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The Shared Learning Collaborative, a Gates Foundation-funded initiative, rebranded itself this week. There's a new name - inBloom, Inc. - but the mission and plans remain the same, the new non-profit insists. That mission is to build an open source, cloud-based education data infrastructure in the hopes of addressing a number of problems schools face: the lack of data interoperability between the various databases and software systems that they utilize and the merits of spending money to update outdated administrative IT (versus, say, buying instructional - or other - tech and/or versus spending money on something altogether non-tech).

" It is, Julio Vildosola concedes, a very big bet. Enlarge This Image Warrick Page for The New York Times Julio and Eva Vildosola and one of their two children. Mr. Vildosola will join a small software company in Cambridge. Readers' Comments Readers shared their thoughts on this article. Read All Comments (269) » After working six years as a senior executive for a multinational payroll-processing company in Barcelona, Spain, Mr. Vildosola is cutting his professional and financial ties with his troubled homeland. He has moved his family to a village near Cambridge, England, where he will take the reins at a small software company, and he has transferred his savings from Spanish banks to British banks."

The language we use affects the decisions we make, according to a new study. Participants made more rational decisions when money-related choices were posed in a foreign language that they had learned in a classroom setting than when they were asked in a native tongue.

"The Open Data Institute, a UK-based incubator and promoter of open-data businesses that was first conceived by Tim Berners-Lee and artificial intelligence pioneer Nigel Shadbolt, is today announcing its first international investment. The Omidyar Network, the investment firm co-founded by eBay's Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam, is putting $750,000 towards the ODI. The money comes on top of the £10 million ($16 million) that the UK government, via the Technology Strategy Board, has already committed over the next five years for the project."

Allison sez, "Michael Geist provides some commentary on yesterday's announcement by Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada and Access Copyright. His conclusion: 'For those that sign the model license, the new AUCC - Access Copyright deal is simply more of the same: AUCC and its institutions pass along copyright costs to students, Access Copyright gets millions in revenues despite ongoing questions about its repertoire (with thousands used to lobby against education copyright reforms and most of the money going to foreign collectives and publishers, not authors), and the potential for digitally-oriented changes within Canadian higher education heading back to the back burner.'"

In this day and age, it seems everything online has a price associated with it. Whether you're subscribing to a pay site for full articles or clicking on ads in a blog, everything online seems to have money associated with it. Luckily there is still a large, and very healthy, movement online for media files listed under the Creative Commons licenses.

Several years ago, I read Brian Aldiss's Billion Year Spree -- his "true history of science fiction" from Mary Shelley to the early 1970s. I found Aldiss's account of the genre's development entertaining and informative... but something bothered me, long after I'd finished reading it. So much so that I've since spent hundreds of dollars on forgotten, out-of-print books; I've written dozens of long, scholarly posts about the thing that bothered me so much, for io9 and my own blog, HiLobrow; and this year I've even launched a money-losing publishing imprint in a quixotic effort to set the record straight.

Having at least six months of expenses provides financial stability, helps you avoid debt with high interest payments, and lowers stress levels. We have a full year of expenses put aside in liquid cash, and it lets me sleep well at night. Emergency funds can actually have a better return on investment than what you see on a bank account. But that doesn't mean I shouldn't still maximize my interest earned, especially as cash is an asset class where you can increase your return without having to take on additional risk (if you stay FDIC-insured or equivalent).

For starters, don't call them slackers or hipsters -- unless you want to get "decaffed."