[LINK] Canberra launches class action

[Tom Worthington]

At 12:03 PM 10/6/2006, Deus Ex Machina wrote:
>http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,20532568-2,00.html
>
>"NATIONAL board of studies with control of a uniform curriculum is 
>being proposed by the Howard Government to free schools from 
>"Chairman Mao"-type ideologies" ...

By an amazing coincidence the Link Institute just released:

                         LINK INSTITUTE LINKGRAM

         Revolutionary Software to Generate Standard Australian School Readers

Canberra 6 October: Answering the Federal Government's call to end 
the bias in education, the Link Institute has announced its LBB 
software system.

LBB takes advantage of the large volume of unbiased material made 
available by the federal government to create standardized readers 
for use in schools. The LBB system uses a specially adapted version 
of the  Australian Government web search system.

Professor Klerphel said: 'There has been strong interest in the 
system from other governments, particularly China. We tested the 
system using the phrase "Prime Minister John Howard said" 
<http://govsearch.australia.gov.au/search/search.cgi?collection=gov&form=au&query_phrase=Prime+Minister+John+Howard+said&gscope1=0&num_ranks=10&chksummary=chksummary> 
and the Chinese said the results were comparable with their 
"Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong": 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotations_from_Chairman_Mao_Zedong>'.

The system finds all federally endorsed information on a topic, 
including statements from government ministers, and creates a topic 
map of the data. Artificial intelligence semantic web techniques are 
then used to arrange the information. Versions of the data are 
automatically created for primary, secondary and tertiary education 
use. The data is then used to create education web sites, courseware 
and podcasts. The created materials will be linked automatically from 
all edu.au web sites, using powers in the Telecommunications 
Legislation Amendment Bill 2000.

An advantage of the new system is that updates can be undertaken 
daily. All educational materials can be reissued to reflect the 
changes in history. LBB will automatically update all learning 
materials each day, including citations and references in linked 
scholarly work.

Professor Klerphel said: "There was a large maintenance task in 
keeping published material up to date with the latest in government 
thinking about the past. As an example the Australian Government has 
had a consistent policy for decades of criticizing countries for 
developing nuclear weapons. Of course, which countries are criticized 
changes from time to time, due to alliances and trade agreements. The 
need to go back and make history consistent with current policy takes 
a lot of work. The new system will update all school and university 
text books overnight and remove any inconsistences in published 
papers, making the teaching of history much more efficient. When 
their is a new trade agreement any mention of a 'military dictator 
threatening their neighbors with nuclear Armageddon' can be quickly 
changed to 'a strong leader who understands the need for diversified 
energy production'."

;-)

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Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd           ABN: 17 088 714 309
http://www.tomw.net.au                PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617