Tuesday, July 18, 2006

Revised Report by Federal Commission Offers Less Harsh Critique of Higher Education, by Kelly Field, CHE. The new version of the report incorporates revisions suggested by members of the 19-member panel and omits some of the most stinging barbs included in the original draft, including a sentence that blamed rising college costs on institutions' failure "to take aggressive steps to improve institutional efficiency and productivity." Instead, the new version acknowledges that cuts in state funding have contributed to rising tuitions. The report also eliminates references to grade inflation, "lax" academic standards, and "a campus culture that in too many instances seems to promote underachievement, anti-intellectualism, and excessive socializing." . . . At commission members' request, a section on the importance of preparing students to compete in the global economy was added to the report, along with new statistics on the underrepresentation of minorities and low-income students in higher education, among other things. Earlier coverage here, and Commission Web page, with links to reports and so on, here. 8:46:39 PM    comment []

Three from the gang at BoingBoing: Coming soon, the $1000 genetic report card. David Pescovitz: In the near future, it might only cost $1000 to sequence your entire genome. Three years ago, the first human genome decoding cost a total of $500 million. Now, it might cost $10-$15 million. The New York Times reports on several companies vying to drive the cost down to less than a grand, possibly ushering in an age where "genetic report cards" may be available at birth. From the new York Times: David Bentley, Solexa's chief scientist, said that the company's DNA sequencing machine had already decoded several bacterial genomes and that he was planning to sequence a human genome -- that of an anonymous man from the Yoruba people of Nigeria. An African genome was chosen because there is greater genetic diversity in African populations, Dr. Bentley said. The demand for whole genome sequencing is a long way off, in Dr. Bentley's view, but not so distant that it is too early to think about the consequences of generating such information. He advocates that two people should control access to a person's genome sequence -- the patient and the physician. Why not the patient alone? Dr. Bentley said genomes would be so difficult to analyze correctly that interpretation should stay within the medical profession. Otherwise, freelance services will spring up, offering to predict whether a person will get heart disease or their age of death. This potential for misinformation "would have a huge adverse impact on the medical use of genetic information," Dr. Bentley said. Link Will Bix kill the record industry? (I hope so). Mark Frauenfelder: Last month I had lunch with Epinions co-founder Mike Speiser, who showed me a preview of a product his team at his new company created. The company is called Bix (named after the early jazz musician Bix Beiderbecke). The idea behind Bix is neat -- a combination of American Idol and YouTube's lip syncing madness. Basically, anyone can set up a contest -- karaoke, lip-syncing, beauty, whatever (I suggested magic routines and Mike seemed to like that idea). People can enter that contest (sometimes paying a required entry fee, which will be split between the contest winner, the contest creator, and Bix) and use their webcam to record their performance. Bix has licensed the use of lyrics and music from the record companies, which I'm sure is costing quite a bit of money. One thing I'm interested in is seeing what happens when bands perform original music on Bix. If Bix (or something like it) really takes off, then bands who win "best original song" contests will have a built-in audience to buy their music. And who needs the record industry to press CDs or make deals with iTunes then? Bix and the artists could simply sell the music as MP3s right from the site. Sure, parts of the music industry probably won't ever go away, especially publishing. But the parts that involves making bands and making CDs are going to have to learn from these new experiments if they want to be around in the next five years. Om Malik has more to say on the business of Bix. Link Iran Air 747 TV ad for '70s TV audiences in the US. Xeni Jardin: Sassan says, This is a a late 1970s advertisement for Iran Air, the nation's airliner. It's interesting because this ad was created before the 1979 Islamic revolution, when Iran and the United States were strong allies. Link [Boing Boing] 8:45:29 PM    comment []

Stuart Hughes is still Beyond Northern Iraq. In fact, He's reporting from Lebanon now. Yup. He notes: Until Flickr updates straight onto the blog, you can check into the Beirut photostream here. 8:44:18 PM    comment []

sethf has some India ISP Blogspot Blocking - Conjecture: I've read a bit on the story of ISP's in India blocking certain blog services. Many people have confirmed that it's happening, so it's apparently true. But it doesn't make sense. India is a democracy, so one wouldn't expect the sort of extreme censorship found in e.g. China. I briefly considered it might be a case of bans of a few particular blogs accidentally leading to widespread overblocking by cutting off entire servers, since many blogs are hosted on a single server (i.e. banning meant to be by-name was instead implemented by-IP address). But that can't be right, since while one ISP might make that mistake, several ISP's wouldn't *all* make that mistake, especially after complaints started coming in. It sure can't be a terrible fear of the Voice Of The People, since only some services are being censored. If the government was afraid of self-agonizing emergent intarwebizens, all such services would be blocked. So that explanation is nonsense. I wonder if we'll find out that somebody said that terrorists were using *blogs* to communicate, so in a panic, prompted by the recent terrorist bombings in Mumbai, some government official issued a hasty "national security" directive to block certain blog services. That would fit the observed pattern, because those sort of panic directives are both overbroad, and people won't want to talk about them. It also implies that this should clear up in few days, as sanity prevails. We'll see. [Infothought] 7:52:00 PM    comment []