July 2011
69 posts
The Master’s as the New Bachelor’s →
nytimes.com
Call it credentials inflation. Once derided as the consolation prize for failing to finish a Ph.D. or just a way to kill time waiting out economic downturns, the master’s is now the fastest-growing degree. The number awarded, about 657,000 in 2009, has more than doubled since the 1980s, and the rate of increase has quickened substantially in the last couple of years, says Debra W. Stewart, president of the Council of Graduate Schools. Nearly 2 in 25 people age 25 and over have a master’s, about the same proportion that had a bachelor’s or higher in 1960.
“Several years ago it became very clear to us that master’s education was moving very rapidly to become the entry degree in many professions,” Dr. Stewart says. The sheen has come, in part, because the degrees are newly specific and utilitarian. These are not your general master’s in policy or administration. Even the M.B.A., observed one business school dean, “is kind of too broad in the current environment.” Now, you have the M.S. in supply chain management, and in managing mission-driven organizations. There’s an M.S. in skeletal and dental bioarchaeology, and an M.A. in learning and thinking.
» via The New York Times (Subscription may be required for some content)
This article is making the rounds, as all articles like it will always do. It kind of pains me that this kind of story exists. This article is going to look stupid in a few years the same way an article from earlier this century would look stupid that touts “High School Diplomas As The New Grade School Education.” Also worth noting is the demographic bias of the New York Times editorial staff: in 2009, under 8% of the over-25 population had masters degrees. This shift is happening, but way more slowly than this story seems to suggest, and also not remarkably.
“Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data, or dollars. It is equally harmful to the victim, whether you sell what you have stolen or give it away.”
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“United States attorney Carmen M. Ortiz, giving “a statement of intellectual property law at its most simple-minded, business-friendly, and injudicious” (via austinkleon)”
That is simple-minded and maybe not too helpful. BUT: it’s important to remember that no one wants to prove that stealing is ok. Both sides think stealing is wrong. Using a computer command to take documents and give them away can be stealing! No one is arguing that taking documents is NEVER stealing. Both sides share a lot of common ground!
FBI Raids Homes of Three ‘Anonymous’ Suspects | Threat Level | Wired.com →
wired.com
We’ll see what this means in the long run, but the main difficulty here is that Anonymous is less like an array of dominos and more like crabgrass: knocking one bit out has little to no impact on the rest, since most of the rest just plain don’t care.
“Investigators have shown themselves, again and again, to be remarkably adaptable when faced with new technology. And absent a major (and unforeseen) breakthrough in computer security, technology will remain, for good or evil, increasingly on the side of the eavesdropper.”
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Matt Blaze: Wiretapping and Cryptography Today.
A great article about the interplay between government wiretapping and cryptography. The basic leaping off point here is that, despite fears by the government, the widespread availability of encryption has not negatively impacted law enforcement’s ability to get the job done. I love a story that encourages skepticism for claims about how some technology or another is ruining society. Technology has always been developing, and every generation thinks that theirs will be the one in which our technology finally destroys us.
Chin up: claims like that have been wrong 100% of the time before.
NY Times 2Q Earnings: Hitting Paydirt with the Paywall - Jeff Bercovici - Mixed Media - Forbes →
blogs.forbes.com
Thought it worth mentioning that it looks like the paywall is kind of working.
“To summarize, peer review is costly (in terms of time and money), random (the correlation in perceived “publishability” of a paper between two groups of reviewers is little better than zero), ineffective at detecting errors, biased towards established groups and against originality, and sometimes abused (in that reviewers can steal ideas from papers they review or block the publication of competitors).”
—Why publish science in peer-reviewed journals? « Genomes Unzipped. Some pretty good ideas here. Certainly a nice place to start the discussion. But a real discussion about why we even WANT scientific journals needs to happen. (Meaning: are these journals just for disseminating current scientific research events? Or are we hoping for a reputable, official compendium of scientific consensus? Or is it just a way to catalog scientific research for future research? It’s certainly more complex than just one of these options.)
Verizon Cripples Embedded Android Hotspot Functionality - Making Your Device Less Useful and More Expensive | DSLReports.com, ISP Information →
dslreports.com
The troubling thing about this is that people will now just not update their phones, instead choosing to run an older version to keep a functionality that they like. That means that Verizon has created a precedent that their updates are not necessarily for your own good, something that puts a minor kink in the whole model of constantly-updating software: if you don’t trust each version to be better for you, why would you pay a premium for a plan that includes subsequent versions?
