This site is not going dark in protest because, well, this site isn’t exactly turning heads. Anyway, if you want to learn more take a look at the video below or read a good breakdown of the current bills here. Now for some pointless musing about what’s really going on. The point of SOPA/PIPA is [...]
All over the country, thousands of armed cops have been deployed to stand around and surveil and even assault the polite crowds of Occupy protesters. This deployment of law-enforcement resources already dwarfs the amount of money and manpower that the government “committed” to fighting crime and corruption during the financial crisis. One OWS protester steps [...]
The occupy movement juxtaposed with recent warrantless GPS tracker cases has really crystallized an idea for me about the two sides of the surveillance state. The key to normalizing a privacy free culture is to trade off the civil liberty issues with the clarity brought about by careful observation of the state. In short, as [...]
I’ve been following the horror show at Penn State with quite a bit of morbid curiosity. At first I wasn’t sure I had anything more beyond a few pithy tweets to say about the matter, but now I think there is a larger truth that’s worth serious consideration by anyone involved in large human institutions [...]
I’ve been watching the slow evolution of the discourse on college athletics with interest. When I casually suggested that college athletes should be paid among friends many years ago I was rebuffed in a way that indicated to me how deeply the dogma of “amateur” athletics was ingrained in fans. I’m happy that the tide [...]
I’ve mentioned a few of my modest life goals before, but I’d like to add another possibly-not-so-modest one to the list: 3. Be important enough to have an email problem. One strange trend is for people (usually from an engineering background) to complain on blogs and things about having an email problem. The phrase “email [...]
I had a discussion about the differences between Switzerland and the USA and in particular graduate and professional education in both countries. The discussion really clarified for me the opportunity costs associated with living in a country with outsized healthcare and military expenditures and undersized social programs and tax rates. First, the cost of attending [...]
I criticized the reaction to this talk before it was put online. There are some interesting ideas in the video, but there are a couple of obvious problems: Hard to see how the mechanized adaptive exercises would transfer to non-STEM areas of basic knowledge. Based on what little I know, problems in education are too [...]
If Savage’s ethical guidelines—disclosure, autonomy, mutual exchange, and minimum standards of performance—seem familiar or intuitive, it’s probably because they also govern expectations in the markets for goods and services. No false advertising, no lemons, nothing omitted from the fine print: in the deregulated marketplace of modern intimacy, Dan Savage has become a kind of Better [...]
I think I understand what Jeff Jarvis finds so problematic about TED. Consider: Salman Khan just personally fixed education for almost everyone on the world. Mark this day. He solved it. I’m stunned. #TED Bullshit.