“For the past 35 years, with technological advancements, there has been an explosion in production and profits, in wealth creation. That unprecedented increase in wealth, as many of you know, has gone to the top economic 1%. Most of it, the lion’s share of it, went to not even the top economic 1%, but to the top one-hundredth of one percent, to the modern day aristocracy. After analyzing the most recent data, here’s the headline: US millionaire households now have $50 trillion in wealth. They have $39 trillion in legally accounted for wealth, and an estimate of $11 trillion hidden in offshore accounts. Let that sink in for a moment… 50 TRILLION DOLLAR$. Most people cannot even comprehend how much $1 trillion is, let alone $50 trillion. One trillion is equal to 1000 billion, or $1,000,000,000,000.00. Only one-tenth of one percent of the population makes one million dollars a year, and, again, most of that wealth is in the top one-hundredth of one percent. To show how consolidated the wealth is, even in the upper most portion of the top one percentile, the richest 400 people have as much wealth as 185 million Americans combined; that’s only 400 people with as much wealth as 60% of the entire US population.
Ecovative’s environmentally responsible products can replace materials ranging from petroleum based expanded plastics (like Styrofoam™) to particle board made using carcinogenic formaldehyde. Our materials are 100% renewable, and primarily made from agricultural byproducts. These low-embodied energy materials can be home composted when they’re no longer needed.
Many of the materials and chemicals that are commonly used come from non-renewable fossil fuel resources. However, cheaply extracted petroleum and gas supplies are a thing of the past. Our landfills are filling up, and even when we recycle things properly, it requires a lot of energy only to yield a lower grade material. The future lies in using rapid renewables that can also be returned to the earth at the end of their use.
The second will be sheer awe for Drudge’s continued ability to pull in massive amounts of web traffic using a site that any teenager with an affinity for the Internet could make in under 15 minutes.
No one — and we mean no one — lacks an opinion when it comes to Drudge and the Drudge Report. The combination of the controversy surrounding Drudge and his legendary reclusiveness makes it difficult to have a conversation about his influence on the culture of web journalism that doesn’t devolve into a shouting match within seconds.
But, Drudge did — and does — have an impact. So, it’s worth going back 15 years this week to a speech Drudge gave at the National Press Club in which he outlined his vision of the future of journalism.
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It’s hard to argue that the vision Drudge had for the news business is what the news business has, in large part, become. It’s worth watching his whole speech, which is below, not only for his remarks but for the obvious and not-at-all-disguised disdain that Doug Harbrecht, the president of the Press Club at the time, has for Drudge.
Coursera, of course, is one of the online providers offering free educational courses online. Textbooks are a logical next step. The have struck a partnership with several publishers to enable students to use certain textbooks for free while they take the courses. Publishers include Cengage Learning, Macmillan Higher Education, Oxford University Press, SAGE and Wiley will be available through e-readers provided by Chegg.
The article states:
“Koller said the agreement will help instructors who felt restricted in what they could require students to read. She also said it will help publishers market full versions of their books to those interested in buying them. Coursera, based in Mountain View, Calif., launched in April 2012, and the company has more than 3 million registered users. Along with edX and Udacity, it is one of the most prominent MOOC providers in a fast-emerging market. Cynthia L. Selfe, an English professor at Ohio State University, said the textbook agreement will benefit thousands who are taking a MOOC on Coursera that she teaches with a group of faculty.”
Does this article suggest that there are more challenges for traditional publishers or is this an opportunity for companies trying to grow and running out of options? The jump from $500 million to $1 billion is a big job.
Crowds—rather than sole individuals—are increasingly bearing witness to disasters large and small. Instagram users, for example, snapped 800,000 #Sandy pictures during the hurricane last year. One way to make sense of this vast volume and velocity of multimedia content—Big Data—during disasters is with PhotoSynth, as blogged here. Another perhaps more sophisticated approach would be to use CrowdOptic, which automatically zeros in on the specific location that eyewitnesses are looking at when using their smartphones to take pictures or recording videos.
