Harvard 2.0 or just another tech bubble?

Posted on by

Interesting piece by Lee Gomes in MIT Technology Review.

Harvard, by many measures the most prestigious college in the U.S., has been at it for nearly 400 years. Ben Nelson, founder of an online education startup called the Minerva Project, says he can do equally well in just three.

Minerva is one of the least-publicized but also most well-funded and audacious of the current crop of online education startups. Funded with $25 million from Benchmark Capital—one of the well-known venture-capital firm’s largest-ever investments—Minerva says it will begin accepting applicants in 2015 for an entirely Web-based college program. The resulting undergraduate degree, it promises, will have all the prestige of anything the Ivy League can offer, but at half the cost.

Many people would dismiss Minerva’s notion of some sort of instant online Harvard as the fever dream of someone who had sat through one too many TED talks. But the for-profit company’s assumptions about how the Internet will change education can be found, to varying degrees, in most of the scores of startups now getting venture money to do instruction online.

The level of venture-capital investments in education has nearly doubled in 2011, and now rivals figures last seen during the dot-com boom. Representative of the crop is Coursera—formed by two Stanford computer scientists—which offers a growing list of free online classes (see “The Technology of Massive Open Online Courses”). Even though Coursera has no clear plans for how to make money, an investor involved in its initial $16 million financing said other top VCs pleaded by phone and e-mail to get in on the deal, regardless of the price. It’s the sort of enthusiasm that often signals a tech investing bubble.

Hmmm… I think I’d read this as Round Two of the 1999-2000 fantasies about online education. It smacks of Fathom.com. But the movement started by Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrunn will eventually have a disruptive effect on Higher Ed. The $64B question is how MOOCs will eventually start to disrupt conventional, lower- and middle-range HE providers. The Harvards, Stanfords and Cambridges of this world will be largely untouched by these developments, largely because they are really selling positional goods as much as an educational experience.

How the news came to Colorado

Posted on by

What is wrong with these people?

DENVER, Colo — “Welcome to Hell!”

The shout broke a brief quiet inside a lounge of Denver’s Sports Authority Field, where the Colorado GOP held its election-night watch party. Fox News had just officially announced that Obama won Ohio, and with it the nation. Karl Rove was another thing, but it was a short moment of quiet, as supporters here processed the fact that not only had the president won the race, but after millions of dollars of advertising and weekly traffic jams from the candidates’ nonstop visits, Colorado ultimately did not matter in the final count.

“What is wrong with America?” one supporter murmured under his breath.

Debbie Cohen, 56, wept.

“I am deeply, deeply distressed. I have two grandbabies, and I look at this and I know there is no turning back,” she said, through tears. “How can America pick a man like that? I have been through many, many elections, but I have never known the desperation that I know now. I feel devastated. I feel hopeless.”

Cohen, a teacher, said she’ll probably feel better tomorrow, but for now, she needs to grieve.

“I don’t know where to go, except on my knees to God,” she said.

The Real Real America

Posted on by

Paul Krugman sums it up.

Tomorrow — or I guess today — comes the cleanup; when thousands, perhaps millions, of right-wing heads explode, it makes quite a mess. Also, notice that the polls were right. I wonder if I can get invited when Nate Silver is sworn in as president?

OK, somewhat more seriously: one big thing that just happened was that the real America trumped the “real America”. And it’s also the election that lets us ask, finally, “Who cares what’s the matter with Kansas?”

For a long time, right-wingers — and some pundits — have peddled the notion that the “real America”, all that really counted, was the land of non-urban white people, to which both parties must abase themselves. Meanwhile, the actual electorate was getting racially and ethnically diverse, and increasingly tolerant too. The 2008 Obama coalition wasn’t a fluke; it was the country we are becoming.

And sure enough that more diverse and, if you ask me, better nation just won big.

Notice too that to the extent that social issues played in this election, they played in favor of Democrats. Gods, guns, and gays didn’t swing voters into supporting corporate interests; instead, human dignity for women swung votes the other way.

A huge night for truth, justice, and the real American way.

Bjørn Lomborg on climate policy

Posted on by

First of all, he says we need to recognise that just continuing with current policies won’t work.

The Copenhagen Consensus is a think tank that ranks the economically smartest approaches to a variety of issues. In 2009, we asked 27 of the worlds top climate economists to identify the costs and benefits of the top climate solutions. A group of eminent economists, including three Nobel laureates, ranked the smartest ways to fix the climate. Their answer was: Dont continue to expand current policies. Trying to make fossil fuels so costly that no one wants them is bad economics, in addition to being bad politics.They suggested instead three changes to the way the United States approaches climate change. First, we should aim to make green energy so cheap everyone will want it. This will require heavy investment in research and development of better, smarter green technologies. Such an investment has much lower costs than current climate policies like the EU 2020-policy, but a much greater chance of allowing the entire world to make the switch to green energy in the long run.

A good example is the innovation of fracked gas, which has made the price of natural gas drop dramatically — allowing a switch in electricity production away from coal. This in turn has singlehandedly caused the United States to reduce its annual CO2 emissions by about 500Mt, or about twice as much as the entire global reductions from the last 20 years of international climate negotiations. Moreover, it has not cost the United States anything — in fact, U.S. consumers are saving about $100 billion per year in cheaper prices. That’s a policy that is easy to sell around the world.

