Digital Education is clearly a labor of love. At the same time it is a thoughtful and sophisticated discussion of the shape of education in the future.
Howard Gardner
The purpose of this book is to provide a panorama of the application of new digital technologies in education as the century comes to an end. In some cases we have described instances where this technology has already been implemented with great success, in others we discuss promises that have still to be confirmed. We also hope to awaken “critical enthusiasm” for an effective and beneficial implementation of the best technology in the service of education and the individual.
. . . . . . .
This book is also the product of permanent collaboration with many teams of professionals in various disciplines. To all of them we convey our sincere acknowledgement and our wishes for success, as the seeds planted with so much effort have now begun to bear fruit. In addition, this grounding in our personal, generational and regional experience has enabled us to process a wide range of information from countries where this technology is more developed, with which we have maintained close and rewarding links during all these years.
Today (March 9, 2012) the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced that 227,000 new nonfarm payroll jobs were created by the economy during February. Is the government’s claim true?
No. Statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) reports that 44,000 of these jobs or 19% consist of an add-on factor derived from the BLS’s estimate that 44,000 more unreported jobs from new business start-ups were created than were lost by unreported business failures. The BLS’s estimate comes from the bureau’s “birth-death model,” which works better during normal times, but delivers erroneous results during troubled times such as the economy has been experiencing during the past four years.
Taking out the 44,000 added-on jobs reduces the February jobs number to 183,000, but does not provide a full correction. In an economy as troubled as the US economy is, most likely the deaths exceeded the births, but we don’t know what the number is. Was it 20,000? 50,000? What number do we deduct from the 183,000? We simply do not know.
Williams reports that seasonal adjustment factors do not work properly during troubled economic times and add their own overstatement to the jobs figure. If anyone could estimate the overestimate of new jobs that results from malfunctioning seasonal adjustments, it is John Williams, but he doesn’t provide an estimate.
Most likely, the new jobs did not exceed 150,000, a figure that would merely keep even with population growth and thus not reduce the rate of unemployment, which, consistent with this deduction, remained constant.
Let’s look now at the kind of jobs that were created. Of the new jobs reported by BLS,
92% are in services. Of this 92%, only 7% could possibly relate to exportable services–architectural, engineering, and computer systems services.
The American radical right grew explosively in 2011, a third consecutive year of extraordinary growth that has swelled the ranks of extremist groups to record levels, according to a report issued today by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The rise was led by a stunning expansion of the antigovernment “Patriot” movement.
“The dramatic expansion of the radical right is the result of our country's changing racial demographics, the increased pace of globalization, and our economic woes,” said Mark Potok, senior fellow at the SPLC and editor of the new report.
“For many extremists, President Obama is the new symbol of all that's wrong with the country – the Kenyan president, the secret Muslim who is causing our country's decline,” Potok said. “The election season's overheated political rhetoric is adding fuel to the fire. The more polarized the political scene, the more people at the extremes.”
Many Americans are enraged by what they see as America's decline, and opportunistic politicians have done their best to stoke those fears and demonize President Obama in the process. For some, the prospect of four more years under the country's first black president also is an infuriating reminder that non-Hispanic whites will lose their majority in this country by 2050.
The Obama administration simulated a cyber attack on New York City's power supply in a Senate demonstration aimed at winning support for legislation to boost the nation's computer defenses. Senators from both parties gathered behind closed doors in the Capitol Wednesday for the classified briefing attended by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, FBI Director Robert Mueller and other administration officials. The mock attack on the city during a summer heat wave was “very compelling,” said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who is co-sponsoring a cybersecurity bill supported by President Barack Obama. “It illustrated the problem and why legislation is desperately needed,” she said as she left the briefing. Bloomberg.
The US defense industry is in a full court press to get tens of billions in funding for cyberwarfare.
To get that funding, they need to dramatize the potential threat of cyberwarfare. Here's how. The central method of attack in cyberwarfare is systems disruption. Systems disruption is a way to break networks to achieve extremely high levels of damage (or, in financial terms, high ROIs). One of the best ways to demonstrate that type of attack is through a disruption of the power supply (usually with NYC as a target).
Two John Robb posts, comment, and see also — university grants at risk.
