Schools in crisis. Stretched budgets and overcrowded classrooms. Aasif Mandvi explores the risks of teaching US children Chinese culture and language:

Maps of cities are now being generated to differentiate where people are taking photos, based on geotag data. This is a view of San Francisco (blue for locals, red for tourists):

Locals and Tourists #3 (GTWA #4): San Francisco

Originally uploaded by Eric Fischer

Locals take photos in residential areas while tourists take photos in touristic areas. Should we be getting more insight out of this map?

What if we break it down by tourist home town, by gender and by age? How do tourists from Korea compare with Japan, or Germany versus France? It would seem the map becomes more informative the more sensitive/privacy data is available…and that is exactly the kind of pressure many companies feel when thinking about how to visualize their databases of customer information.

Microsoft is releasing new marketing information as part of their campaign to kill IE6.

An IE8 security video is now available on their site, and on some TV stations, which mentions three features:

• Domain highlighting
• Smart screen filter
• Blacklist of malicious sites

The video, to be frank, does not work for me. Nothing is memorable. I know I am not the intended audience but I think most people would find the music bland, the actors bland (they just sit and stare at a screen), and the information extremely dry. Terms like click-jacking and XSS are just tossed in at the end of sentences without any context. They really lost me with the phrase “right out of the box”. It should be obvious to everyone there is no box for IE8 and installation and configuration is still required.

Microsoft’s best hope for this video could be that some parodies emerge and get viral (pun not intended).

My suggestion for improvement? They should have tried to produce something more like Virgin’s pre-flight warning video. It delivers security information and safety features in a very memorable and enjoyable format:

Diebold has issued a press release called New Skimming-Protection Solutions to Combat ATM Fraud

Designed to provide effective countermeasures against known skimming attack vectors, Diebold’s ATM Security Protection Suite consists of anti-skimming packages and an industry-leading outsourced monitoring service. The suite offers five levels of protection to proactively guard against increasingly sophisticated card-skimming attacks.

1. Level one is meant to prevent skimmer attachment.
2. Level two generates an alert – directed either to the branch alarm system or to the ATM network monitoring system – when a skimmer is detected.
3. Level three and four involve different detection methods such as an electromagnetic field to prevent a skimmer from capturing magnetic-stripe data in both motorized and dip card readers
4. Level five is “Diebold’s ATM SkimmingAlert Monitoring Service.”