Though more advanced in execution, today’s electronic nudges and tweaks are identical in purpose: use what you can control to affect what you can’t. The simple elegance of this concept flips on its head Chomsky’s suggestion that behavior modification treats people as if they were no more intelligent than animals. What distinguishes our intellect from animals’ is not that we can go against our environment—most of us can’t, not in the long run—but rather that we can purposefully alter our environment to shape our behavior in ways we choose.

Andrew Delbanco’s insightful new book on the history and future of the American college exposes an institution that has no idea what it should be.

"Tech stakeholders and analysts generally believe the use of game mechanics, feedback loops, and rewards will become more embedded in daily life by 2020, but they are split about how widely the trend will extend. Some say the move to implement more game elements in networked communications will be mostly positive, aiding education, health, business, and training. Some warn it can take the form of invisible, insidious behavioral manipulation."

"Welcome to SIG ED, the Special Interest Group for Education in Information in Information Science at the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS

"Using data from the last 150 years in a small set of countries, and from the postwar period in a large set of countries, we show that large investments in state primary education systems tend to occur when countries face military rivals or threats from their neighbors. By contrast, we find that democratic transitions are negatively associated with education investments, while the presence of democratic political institutions magnifies the positive effect of military rivalries. These empirical results are robust to a number of statistical concerns and continue to hold when we instrument military rivalries with commodity prices or rivalries in a certain country’s immediate neighborhood. We also present historical case studies, as well as a simple model, that are consistent with the econometric evidence. "

"Once we had our data, we divided it up into works set in the Near Future (0-50 years from the time the work came out), Middle Future (51-500 years from the time the work came out) and Far Future (501 years from the time the work came out)."

"In other words, Barack Obama and his franchise are emulating the Clinton’s, and are speaking not to voters, but to potential post-election patrons. That’s what their policy goals are organized around. So when you hear someone talking about how politicians just want to be reelected, roll your eyes. "

" xmlformat is a configurable formatter (or "pretty-printer") for XML documents. It provides control over indentation, line-breaking, and text wrapping. These properties can be defined on a per-element basis. "

The world's first peer-reviewed video journal gives scientists a better way to show others how to replicate experiments.

Here’s what I propose. In the 21st century, we flip Bloom’s taxonomy. Rather than starting with knowledge, we start with creating, and eventually discern the knowledge that we need from it.

In many cases, our views of reality are not based on personal experience.  We find politicians personable or despicable, even though we have never met them in person.  And we feel intimately familiar with landmarks in foreign countries even though we have never visited them.  For many of us, the same is true for scientists working in a lab.  We have mental images of how they act or what they look like, even though few of us have never been in a lab watching a scientist at work. The tricky part: Many of those images may have little to do with reality.

Welcome to Ektoplazm, the world's #1 source for free and legal psytrance, techno, and downtempo music in MP3, FLAC, and WAV format, and home of the Ektoplazm netlabel group: Ektoplazm (psytrance), Drumlore (progressive/techno), and Omnitropic (downtempo/ambient).

In the mind of today’s technological entrepreneur, the ideal user (and employee) is semi-skilled – or unskilled entirely.  The ideal user interface for such a person never rewards learning or experience when doing so would come at the cost of immediate accessibility to the neophyte.  This design philosophy is a mistake – a catastrophic, civilization-level mistake.  There is a place in the world for the violin as well as the kazoo.  Modern computer engineering is kazoo-only, and keyboards are only the most banal example of this fact. 

But the really surprising thing about the no-more-tax consensus is how much of an outlier it makes the United States compared both with the rest of the world and with itself in recent history. When it comes to foreign policy or to global economic dominance, American exceptionalism may indeed be in jeopardy. But when it comes to taxes, the United States is quite different from most other Western industrialized economies.

This is not simply a failure to achieve perfection or a matter of a few percentage points

Expanding Your Horizons in Science and Mathematics™ conferences nurture girls' interest in science and math courses to encourage them to consider careers in science, technology, engineering, and math

The Modern Architecture Game is the second edition of the architecture game. The first edition was launched on 30 August 1999. It was the first project collaboration involving the four partners at NEXT architects and was distributed in the private environment of Delft University of Technology.

Don’t say you haven’t been warned. NASA put out an official document today specifying how close any future spacecraft and astronauts visiting the Moon can come to the artifacts left on the lunar surface by all US space missions, including the Apollo landing sites, any robotic landing sites like Surveyor and impact sites like LCROSS.

