The 37 best websites to learn something new
Online courses; learn how to code, learn how to work with data, learn new languages, expand your knowledge, and more.
Sepp Hasslberger: Peer Review Does Not Work
03 Economy, 04 Education, Academia, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence
Peer review, instead of helping science stay on track, is actually retarding real progress.
The peer review drugs don’t work
EXTRACT
Peer review is anti-innovatory because it is a process that depends on approval by exponents of the current orthodoxy. . . . Perhaps the biggest argument against the peer review of completed studies is that it simply isn’t needed. With the World Wide Web everything can be published, and the world can decide what’s important and what isn’t. This proposition strikes terror into many hearts, but with so much poor-quality science published what do we have to lose?
Continue reading “Sepp Hasslberger: Peer Review Does Not Work”
SchwartzReport: Most School Kids Have No Clue How Government Works (Or Does Not Work)
#OSE Open Source Everything, 04 Education
How long can a democracy endure when its children don't even know what a democracy is. I agree with Justice Sandra Day O Connor when she says, the results are “truly frightening, and demonstrate that we must put the same emphasis on these subjects that we are putting on math and science.” The only additional comment I would make is that if we are emphasizing science and math, we are doing a dreadful job of it. American school children rank very low in the developed world on either science or math.
Most U.S. Middle-School Kids Don't Know How Government Works
SchwartzReport: Asking the Rich for 1.5 Percent
03 Economy, 04 Education, 09 Justice, 11 SocietyI am continually struck by the social damage done to the human societies of the Earth because of the abounding grotesque economic inequities. Just look at the United States: There are numerous CEOs making more in an hour than a skilled craftsman whose work may become historically significant can make in a lifetime. And particularly I do not understand why it is not generally understood that seeing that children are fed and educated will change things for the better for everyone.
Every Kid on Earth Could Go to School If the World's 1,646 Richest People Gave 1.5 Percent
Continue reading “SchwartzReport: Asking the Rich for 1.5 Percent”
SchwartzReport: Charter Education, Public Dollars, Ideological Outcomes
04 EducationThe Charter School Movement, whatever it might have intended in the beginning, has become something of a racket. Like all privatization movements it is about finding a way to tap the public treasury to make profit. Unfortunately, what it was supposed to deliver has not panned out — improved education for children. Note particularly the involvement of the Koch brothers. For close to a decade they have been exploring ways to use their money to bias the education of children to their worldview on the theory that if they can get them young they can mold them to support the policies they espouse.
How Public Education Dollars Are Flowing Into For-Profit Companies
Berto Jongman: Outernet Provides Data Offline
04 EducationOuternet aims to provide data to the net unconnected
“When you talk about the internet, you talk about two main functions – communication and information access,” he told the BBC. “It's the communication part that makes it so expensive.” So, Outernet focuses instead on information. The project aims to create a “core archive” of the world's most valuable knowledge, culled from websites including Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg, a collection of copyright-free e-books. This would be updated on roughly a monthly basis.
Berto Jongman: Harvard to Journal Publishers – Piss Off! Open Access Here We Come…
04 Education, Access, Commerce, CorruptionHarvard University says it can't afford journal publishers' prices
University wants scientists to make their research open access and resign from publications that keep articles behind paywalls
Exasperated by rising subscription costs charged by academic publishers, Harvard University has encouraged its faculty members to make their research freely available through open access journals and to resign from publications that keep articles behind paywalls.
