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Innumeracy is a serious problem in this country, especially when it afflicts our elected representatives. The phenomenon manifests itself in lots of ways, some of them deadly. Here is one from this morning. Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn was on Morning Joe today, dismissing the idea that Congress would have to help his state through the recovery from the tornado disaster. Existing FEMA funds would cover it, he said. No problem with that, nor with his opinion, voiced a few minutes later, that it should be up ...I had never heard of Jason Richwine until I started reading the reports about his Harvard PhD thesis, on the IQs of immigrants and the policy implications for the US. The thesis itself ( here it is , if you want to read it and make up your own mind) was presented in 2009. Apparently nobody noticed it, or thought it was worth complaining about, until Richwine worked its conclusions into the Heritage Foundation's report on the economic costs of US immigration policy. That blew up, and Richwine resigned from ...From " When Governments Go Bad ": This scandal arises from a larger cultural virus: leakaphobia. Every administration centralizes power more tightly than the one before and is more paranoid about leaks than the one before. Every administration successively narrows the circle of debate, forsaking wide deliberation for the sake of reducing leaks (except the politically useful ones). Why do they do this? Because people who go into government not only have a tendency to want to control other people but also to ...After reading yesterday's post about MOOCs , a colleague asked me why I preferred BY-SA licensing to BY-NC-SA licensing. Now that looks like a technical question about lawyerly alphabet soup, but it is actually a basic question about what HarvardX is trying to accomplish. The faculty should be discussing the nature of the HarvardX intellectual property policy, and if we don't, we'll have another explosion like the one that happened this year when Harvard unwisely sent around detailed proposed revisions to ...There is a drive-by quote from me in Nathan Heller's good New Yorker article about Massive Open Online Courses. Reading the story reminds me how hard this kind of writing is -- I spent a long time with Heller, and tried to sell him on the idea of CS20 as an anti-MOOC , but our conversation got reduced to one line about students sleeping through class. It is interesting to see the MOOC euphoria being replaced by MOOC dread. The best articulation of the worries is that of Pr of. Bob Meister of the UC Santa ...I am back from a few days in Germany, which have made me appreciate some things about Germany and some things about the US. I was in Berlin and Dusseldorf, and I love how open and uncongested these cities are, with quiet, efficient streetcars everywhere (by contrast, I took the Green Line home from Logan, and was crushed and suffocated). There is a lot of green and many open areas for walking; in Dusseldorf several downtown blocks near the Rhine are given over to pedestrian walkways with shops and ...Yesterday's New York Times has an excellent piece by Salman Rushdie, Whither Moral Courage? The political class is notably lacking in courage, Rushdie says, but even artists and writers get no respect for taking tough stands. [W]e have become suspicious of those who take a stand against the abuses of power or dogma. It was not always so. The writers and intellectuals who opposed Communism, Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov and the rest, were widely esteemed for their stand. … This new idea — that writers, ...Harvard Magazine has an excellent summary of where things stand. Among the unanswered questions the Magazine mentions are these: What was the impetus for the second and third e-mail investigations? How were they initiated without the FAS dean’s assent? What was learned about the handling of Ad Board materials from those further queries? What transpired in the March 12 meeting that prompted Smith to pursue further queries? When did he and Faust learn about the additional investigations? There is also an ...The convergence of Patriot's day and my birthday, along with the marathon of course, always made this a special day for me. (I think the marathon used to be on April 19 and the holiday was moved to Monday only a few decades ago.) It is unreal to sit at home as instructed by the police, miles from the center of the action, watching TV like everyone else in the country is probably doing. The news, just announced, that the suspect seems not to be in the house that law enforcement had surrounded, is deflating. ...A university operates on trust. Universities regularly complain about the regulations under which they operate. We attribute the growth of the nonacademic bureaucracy to the cost of compliance with government regulations, and explain our rising costs by saying that we have to pass those costs along to the consumer. For example, in the American Council on Education report " Putting College Costs in Context , the section "Burdensome and costly federal regulations drive college prices higher": Given the range ...Given the snarkiness over Harvard winning a single game in the NCAA men's basketball tournament, it will probably not take long for critics to go after Yale for being successful in ice hockey. Yale's victory yesterday -- winning the NCAA tournament 4-0 over Quinnipiac, a team that plays about 10 miles away from Yale and had beaten Yale three times this year -- is stunning. That's a #15 seed beating the #1 seed, having beat the #2 and #3 seeds along the way. That's a team with 12 losses and 3 ties winning ...Are the Resident Deans of the Houses faculty? The question acquired a certain technical significance when the Globe reported that their email had been searched, because there is a special policy about privacy of faculty email. (See my previous post, Email Privacy at Harvard .) But the proposal for an honor code for undergraduates has raised the question of the faculty status of the Resident Deans in another context, because of the accompanying proposal that allegations regarding undergraduate academic ...The best part of Tuesday's FAS faculty meeting (see the Harvard Magazine site for the most complete account) was President's announcement of the independent authorities she is calling on for help: a privacy task force, and also an outside lawyer to check the facts of the particular email searches that took place recently. What comes from these two initiatives could be very helpful in putting this issue finally to bed and reassuring the community about what may and may not happen in the future. Let's start ...