"If you skim Sunlight’s findings, and bring to them a sporting quotient of party prejudice, you might conclude that Republicans are, say, “idiots” and Democrats are, oh, “showoffs.” To use the pre-K-level idiom preferred by the biased twerp in each of us.

If, however, you listen to a sampler of speeches by various congresspeople at a range of oration grade levels, you might find something completely different."

"This paper uses basic empirical facts from attention and perception psychology for a behavioral approach to equilibrium analysis at the industry and the macroeconomic level. The paper endogenously determines whether an economy is information-rich and whether scarcity of attention complements economic scarcity. A conventional economic equilibrium results if subjects have free attention capacity. At the positive level, the impacts of IT-progress, international integration and media on equilibrium diversity and level of attention-seeking activities are shown. At the normative level, welfare, efficiency and optimal policy interventions are characterized. Finally, behavioral effects of intensified attention-seeking on market power, sectoral economic structure and work-leisure choice are considered."

Citizen Cyberscience Centre

Vinnie Mirchandani on global technology innovation and impact on how we work, live and play

Profiles in compound-technology innovators.

"This article examines the extent to which two concepts from research on organizational learning—theories-in-use and reflection-in-action—could align with typical learning outcomes associated with LIS education. Two illustrative case studies are considered: one from an undergraduate-level course on search strategies and one from a graduate-level course in collection development. Based on the kinds of classroom experiences that are reported to be most valuable to students, these concepts appear to be useful for designing and assessing the effectiveness of activities, exercises, and assignments. Student feedback from these two cases, while not universally positive, is suggestive of the utility of these concepts as guiding principles for instructional design and evaluation in the context of LIS education."

"As online course delivery becomes increasingly prevalent in higher education, it becomes more important to assist faculty in gaining new pedagogical skills. This article scans current literature regarding concerns and best practices in this area, and reports on a study of institutional support for training LIS faculty. The online survey of 16 quantitative and qualitative questions was distributed to all faculty from ALA accredited master’s programs requesting feedback about what support was available and what support was especially needed and/or appreciated by the faculty members. The results of this survey suggest a model of institutional support that includes faculty course release, LIS program level training and support, and structured mentoring. Implementation of such a model will help institutions create a culture of support for online
teaching."

"If Planet Earth is to survive in the coming decades as we know it, we must find new ways to protect our planet from the unsustainable growth imperatives of neoliberal economics and politics. This will require a new architecture of “green governance”―laws, public policies, and social practices that can honor human rights and commons-based management of natural resources large and small"

"In the United States, everyone may enjoy freedom of speech so long as it doesn’t matter. For those who would like what they say to matter, freedom of speech is very expensive. It is for this reason that organizations with a strong sense of public mission but not much money are dependent on the “blonde child of capitalism,” private philanthropy. This dependence is true for both conservative and progressive causes, but there is an important difference in the philanthropic cultures that they appeal to."

"Each tale was carefully fabricated by undergraduates at George Mason University who were enrolled in T. Mills Kelly's course, Lying About the Past. Their escapades not only went unpunished, they were actually encouraged by their professor. Four years ago, students created a Wikipedia page detailing the exploits of Edward Owens, successfully fooling Wikipedia's community of editors. This year, though, one group of students made the mistake of launching their hoax on Reddit. What they learned in the process provides a valuable lesson for anyone who turns to the Internet for information. " Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/05/how-the-professor-who-fooled-wikipedia-got-caught-by-reddit/257134

"Comprehensive yet accessible, this key Handbook provides an up-to-date overview of the fast growing and increasingly important area of ‘public communication of science and technology’, from both research and practical perspectives."

Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http://alicerosebell.wordpress.com/2012/05/16/what-is-science-news-and-who-gets-to-decide

"When I say superhero movies aren't taken seriously (by critics, fans or filmmakers), I don't mean that people aren't invested in them (analytically, emotionally, financially) but that, as we've been saying year in and year out about certain kinds of fantasy-action-science-fiction blockbuster attempts since the late 1970s, they're more like amusement park rides (and they eventually become those, too) than movies. Superhero partisans do indeed take these pictures seriously, but only insofar as "seriously" can be interpreted to mean "lacking a sense of humor." "

"“It was the biggest upheaval in film exhibition since synchronized sound. Between 2010 and 2012, the world’s film industries forever changed the way movies were shown.”

This is the opening sentence of Pandora’s Digital Box: Films, Files, and the Future of Movies. Written in lively and accessible language, it tells the story of how the recent revolution in film projection came about. It also situates the digital change in the history of American film distribution and moviegoing."

