Friday, January 19, 2007

Google's Sinister(?) Plans. puppetman writes "This week, Robert X. Cringely makes some interesting observations as to what Google's up to next. He theorizes that Google is looking to create a bandwidth shortage that will drive ISP/cable/telephone customers into it's open arms (often with the blessing of the ISP/cable/telephone company). The evidence: leasing massive amounts of network capacity, and huge data centers in rural areas (close to power-generation facilities). The shortage will only occur if the average bandwidth consumption by individual consumers skyrockets; think mainstream BitTorrent, streaming moves from NetFlix, tv episodes from iTunes, video games on demand, etc, etc. Spooky and sinister, or sublime and smart?"[Slashdot] -- the high bandwidth future may be unfolding faster than the pedestrians are thinking possible but growth rests on the idea the video streaming will be and exciting growth business -- BL 11:13:12 PM      Google It!.

Is it Time for Open Office?. lazyron asks: "I've been using Open Office a bit more lately, and got to thinking: this is much more like my current version of Microsoft Office than Office 2007 will be. Could it be time to try Open Office in the workplace, especially since there is still some time left before Office 2007 will be forced on us by the demands of the product cycle? Are there any IT admins out there thinking about trying Open Office, either with a few users or all of them?" [Slashdot] 10:56:27 PM      Google It!.

Analog TV Off by 2009 has been predicted by television-industry leaders because the cutoff of analog over-the-air TV in February 2009 would occur as planned. The spectrum auction bidders need to know whether they will take control of their Federal Communications Commission licenses immediately after the DTV transition because a billion dollars is at stake. 8:00:55 PM      Google It!.

Blackboard to Offer Assessment Product Line - from individual courses to entire institutions, citing interest in assessment as evidence of increased pressure on colleges to document learning. -- this will serve many political agendas especially in research universities where  teaching is regarded as more of a burden than an opportunity at the undergraduate level and Teaching Assistants could potentially be of more institutional value as Research Assistants.  There is a potential for the emergence of a different kind of university culture where the educational quality control mechanism of instructor designed assessment standards shifts to an outsourced "professionalized" model that is psychometrically sound but driven by interests outside of the purview of the instructor in the classroom.  In this vision, the classroom instructor is skillfully deconstructed into an array services that do assessments, intelligent tutoring, online learning labs, group learning assignments "freeing" the instructor from time consuming face-to-face student interaction and freeing the institution from the expensive need to maintain legions of traditional instructors.  This process of deconstruction of the teaching side of academia strategically hinges on the control of the assessment process that leads to student grades -- the coin of the educational realm.  If (burden of) grading can be deconstructed from the instructor role then the instructors as a group will be in the same situation as corporate trainers - entirely beholden to the politics of the institution - for good or otherwise. --BL 7:48:04 PM      Google It!.

U of Phoenix[base ']s Parent Purchases Online High School --  The Apollo Group Inc., which owns the University of Phoenix, announced on Wednesday that it had bought a company that provides online high-school education. -- the online high school marketplace is about to be "consolidated" and this will make substantial differences in public education systems.  These folks do not seek equitable access but rather sustainable profit unshackled by traditional methods and funding models and historical school district boundaries.  They bring vertical market strategies like those used by WalMart to educational management so they are powerful (750 million profit last year in higher ed) and agile competitor in the education marketplace. --BL 7:08:28 PM      Google It!.

- MTV Buys RateMyProfessors.com MTVu, the campus outlet of the music-television network MTV, announced on Wednesday that it planned to buy RateMyProfessors.com, one of the largest online forums for students to anonymously review the teaching abilities of faculty members. 6:50:59 PM      Google It!.

Reliability of disclosure forms of authors' contributions "Our study confirmed that reports about others' behaviours, such as proxy reports on the contributions of one's coauthors, were not an accurate way of assessing authorship. As has been shown by well-controlled experimental psychological observations,5 proxy reports about behaviours of others are burdened by a subjective inference process in estimating behaviour." 6:39:48 PM      Google It!.

Folic acid boosts minds of over-50s, study finds. Absent-mindedness in the over-50s is significantly improved when people take folic acid supplements, according to a large study reported in today's Lancet. Short-term memory, mental agility and verbal fluency tests were all better among people wh... [KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News] 5:37:41 PM      Google It!.

Single-pixel camera takes on digital. Rice University researchers are developing a single-pixel camera to capture high-quality images without the expense of traditional digital photography. This "digital micromirror device" consists of a million or more tiny mirrors each the size of a... [KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News] 5:36:45 PM      Google It!.

Surgical Microbot Developed. An anonymous reader writes to mention a Wired article about the first surgical nanobot developed for practical use. No wider that two human hairs, the machine is intended to swim through arteries and the digestive tract, and can perform surgical procedures in spaces no bigger than 250 microns. The article also addresses safety concerns; the bot will swim upstream from blood flow, so if something goes wrong it can be retrieved on its way back. Likewise, for the most delicate procedures it can be fitted with a tether, to ensure it doesn't get lost. From the article: "The tiny robot, small enough to pass through the heart and other organs, will be inserted using a syringe. Guided by remote control, it will swim to a site within the body to perform a series of tasks, then return to the point of entry where it can be extracted, again by syringe. For example, the microrobot might deliver a payload of expandable glue to the site of a damaged cranial artery -- a procedure typically fraught with risk because posterior human brain arteries lay behind a complicated set of bends at the base of the skull beyond the reach of all but the most flexible catheters."[Slashdot] 5:31:53 PM      Google It!.

Seamonkey 1.1 Released. stuuf writes "Version 1.1 of the Seamonkey Internet Application Suite is now available, with quite a few improvements over the 1.0 series. Some of the new features include spell checking in form text areas, a new tagging system to classify email, a better indicator for secure web sites and preview images for browser tabs. This release also includes many of the updates that have gone into the Firefox 2 and Thunderbird 2 branches. Check out the release notes and download page for more." [Slashdot] 5:29:43 PM      Google It!.

Investigating Online Office Suites. jcatcw writes "Computerworld reviewed four online office suites [~] Ajax13, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, ThinkFree Online and Zoho Office Suite. None has all the applications and features of Microsoft Office, but if you're looking for the core office applications in an access-anywhere format, at least two were surprisingly sophisticated. The article weighs the ability to save files to a centralized server quite heavily in its ranking. The winner is ThinkFree Office because it provides the most sophisticated features and has the best Microsoft Office compatibility. Zoho's suite is the second choice."[Slashdot] 5:03:43 PM      Google It!.