A "Teach for America" friend has recently been tasked with building a small Midwestern charter school's first Spanish program. One of the biggest challenges for her is finding ways to immerse students in the language with a lack of resources and a tight budget. This certainly seems like a quick, inexpensive and appealing way to get students engaged. I'll see if she can provide feedback.
The "social echo chamber and pop-culturization of news" phenomenon described in Brad's latest blog posts is exactly the issue my friends and I have been discussing for some time now. As a shameless news-junkie, I'm genuinely curious to find out how the Woven team aims to tackle this problem. Oh, and congratulations on the acquisition!
Great intro to DSP. If you're looking to build your EE library further, Ron Mancini's Op Amps for Everyone is also available as a free download from Texas Instruments. If you don't already have it, you can get it here: http://focus.ti.com/lit/an/slod006b/slod006b.pdf
Each of the programs listed are geared toward very early-stage companies and provide many different types of support functions. Each program (I believe) offers grants or loans, office space, and mentorship. At its current state, the Techarb is more of a conventional incubator with outside entities providing financial and mentorship functions, however it is intended to be grown into a full accelerator in the near future by U-M (it was created only a few months ago and just getting off the ground). I'm less familiar with the SmartStart's program (I only visited once), however I believe it offers a full range of early-stage startup assistance.
I just did a Google search of a few elements I have in my kitchen and was really surprised to find your website as the top result. Keep up the good work!