"One hundred years from now, the role of science and technology will be about becoming part of nature rather than trying to control it."

Using Google ngrams to break down 2-word phrases including "capitalism"

"Humanities students should be more like computer-science students.

I decided that as I sat in on a colleague's computer-science course during the beginning of this, my last, semester in the classroom. I am moving into administration full time, and I figured that this was my last chance to learn some of the cool new digital-humanities stuff I've been reading about. What eventually drove me out of the class (which I was enjoying tremendously) was the time commitment: The work of coding, I discovered, was an endless round of failure, failure, failure before eventual success. Computer-science students are used to failing. They do it all the time. It's built into the process, and they take it in stride."

"Experts in cyber law told TPM that Twitter’s stance in Harris’ case was undeniably important and could prove to be a landmark one for user privacy and law enforcement’s ability to access user information going forward."

"Based on these findings, Peterson recommends junking the "elite culture-mass culture" distinction in favor of an "omnivore-univore" distinction. There is indeed a significant difference in the cultural tastes of high-status and low-status people

"So I continue to believe both things: that statements about social entities and powers must be compatible there being microfoundations for these properties and powers

"There is an active and extended group of scholars in Europe with a very focused concentration on the philosophy of the social sciences."

"Livehoods offer a new way to conceptualize the dynamics, structure, and character of a city by analyzing the social media its residents generate. By looking at people's checkin patterns at places across the city, we create a mapping of the different dynamic areas that comprise it. Each Livehood tells a different story of the people and places that shape it. "

"So assuming you actually have a viable choice, the situations where it makes sense to reject religion in favor of far truth are extreme – either there are big personally-useful far contrarian claims to learn, or you have a good shot at being a rare far expert, respected by a community with truth-correlated standards. So if such extremes seem unlikely to you, far truth probably isn’t worth its costs to you."

"But just because something is possible doesn’t make it reasonable, or smart, or sustainable. It also may have a hidden or long-term cost that is actually more negative than any benefit that will accrue from doing the requested task. It also, by the way, sets a bad expectation and precedent."

"The LiquidFeedback mission statement concludes, “All the experience we have gained over the past months shows people participate if they think it makes sense and representatives at least acknowledge the will of the participants rather than arguing with silent majorities.” It concludes with a ringing line from Thomas Jefferson: … every man is a sharer… and feels that he is a participator in the government of affairs, not merely at an election one day in the year, but every day.” "

"Recently psychologists and experimental philosophers have reported findings showing that in some cases ordinary people’s moral intuitions are affected by factors of dubious relevance to the truth of the content of the intuition. Some defend the use of intuition as evidence in ethics by arguing that philosophers are the experts in this area, and philosophers’ moral intuitions are both different from those of ordinary people and more reliable. We conducted two experiments indicating that philosophers and non-philosophers do indeed sometimes have different moral intuitions, but challenging the notion that philosophers have better or more reliable intuitions. "

"Just as American manufacturing turned belly-up in the face of the out-sourcing of labor in the globalized market in the 1990s, higher ed is now poised to do exactly the same thing with the professoriate.

Distance learning, the fastest growing segment of the higher education market, will make it possible for a Ph.D. in New Delhi to teach that big section of Chemistry 100 to students from all over the world.  And in New Delhi, $4,000 will probably seem like pretty good money."

"Even as hip-hop is more mainstream than ever, one of the key musical innovations has been pushed to the margins. That should serve as a reminder that the battles over intellectual property don’t merely pit the economic interests of creators against would-be freeloading consumers. The existing stock of recorded music is, potentially, a powerful tool in the hands of musicians looking to create new works. But it’s been largely cut off from them—for no good reason."

"Liberals often say that the Right’s hatred of Obama is about his race. Conservatives say it’s about his socialist agenda. But there’s something more going on, and it’s captured in the way that the Right has often mocked Obama as “the chosen one,” the Messiah. Dig a little under the surface of that derision and you’ll discover a world of confusion and ambivalence.

Obama is a deeply familiar figure among tea partiers and conservative Christians. He has the energy and charisma of a pastor, and he’s the sort of authority figure many on the far-Right are conditioned to respect. But the context is all wrong. The messenger is a black man. The hope he offers is grounded in the possibility that human institutions can be expressions of the common good."

Michael Eisen
I'm an evolutionary biologist at UC Berkeley and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. My research focuses on the evolution and population genomics of gene regulation in flies, and on the ways that microbes control animal behavior. I am a strong proponent of open science, and a co-founder of the Public Library of Science. And most importantly, I am a Red Sox fan.