Cruel Expectations: College for All
Now that I’m a graduate student, I’ve been looking at the troubling results of the nation’s push towards college-for-all.
Un-neighborly: Ad Blocking in Park Slope
Grumpy laminated signs are uglifying the gorgeous architecture of Brownstone Brooklyn. “Do not deface my property with your disgusting advertising,” they seem to say. “Let me deface my own property with this churlish plastic billboard.” The most subtle sign is postcard-sized with a giant NO! — flyers, ads, menus — but you can get a lawyer-worded 5″ x 7″ placard that is “technically compliant with the new Anti-Flier Law” with each letter 1 inch tall. Continue Reading →
Trends in Career & Technical Education
PDF of Jack's slides
For a session at the United Federation of Teachers, here are my slides with: a quick update on NYC CTE partners’ activities; a recap of an excellent job market briefing we got from the New York State Department of Labor; some stats about college completion; and a look at the increasing dissatisfaction with the way higher education has been churning out degrees that go nowhere.
In addition, I use stats and art from several studies: From Wall Street to Wall Mart, Diplomas and Droputs and the just-released Harvard report Pathways to Prosperity.
Beautiful Nightmare: Matsuda’s Augmented Reality Visualization
London architecture student Keiichi Matsuda has posted a brilliant and scary visualization of the near future of augmented reality.
Saletan’s Stat-Packed 2010 State of the Digital World
Saletan on the state of the world as we live it through technology.
Augmented Reality Still Too Jumpy
Today’s AR apps don’t offer a solid user experience.
EMRs: Don’t Wait for the Government
A new study urges physicians to use stimulus spending to install electronic medical records.
Taming social media in the new decade
I sign up for everything: GeoCities, Classmates, Ryze, Orkut, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, Yahoo, Flickr, LibraryThing, Plurk, Lifeblob, Meme, various Ning sites, Technorati, RSS feeds and God knows what else. Partly it’s to learn what they’re all about, partly to link to the folks who are there, partly for the sheer info-glut geekiness of it all. Continue Reading →
Dan Bricklin and the Cold Comfort of Experience
I saw Dan Bricklin, inventor of the first PC spreadsheet program VisiCalc, at the NY Tech Meetup last night. The opening acts were some machine vision and robotics researchers from NYU and Columbia showing their new work to a big but under-charmed crowd. Things ran late, and then proto-blogger Anil Dash gave some admiring introductory remarks and brought out Dan.
Dan Bricklin / Image via Wikipedia
Dan brought out his new book, Bricklin on Technology, a compilation of his blogs, podcasts and essays over the last decade.
He read from the book — from his old blog posts — and illustrated his talk with pictures from the East Coast birthplace of computing around Route 128 near Boston back in the 60s, 70s and 80s. Dan unrolled ancient scrolls from the before-time: DEC minicomputers, dumb terminals, the Apple II, the revolutionary Harris 2200 page layout machine, the first IBM PC and some promo videos for spreadsheet programs that eclipsed VisiCalc, Lotus 1-2-3 and Microsoft Excel. The audience roared at the 1980s dweebs in three piece suits dancing to a pre-Windows jingle as Dan told about inventing the spreadsheet in a wet basement in Massachusetts. In the background were Gates and Jobs but also the armies of hopeful start-ups, brilliant programmers, careful CFOs, lucky salesmen and visionary inventors who drove computing onto every desk and into every home in those years.
Survey: Which Smartphone Will Own the Healthcare Market?
The folks at Software Advice are conducting a short survey on smartphones in the healthcare market with questions about applications, carriers and purchasing preferences. The survey closes tomorrow, Tuesday, July 28th at 5 PM CDT. It's only six questions long and takes just a couple of minutes to complete. Results will be emailed to respondents.
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Social Media: The Narcissphere
"Circulating
throughout the narcissphere." A throwaway line from Chris Ayres, LA columnist for the Times of London, has been rattling around inside my head for a couple of weeks. Social networks — Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace and all the rest — are all about the "I". Each service is a walled garden of Friends and Followers answering the question: "What are you doing?" The only people in the garden are the people I know, culled from my email address book or vetted by an invitation subroutine. My ego expands with my list of Friends, and I surf for ever more worthy Friends to enhance my Connections.
The Internet has always featured user-generated content: home pages, email, chat lines, fan fiction, blogs, wall postings and the Fifth Circle of Hell — wrathful and sullen comment threads. But the public Internet also delivers exabytes of professionally-generated content: the academic, journalistic, literary and — most recently — cinematic. It's got people we don't like, ideas we're afraid of, philosophies we haven't considered, chances we're not ready to take. It's life. The world. Everything.
Social networks carve up the Net into special interest groups so we mainly see the people who think like we do. No wonder the marketers and spammers are all over social media: we do their research work for them by lining up into the correct psychographic. I think I prefer a life that's not so easily pigeonholed.