“On social media, the reader is the one that provides the lede,” said BuzzFeed CEO and Founder Jonah Peretti during a talk about how all media is (or should be) going social today during the fifth annual Wired Business Conference in New York City Tuesday. “We think that sharing is the highest bar of quality, more than a click, more than a pageview.”

“If the smartest, most motivated people are both more likely to go to college and more likely to be financially successful, then the observed difference in earnings by years of education doesn’t measure the true effect of college,” reads the report.”

“Is more data always better? Hardly. In fact, if you’re looking for correlations—is thing X connected to thing Y, in a way that will give me information I can act on?—gathering more data could actually hurt you.”

“94% of parents say libraries are important for their children”

“Not getting into Brown was the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” said Assaf, a vice president of sales at S.W. Basics of Brooklyn who ultimately ended up studying at NYU and has been accepted to the Harvard Business School. The private school environment, according to Assaf, too often tended to engender in her and her classmates “an entitlement mentality.” “At NYU, in a city like New York, nothing happens for you,” she said. “You have to earn every opportunity.”

“An estimated 5 million Americans are already using wearable devices to sync their lives to the cloud, and their ranks are growing rapidly. Like Paulus, they are sending vast amounts of information—collectively referred to as Big Data—to the servers of salivating Silicon Valley executives. In just the first half of last year, venture-capital firms invested $700 million in businesses developing new wearable and embedded devices. According to a study by the consulting giant McKinsey, Big Data could be worth $300 billion annually to the health-care industry alone. But its value to sports-apparel companies, health-food purveyors, and even mattress-makers is also apparent. At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, 283 vendors showed up to promote digital health products—over 100 more than the number of companies hawking games. One British mobile-research firm estimates that by 2017, 70 million people will be buying wearable devices annually and slapping them on their wrists (and chests, ankles, and necks). And while there is no valuation yet for, say, what Paulus’ heart rate is worth per beat, there’s reason to think that users of tracking apps and sensor-laden devices are giving the milk away free.”

“And this gets to the fundamental problem with Google Fiber: It’s totally awesome, and totally unnecessary. During my time in Kansas City, I spoke to several local businesspeople, aspiring startup founders, and a few city boosters. They were all thrilled that Google had come to town, and the few who’d gotten access to the Google pipe said they really loved it. But I couldn’t find a single person who’d found a way to use Google Fiber to anywhere near its potential—or even a half or quarter of what it can do. It was even difficult to find people who could fully utilize Google Fiber in their imaginations. As hard as people tried, few could even think up ways to do something truly amazing with the world’s fastest Internet.”

“From Texas, the idea of a $10,000 bachelor’s degree has spread like an Internet meme to governors in Florida and Wisconsin, a state legislator in California, and some national online colleges. But the growing attention to the bargain-basement bachelor’s degree isn’t just an indication of how an idea can quickly take hold with the public and lawmakers. The idea itself has become a kind of Rorschach test for how people view American higher education, what they think its role should be, and whom or what they blame for its shortfalls.”