Pakistan Looks to Build a Censorship Firewall

The Business and Human Rights Resource Center  (BHRC) has a great set of resources on Pakistan's new request for proposal (RFP) for the "development, deployment and operation of a national-level URL filtering and blocking system":

In February 2012 the Pakistan Government published a public tender for the "development, deployment and operation of a national-level URL filtering and blocking system". Bolo Bhi, a Pakistan-based NGO, issued a petition calling on eight tech companies not to respond to the tender. Business & Human Rights Resource Centre invited the companies to respond.

 The BHRC has links to the responses from Cisco, Sandvine, and Verizon. The general idea is if tech companies refuse to supply to oppressive regimes, those regimes will have limited options to achieve oppression through technology. NPR has a good overview of tech in oppressive regimes.

image: mercuryreliance.wordpress.com

Aimless Surfing a Result of Fatigue and Stress

The Chronicle discusses a new study that connects that experience of surfing aimlessly, even though you have things that have to get done, to sleep deprivation:

They asked 96 undergraduates, who had worn a sleep-monitoring device the night before, to sit at a computer and pay close attention to a 42-minute lecture by a professor (whom they were told was being considered for a job). The students were left alone for this task, which required considerable concentration and patience, but any web surfing they did was monitored. 

As predicted, the less students had slept the night before, the more they were likely to wander off from their assigned task. Conversely, every minute of sleep meant .05 fewer minutes surfing.

A recent blog post by Tim Sacket highlighted the 80 hour work week fallacy. Seems like a consistent balanced approach to work allows you to get the most, high quality, work done over time.

image: www.webmd.com

Will Technology Make Universities Obsolete?

An article in the Chronicle discusses the future of universities with two folks from Georgia Tech:

It’s the same idea as the news industry. Local newspapers survived most of the last century on profits from classified ads. And what happened? Craigslist drove profits out of classified ads for local newspapers. If you think that it’s all revolving around you, and you’re going to be able to impose your value system on this train that’s leaving the station, that’s going to lead you to one set of decisions. Think of Carnegie Mellon, with its “Four Courses, Millions of Users” idea [which became the Open Learning Initiative], or Yale with the humanities courses, thinking that what the market really wants is universal access to these four courses at the highest quality. And really what the market is doing is something completely different. The higher-education market is reinventing what a university is, what a course is, what a student is, what the value is. I don’t know why anyone would think that the online revolution is about reproducing the classroom experience.

For someone who attended a small school like Pomona College, these people are missing the point. A community of learners and the development of an identity as an academic is a major component of any school, which isn't typically what happens in a social network of 150k people.

An alternative approach to education is happening here in Austin - a middle school teacher records lectures and the students watch them for homework. Problem sets and application of the material happens in the classroom, with teacher support. Technology is used to support an approach to teaching, not supplant it.

image: www.nj.com of The College of New Jersey