The House Republicans recently voted to remove funding from the US Census. According to news reports, this action was motivated by a mix of Tea-Party symbolism and the legacy of a long-standing fight with the Census. This post will present a short editorial. While I have sympathy for part of the motivation for this action …
Continue reading "Do not cut the American Community Survey: an editorial."
I've written before that successful social networks are geared towards encouraging sharing. In its desktop mode, Facebook achieved this by virtue of simplicity and a default group of circles. But in the mobile space it is struggling and I think I know the reason why. There are two broad activities that make a social network: …
Continue reading "Why Facebook needs to be baked into mobile OS"
It seems that you can't go anywhere these days without seeing a new pretender to a digital revolution in education. Just this week, Harvard and MIT launched an online initiative, edX. It follows Stanford University's digital education initiatives and the start-ups it has spawned, CourseRA and Udacity. Apple (with iTunes U) and now Microsoft (with its …
Continue reading "The Next Digital Revolution in Education? Grading"
Over at Forbes on my Parentonomics blog I recount the experience my 11 year old son had taking Stanford's Game Theory course. My take-a-away is that designing online content and also assessment is a real challenge and it is unlikely that normal course content will simply translate over to the new medium.
Some folk like to read blogs. Some folk like to listen to podcasts. Why not give everyone the option to do what they prefer? Now it is possible to read or listen to many of the essays that appear in my IEEE Micro Economics column (and appear here in digitopoly). The IEEE deserves credit for …
Just a conference announcement related to the Sloan Foundation program I co-direct ... for those interested. NBER Workshop on Scholarly Communication, Open Science and Its Impact This workshop is part of a Sloan Foundation program co-directed by Joshua Gans and Fiona Murray. This year's workshop will focus on scholarly communication, its incentives and the effectiveness …
Continue reading "Workshop Announcement on Scholarly Communication and Open Science"
[HT: Geekdad] Or what Facebook might do. Just don't ask about happiness.
Just an alert to interested people (especially grad students, current or newly minted) of a competition for proposals for research into smart disclosure. What is smart disclosure? "Smart Disclosure” policies help consumer markets work more competitively by providing decision-makers with convenient, computable, and cogent data--both about products or services and also about personal use patterns …
Continue reading "Competition for Research on Smart Disclosure"
Felix Salmon observed the other day that the NYT's Walmart expose sent Walmart's share price tumbling. As it is the kind of investigative reporting we'd all like to see if someone would pay for it, he wondered if this fact meant there would be someone to pay for it. A slight tweak to the NYT's …
Just before he stepped down as CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs tried to buy DropBox for Apple. But he and Dropbox founder, Drew Houston, had a dispute about what DropBox was. Jobs had claimed it was "a feature, not a product." I agreed, much to the consternation of some. This week saw the "feature" story gain weight …
