Miles away, ‘I’ll have a burger’ – The Boston Globe:

NASHUA — When Jairo Moncada pulled up to the drive-through at Wendy’s in Burbank, Calif., for his usual cheeseburger, fries, and soda, he knew things looked different. There was an extra lane.

But the 25-year-old could not see the biggest change: The woman taking his lunch order was sitting 3,000 miles away at a computer terminal in Nashua, and fielding calls from Wendy’s customers at drive-throughs as far away as Florida and Washington, D.C.

“I had absolutely no idea I was talking to someone in New Hampshire,” Moncada said in a phone interview later that day. “Our order was ready at the window. It was really quick.”

It took a total of 66 seconds.

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wow…. this changes…. something…. not sure what, but something.

Change Magazine Article(s): A Tectonic Shift in Global Higher Education:

For two decades, worldwide enrollment growth in higher education has exceeded the most optimistic forecasts. A milestone of 100 million enrollments was passed some years ago, and an earlier forecast of 120 million students by 2020 may be reached by 2010. If anything, enrollment growth is accelerating as more governments see the rapid expansion of higher education as a key element in their transition from developing to developed countries.

That is the situation in China, where enrollments doubled between 2000 and 2003. With 16 million students enrolled by 2005, China had overtaken the United States as the world’s largest higher education system. Malaysia also illustrates the trend. It plans to increase enrollments in higher education by 166 percent in the next four years, from 600,000 to 1.6 million, to achieve college participation rates similar to those of developed nations. Mauritius has recently passed legislation to create a third university for its 1.2 million people, having added its second only five years ago.

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Some would say that this will ruin…. the american university… I say… contrarily that the key is to encourage learning and that doesn’t have to be ‘american’

FT.com / Comment & analysis / Columnists – A closed mind about an open world:
Studying intellectual property and the internet has convinced me that we have another cognitive bias. Call it the openness aversion. We are likely to undervalue the importance, viability and productive power of open systems, open networks and non-proprietary production. Test yourself on the following questions. In each case, it is 1991 and I have removed from you all knowledge of the past 15 years.

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I agree there is an aversion to openness, and i think this is very problematic. when professors and scientists won’t share data because they are afraid of competition, you have a real problem with innovation, that you might have to make a law to make people share is utterly surprising. openness and sharing are being overwritten by other values and those values are not market values, but anti-market, monopoly capital values. However, this was predicted by Simmel, so….