"So what is the point of publication? Certainly you want your paper easily read and cited. But also you want a careful peer review leading to a polished version that has the stamp of approval by appearing in some respectable conference or journal. Publishing also acts as a filter, allowing the reader to get some idea of the level of quality of the paper before reading it. Almost any paper can appear on an archive site but it takes more to be published."

"Recognize that there is a demand for certification. The agile community needs to put together a decent certification program, something that the Scrum Alliance has clearly failed at doing. My article Coming Soon: Agile Certification provides some thoughts as to what we need to do. The good news is that people such as Ron Jeffries and Chet Hendrickson, and others, are putting together a developer certification program. The really good news is that these are the right people to do this. The really bad news is that they’re doing it under the aegis of the Scrum Alliance, so whatever they accomplish will unfortunately be tainted by the fallout of the CSM debacle."

"StraighterLine is the brainchild of a man named Burck Smith, an Internet entrepreneur bent on altering the DNA of higher education as we have known it for the better part of 500 years. Rather than students being tethered to ivy-covered quads or an anonymous commuter campus, Smith envisions a world where they can seamlessly assemble credits and degrees from multiple online providers, each specializing in certain subjects and—most importantly—fiercely competing on price. Smith himself may be the person who revolutionizes the university, or he may not be. But someone with the means and vision to fundamentally reorder the way students experience and pay for higher education is bound to emerge."

"In the industrial model of student mass production, the teacher is the broadcaster. A broadcast is by definition the transmission of information from transmitter to receiver in a one-way, linear fashion. The teacher is the transmitter and student is a receptor in the learning process. The formula goes like this: "I'm a professor and I have knowledge. You're a student, you're an empty vessel and you don't. Get ready, here it comes. Your goal is to take this data into your short-term memory and through practice and repetition build deeper cognitive structures so you can recall it to me when I test you."... The definition of a lecture has become the process in which the notes of the teacher go to the notes of the student without going through the brains of either."

"To create economic value, journalists and news organizations historically relied on the exclusivity of their access to information and sources, and their ability to provide immediacy in conveying information. The value of those elements has been stripped away by contemporary communication developments. Today, ordinary adults can observe and report news, gather expert knowledge, determine significance, add audio, photography, and video components, and publish this content far and wide (or at least to their social network) with ease. And much of this is done for no pay.

Until journalists can redefine the value of their labor above this level, they deserve low pay."

"Universities are going through a tough time financially. People no longer have to attend them to get the credentials they need. People inside universities think they are selling an experience and that people are turning away from that. I think universities were always selling credentials.

They're just not the only place to get them any more."

"This the right thing to do not only because it is a more realistic assessment of an academic’s worth. It’s also the right thing to do because it helps to build the value of the network. If knowledge and expertise are becoming properties of the network, it is the social responsibility of our institutions to encourage the enhancement of that network."

"Can a combination of a wiki, karma, and a voting method like reddit or digg substitute the current system of academic publication?"

[A: yes]

"Can we learn anything from all this? Going back to the triumph-of-evil quote, we may ask, how can we defend ourselves from the bogus quote? It is clearly unreasonable for anyone to have to prove a quote bogus...."

"What Dave Winer says here about the news applies as well to scientific publishing. The arguments about open access and about review quality are but a sideline to a much more fundamental one: how to create sustainable mechanisms that will increasingly open up the process of writing up new ideas, reviewing them, and publicly building a consensus for or against their scientific soundness and importance."

"It's promising that both are increasing over the past 30-odd years, since that means more people are bothering to be quantitative. Still, less than 5% of articles mention p-values or information criteria -- some of that is due to the presence of arts and humanities journals, but there's still a big slice of the hard and soft sciences that needs to be converted. Also encouraging is the steady decline in the dominance of p-values to the AIC: they're still about 4.5 times as commonly used in academia at large, but that's down from about 15.5 times as common in the mid-1970s, a 71% decline. Graduate students and young professors -- the writing is on the wall. Aside from being intellectually superior, information criteria will give you a competitive edge in the job market, at least in the near future. After that, they will be required."

"A logic question. Which financial professionals would be more likely to be audited: bad ones or good ones? Logically, I would say good ones – if you’re bad, you want to hide it – if you’re good, you want to prove it. Now I’m not saying all audited professionals are good, or all unaudited professionals are bad, but on par I think it’s fair to say that audited professionals are better."

"In the end, the question of whether anyone can be a designer comes down to the way in which design is defined. Professional designers think of it as a process which encompasses everything from consumer research and blue-sky concepting to the constraints imposed by manufacturing. In contrast, consumers tend to understand design as a noun, rather than a verb - something which is added to a product rather than something which fundamentally decides it. New manufacturing technologies, and the companies which are giving consumers access to them, will not turn consumers into designers. But they will allow consumers to act creatively to interact with a product and make decisions about its form and function. For me, that’s better than just shopping."

"I maintain that small world ethics will trump big world ethics everytime."