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SmartPlanet: 4% Completion Rate for Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC)

Only four percent complete massive open online courses: setback or growing pains? Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have relatively few active users, and  user engagement falls off dramatically, especially after the first one to two weeks weeks of a course. Ultimately, only a handful of users persist to the course end. That’s the gist of …

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Stephen E. Arnold: Social Media and News – Amazing Graphic + Comment on Amazon & Wikipedia

Social Media and News: Amazing Graphic “News Use across Social Media Platforms” confirms what I have suspected for a while. The mobile generation has some interesting behavior patterns with regard to news. Among the factoids that the Pew outfit has boiled down to numbers are: ITEM: YouTube viewers are not using the service to get …

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SmartPlanet: Staggering Costs of Fukushima Clean Up (Never Mind Toxicity Blowing East) + Fukushima RECAP

The staggering costs to clean up Fukushima More than two years since the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, the Fukushima power plant meltdown is still a major, global environmental problem. And the staggering price tag for cleaning it up continues to rise. The Japanese government just announced that it’s borrowing about $30 billion more to …

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Marcus Aurelius: Five Takeaways from a Decade of War [Defense One] Plus Blistering Alternative View from Phi Beta Iota Editors

Five Takeaways from a Decade of War Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, in a keynote address at the Center for Strategic and International Studies this week, signaled to military commanders that they should assume the across-the-board, automatic spending cuts imposed by sequester over the next decade will remain in place indefinitely. “We do not have …

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Stuart Umpleby: The Triple Bottom Line & Current Challenges

The triple bottom line — people, profits, planet — is a recent business concept.  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_bottom_line. We are now facing major issues on all three: 1.  People.  The safety of people is threatened by a)  vulnerable cyber infrastructure.  See the National Geographic video American Blackout; and b) inequality leading to lower standards of living for …

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Stephen E. Arnold: Tables and News — or Tables and Decision-Support?

Tablets and Periodicals October 19, 2013 Are tablets the salvation of the newspaper industry? Google’s chief economist thinks they may be. In a speech he recently gave in Milan, Hal Varian points to the ways consumers’ usage of tablets differs from that of other devices. Writer Will Conley summarizes: “Varian said tablets are the most …

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Steve Aftergood: To Fix US Intelligence, Shrink It

TO FIX U.S. INTELLIGENCE, SHRINK IT? Criticism of U.S. intelligence takes many forms:  Intelligence agencies are too secretive, or they are too leaky.  They over-collect, or they under-perform.  Or all of these, and more besides. Many of the criticisms can be reduced to a single argument: The U.S. intelligence community has become too large to …

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