infoneer pulse

Education Chief Lets States Delay Use of Tests in Decisions About Teachers’ Jobs

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 21:41:09 -0400

Education Chief Lets States Delay Use of Tests in Decisions About Teachers’ Jobs:

Acknowledging that the nation’s educators face large challenges in preparing students for more rigorous academic standards and tests, Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, informed state education officials on Tuesday that they could postpone using the tests to make career decisions about teachers.

Responding to growing complaints from teachers’ unions and school administrators that they were being held accountable for results on tests before they had time to adjust to new curriculum standards, Mr. Duncan wrote in a letter to state education officers that they could delay using teacher evaluations for “personnel determinations” by another year.

» via The New York Times (Subscription may be required for some content)

America's Teacher Training Programs Aren't Good Enough

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 21:13:00 -0400

America's Teacher Training Programs Aren't Good Enough:

A report out today from the National Council on Teacher Quality rates more than 1,100 elementary and secondary programs at just over 600 institutions of higher education across the country and concludes that the bar is set too low for entrance into professional training, future teachers are not being adequately prepared for the classroom or new requirements such as the Common Core State Standards, and the nation’s expectations are far below those for teachers in countries where their students score higher on international exams.

» via The Atlantic

"According to a new report on the state of US education from the Council on Foreign Relations,..."

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 10:50:54 -0400

“According to a new report on the state of US education from the Council on Foreign Relations, Americans going into the labor force today are less educated than those retiring from it. This phenomenon is unique among developed countries. For 55- to 64-year-olds, the US has the highest percentage of high-school graduates and the third-highest percentage of college graduates; in people aged 25 to 34, the country is 10th and 13th respectively.”

- People joining the US workforce today are less educated than those leaving it - Quartz

"The bad news: Just 23 percent of Americans told Gallup they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of..."

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 10:04:46 -0400

“The bad news: Just 23 percent of Americans told Gallup they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers, the same percentage who said they trust TV news. The good news: Both are still more popular than big business, organized labor, HMOs and Congress.”

- Gallup: Only 23% of Americans trust newspapers, TV news | Poynter.

"Nobody can think anymore because they’re constantly interrupted,” said Leslie Perlow, a Harvard..."

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 09:17:39 -0400

““Nobody can think anymore because they’re constantly interrupted,” said Leslie Perlow, a Harvard Business School professor and author of “Sleeping With Your Smartphone.” “Technology has enabled this expectation that we always be on.” Workers fear the repercussions that could result if they are unavailable, she said. The intermingling of work and personal life adds to the onslaught, as people communicate about personal topics during the workday, and about work topics when they are at home.”

- Messages Galore, but No Time to Think - NYTimes.com

"The deal was big news across the web. Amazon, pundits said, had stepped up its effort to challenge..."

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 08:31:16 -0400

“The deal was big news across the web. Amazon, pundits said, had stepped up its effort to challenge old-school giants like IBM in an area the old guard had long dominated federal contracting. The chorus of voices swelled Friday when the General Accounting Office responded to IBM’s protest with a ruling that said the CIA chose Amazon over Big Blue due to a “superior technical solution.” But Amazon’s CIA contract is important for far bigger reasons, and marks a much bigger shift than most people realize. You see, the GAO ruling on the matter reveals that the contract involves Amazon building cloud services inside CIA data centers. “The contractor generally was to provide a copy of its existing public cloud (modified where necessary) to be installed on government premises,” the GAO ruling explains. That may seem like a small thing, but in the world of cloud computing, it’s a seismic event.”

- Amazon’s Invasion of the CIA Is a Seismic Shift in Cloud Computing | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com

India to send world's last telegram. Stop.

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 08:19:00 -0400

India to send world's last telegram. Stop.:

At the Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), India’s state-owned telecom company, a message emerges from a dot matrix printer addressing a soldier’s Army unit in Delhi. ”GRANDMOTHER SERIOUS. 15 DAYS LEAVE EXTENSION,” it reads. It’s one of about 5,000 such missives still being sent every day by telegram – a format favored for its “sense of urgency and authenticity,” explains a BSNL official.

