All those topics that i wish i had time to pursue more earnestly.

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….

Library NOT Heart of University, Survey Shows:
“Every faculty member here knows students’ papers are already just swaths of text cut and pasted from shit sites they found on Jackpot strung together with their own pathetic run-on sentences. Faculty apathy and grade inflation are the only things keeping students’ GPAs and campus retention from plummeting through the floor and our funding from going with them. Without a library for faculty at least to conduct their research all bets are off!” The Library Association of North America (LANA) has issued a terse response to both the NCUP’s report and developments at Wilburn: “Looks like the party’s over.”
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The party is over for libraries? i’d say it ended years ago, prolly in the reagan era. the library is still a necessity, but I don’t think it is a heart…. the heat of a university is the total environment for learning that it provides. not the classroom, not the library, not the lounges, but the whole and how it is architected in passing to encourage learning.

Web Curator Tool:
The Web Curator Tool (WCT) is a tool for managing the selective
web harvesting process. It is designed for use in libraries and
other collecting organisations, and supports collection by
non-technical users while still allowing complete control of the
web harvesting process.

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this looks like a great tool.

Take Back Your Time:
TAKE BACK YOUR TIME is a major U.S./Canadian initiative to challenge the epidemic of overwork, over-scheduling and time famine that now threatens our health, our families and relationships, our communities and our environment.

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I missed take back your time day.

Season Shot – Ammo with flavor.:
Season Shot is made of tightly packed seasoning bound by a fully biodegradable food product. The seasoning is actually injected into the bird on impact seasoning the meat from the inside out. When the bird is cooked the seasoning pellets melt into the meat spreading the flavor to the entire bird. Forget worrying about shot breaking your teeth and start wondering about which flavor shot to use!

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finally… hunting with flavor….

Want a lesson on what can happen when you anger the blogosphere? (and you happen to steal pictures):
Unbelievable right? It gets worse. After the 441 comments are posted to Kris’s blog post about this, then it takes off on Kris’s flickr site – where people start to discover that the thief had stolen almost every photo on his web site. The poor schmuck eventually apologizes and admits his wrong-doing after one of the absolute worst web-based pummelings I have EVER seen.
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web based pummeling…. A new concept?

How many calories are in Coke Zero?:
If you answered zero, go to Question 2: how many calories are in Pepsi One? If you answer one, you are wrong. Nancy, a friend and colleague of mine, told me her son did a college project to find out how many calories are actually in soda. Pepsi One, it turns out, has something like 28 calories. Pepsi One pays a little fine every year to the Food & Drug Administration for lying about its calorie count, because it is much more profitable to pay the fine every year than change the calories.

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ahhh trüth in advertising is great…. government complicity is better.

Welcome to the Bottom Half:
In terms of retention and graduation rates, American colleges and universities are now in the bottom half of all higher education institutions in the developed world. According to a New York Times story and editorial, the U.S. is now 16th out of 27 countries.
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yep… but how do you resolve it.