and fearsome-looking winger who calmly announced that he was going to kill him.

“I believed him because, although I had fast hands for rugby, I lacked confidence,” admits the stocky figure who is now head of psychology at the University of Hull.

We’re on our way from Hull station to a nearby coffee bar. Clough is walking with a jauntiness that suggests confidence is no longer an issue. The painful lessons he learned on the sports field are what he’s now trying to pass on to those who find themselves in the less bruising but equally intimidating environment of the examination hall.

“Life’s tough; deal with it,” is his motto. Or, to put it another way, those who can train themselves to work well under pressure are more likely to do well in exams than intelligent students who are not good at coping with stress.

The term “mental toughness” is more associated with the world of professional sport than education. Indeed, I find myself inquiring whether this Clough is by any chance related to Brian, who knew a thing or two about psychology when it came to preparing footballers for the fray. He grins and shakes his head before conceding: “We would have had similar views, me and Brian.”

And that would appear to go for politics as well as psychology: Clough describes himself as “left of centre”, something of a surprise from a man who seems determined to challenge some liberal orthodoxies.

“I don’t buy into the theory that today’s schoolchildren are more stressed than previous generations,” he says.

Nor does he believe that there’s too much testing. “I’m a great believer in tests. It’s how the results are used that’s the problem. There’s an obsession with league tables [in the UK]. But I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally wrong with expecting children to sit down and answer questions about what they’re supposed to have learned.”

Clough is 48. There must have been fewer formal tests when he was at school in the 60s and 70s? “The same level of formalised teaching wasn’t there,” he agrees. “But I remember having to read out homework in front of the rest of the class while the teacher rubbished it.”

Clough insists: “What I’m not advocating is bullying or harassment. And I do accept that some people need help and intervention to boost their self-esteem. Children who are screwed up clinically and have behavioural issues are outside my area of expertise.”

As a chartered sports and occupational psychologist, however, Clough believes that he’s well placed to offer advice to those who underperform simply because they lack confidence.

He accepts that some secondary school teachers “doing one of the most stressful jobs there is” might be a bit suspicious of “academics like me coming in and telling them how to do their job”. Still, at least five schools in the north of England have allowed researchers from his department to talk to children about dealing with pressure.

Clough was brought up in a working-class area of Leeds; his father was a postman. He has little sympathy with those who blame their background for their lack of success.

“If they’ve had abusive parents, that’s different,” he says. But poverty is not a sufficient excuse. If you’re from a poor background, there will be fewer opportunities, but people have to take responsibility for their lives. There’s always a moment in life when the door of opportunity opens slightly. My job is to train people to put their foot in it.”

Paradoxically, perhaps, he also believes that children have to be allowed to fail if they are ultimately going to succeed. “Most people learn from their mistakes and bounce back, vowing not to make the same errors again,” he says. “In my view, there are too many safety nets in schools, such as the option to re-sit exams. It means that young people are less tough than previous generations, and less able to cope with life at university.”— courtesy The Guardian, London and Dawn, Karachi

Q.Quotes

1 .For we must consider that we shall be a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world – John Winthrop, discourse written on board the Arabella, 1630, as Pilgrim Fathers approached America, (1588-1649)

2. What will God say to us, if some of us go to him without the others? – Charles Peguy , quoted in W.Neil, Concise Dictionary of religious Quotations, (1873-1914)

3. When you travel to the Celestial City, carry no letter of introduction. When you knock, ask to see God-none of the servants. In what concerns you much, do not think that you have companions: know that you are alone in this world – Henry David Thorea (1817-1862) Letter to Harrison Blake, 27 March 1848

4. I think it would be a good idea – Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) when asked by an interviewer what he thought of Western Civilization

5. The pyramids themselves, doting with age, have forgotten the names of their founders – Thomas Fuller (1608-1661)

6. Death said: ‘The good is one thing, the pleasant the other: these two, have different objects, chain a man. It is well with him who clings to the good; he who chooses the pleasant misses his end.’ Upanishads (7 cent B.C) Katha Upanshid

7. I cannot help it;-in spite of myself, infinity torments me - Alfred De Musset (1810-1857)

8. Learn to think imperially – Joseph Chamberlain (1836-1914) British Colony secretary. Speech Guildhall, London, 19 January 1904

9. In the coming world, they will not ask me: “Why are you not Moses?” They will ask me: “Why were you not Zusya?” Zusya (?-1800) Before his death. In Martin Buber “Zusya of Hanipol,” tales of the Hasidim: The Early Masters, tr. Olga Marx, 1947

10. The secret of success in [education] is pace, and the secret of pace is concentration. But, in respect to precise knowledge, the watch-word is pace, pace, pace. Get your knowledge quickly, and then use it. If you can use it, you will retain it. – Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), The Aims of education and other essays, 3, 1929.

11. There is always room at the top – Daniel Webster (1782-1852) When advised not to become a lawyer, since the profession was overcrowded

12. Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough – Gustave Flaubert

13.It’s a damn poor mind that you can think of only one way to spell a word- Andrew Johnson

14. Education cannot be for students in any authentic way, if it is not of and by them – William H. Schubert (1944-) John Dewey Society president. “The Activist Library: A Symposium”, Nation 21 September 1992

15. The sum total of excellence is good sense and method. When these have passed into the instinctive readiness of habit, when the wheel revolves so rapidly that we cannot see it revolve at all, then we call the combination genius. – Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1722-1834). In Lord Acton, appendix (70) to essays on Freedom and Power, ed. Gertrude Himmerlfarb. 1949

16. Imagination is a very high sort of seeing – Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) . “The Poet”, Essays: Second Series , 1844