About Anything

A summary of the  March 10th Union Square Ventures put on a conference called Hacking Education with the theme of re-imagining how education should look in a web 2.0 world.
From the summary: “If the transition from the current high touch, but high cost, learning environment to an efficient peer produced learning network is as abrupt and brutal as the transition we are witnessing in the music and newspaper industry, the social consequences are likely to be a lot more severe. [Brad Burnham on unionsquareventures.com]

A brief piece on the difficulty of explaining authority. [on ACRLog]

How to become a digital nomad. The solution is to digitize everything.  [Mike Elgan in Computerworld]

Human population density does affect animal populations, in this case, fish. [Christopher Stallings in PLoS One]

A little comic relief. The Creation Wiki entry for the Flying Spaghetti Monster may not be the funniest page on the Internet, but it’s pretty funny. And I wasn’t even aware that there was a Creation Wiki. [Sean in Discover Magazine]

More comments on Elsevier’s six fake journals. [Barbara Fister on ACRLog]

A simple conclusion: Culling impedes the evolution of avian host resistance against influenza. [Eunha Shim in PLoS One]

What was Merck thinking? And Elsevier? Bob Grant reports on how Merck paid Elsevier to publish a fake peer-reviewed journal that reported favorably on Merck products.

Summer Johnson’s comments on Merck’s fake journal in the biothects.net blog. He points out “These kinds of endeavors are not possible without help.”

Anne-Marie Deitering comments on Merck’s fake journal in her info-feteshist blog. She argues that ultimate control is passing away from scholars’ and researchers’ professional societies and into the hands of corporate entities.

Christopher Dawson reviews Nature’s Scitable, concluding that he content is accessible, deep, relevant, and understandable.

Doc Searls wonders if Google’s lack of progress on basic search is because of advertising.

Sajid Surve reviews experiements done by Stanley Milgram and Jerry Burger and concludes, sadly, that when presented with a perceived authority figure, the majority of people will override their moral compass in favor of obedience.

Neil Schlager’s piece arguing that the fundamental problem with  reference publishing is discoverability.

Jason Fell summarizes three paid content strategies that work.

Mark C. Taylor in the NY Times argues that we should abolish the university as we know it by restructuring the curriculum, abolishing permanent departments, increasing collaboration among institutions, transforming the traditional dissertation, expanding the range of professional options for graduate students, imposing mandatory retirement and abolishing tenure.

Scott Walter amplifies the Taylor article and argues that it’s time to change the current reward system.

Elyssa Kroski’s comprehensive overview of libraries and mobile technologies.

Elaine Jarvik’s review of David Wiley’s comment that universities will be irrelevant by 2020.

Nick Anthis’s summary of Obama’s address to the National Academy of Sciences pledging a major new commitment to science.

Christopher Dawson argues that Second Life is “dead in ed” — time drain, bandwidth requirements, and proliferation of adult content make it a poor choice when compared to BlackBoard snd  Moodle.

Bill Thompson points out that most of us have become dependent on using computers to perform our day-to-day activities. Understanding how computers work should not be left to a small geek minority.

Shikha Dalmia argues that Obama is turning it’s back on principle in order to pay off the teacher’s unions and kill school vouchers in D.C.

Terry Anderson summarizes a new open-access m-learning book, Issues in Distance Education.

John K. Waters summarizes the issues about the future of Java and MySQL under Oracle.

StevenB’s post on the ACRLog advising writers to focus on critics who seriously question ideas.

David Munger summarizes recent research that shows the context in which we make moral decisions matters quite a lot.

A summary of the JISC e-books observatory project reports two surprises: e-book usage has no impact on print sales and e-book usage is widespread across all age groups.

Exploring Scitable, Nature Publishing’s new personal learning tool, which currently concentrates on genetics, evolution and variation.

Exploring Radar Networks’ Twine site.

A new McKinsey report on the economic impact of the achievement gap in America’s schools, says the resulting underutilization of human potential imposes the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession — substantially larger than the deep recession the country is currently experiencing. Friedman likens the conclusions to having the tide go out while swimming naked.

I know nowhere near enough physics to understand the details of this but I still find it completely fascinating that crossing an event horizon might take you into a region of space in which some of the dimensions disappear.

Elena Angulo and Franck Courchamp use a novel web-based experiment to collect data from 2560 visitors and demonstrate that people strongly prefer to see rare species over common ones. They go on to argue that this high value on rarity can fuel a disproportionate exploitation of rare species, making them even rarer and thus more desirable and ultimately extinct.

Seventeen ways that social media differ from traditional marketing.

Nature interviews John Van Oudenaren, director of the World Digital Library, launched this week as an online collection of significant, interesting and important cultural and historical documents.

Mark M. Tanaka, Jeremy R. Kendal and Kevin N. Laland develop a cultural evolution/stochastic model that shows how maladaptive and superstitious treatments can win out over effective ones because their actual ineffectiveness prolongs illness and provides more opportunities to demonstrate them to others.

Dean Dad writes about how libraries’ missions are changing, with young technies studying in groups and older students looking for a quiet haven. The discussion, particularly about how to choose the right set of resources,  is as insightful as the article.

Side-by-side timelines of the universe, one according to science and one according to the YEC’s (young earth creationists).

“Pursuasive design for sustainability” summarizes the way that tools can pursuade.

Laura Devany describes why cost and flexibility are pushing libraries to use open-source library managment systems.

Another article about the potential of the semantic web, this time for e-learning. Written by Chris Daly. The more of these I read, the more I think that Tim O’Reilly has it right. The Semantic Web is a dead end.

A South Florida Times report on a new charter school with a heavy emphasis on computer-based individualized learning. Technology could yet do to education what it’s done to the news business.

Smithsonian American Art Museum’s 1934: A New Deal for Artists slide show, Flickr group and map show paintings done by artists sponsored by Roosevelt’s Public Works of Art Program. Many are stunning; many are moving. I’d love to see our current government fund an arts-based piece of the stimulus plan.

If you are right-handed then an eye exercise can help with memorization. A possible explanation is that the eye exercise increases inter-hemisphere activity in your brain. Left-handed people have a higher degree of activity to start with. The report is on Cognitive Daily, along with a link to an online handedness test.

Farhad Manjoo writes that the lack of appeal to advertisers and the cost of hosting user generated content on sites like YouTube, Flickr and Facebook threaten their long-term viability.

MG Siegler follows Peter Rojas’ tweet and argues that twitter should remove it’s follower count.

Scott Seider writes in Edutopia about Multiple-Intelligence Theory as a counterbalance to an educational climate increasingly focused on high-stakes testing.

Owen Edwards interviews the “father of multiple intelligences“, Howard Gardner in Edutopia. Gardner says in the interview, “The challenge in education is to help students develop valued areas of knowledge, skill, and values”.