Old joke. Someone writes a computer program (creates an app?) that translates from English into Russian (say) and vice versa. Works fine on simple stuff, so the next test is a a bit harder: “the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” The program/app translates the phrase into Russian, then the tester takes the result, feeds [...]
It’s been an interesting few weeks: Facebook’s upcoming $100-billion IPO has users wondering why owners get all the money while users provide all the assets. Google’s revision of privacy policies has users thinking that something important has changed even though they don’t know what. Google has used a loophole in Apple’s browser to gather data [...]
(This is a copy of one of my EDUCAUSE blog posts) Internet domains in the new “adult” .xxx domain recently became available. So did arbitrary generic top-level domains (gTLDs) beyond the existing .com, .net, .org, .edu, .gov, and so forth. Both initiatives affect higher education. The effects of these initiatives thus far have been modest, but they have been entirely negative. [...]
Here’s how the New York Times broke the story: In what the federal authorities on Thursday called one of the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought, the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation seized the Web site Megaupload and charged seven people connected with it with running an international enterprise based on Internet [...]
To my amazement, I cleared standby on the 1:30 United flight from Washington to Chicago, and so barely had time to grab a couple of snacks before dashing down to board the plane. Better still: Turned out our flight was carrying time-sensitive medical material (bone marrow, someone said), and so it became a so-called “lifeguard” [...]
Note to prospective readers: This post has evolved, through extensive revision and expansion and more careful citation, into a paper available at http://gjackson.us/it-he.pdf. You might want to read that paper, which is much better and complete, instead of this post — unless you like the pictures here, which for the moment aren’t in the paper. Even [...]
In oversimplified caricature, many colleges and universities have traditionally staffed the line, management, and leadership layers of their IT enterprise thus: Students with some affinity for technology (perhaps their major, perhaps work-study, perhaps just a side interest) have approached graduation not quite sure what they should do next. They’ve had some contact with the institution’s [...]
To understand why policy debates sometimes seem to make no sense, to circle endlessly, or to become bafflingly confused, it’s important to remember that the demography of higher education isn’t politically straightforward. By “demography” I don’t mean Gen X, Gen Y, and echo booms, but rather straightforward counts of degree-granting institutions and students. And by [...]
(This is an edited version of comments from “The Future of Scientific Knowledge Discovery in Open Networked Environments: A National Symposium and Workshop” held in Washington, DC, March 10-11, 2011 under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences Board on Research Data and Information and Computer Science and Telecommunications Board. The presentation slides can [...]
“There are two possible solutions,” Hercule Poirot says to the assembled suspects in Murder on the Orient Express (that’s p. 304 in the Kindle edition, but the 1974 movie starring Albert Finney is way better than the book, and it and the book are both much better than the abominable 2011 PBS version with David [...]