Rawalpindi (Pakistan): In his quest for the truth about his country's most notorious guest, Shaukat Qadir started where it all ended: the room where Osama bin Laden was killed.
Last August, Mr. Qadir, a retired Pakistani Army brigadier, retraced the steps of the American commandos who stormed through the corridors of Bin Laden's hide-out on May 2.
Climbing the stairs to the second floor, Mr. Qadir passed a body outline that marked the spot where Bin Laden's 22-year-old son, Khalid, was shot dead. Then he turned to a small room with a low ceiling, an empty wardrobe and a tight cluster of bullets holes in one wall, he said. Above that, on the ceiling, was a fading splash of blood that, his Pakistani intelligence escort told him, belonged to Bin Laden.
“As a former soldier, I was struck by how badly the house was defended,” Mr. Qadir said in an interview. “No proper security measures, nothing high-tech – in fact, nothing like you would expect.”
Paul Zak, a pioneer in the field of neuroeconomics, talks about the genes that can make or break a Wall Street trader, and about the chemical that helps us all get along.
Eryn Brown
Los Angeles Times, March 2, 2012
Neuroscience might seem to have little to do with economics, but over the last decade researchers have begun combining these disparate fields, mining the latest advances in brain imaging and genetics to get a better understanding of the biological basis for human behavior.
Paul Zak is a pioneer in this nascent field of neuroeconomics. In a recent paper published in the journal PLoS One, he examined genes that may predict success among traders on Wall Street. His forthcoming book, “The Moral Molecule,” will explore how a chemical in the brain called oxytocin compels cooperation in society.
Zak, director of the Center for Neuroeconomic Studies at Claremont Graduate University, discussed this work with The Times.
Phi Beta Iota: Convergence is upon us. Most universities do not get this, but a couple are struggling to change recalcitrant faculty and force the break-down of silos and the reconstitution of unified knowledge. We are at the very beginning of most interesting times.
While I normally don’t discuss two speakers at All School Meeting (ASM) within one month, the reality is that last week’s speaker was equally as provocative and exciting as the one two weeks before, so I will make this an “exception to the rule.”
Professor Loren J. Samons Jr. is the chair of BU’s Classics Department, a highly decorated teacher (both at BU and nationally), and a widely published scholar (his list of publications is several pages long). Perhaps most important for his impact at ASM, he has a drop-dead hilarious deadpan comic style (think “Saturday Night Life”), and he is able to bring ancient Greek topics vividly to life in terms of our own contemporary issues.
This week at ASM Professor Samons spoke to us about the ancient Greek definitions of “democracy” and “citizenship,” demonstrating how dramatically they differed from our own modern definitions. “Democracy” is the conjoined Greek words for “people power” – he joked that English speakers prefer to borrow prestigious sounding words from other languages, rather than using our own. But while we Americans tend to think of democracy as providing certain citizen “rights” by birth (voting, trial by jury), these were not at all what distinguished ancient Athens as the first city state in Greece to practice democracy; for instance, other city states allowed the vote, even if a king ruled. Rather, ancient Athenians assumed that being a citizen was a group-given privilege (not a natural right) that involved other group-expected duties. Privileges included being chosen by lottery to serve in the legislature (just think of the savings in campaign spending if that’s how Congress were selected!), and duties included serving in the army almost yearly from age 18 to 59, for instance. If you think about these two examples, you’ll notice that the very people voting to go to war were the ones having to serve in it. And since you served next to your friends and family (often a father, brother, and grandfather at your side), the realities of battle were both more personal and more demanding – flight was either not an option during battle (observed by those you loved), or once Uncle Georgios fled, you were right behind him.
While Professor Samons went on to detail the Hoplite army model of ancient Athens, his main points focused on citizenship, especially how our culture has lost its understanding of privileges combined with duties, and replaced that understanding with a sense of entitlement based on natural individual rights. Our “political will” as a society reflects this, as we see presidential debates from both parties pander to what each voter wants, rather than to the spirit of individual sacrifice for the common good. Ancient Athens might have had many troubling qualities, such as an annual draft, but its spirit of democracy is a virtue we would do well to revive. At the Academy, learning about the classics helps to do just that!
