Biz Supply Home|Home Business Information

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Tomorrow’s New York Times carries the second installment in the paper’s series “Grading the Digital School.” Like the first installment, this one finds little solid evidence that popular, expensive computer-aided instruction programs actually benefit students. The focus of the new article, written by Trip Gabriel and Matt Richtel, is Cognitive Tutor, a widely esteemed and much coveted software program for teaching math in high schools. The software was developed by Carnegie Learning, a company founded by Carnegie Mellon professors and now owned by Apollo Group, the same company that owns the University of Phoenix. Carnegie Learning promotes its software as producing “revolutionary results.” It is widely used, and has been applauded by respected thinkers like the Harvard Business School’s Clayton Christensen, who in an article published by the Atlantic two weeks ago used Carnegie Learning as the poster child for the power of software-based education: Carnegie Learning is the creation of computer and cognitive scientists from Carnegie Mellon University. Their math tutorials draw from cutting-edge research about the way students learn and what motivates them to succeed academically. These scientists have created adaptive computer tutorials that meet students at their individual level of understanding and help them advance via the…

Read the rest of this entry »

Cycle In Cinema – Magnificent Revolution from culturehunter on Vimeo.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to interconnected computers that are able to compute and communicate at incredibly low costs, we have entered a time of what I’ll call deep automation. The story of modern economies has always been a story of automation, of course, but what what’s going on today goes far beyond anything that’s happened before. We don’t know what the consequences will be, but the persistent, high levels of unemployment in developed economies may well be a symptom of deep automation. In a provocative article in the new issue of the McKinsey Quarterly, W. Brian Arthur argues that computer automation has in effect created a “second economy” that is, slowly, silently, and largely invisibly, beginning to supplant the primary, physical economy: I want to argue that something deep is going on with information technology, something that goes well beyond the use of computers, social media, and commerce on the Internet. Business processes that once took place among human beings are now being executed electronically. They are taking place in an unseen domain that is strictly digital. On the surface, this shift doesnt seem particularly consequentialits almost something we take for granted. But I believe it is causing a revolution no less important…