learn. create. share. reflect. iterate.
Google may already be conscious.
The Internet is waking up.
And it’s breaking things.
Excellent.
Microsoft unveils its Huawei 4Afrika Windows Phone to aid the rapidly growing African tech market - The Next Web (via thenextweb)
Good Guy Gates, at it again.
(via emergentfutures)
(via emergentfutures)
We can do better than lecture videos
What I meant to say about this article about online education: MOOCs are a breakthrough in distribution of educational content, but not really a breakthrough in the way that we learn. What this article points out is that there are more important developments in the way we teach and learn happening. (And by developments, I mean things that have happened in the last 100 years or so, but haven’t been widely adopted.)
Making — aka constructivism — and peer teaching & learning — those are legitimate advances over the model of talking heads dropping knowledge on the masses.
With the interactivity of online technology advancing quickly, and with the immediacy of touch-based physics models, easy construction kits, ways to share what you’ve built and created — well that changes everything.
We can do a hell of a lot better than just distributing videos of lectures online — we have to. We know so much about now about how people learn, how they construct knowledge about their own world — how they create and synthesize and share and communicate. We can do better than where the MOOCs are right now, and I really think we’re right on the precipice of doing just that. But we’ve got to focus on making & sharing & discussing; on learners & doers. Not just the videos & quizzes.
Quote from Steve Wozniak’s keynote at TEDxBrussels http://tnw.to/l0Ago
1/3 of Younger Americans Are NOT Affiliated with Any Religion
The number of Americans who do not identify with any religion continues to grow at a rapid pace.
One-fifth of the U.S. public — and one third of adults under 30 — are religiously unaffiliated. Young adults today are much more likely to be unaffiliated than previous generations were at a similar stage in their lives. These generational differences are consistent with other signs of the increasing irrelevance of religion among many Americans.
Brad Stone and Ashlee Vance of Bloomberg Businessweek spoke with Mark Zuckerberg on the milestone:
We’re having a hackathon to celebrate this when we announce it publicly, and the theme is going to be the next billion. So people will be thinking of ideas and working on prototypes and things that we’ll need to do to help connect the next billion people, which I think is pretty cool.
And climbing.
BIG DATA
And the data artists (more technical term: data scientist… if you’re a buzzkill) that collect, analyze, and interpret it.
http://venturebeat.com/2012/08/27/data-scientists-supermodels-football-stars-or-artists/
Goddamn fascinating. We’ve never been able to collect data as callously and with as little effort as we do now; and the SCALE (sorry for my abuse of CAPSLOCK in this post, but when dealing with BIG DATA it just feels right).
Everything will be measured, stored, analyzed, and interpreted to improve profits — which often means improving user experience. Yay us!
How to Recognize Disruptive Opportunities
And why Twitter is more disruptive than Facebook.
Mark Suster is such a g, getting into the difference between emerging and disruptive technologies, open versus closed, and how companies need to start taking advantage of these tools.
Emerging technologies are new and cool, but only the rich kids on the block get to play with them. Think computers, circa early 1960s. Or 3D printers today, you know, whatever. These technologies become disruptive when they become an order of magnitude cheaper and an order of magnitude lower quality, since at that point they become accessible to orders of magnitude more people.
The interesting thing about that change, where an emerging technology becomes disruptive, is that the quality of the disruptive technology continues to increase; and once it reaches a certain level, the established titans of the industry who’ve been selling high-quality versions at obscene margins are displaced. It is at this point that the emerging technology which used to be expensive and exclusive transforms into a disruptive technology that is accessible and open.
Mark Suster takes some time to criticize Apple and Facebook for being closed systems, and I love him for it (even though I fanboy pretty hard for the two). He believes that the future is getting more open, especially on the Internet, and that segues into why Twitter is more disruptive than Facebook — it’s more open.
3D printing is only getting more and more compelling…
Facebook Monitors Your Chats for Criminal Activity
Facebook and other social platforms are watching users’ chats for criminal activity and notifying police if any suspicious behavior is detected, according to a report.
The screening process begins with scanning software that monitors chats for words or phrases that signal something might be amiss, such as an exchange of personal information or vulgar language.
The software pays more attention to chats between users who don’t already have a well-established connection on the site and whose profile data indicate something may be wrong, such as a wide age gap. The scanning program is also “smart” — it’s taught to keep an eye out for certain phrases found in the previously obtained chat records from criminals including sexual predators.
If the scanning software flags a suspicious chat exchange, it notifies Facebook security employees, who can then determine if police should be notified.
Keeping most of the scanned chats out of the eyes of Facebook employees may help Facebook deflect criticism from privacy advocates, but whether the scanned chats are deleted or stored permanently is yet unknown. Mashable has reached out to Facebook for additional information, and we’ll update this post when we hear back.
The new details about Facebook’s monitoring system came from an interview which the company’s Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan gave to Reuters. At least one alleged child predator has been brought to trial directly as a result of Facebook’s chat scanning, according to Reuters’ report.
SEE ALSO: State Law Requires Sex Offenders to List Status on Facebook
Facebook works with law enforcement “where appropriate and to the extent required by law to ensure the safety of the people who use Facebook,” according to a page on its site.
“We may disclose information pursuant to subpoenas, court orders, or other requests (including criminal and civil matters) if we have a good faith belief that the response is required by law. This may include respecting requests from jurisdictions outside of the United States where we have a good faith belief that the response is required by law under the local laws in that jurisdiction, apply to users from that jurisdiction, and are consistent with generally accepted international standards.
“We may also share information when we have a good faith belief it is necessary to prevent fraud or other illegal activity, to prevent imminent bodily harm, or to protect ourselves and you from people violating our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. This may include sharing information with other companies, lawyers, courts or other government entities.”
Indeed, Facebook has cooperated with police investigations in the past. In April, it complied with a police subpoena from the Boston Police Department by sending printouts of wall posts, photos and login/IP data of a murder suspect.
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Am I surprised….not really.
Done with FB chat.
Seriously, fuck you guys.
Fucking geniuses.
What if there were no maps, never had been maps, and humans couldn’t walk, only teleport places they’d heard of?
Cuz that’s kinda like the Internet.
Point is I want a goddamn map.
Google is bringing DoubleClick up to snuff with the new wave of the Internet, where everything is social and in real-time.
Love Dave Grohl
(via thenextweb)
