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  • 1 min read

Sage on the e-stage?

There are fascinating shifts going on in higher education today, from MOOCs to the 'flipped classroom'. A lot of action. I think we are looking at another text-book "Innovator's Dilemma" scenario playing out:

The established players (traditional universities), aware of a new way of delivering their offer, but seeing that it doesn't meet the needs of their customer's as well as the old way. And the upstarts (udemy and others), the disruptors, applying and refining the use of the technology in niche markets, eventually perfecting it to the point that they can blow by the laggards, and leave them in the dust. Textbook!

Check out today's New York Times:

"Institutions of higher learning must move, as the historian Walter Russell Mead puts it, from a model of “time served” to a model of “stuff learned.” Because increasingly the world does not care what you know. Everything is on Google. The world only cares, and will only pay for, what you can do with what you know." (fromNew York Times: The Professor's Big Stage)

  • 1 min read

It’s very hard to know what’s true about government spending

I saw this in the Boston Globe this morning and I jotted it down because yet again a bit of totally counterintuitive and confusing info:

“It is not like we have Soviet tank divisions at the German border poised to launch a sneak ­attack,” said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, an independent research group in Alexandria, Va. “It is not a question of readiness. It is a question of readiness to do what? The ­defense budget is twice what it was before Sept. 11th and we have half as many enemies. A lot of this is theater. Let them sequester and they will see that nothing happens.” (from The Boston Globe)

"The ­defense budget is twice what it was before Sept. 11th…" : Really? Twice what it was 10 years ago? I can't tell whether that's true but I suppose it's a number that technically could be objectively determined to be true or false. The second phrase though: "…and we have half as many enemies." is quite odd: I suspect there's a lot of subjectivity in that statement making it impossible to judge true or false.

No wonder I am confuted

  • 1 min read

LinkedIn invites are flooding in?!

I don't know what's going on, am I suddenly famous? LinkedIn invites are picking up. I think it's more likely that LinkedIn has come up with a clever way to encourage people to link to others. I don't know, but I am receiving LinkedIn invites, from people I never heard of before, and from other cities and even countries. Whatever, first I was feeling important, now I am starting to feel a little besieged!

  • 1 min read

US Politics don’t have a left?

An interesting international perspective on politics:

"…So, believe me, US politics don’t have a Left. Looking at the presidential candidates, I am frankly appalled. None of them would be a viable politician in Sweden. They all support the death penalty, none advocates strict gun control and all make frequent mention of their religious beliefs in public. These are extremist stances. Not even the tiny Christian Democrat party mentions God publicly in Sweden, for fear of alienating the pragmatic rationalist majority…." (from Aardvarchaeology)

  • 1 min read

Aaron Swartz: continuing developments

In the continuing stories around Aaron Swartz and events that led to his tragic suicide recently:

"Many people speculated throughout the whole ordeal that this was a political prosecution, motivated by anything/everything from Aaron’s effective campaigning against SOPA to his run-ins with the FBI over the PACER database. But Aaron actually didn’t believe it was — he thought it was overreach by some local prosecutors who didn’t really understand the internet and just saw him as a high-profile scalp they could claim, facilitated by a criminal justice system and computer crime laws specifically designed to give prosecutors, however incompetent or malicious, all the wrong incentives and all the power they could ever want." (fromTarenSK)

  • 1 min read

Yay! Coffee is good for me (again)

Well these stories appear from time to time, either saying it's good or bad for you. What's an addict to do?

"Coffee isn't just warm and energizing, it may also be extremely good for you. In recent years, scientists have studied the effects of coffee on
various aspects of health and their results have been nothing short of amazing." (from Lifehacker)

  • 1 min read

I love sriracha sauce, do you?

Just tonight I squirted a few shots of Sriracha on my multi-layered-grilled- vegetable parmigiana. And now there's an article about Sriracha in Business Week!

"…Like ketchup, sriracha is a generic term, its name coming from a port town in Thailand where the sauce supposedly was conceived. When people in America talk about sriracha, what they’re really talking about is Huy Fong’s version. It’s been name-checked on The Simpsons, is featured prominently on the Food Network, and has inspired a cottage industry of knockoffs, small-batch artisanal homages, and merchandise ranging from iPhone cases to air fresheners to lip balm to sriracha-patterned high heels… " (fromBusinessWeek)

Just writing this blog post is making my mouth water! And, yeah, so I also learned that I had been pronouncing it wrong the whole time. It's

Sriracha

  • 1 min read

Kluge: Is that an obsolete term?

I was amazed today when in a group of 25 undergraduate engineering students, only three had heard the word kluge. When I explained what it was, it still did not ring a bell. When I asked how they refer to an ugly, clunky, scotch-taped solution, inelegant and embarrassing, but which basically works, they came up with "hack".

Query: Is the word "kluge" becoming obsolete among the geek community?