But the days of such communication are numbered: The world’s last telegram message will be sent somewhere in India on July 14.

That missive will come 144 years after Samuel Morse sent the first telegram in Washington, and seven years after Western Union shuttered its services in the United States. In India, telegraph services were introduced by William O’Shaughnessy, a British doctor and inventor who used a different code for the first time in 1850 to send a message.

» via Christian Science Monitor

"The pending closure is credit negative for a small subset of the higher-education sector with..."

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 03:52:38 -0400

““The pending closure is credit negative for a small subset of the higher-education sector with similar attributes to Saint Paul’s and other closed colleges: very small, private colleges with a high reliance on student charges, indistinct market positions, and limited donor support,” Moody’s analysts said. “We anticipate more closures for these types of colleges given the current pressures on all higher-education revenue sources and increased accreditation scrutiny.””

- College’s Closure Signals Problems for Others, Credit-Rating Agency Says - Bottom Line - The Chronicle of Higher Education

China's Tianhe-2 retakes fastest supercomputer crown

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 03:06:11 -0400

China's Tianhe-2 retakes fastest supercomputer crown:

A China-based supercomputer has leapfrogged rivals to be named the world’s most powerful system.

Tianhe-2, developed by the government-run National University of Defence Technology, topped the latest list of the fastest 500 supercomputers, by a team of international researchers.

They said the news was a “surprise” since the system had not been expected to be ready until 2015.

» via BBC

"Email is the main cause of information overload at work today. It prevents us from being able to..."

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 02:19:41 -0400

“Email is the main cause of information overload at work today. It prevents us from being able to make good decisions and tackle important tasks according to priority.”

- Can Activity Streams Save Us From Information Overload? | Fast Company | Business Innovation

"For every book you send to 1DollarScan, you’ll also have to send along a signed waiver stating that..."

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 01:33:16 -0400

“For every book you send to 1DollarScan, you’ll also have to send along a signed waiver stating that you understand you’re having a copy of your books made under the company’s Fair Use Policy. The waiver also frees the company from any liability that they might have incurred for making a copy of a book that you don’t own. Once the contracts are signed, just pop them into the box with your books and ship them off to the company’s offices in California. When the books are received by 1DollarScan, the workers cut the spines off of them. This ensures that the pages of the book lay flat on the scanner, and makes it impossible to resell the hard copy of the book after it’s been scanned. When the scanning’s complete, the pages are shredded and recycled, ensuring that the owner only has access to one copy of their book: the freshly minted digital version, which can be downloaded as a PDF from the company’s website via the user’s password-protected account.”

- Review: 1DollarScan Book Digitizing Service

"David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, said: “Since 2008, we have used ‘hashing’ technology..."

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 00:46:42 -0400

“David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, said: “Since 2008, we have used ‘hashing’ technology to tag known child sexual abuse images, allowing us to identify duplicate images which may exist elsewhere. “Each offending image in effect gets a unique fingerprint that our computers can recognize without humans having to view them again. “Recently, we have started working to incorporate these fingerprints into a cross-industry database. This will enable companies, law enforcement, and charities to better collaborate on detecting and removing child abuse images.””

- Google builds new system to eradicate child porn images from the web - Telegraph

"Some 74 percent of professors aged 49-67 plan to delay retirement past age 65 or never retire at..."

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 23:13:43 -0400

“Some 74 percent of professors aged 49-67 plan to delay retirement past age 65 or never retire at all, according to a new Fidelity Investments study of higher education faculty. While 69 percent of those surveyed cited financial concerns, an even higher percentage of professors said love of their careers factored into their decision.”

- Data suggest baby boomer faculty are putting off retirement | Inside Higher Ed

U.S. Opens Antitrust Investigation Into Colleges' Talk of Student-Aid Reform

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 22:27:28 -0400

U.S. Opens Antitrust Investigation Into Colleges' Talk of Student-Aid Reform:

The U.S. Department of Justice has begun an investigation into “a possible agreement” among colleges to reform their financial-aid policies, according to a letter sent last month to at least two college presidents.

