Mounting student debt and fading job prospects are reflected in stagnating enrollments in higher education, intensifying the financial difficulties of universities and indeed exacerbating the overall economic malaise.[1] The growing cost of universities has led recently to the emergence of Massive Online Open Courses whose upfront costs to students are nil, which further puts into doubt the future of traditional colleges and universities. These so-called MOOCs, delivered via the internet, hold out the possibility, or embody the threat, of doing away with much of the expensive labor and fixed capital costs embodied in existing university campuses. Clearly the future of higher education hangs in the balance with important implications for both American politics and economic life.
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Scientists May Be Using the Wrong Cells to Study Covid-19 | WIRED - 0 views
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BY NOW THERE'S little doubt about hydroxychloroquine: It doesn't work for treating Covid-19. But there's a bigger, more important lesson hidden in the story of its failure-a rarely-mentioned, but altogether crucial, error baked into the early research. The scientists who ran the first, promising laboratory experiments on the drug had used the wrong kind of cells: Instead of testing its effects on human lung cells, they relied on a supply of mass-produced, standardized cells made from a monkey's kidney. In the end, that poor decision made their findings more or less irrelevant to human health. Worse, it's possible that further research into novel Covid-19 cures will end up being compromised by the same mistake.
How Universities Are Increasingly Choosing Capitalism Over Education | naked capitalism - 0 views
"The End of Employees" | naked capitalism - 0 views
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Contracting, like other gig economy jobs, increase insecurity and lower growth. I hate to belabor the obvious, but people who don’t have a steady paycheck are less likely to make major financial commitments, like getting married and setting up a new household, having kids, or even buying consumer durables. However, one industry likely makes out handsomely: Big Pharma, which no doubt winds up selling more brain-chemistry-altering products for the resulting situationally-induced anxiety and/or depression. The short-sightedness of this development on a societal level is breath-taking, yet overwhelmingly pundits celebrate it and political leaders stay mum.
coffee - 0 views
Opinion | It's Westworld. What's Wrong With Cruelty to Robots? - 1 views
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The biggest concern is that we might one day create conscious machines: sentient beings with beliefs, desires and, most morally pressing, the capacity to suffer. Nothing seems to be stopping us from doing this. Philosophers and scientists remain uncertain about how consciousness emerges from the material world, but few doubt that it does. This suggests that the creation of conscious machines is possible.
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If we did create conscious beings, conventional morality tells us that it would be wrong to harm them — precisely to the degree that they are conscious, and can suffer or be deprived of happiness. Just as it would be wrong to breed animals for the sake of torturing them, or to have children only to enslave them, it would be wrong to mistreat the conscious machines of the future.
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Anything that looks and acts like the hosts on “Westworld” will appear conscious to us, whether or not we understand how consciousness emerges in physical systems. Indeed, experiments with AI and robotics have already shown how quick we are to attribute feelings to machines that look and behave like independent agents.
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Judicial Strategies to Contain the Administrative State - 0 views
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"The Empire Will Strike Back But in case there is any doubt that the battle for controlling the administrative state is not yet won, consider the opinion in the census case written by the four liberals on the Court. They would have disallowed the citizenship status question whatever the sincerity of the administration's reasons. They argued that it was arbitrary and capricious, despite the fact that the exact same question had been included before and that similar questions are included by many other nations. Crucial to their reasoning was the creation of a technocratic baseline for "reasonableness"-a standard that would elevate the judgement of the career civil servants who believed that the cost of reducing responses outweighed the benefits of getting a more accurate account of immigration status. This is a truly radical view, one that would further embolden the career bureaucracy by requiring political appointees to provide special reasons to override the decisions of their subordinates."
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