UCLA Anderson School’s Noah J. Goldstein writes in the Harvard Business Review about Harnessing Social Pressure: just giving people access to data alters their behavior (e.g., letting hotel guests know others who had stayed in the same room before them had reused towels resulted in more guests reusing towels). But I love the idea of the “magnetic middle”, in which such data can not only influence people to do better, but to “backslide” to where others are if they were already ahead of the curve...

Robert Berdahl’s October 2008 address at the University of Missouri Centennial of AAU Membership, Research Universities Addressing the Issues of the 21st Century (PDF), is just a stellar talk and a must-read in my opinion.

Tags: research universities

So asks Nicholas Carr in the cover article of the July/August Atlantic Monthly. I put this here not just because i't's an interesting and worthy read, but because it resonates with me, both the good and the bad. The good is how the technology has quite fundamentally changed my ability to write: I simply couldn't do what I do with pen and paper, though like many, I still like to print out an intermediate draft now and then to read through end-to-end (but that may be simply a lack of the right technology to enable the same ability). The bad is that I, too, have slowly, over a decade, gone from voracious book reader to being barely able to keep up with print publications like the Economist and Atlantic Monthly. Perhaps the glass-is-half-full explanation is just that my information consumption has actually gone up; it's just different. The article's mention of neurological rewiring echos Marc Prensky's thought in Digital natives, digital immigrants part 2.

On the other hand, I can't say I resonate with the glass-is-half-empty predictions of the article. Change of the sort described just is. If indeed it's a problem - and I don't think so - then the genie is already out of the bottle and all we can do is manage the effects. Wired Magazine's cover article The End of Science and two related articles, Tap Into the 12-Million-Teraflop Handheld Megacomputer and Supercomputing Power Hits the Desktop, Minus the Software, curiously speak in some way to this issue from a different perspective.

Tags: Google, information literacy, Digital immigrants, Digital natives

Esquire's December 2003 article Science & Industry: DARPA and more recently, Daniel Engber at Slate writes I Want to be a Mad Scientist.

Tags: DARPA

Two terrific sites with sensational content: ideas worth spreading from ted.com and pop!casts from poptech.org.

Tags: TED, pop!tech

BusinessWeek’s article, Cheating - Or Postmodern Learning?, provides a novel defense against cheating that underscores the continuing and increasing complexity of assessing individual ability in a collaborative context.

Tags: information literacy, intellectual dishonest

"Web 2.0 in just five minutes." Fabulous.

Reference: Tim O'Reilly's founding document on "What is Web 2.0". Also, a timely article about Web 2.0 in Science from Cyberinfrastructure Technology Watch.

Tags: Web 2.0

An absolute classic must-read: Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants by Marc Prensky. “It is amazing to me how in all the hoopla and debate these days about the decline of education in the US we ignore the most fundamental of its causes. Our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.”

Tags: Digital natives, Digital immigrants