The investigation, several sources said, was prompted by recent discussions among a handful of college officials about how—or whether—they could collaborate to limit their use of merit-based financial aid and reduce bidding wars for applicants.

In the May 21 letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Chronicle, a lawyer in the department wrote that an agreement “to restrict tuition discounting and prevent colleges from changing or improving financial-aid awards to individual students” may restrain competition in violation of antitrust laws.

» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)

"I just wish that we could talk about books as if they are for use, not as symbols of enduring..."

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 22:02:44 -0400

“I just wish that we could talk about books as if they are for use, not as symbols of enduring knowledge that must be preserved against the ravages of digital barbarians or as emblems of obdurate and blinkered resistance to inevitable change.”

- Throwing the Books at Each Other | Inside Higher Ed

"As hybrids, they defy easy categorization and threaten to upset the tidy categories we have for..."

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 21:42:18 -0400

“As hybrids, they defy easy categorization and threaten to upset the tidy categories we have for judging who is and is not college-educated. Like monsters, MOOCs threaten to disrupt our social world and bring chaos in their wake.”

- Why We Fear MOOCs - The Conversation - The Chronicle of Higher Education

"Nowadays in the digital world you can hardly own anything anymore. If you put things in the cloud,..."

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 12:38:38 -0400

“Nowadays in the digital world you can hardly own anything anymore. If you put things in the cloud, someone, somewhere might disappear it and it’s gone forever. When we grew up, ownership was what made America different than Russia.”

- Steve Wozniak, lamenting the loss of first sale rights, as well as privacy, in Woz: This is not my America | Technically Incorrect - CNET News. (via arlpolicynotes)

"The work of the Chinese Communists within academic circles in the United States is far greater than..."

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 10:14:18 -0400

“The work of the Chinese Communists within academic circles in the United States is far greater than what people imagine, and some scholars have no option but to hold themselves back. Academic independence and academic freedom in the United States are being greatly threatened by a totalitarian regime.”

- Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng • Suggesting, in a statement released Sunday night, that he was forced out of his fellowship role at New York University, which he suggests was damaging the university’s relationship with China. Chen, a bliind lawyer whom you might remember pulled off a daring escape to achieve his dissident status in the U.S. just over a year ago, has until the end of June to vacate the university’s premises. NYU, meanwhile, disputes Chen’s account, stating that he knew from the outset that the fellowship would last just a year. (via shortformblog)

Archivists in France Fight a Privacy Initiative

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 22:36:14 -0400

Archivists in France Fight a Privacy Initiative:

As a European proposal to bolster digital privacy safeguards faces intense lobbying from Silicon Valley and other powerful groups in Brussels, an obscure but committed group has joined in the campaign to keep personal data flourishing online.

One of the European Union’s measures would grant Internet users a “right to be forgotten,” letting them delete damaging references to themselves in search engines, or drunken party photos from social networks. But a group of French archivists, the people whose job it is to keep society’s records, is asking: What about our collective right to keep a record even of some things that others might prefer to forget?

The archivists and their counteroffensive might seem out of step, as concern grows about American surveillance of Internet traffic around the world. But the archivists say the right to be forgotten, as it has become known, could complicate the collection and digitization of mundane public documents — birth reports, death notices, real estate transactions and the like — that form a first draft of history.

» via The New York Times (Subscription may be required for some content)

"The researchers now know why ancient Roman concrete is so superior. They extracted from the floor of..."

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 18:35:07 -0400

“The researchers now know why ancient Roman concrete is so superior. They extracted from the floor of Italy’s Pozzuoili Bay, in the northern tip of the Bay of Naples, a sample of concrete headwater that dates back to 37 B.C. and analyzed its mineral components at research labs in Europe and the U.S., including at Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source. The analysis, the scientists believe, reveals the lost recipe of Roman concrete, and it also points to how much more stable and less environmentally damaging it is than today’s blend.”

- Ancient Roman Concrete Is About to Revolutionize Modern Architecture - Businessweek