fuse

iPads in classroom provide 20 percent jump in math scores, study says

After a yearlong pilot program in California initiated by publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the math scores of students using iPads jumped 20 percent compared with classrooms that used traditional paper textbooks.

HMH Fuse: Algebra I was instituted at Amelia Earhart Middle School in the Riverside Unified School District as the world's first iPad-driven algebra curriculum. According to the HMH official press release, 78 percent of students in the pilot program scored "proficient" or "advanced" on the California Standards Test for spring 2011.

Compared with the 59 percent of students that had the same rating using … Read more

How to easily edit group photos

There are about 14 million (number not scientifically accurate) ways for a group photo to go wrong. People blink, sneeze, look the wrong direction, or otherwise get distracted and the potentially perfect shot gets ruined as a result. Fortunately for any Windows user, software is available with tools to help you splice pieces of different photos into one problem-free picture.

What you'll need:

Windows Live Photo GalleryLots of pictures--you'll want to take the same photo a few times to make the near-perfect shot a reality.

Step 1: Open the Start menu and type Windows Live Photo Gallery into … Read more

Get ironclad passwords with SoftFuse Password Generator Free

All too many people use passwords that are both easy to remember and easy for other people to figure out, which can leave e-mail, Internet banking, and many other sensitive accounts vulnerable to hacking. One of the best ways to protect your accounts is to use a long, randomly generated password, and to use a different one for each account. SoftFuse Password Generator Free makes it easy to create strong, customized passwords. All you have to do is figure out how to keep track of them.

The program's interface is simple, with a box in which users enter the … Read more

Microsoft turns searches into Web albums

A new Web app from Microsoft can bring life to your Web searches by using them to build customizable news-oriented Web albums.

Demoed at Le Web conference last week, Microsoft's Montage can take virtually any topic or keyword that you enter and create a Web page filled with articles and photographs grabbed from news sites, Twitter, YouTube, and a variety of other sources. You can customize your page with different layouts and change each section of the page to point to specific sources of information. When you're done, you can save your page and publish it or share … Read more

Fuse Labs' Montage blends search with blogging

Is there a happy medium between a Tweet and something like a full-blown blog post? Microsoft seems to think so and is working on a new experimental publishing system called Montage that lets you throw together a page of content--be it yours, or collected from the Web in just a few minutes.

Actually, less than a few minutes is the aim of the game for Montage, which pulls together news headlines, photos, and Tweets based on Bing searches. These items can then be placed on a page that stays static or changes based on the searches and feeds it's … Read more

Microsoft's Lili Cheng on FUSE, Spindex, and more

SAN FRANCISCO--It's always fun to catch up with Microsoft's Lili Cheng. In addition to being a bundle of energy, she's always working on some interesting project.

In her years, she has worked in Microsoft's research labs and on the Windows team. Since last year, she has been heading a social software project known as Future Social Experiences, or FUSE Labs. The effort, under Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie, looks at how to merge the social computing world with traditional software.

At Web 2.0 on Tuesday, Cheng showed off Spindex, the group's latest project. Like … Read more

Synaptics Fuse: Multi-input phone gets a grip

If you thought tilting and swiping your iPhone was the future, just take a look at the Synaptics Fuse. It's a concept phone that points to how we'll be fingering, tilting, and even squeezing our phones in 2010 and beyond. We're lighting the fuse on this innovative concept and standing well back.

Santa Clara, Calif.-based touch-screen and trackpad manufacturer Synaptics has headed up a coalition of interface experts to produce what it calls a "next-gen mobile phone concept." It packs a 94mm (3.7-inch) WVGA AMOLED touch screen with a cool interface, rolling icons … Read more

Microsoft creates social computing sandbox

Update at 9:20 a.m. PDT: Comments from Lili Cheng added.

Ray Ozzie is getting more social.

No, the infrequent blogger and Microsoft's chief software architect has not decided to Twitter his every move. Rather, Ozzie has set up a new social computing lab at Microsoft, to be headed by Microsoft Research veteran Lili Cheng.

The Future Social Experiences (FUSE) group brings together three existing efforts: Cheng's creative systems group from Microsoft Research and two units that were already part of Ozzie's world--the Media Labs and Startup Labs group.

Ozzie sent an e-mail Thursday to Microsofties … Read more

$39 gold-plated fuses improve sound quality

Isoclean makes audiophile-grade gold-plated fuses. This fuse is a "tweak," an accessory that promises to improve the sound of your hi-fi.

Audiophiles eat this stuff up. We put special cones or pads under our equipment to eliminate bad vibes, plug our electronics into AC power line conditioners, and buy equipment stands to coddle our components.

Isoclean isn't the first company to offer audiophile fuses, and I can't say I'm game for these types of tweaks. They reek of "snake oil" silliness, but an audiophile buddy couldn't stop raving about the difference the … Read more

Swift does mobile blogging for the LEGO generation

I'm a fan of having all the tools to blog in one simple editor, but if you're more the piece-work type (hence the LEGO reference) then check out Swift, a new blogging tool created by the folks at Proteus. Swift lets you design and maintain a blog built specifically for handheld devices. It's completely free to use, although it's subsidized by targeted advertising based on the content you're serving up on your site. Paid "pro" members who pay $10 can get rid of the advertising altogether.

Similar to Zinadoo, which we checked out … Read more