buridan's blog

Access : : Nature:
The use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by both ill and healthy individuals raises ethical questions that should not be ignored, argue Barbara Sahakian and Sharon Morein-Zamir.
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this makes me wonder.... if we buy into Ken Robinson's argument about reproduction, which is loosely parallel to bourdieu.... what are we now reproducing in the minds of students?

I find the whole thing a bit disturbing.

Books: None of the Above: Books: The New Yorker:
I.Q. measures not just the quality of a person’s mind but the quality of the world that person lives in.
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this is a good explanation of culturally generated differences in intelligence.

The Cape Town Open Education Declaration:
Cape Town Open Education Declaration:
Unlocking the promise of open educational resources
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I think most people should support open education, if not in this form, then in some reasonable form that admits that knowledge cannot be owned, though it is frequently proprietized into a commodity, that commodity-form, i argue, is not knowledge anymore, it is an object, whereas knowledge only exists inside subjects, which is something objects tend not to do.

This article and this article provide a basis of critique for people using 14 letter passwords in rc5 and assuming some sense of security. Hint is... it is not secure. It is not as bad as Microsoft using rot13, but it is close. Computing power and memory win against encryption. Given extensible memory and speed, password and/or public/private key hacks can be managed the same way. granted it would take a ton of resources to build the massively parallel computer that could do such a key shuffle, but it is theoretically conceivable and likely from my sources already existing. Now granted, what one can do in a small black-hat setup is fairly limited in terms of 1024 encryption, and most people scoff at the resources required to do a large shuffle.

edu-Impact | college & university economic impact portal:
Welcome to edu-Impact, the College & University Economic Impact Portal.
Appleseed, a New York City-based consulting firm, created this portal in response to a growing interest in the regional economic and community development impacts of colleges and universities. This portal is the most comprehensive source of information on the subject.

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this is a handy site for economic impact studies related to universities.

Print Story: New software detects Web interference on Yahoo! News:
Increasingly worried over Internet providers' behavior, a nonprofit has released software that helps determine whether online glitches are innocent hiccups or evidence of deliberate traffic tampering.
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we needed something like this. we just need it built into every OS now.

The Chicago Metaverse Meetup (Chicago, IL) - Meetup.com:
The Chicago Metaverse Meetup
Meetup with other local players of the online gaming community, Second Life, and all sorts of other virtual communities! Gather with other players, talk about the game, and make new "offline" friends!

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come and have fun.

25+ Sources For Creative Commons Content
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cool stuff from creative commons, now a bit easier to find.

Well the Learning and research in Second Life workshop was by all current reports a resounding success. We had a full room in real life and a significant group of people in second life at Kula. We have some photos on flickr that are tagged, and some others that are note are in the Internet Research 8.0