“Once a crowd’s point of focus is determined, any content generated by that point of focus is automatically authenticated, and a relative significance is assigned based on CrowdOptic’s focal data attributes […].” These include: (1) Number of Viewers; (2) Location of Focus; (3) Distance to Epicenter; (4) Cluster Timestamp, Duration; and (5) Cluster Creation, Dissipation Speed.” CrowdOptic can also be used on live streams and archival images & videos. Once a cluster is identified, the best images/videos pointing to this cluster are automatically selected.
If you are interested in taking curation onboard in your learning or teaching program, here is a collection of the best web curation tools and services specifically designed for the education world. Whether you need to pull together a collection of relevant books and reading resources for your next class, or want to push your students to collaborate on creating relevant information collections on specific topics, here are over the best tools that can be used for this task. *Curation Tools for Education and Learning* P.S.: Please, feel free to suggest new and additional relevant tools that should be added to this collection in the comments at the original post, “Curation Tools.”
Academicpub – Personalize and customize books and documents with this patented publishing and compilation platform.
Adobe Acrobat – Collect and organize different types of documents, presentations and video into a professional portfolio
Adobe Acrobat Professional XI – Collect and organize different types of documents, presentations and video into a professional portfolio.
Avoca – The Avoca Learning platform is a web service which facilitates the finding, collection and organizing of vetted learning resources from dozens of the leading educational sites. The platform already offers over 20,000 resources from over 35 leading education sites. In the near future new educational resources in the fields of of Language Arts/Reading, and History/Social Studies will be added.
Bindworx– revolutionary new service, potentially allowing anyone to assemble a truly personalized new book by mixing and matching other published works, is 100% the way it is being described. On paper, Bindworx offers you the opportunity to buy content from existing published books and eBooks, by specifically picking out a page, a chapter or an entire section and pulling it together into your own custom (e)book.
Curatr – Curatr builds online courses from any digital content, which we refer to as learning objects. Learning objects can be anything that works on the web – from a video to an interactive diagram, a PDF to a webpage.
Edcanvas – EdCanvas is a web service which allows you to search, find, clip and collect any kind of content, from text to video clips and to organize it into visual boards for educational and learning purposes. Differently than Pinterest, EdCanvas is specifically targeted at the education world and at schools and teachers, and it makes possible not just to collect “images” from web pages, but to collect and organize whichever content elements you want, including full web pages.
Educlipper – EduClipper is a new educational curation platform allowing both teachers and students to clip just about any type of content from the web and to organize it into topic-specific clipboards. Clipboards can be made “private” or public depending on your needs and both their individual content items as well as any full clipboard can be easily shared on all major social networks.
Learnist – Learnist is a new pinboard where users can organize their learning materials. It resembles Pinterest except that Learnist is just for sharing learning resources.
Libguides – Offers a perfect environment to create/curate collections of relevant resources on a specific learning topic. The link points to a good curated example page authored by Joyce Valenza and Deb Kachel focuses on showcasing an extended curated selection of content references, video clips, PDFs, tools lists on the topic of digital content curation in education. Lots of useful resources and references, and some good examples of curation at work in different educatonal projects.
Livebinders – Allows you to create folders containing collections of relevant resources and links on a specific topic.
McGraw-Hill Create – Allows you to curate customized textbooks on any topic by selecting and picking individual chapters, pages or excerpts from already published books.
Mentormob – Allows you to create annotated playlists of websites on a specific topic/theme
The following books are on sale by the box at 40% of retail — 60% off. Enterprising individuals could reasonably expect to profit by buying a box and then selling the books at $20 each. Or offices could buy on the credit card (arrange for invoice and payment via email to robert.david.steele.vivas [at] gmail [dot] com), distribute and if desired, have a follow-up Skype session with Robert Steele. Going away, trying to empty the storage room before departure. Boxes are generally 20 books to the box, or 16 books in some cases of larger books.
Ecovative’s environmentally responsible products can replace materials ranging from petroleum based expanded plastics (like Styrofoam™) to particle board made using carcinogenic formaldehyde. Our materials are 100% renewable, and primarily made from agricultural byproducts. These low-embodied energy materials can be home composted when they’re no longer needed.
