infoneer.net

over the past few months, something has changed. The elite, pace-setting universities have embraced the Internet. Not long ago, online courses were interesting experiments. Now online activity is at the core of how these schools envision their futures

Google says that its search engine now contains 500 million objects and knows more than 3.5 billion facts ‘and relationships between these different objects.’

People who are highly creative often have odd thoughts and behaviors—and vice versa.
Both creativity and eccentricity may be the result of genetic variations that increase cognitive disinhibition—the brain’s failure to filter out extraneous information.
When unfiltered information reaches conscious awareness in the brains of people who are highly intelligent and can process this information without being overwhelmed, it may lead to exceptional insights and sensations.

It’s just a matter o time until we see the same meltdown in traditional college education. Like the real estate industry, prices will rise until the market revolts. Then it will be too late. STudents will stop taking out the loans traditional Universities expect them to. And when they do tuition will come down. And when prices come down Universities will have to cut costs beyond what they are able to. They will have so many legacy costs, from tenured professors to construction projects to research they will be saddled with legacy costs and debt in much the same way the newspaper industry was. Which will all lead to a de-levering and a de-stabilization of the University system as we know it.

Apple’s success should serve as a lesson to every small business looking to survive in the age of Amazon. There are lots of things the Web does very well, and every year, it gets better. If you build a business that merely replicates one of the Web’s strong suits—selling books or music, making travel arrangements, that kind of thing—you’re obviously gonna be toast. But the Web has blind spots—services it doesn’t reliably perform well now, and services it won’t ever be able to reliably perform well. If you’re starting a small company now, you’ve got to make sure your firm fits in one of these buckets. Find some place where the Web fails, and see if you can create an online service that amends that failure. Failing that, create an offline company that’s Amazon-proof—one whose future can’t be disrupted by a digital service because its very purpose is to offer direct human contact.

Chancellor Kaya Henderson said: “We have invested in full-time librarians for the last three or four years and we haven’t seen the kind of payoff we’d like”While noting that she is not disparaging librarians she said “We have pulled away from programs where we haven’t received a return on our investment.” Apparently a payoff on investment would involve improved test scores.

The importance of learning to code isn’t so that everyone will write code, and bury the world under billions of lines of badly conceived Python, Java, and Ruby. The importance of code is that it’s a part of the world we live in. I’ve had enough of legislators who think the Internet is about tubes, who haven’t the slightest idea about legitimate uses for file transfer utilities, and no concept at all about what privacy (and the invasion of privacy) might mean in an online space. I’ve had enough of patent inspectors who approve patents for which prior art has existed for decades. And I’ve had enough of judges making rulings after listening to lawyers arguing about technologies they don’t understand. Learning to code won’t solve these problems, but coding does force engagement with technology on a level other than pure ignorance. Coding is a part of cultural competence, even if you never do it professionally. Alsup is a modern hero.

Instinctually, we want to maintain the hunter/prey relationship of the independent citizen who isn’t being snooped on. But you know what? You’re already being snooped on, ceaselessly.