Augustana College, a United States college affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, is using Drupal.  According to Augustana's Web Editor the site was developed by Tim Broeker of Electric Jet (Mnpls) using Drupal 5.  Electric Pulp, a local Sioux Falls company, also contributed to the project by doing the design and CSS work.

I don't think I've ever met Tim Broeker, but what is interesting about this Drupal site developer is that he also has a Joomla! Core Team connection.  Yes indeed, open source does matter.

Linux.com: "The key to being successful in the IT industry is interning while still attending college and taking some certification courses after graduation. Do some research. Find an open source technology company that will provide you with the tools and resources you will need to build your career. Open source spans platforms, middleware and applications from data centers to desktops. There are many companies that offer internship programs and certification courses."

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"After one year of research, the biggest Latin America university moves to Joomla! 1.5.

229 courses in 40 different places, five thousand teachers and more than 56 thousand students make the USP – Universidade de São Paulo (São Paulo University) in Brazil is the number one in Latin America and one of the 100 most important in the world. Since 1997 in the Internet, the university conduct a research on the last year with the visitors of USP Portal (www.usp.br) about changes and new features on this gate with intent to support the desires and requests of national and international users. The result was a set of new websites with a new navigation system, news and events channels, maps, informations to foreigners in four different languages and a new design."

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Note: The off-topic but good discussion about Joomla! has been moved to its very own post: http://cmsreport.com/node/1664 . Please post there your opinions about Joomla! there. If you have comments specifically related to São Paulo University's implementation of Joomla!, those comments are still welcomed and appreciated here.

This is very cool, HarvardScience has chosen Drupal for their CMS.  I'm looking at Drupal for a science oriented server on the Intranet side.  Hmmm...ideas from Harvard...

Choosing a CMS

During the six months before I began building the HarvardScience site, the Harvard News Office had been working with designer Claudio luís Vera of Studio Module. The result was 28 beautiful templates, which had been chiseled, filed, and polished to the client's adoration. Unfortunately, during this time the News Office had still not made up its mind about what CMS to use. In fact there was still some muttering about how a custom CMS was the way to go.

So approximately six months ago, I built the first draft of HarvardScience using Drupal over the course of a weekend. The result was exactly what I had hoped for - the news office was so excited by the speed at which the site could be built they decided to go with Drupal. The rapid development of a prototype or draft site can be built using Drupal made the CMS issue a fait accompli strategy.

Complete Story via Drupal.org

I wonder how OnStar could have made my 4-door 1976 Chevy Nova any slower than it already was?

Will a new anti-theft tool from General Motors and OnStar be enough to make your car not worth the hassle of stealing?

The Stolen Vehicle Slowdown, a new feature added to OnStar, takes away the ability to use a car's gas pedal, while allowing braking and steering controls to work.  More...

By the time my Dad gave me the Nova for college during the second half of the 1980's...the car had already it earned it's nickname, The Rustmobile.  I miss that car...

"Accepted student applications for Google Summer of Code have been announced! We accepted over 900 student applicants from a pool of nearly 6,200 applications.

All the mentoring organizations that will participate in Google Summer of Code 2007 are listed below. You can learn more about the accepted students and their projects by visiting each organization's "about" page."

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All I can do is shake my head in the direction education has taken in the United States. I've written about this topic in the past, a little here and on another blog of mine. In one of those blog posts, I wrote the following.

American society as a whole seems to have less value for education, especially in the sciences and math, than when I was growing up. Maybe I’m more sensitive to these numbers since I am a scientist at heart…but isn’t anyone else disturbed by this trend? While I feel there should have been something done to help reverse this downward spiral sooner, I’m glad at least that it is finally getting some some well deserved attention by the Bush administration.

College students in the United States are not showing up in those university programs that are focused on physical science, computer science, math, and engineering. There are a number of politicians, parents, and students that will blame the public school education system for the current state of education in the United States. I have some serious doubts whether fingers should really be pointed in the direction of the teachers or even school system. I think in many ways, those fingers should be pointed right back to the parents and their children. Perhaps life in America is so good that by the time the student becomes a young adult, life hasn't prepared them to face the challenges and disappointments they need to do well in the sciences.