The French ministry of education organized a meeting entitles “L’Apprentissage des Sciences dans L’Europe de la Connaissance” that is right now taking place in Grenoble. Minister Xavier Darcos, the French minister of education, is talking and mentioned that, in France, during the last several years, physics has lost in average 5.5% of the student body a year. Several other countries report similar trends.

We have today taken action to upgrade the Drupal core engine powering the JEM portal to the latest version due to security issues found on the previous Drupal 5.x series of releases.

Security announcement on the issue is available at http://drupal.org/node/318706, please report any possible problems with the website.

Dominique has just announced that the odt2tbook plugin for OpenOffice.org has won an award. He does not mention he has been interviewed in a podcast about the OpenOffice.org community. Congratulations are in order!

The JEM server was down most of today, Saturday, September 27. The JEM server is located in a machine room of the Physics Department, and, of course, none of the administrators of the machine room was reachable off hours. Together with Antti Alamäki I then went to Campus, got the security guard to let us in to the machine room, and rebooted ubu, the JEM server.

It is possible to use our laboratory of curves in:
www.mat.uned.es/GeoCM/2PP/lab_curvas/_apps/matematica3d_20.app/matematic...
(please be patient, some times our server is very slow)
With this laboratory it possible to visualize the Frenet frame, osculatrix circle, evolute, osculatrix plane, ... and to compute curvature, torsion, arc length, ... of differential curves.
There are several curves previously defined and the user can introduce its favourite ones using parametrization or curvature and torsion (i.e. it is possible to experiment with the fundamental theorem of curves).

The JEM community now is a registered dataprovider for the LOM records on the website. A complete list of dataproviders can be fetched from http://www.openarchives.org/Register/BrowseSites.

MathDox is a collection of tools for interactive Mathematical
Documents on the web.

At our website http://www.mathdox.org you will find a
Windows Installer for our MathDox software.

Of course Linux user can go to our download site and find their all the files to install MathDox.

This blog comment is related to Olga Caprotti's blog entry "Mission Accomplished."

We are in the business of advancing the use of information technology in education. At times I feel that this is a Mission Impossible.

One of the goals of the JEM network is to connect the various communities involved in mathematics education, from the technology developers to the users to the researchers in education. The last JEM workshop was organized as a satellite event to the fourth in a series of European workshops on MathML, which has shifted the emphasis from being purely technically oriented to addressing also the various communities.

The slides can be found here. They contain a pointer to the example grammars, including the Spanish one that was built during the tutorial.