Group items tagged

Freelance Professors December 14, 2012 - 3:00am By Paul Fain "Self-employed professor" could soon be an actual job title, thanks to two companies that are helping a small group of college professors market their own online courses, set prices for them and share the tuition revenue. Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/12/14/two-companies-give-faculty-more-control-online-courses#ixzz2J7h5IRxb Inside Higher Ed

Disintermediating students and teachers.

"The International Telecommunications Union, a UN agency dominated by veterans of incumbent telcoms who mistrust the Internet, and representatives of repressive governments who want to control it, have quietly begun the standardization process for a kind of invasive network spying called "deep packet inspection" (DPI). "

"In 2020, the annual amount of digital data created, replicated and consumed will total more than 5,200 gigabytes for every man, woman and child on the planet, according to a new International Data Corp. report. That's 50 times the amount of per-person data than in 2010. Once it's consumed, almost all of the rough information today effectively vanishes in the overall ocean of data. Yet within the data are tidbits of facts on customers, suppliers and business operations that, if linked, could prove useful or even profitable. Seeing the potential, some businesses are sizing up the trove - the data they control and other's. We are on the cusp of the data wars."

The Evolution of Cognition William L. Benzon and David G. Hays Abstract: With cultural evolution new processes of thought appear. Abstraction is universal, but rationalization first appeared in ancient Greece, theorization in Renaissance Italy, and model building in twentieth-century Europe. These processes employ the methods of metaphor, metalingual definition, algorithm, and control, respectively. The intellectual and practical achievements of populations guided by the several processes and exploiting the different mechanisms differ so greatly as to warrant separation into cultural ranks. The fourth rank is not completely formed, while regions of the world and parts of every population continue to operate by the processes of earlier ranks.

Some of you might recognize the title of this talk as a nod to the TV program "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" - a show that ran for 8 seasons on ABC and which is apparently coming back to cable after a 10 year hiatus. Bonus points if this title conjures the British version of the show rather than the Drew Carey hosted one. Double bonus points if you think of the radio show that predated both.