Why middle school? According to Ken Perlin, an NYU professor of computer science, in middle school many students “become discouraged or uninterested and pour their time at home into gaming. We think gaming is our starting point to draw them into math, science, and technology-based programs.”

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You probably caught the news about the availability of the newest version of the Silverlight plugin: Silverlight2. Thanks to some high profile efforts, like the Microsoft-NBC partnership on the Olympics website for example, Silverlight is now installed on 1 in 4 of PCs worldwide.

If you haven’t already installed Silverlight on your PC, Microsoft and their partners will soon unveil a number of other websites which may compel you to do so. One of the new websites which will feature Silverlight is the CBS College Sports Network, which will stream 20,000 hours of live games for over 150 universities. AOL will also reveal their new AOL Mail browser (see image to left). That sleek new rich-internet app was teased at this year’s MIX08 conference, if you remember. In addition, Yahoo! Japan is now live streaming Major League Baseball games, Hard Rock International will update their memorabilia site with new features, and  other companies like Toyota, HSN, and others will be launching this week, too. In other words, 1 in 4 is just the beginning.

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Motorola has just introduced a new dash-mounted mobile computer, the VC6096. Running Windows Mobile 6, this computer is designed specifically for work-related applications like those used for fleet management or vehicle tracking systems, for example. Another use for the device would be in emergency and police vehicles. Currently, the systems used in those vehicles tend to run Windows XP, XP Embedded, or Windows CE.

With its wireless LAN (WLAN) capabilities, the device can be easily integrated with a company’s existing WLAN for real-time visibility of the vehicle. In addition, its 3.5 G GSM HSDPA WWAN allows for simultaneous voice and data and the bandwidth to support even data-intensive applications. Because of the VC6096’s open platform, any number of applications can be installed on the device to support whatever your business needs.

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A new project from Microsoft Research (who by the way, is doing the coolest things these days), is a social search experiment called U Rank. The current U Rank prototype is a social search engine built on Live Search that lets you organize, edit, and annotate your search results as well as share them with others.

Essentially, the way U Rank works is by letting you move the search results around – either higher or lower using drag-and-drop while also optionally adding notes to the results or deleting them entirely. In other words, you can create the perfect, personalized search results instead of relying on an algorithm to do it for you.

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The Live Labs team has just released a new project, Political Streams, and just in time as the U.S. Presidential election draws near. The site mines social media from across the internet, including blogs, newsgroups, and web sites, in order to track what stories are popular and if that popularity is increasing or decreasing.

When you click into an article on Political Streams, you’ll see a snippet of text from the article’s start and a link to the source if you’re interested in reading the complete story. Beneath this text are charts and graphs that show the attention the people and places mentioned in that particular story have seen over time. On the right, you’ll also see links to related information like other articles on news sites and blogs as well as links to people and places. Those people and places are generated by leveraging the API from the online open database project, Freebase.

The Political Streams site was built on the Social Streams platform, a platform that mines the social web for data. BLEWS, an earlier project by Microsoft Research, was also built on this platform.