Professor Adam Habib, vice-chancellor of the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa argued: "If you think you're going to democratise education by giving people MOOCs instead of face-to-face education, it means the poor in the developing world get MOOCs and the elite continue to get face-to-face education. What you have done is consolidate inequalities. And one of the biggest problems we have is inequality." Follow this argument and others in a healthy debate at the the "Going Global" conference in Miami over the opportunities and threats posed by massive open online courses. http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20140502101632495
Between 3,000-50,000 deaths occur in the US each year that are attributed to this disease, but by monitoring the rate of particular Wikipedia article views on a daily basis, researchers calculated the number of times certain influenza- or health-related Wikipedia articles were accessed each day between December 2007 and August 2013 and compared these data to official ILI activity levels provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. what a clever way to use Wikipedia! http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.1003581
Majedien Norton, a 29-year-old father of two from the Cape Flats, South Africa, was accused of using The Pirate Bay to distribute a digital copy of the film Four Corners. http://www.htxt.co.za/2014/03/05/three-years-four-corners-south-africas-moment-decision-copyright-looms/ .He received a suspended prison sentence for 5 years and no fine. The current copyright law is from 1978, long before internet. I would love to read more about court cases regarding copyright infringements!
New Visions in Citizen Science by Anne Bowser and Lea Shanley:
* different models that support public contribution, potential challenges, and positive impacts that projects can have on scientific literacy, research, management, and public policy.
* Illustrate how citizen science functions at its best demonstrating how open innovation can address agency-specific challenges in new and compelling ways.
This slideshow provides a very stimulating and entertaining view of the world of open science. It deals with the key dimensions of open science such as the meaning and scope of openness , opportunities in being open, funding , problems and other related issues.