By Joshua Kim. So I’m not that impressed with the Apple Watch (maybe I’ll be wrong), but I am excited about HBO Now. Paying $15 a month to get access to Game of Thrones season 5 seems like a relatively good bargain. Being able to watch Silicon Valley season 2 is a bonus. We are a cord-cutting household (no cable or satellite TV), so we are a prime target for HBO Now (along with Hulu Plus and Amazon Prime and Netflix). Read more...
15 mars 2015
HBO Now, Multi-Bundling, and Higher Ed
The Apple Watch and the End of Hardware
By Joshua Kim. Can you come up with a scenario in which you would want to buy an Apple Watch? For the Apple Watch to do anything useful it needs to be paired with an iPhone. This means that the Apple Watch will spend its life within a few feet of an iPhone. Is there anything that you need to do on your wrist that you don’t want to do on your phone? Why would you want to read or send messages, or hail an Uber ride, on the tiny screen of the Watch when your phone is as close as your pocket. Read more...
An EdTech Perspective on Sweet Briar
By Joshua Kim. We are all Monday morning quarterbacking the Sweet Briar story. All of us have firm ideas about what we would have done differently in Sweet Briar’s academics, admissions, marketing, finances, or any other part of the school responsible for keeping the lights on. Read more...
Louisiana to Disappear Completely by July, Scientists Say
By Oronte. Earth scientists today reported what appears to be the largest landslide in historic times and one that resulted in the entire state of Louisiana losing strength, failing, and slumping across the continental shelf and slope and into the deep Gulf of Mexico Basin. Satellite photographs show the state’s former geographic location is now occupied by a large embayment bounded by Texas, Arkansas, and Mississippi. Early sonar soundings of the embayment show it to be typically very deep (1,500 to 6,000 feet) with very steep slopes. Read more...Mardi Gras in Louisiana
By Oronte. “To a perfect foot no place is slippery,” writes Emerson in his journal in 1862. That sounds like hope, admonition, and directive all at once—especially for writers—and I’d like to believe it’s true. To find oneself in a strange new situation and to continue to see things with interest and equanimity is the task. Read more...
The LEADS Act
By Tracy Mitrano. Of all the laws in need of reform due to the Internet’s disruptive effects, ECPA remains primary. Promulgated in 1986, it updated the Safe Streets and Crime Control Act of 1968, the first U.S. “wire-tap” law. At the time prescient because it included “data networking” in the definition of electronic communications, ECPA nonetheless would quickly become antiquated once the Internet became public. Read more...Winning Through Intimidation
By Susan O'Doherty. I grew up believing that I was "dumb at math."This was partly because my father, an IRS agent, would routinely try to help me with my homework and end up yelling at me that I was "stupid" for not immediately grasping the concepts he tried to communicate, but the belief was also supported by a school environment that presumed that girls weren't competent in STEM subjects. Read more...
Math Geek Mom: Irrational Decisions
By Rosemarie Emanuele. In Economics, the idea of someone acting in a “rational” way implies that they make decisions that maximize their own utility, and that they do so consistently. in Mathematics, the same word means that a number can be represented as the ratio of two integers, that it can be written as a decimal that either ends or repeats forever. I found myself thinking of this recently, and the many decisions that we make in life that might be seen as “irrational”, as we approach the day the most famous irrational number is often celebrated. That number, “pi”, can approximated by its first three numbers, 3.14, and is therefore sometimes celebrated on March 14th. Read more...
Standing Corrected
By Susan O'Doherty. Carl Bankston took me to task for writing, in this post about the failures to indict the killers of Michael Brown and Eric Garner as though they were equivalent, and "Moltar" and "gbpeters" criticized the post as biased. Read more...
Analysis Doubts Jeb Bush Claim on Minority Enrollment
During his appearance at last month's meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference, Jeb Bush spoke of his pride in barring state universities from considering race in admissions. "I eliminated affirmative action by executive order -- trust me, there were a lot of people upset about this," Bush said. Read more...