Second, we should investigate (but not deploy) geoengineering as a possible insurance policy to runaway climate change. Cooling the planet with slightly whiter clouds over the Pacific could completely counteract global warming at the cost of $6 billion, according to research by Eric Bickel and Lee Lane for the Copenhagen Consensus — between 1,000 and 10,000 times cheaper than anything else we are considering today.

Third, we should recognize that there are huge lags between our actions and their effects on the climate — no matter what we do, it will only affect the second half of this century. Thus, if we want to tackle climate impacts such as Hurricane Sandy, we need to step up adaptation and make our societies more resilient. This is mostly an inexpensive no-brainer.

Yep. Wonder if the good citizens of New York are thinking along those lines too. And what about the good citizens of London Town, much of which is as vulnerable as Manhattan

Book publishers have long been playing into Amazon’s hands

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column.

In the long view of history, the Bertelsmann-Pearson deal will be seen as just the latest instalment of a long-running story: a tale of formerly dominant industries trying to prevent their venerable business models being dismantled by the internet. The early victims were travel agents, record labels, newspapers, magazines and broadcast networks.

In each case, the relevant executives could be heard loudly declaring that while it was indeed the case that the guys “over there” (gesturing in the direction of some other industry) were being disintermediated by the network, nevertheless the speaker’s own industry was special and therefore immune from technological contagion. Universities and book publishers have been arguing like this for quite a while. The Bertelsmann-Pearson deal suggests that the publishers have finally heard the tocsin. Universities haven’t got the message yet.

The funny thing about the publishing industry is that long before it was really threatened by the internet it was busily rearranging itself so as to make it more vulnerable to it…

The Two Cultures — again! But this time the other way round

Posted on by

53 years ago this year, C.P. Snow gaves his famous Rede Lecture at Cambridge, about the intellectual and ideological chasm he perceived between Britain’s two cultures – that of ‘literary intellectuals’ vs that of scientists and engineers. He argued that the former dominated the latter, with devastating consequences for Britain’s future and its place in the world. In the half-century since then, it looks as though the pendulum has really swung the other way, as the utilitarian values implicit in the Browne Review of Higher Education start to distort the entire university system, and now the Gove ‘reforms’ of the school curriculum will excise Arts subjects from the new English baccalaureate.

Planned Obsolescence v2.0

Posted on by

Nick Bilton had a perceptive piece in the New York Times about Apple’s product strategy.

Philip W. Schiller, Apple’s vice president for marketing, strode across the stage of the California Theater in San Jose last week trumpeting the virtues of new Apple products. As he caressed the side of the latest iMac personal computer, he noted how thin it was — five millimeters, 80 percent thinner than the last one. Then he said, with an air of surprise, as if he’d just thought of it: “Isn’t it amazing how something new makes the previous thing instantly look old?”

Umm, yes, Mr. Schiller, you design your products that way. It’s part of a strategy that Apple has perfected. How else can the company persuade people to replace their perfectly fine iPhone, iPad, iMac and iEverything else year after year?

It’s called planned obsolescence and it’s an old marketing trick. Mr Bilton traces it back to Brooks Stevens, an American industrial designer who specialised in automobile design in the 1950s. He’s the guy who inspired cosmetic changes (tail fins etc) on American gas-guzzlers of the period to ensure that new models always made their predecessors look dated.

But actually the idea goes back even further than that. Wikipedia traces it to Bernard London’s 1932 pamphlet entitled Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence, the nub of which was that the government should impose legal obsolescence on consumer articles in order to stimulate and perpetuate consumption.

The funny thing about Apple’s strategy is how blatant it is. I have an iPhone 4 which is a perfectly satisfactory device, in the sense that it does everything I need from a phone. But with the launch of the iPhone 5 my handset has suddenly become the oldest iPhone that the company will support. It’s been scheduled for obsolescence, in other words, not because of any functional inadequacy but because its continuation threatens Apple’s corporate need to have me ‘upgrade’ to a device that I don’t actually need.

When researching his piece, Mr Bilton spoke to Don Norman, who is a real design guru IMHO and who observed that consumer electronics companies like Apple

have adopted the same marketing techniques the automobile industry perfected decades ago. Introduce fancy upgrades to the top and then, each year, push them down to lower-tiered products. This way, customers on every level feel the need to buy a newer version. “This is an old-time trick — they’re not inventing anything new,” he said. “Yet it’s to the detriment of the consumer and the environment, but perhaps to the betterment of the stockholder.”

He added: “For Apple, you forgot the other trick: change the plugs!” While the rest of the electronics industry has adopted micro-USB ports, Apple just changed the proprietary ports and plugs on all of its latest devices — laptops, iPads and iPhones included.

Spot on. We laugh derisively at our fathers’ (and grandfathers’) pathetic obsessions with tail-fins and chrome fittings. And then we contemplate the long queues of mugs lining up to buy the latest glass rectangle from Cupertino and ask: are we getting smarter?

Answer: no.