Nailchipper: category

The Online Education Database is running a story on the way the Open Source movement changed education, that assumes a causal relationship between the two:
MIT provides just one of the 10 open source educational success stories detailed below. Open source and open access resources have changed how colleges, organizations, instructors, and prospective students use software, [...]

I’ve always been fond of economics. To me, economics has always felt like a logical extension of computer science. (Elaboration: the science of computers is actually done by mathematicians and computer scientists apply these ideas to become ‘computation experts’ ). Since modern economies are driven by technology, often involving computers, and technologies change the way [...]

College, for me, as it is for many, was a profound experience where I learned, most importantly, how to look and analyze the world in a way that was relentless, but rewarding. As a child I believe I collected lots of information, but reserved judgment on many of them. I was able to hold contradicting [...]

I’ve said this before, but there is interesting project called Global Text Project, which looks to give text books away.

Education can play a fundamental role in reducing poverty, but high-quality and up-to-date textbooks are often too expensive for most people in developing countries.
[...]
To make education more accessible, a professor in the University of Georgia Terry [...]

For those in power, the abstraction that a television screen or computer screen provides is both necessary and dangerous. It is necessary because it allows us to model increasingly complex devices and accomplish ever sophisticated tasks. Dangerous because the ramifications of these models on the real world are sometimes masked or not apparent.
Autocrats and aristocrats [...]

I read The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil a few months ago, and I found it to be thought provoking book and highly recommend it (I did find Kurzweil’s fascination with living forever somewhat bizarre). One of the most interesting topics I was exposed to was on the movement [...]

Jeff Young, from the The Chronicle of Higher Education, wrote a piece titled Book 2.0: Scholars turn monographs into digital conversations, where he discusses a bit about the work going on at the Institute of Future of the Book . Sadly, it’s a paid service, and the article is not public, but a quote from [...]

On a very interesting series on PBS, Bill Moyers interviews Mary Gordon.

Author Mary Gordon is widely regarded as one of the leading chroniclers of contemporary Catholic life in America. Her literary oeuvre - novels, short stories, essays, and personal memoirs - paints a rich picture of the complexities of faith, morals, politics, and religious and [...]

The following was a comment I wrote in Future of the Book, in the post Rosenzweig on Wikipedia.
While some people think that finding an error in Wikipedia is a sign of its weakness, I am reassured that this is Wikipedia’s greatest strength.
I found this quote in the essay particularly interesting:

The limited audience for subscription-based [...]

Check out this segment of “New Rules” in Bill Maher’s “Real Time”. The first part of the clip is fairly typical Maher. He makes fun of Anna Nicole Smith, mocks “metro-sexuals”, makes a joke about the recent immigration protests and finally mocks religion.
But after all that, Maher focuses on the Americans and the “American Dream”. [...]

A few months ago my brother told me to watch a PBS documentary called “Commanding Heights“. I did. And I enjoyed it. The documentary begins at the dawn of the 20th century, when Europe first attempted globalization through colonization and the foundations of macroeconomics were being laid by John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich von Hayek.
The [...]

I read a very interesting article in the New York Times on how the United States is losing not only non-skilled work, like manufacturing, to outsourcing, but today even the most prestigious of jobs, scientific research, is being outsourced.

“American executives who are planning to send work abroad express concern about what they regard as an [...]

A few months back I read very upseting essay in Harper’s Magazine by Jonotahn Kozol . I found it online here: Still Separate, Still Unequal: America’s Educational Apartheid. The essay was published at around the same time his new book, The Shame of the Nation : The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America was released. [...]