By Alfie Kohn
Opinion | Why Can’t Everyone Get A’s? – The New York Times
For a generation now, school reform has meant top-down mandates for what students must be taught, enforced by high-stakes standardized tests and justified by macho rhetoric — “rigor,” “raising the bar,” “tougher standards.”
Libraries Considered Hazardous | February 2019 | Communications of the ACM:
All this tells us is that persistent accumulation of knowledge requires care and curation over time. One might even imagine that digital online libraries might have the ability to update themselves as new knowledge is added. John McCarthyb once said to me, “Do you know, 100 years from now they will say, ‘100 years ago they had books that didn’t talk to each other!'” It will be an enormous task to devise methods to accumulate and curate digital content and its relevant metadata including provenance and validity. Will computer, information, and library science be up to the task? We can but try.
Books that don’t talk to each other? Who knew?
Amazon’s New Customer – Stratechery by Ben Thompson: “I was reminded of this quote after Amazon announced an agreement to buy Whole Foods for $13.7 billion; after all, it was only two years ago that Whole Foods founder and CEO John Mackey predicted that groceries would be Amazon’s Waterloo. And while Colligan’s prediction was far worse — Apple simply left Palm in the dust, unable to compete — it is Mackey who has to call Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, the Napoleon of this little morality play, boss.”
This is an insightful view of the Whole Foods purchase. Want to shop with me online?
The PC is dead. Rising numbers of mobile, lightweight, cloud-centric devices don’t merely represent a change in form factor. Rather, we’re seeing an unprecedented shift of power from end users and software developers on the one hand, to operating system vendors on the other—and even those who keep their PCs are being swept along. This is a little for the better, and much for the worse.
via The PC is dead. Why no angry nerds? :: The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It.
A study of how University of Washington graduate students integrated an Amazon Kindle DX into their course reading provides the first long-term investigation of e-readers in higher education. While some of the study’s findings were expected – students want improved support for taking notes, checking references and viewing figures – the authors also found that allowing people to switch between reading styles, and providing the reader with physical cues, are two challenges that e-readers will need to address in cracking the college market.
We ran a within-subjects study, testing each user on all 4 reading conditions — printed book, PC, iPad, and Kindle — rotating the sequence in which we exposed users to each device.
via iPad and Kindle Reading Speeds (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox).
In the movie “Ironman 2,” Larry Ellison makes a cameo appearance as a billionaire, playboy software magnate. It is a role he knows well. He is playing himself — chief executive of Oracle Corp, one of Silicon Valley’s most enduring, successful and flamboyant figures.
via Special Report: Can That Guy in Ironman 2 Whip IBM in Real Life?.
MySQL :: MySQL Enterprise for Amazon EC2:
Amazon EC2 is a web service that allows organizations to right size their computing capacity on demand using Amazon’s proven computing environment. Using MySQL Enterprise for Amazon EC2, developers can cost-effectively deliver web-scale database applications in the “cloud”, fully backed by the database experts at MySQL. Amazon EC2 and MySQL are a great fit for organizations that want to reduce the capital expenditures and operating costs required to build out and run their IT infrastructure. The benefits of MySQL Enterprise for Amazon for EC2 include:
Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and Sun are now fueling the growing fire around the database-as-a-service and cloud database markets, but what’s the difference between these offerings and what’s the appeal? Database guru Don Feinberg defines terms and raises important questions about reliability and security.