… that begins with the news that your men's basketball team has won a game in the NCAA tournament and ends with the news that your team of student mathematicians has won the William Lowell Putnam Mathematics Competition. (That's the premier mathematics competition in the world.) The secret in both cases? Recruiting. Teaching and coaching helps too, but finding the people who will thrive here and excel in their special talents is more important. And by the way, the star of the basketball victory over New ...We are known by the company we keep. So I was glad, in the days following the Globe's original reporting on the faculty email issue, when some people I respect were quoted expressing their alarm in terms stronger than I had used. Theda Skocpol , for example, told the Crimson, “Whoever designed this entire cheating scandal in all of its many investigative aspects fits better at the Hoover era FBI than at a modern university." The same Crimson story also quotes Charles Maier, a Harvard venerable. The New ...A profile in courage is emerging out of the Harvard email mess -- Sharon Howell, Resident Dean in Adams House, who on behalf of her fellow Resident Deans, raised the level of the conversation in a letter she sent President Faust on Monday. The letter has a dignity of tone and an aspirational quality one rarely hears here these days. I reproduce it below with her permission.Deans Smith and Hammonds put out a very helpful statement yesterday, which has been widely reported. It contains a limited apology ( " we apologize if any Resident Deans feel our communication at the conclusion of the investigation was insufficien t ," which is limited in two ways -- it is restricted to not informing the deans that their email had been searched, and limited only to the deans who had certain feelings and not to the others). Part of it was immediately denied by one of the few people ...In the blog post below, I wondered parenthetically, (Don't ask me why the fact that you have no email privacy as a Harvard employee is kept secure behind a login wall.) I got an email from someone I don't know, offering an explanation, and here quote it with permission: While I am not an attorney, I believe the reason the University policy is only accessible through logon is that this provides the administration with a record of folks who have accessed the policy, thereby potentially limiting the ability ...The Globe reports that Harvard read email sent via Harvard servers from 16 of its resident deans. I know nothing about what actually happened except what the Globe reporter told me; the story states that she has two independent sources, both of whom wished to remain anonymous to protect themselves. It appears that Harvard has confirmed the basic facts by informing the deans, some six months after the search of their email, that the search had in fact occurred. Some background first of all. Years ago I ...The Globe reports that Harvard sometimes reads the email being sent via Harvard email servers. Even email being sent by people holding faculty appointments. This is a long story. Some background first of all. Years ago I noticed Harvard's employee email policy. Here it is . It's in the employee manual, which for some reason is behind a login screen. I hope I am not breaking some rule by disclosing what it says; I doubt many Harvard employees ever saw it or focused on it. Privacy/Management's Right to ...On Monday I blogged ( here and here ) about the announcement that Oprah Winfrey would be Harvard's Commencement speaker. After that was picked up and I was quoted in the Globe yesterda y on the selection, Kevin Hartnett of the Globe's Ideas page emailed me some questions, which I answered. As I explain below, this was a good opportunity for me to explain that Oprah's status as a rich celebrity wasn't the real problem, though that was the only part of my interview with the reporter that made it into print ...A comment on the Crimson stor y got me poking around (I am not a big Oprah watcher) and now I wonder: Did anyone on the Harvard honorary degrees committee consider the fact that Oprah is a major purveyor of pseudoscience? Four years ago Newsweek did an extensive debunking of pseudo-medicine pandered on her show. She was #1 on Brian Dunning's list of the top 10 purveyors of pseudoscience, citing her as follows: " she promotes the paranormal, psychic powers, new age spiritualism, conspiracy theories, quack ...For two years in a row now, Harvard has chosen a television celebrity as its Commencement speaker. Last year it was Fareed Zakaria, who, happily, gave his address a few weeks BEFORE it came out that he had plagiarized a magazine article from a Harvard professor. The venerable John Lewis, who was receiving an honorary degree at the same time (and who is in the news again this week, reliving the sixties) sat and listened. This year, it's Oprah Winfrey . I am sure she is an inspiration, though I can't quite ...Several interesting pieces today, touching on themes in which I am interested. No time for a lot of blogging but here are quick links: Today's Crimson has a good piece called The Fall of Academics at Harvard . The thesis is that Harvard students care more about winning and prestige than they care about learning, and that has something to do with the so-called "cheating scandal." I am quoted several times, and some of my comments are more temperate than others. The important question behind the thesis is, ...The Crimson reports that undergraduates are petitioning the dean for nap space in Harvard Yard. “People don’t realize how important it is to take a nap,” said the student who started the petition. “It improves your GPA because you’re actually more focused.” I should probably be glad that the student body has recovered from the cheating scandal and is returning its attention to silly ideas. Of course getting enough sleep is not a silly idea, but let's remember that virtually all undergraduates ...… how is it that Facebook had $1.1 billion in pre-tax profits from US operations in 2012, resulting in a federal tax liability of $559 million, but will instead receive a tax refund of $429 million? Because of the deductibility of executive and employee stock options. This is all explained quite clearly in footnote 68 of Facebook's 10-K, according to Business Insider , for those who know how to read such footnotes. That's right -- while the rest of us are working on our 1040s, and while Congress dithers ...Jon Stewart gets it right.I was with a group of Harvard classmates this evening, planning our 45th reunion. (Class of 1968.) One of them pointed out that the beginning of the Vietnam war is as distant from today's freshmen as the beginning of World War I was from us during our freshman year. What a good argument for teaching history. The follies of yesterday's politicians are so easily forgotten, or rewritten.In the previous post I wondered what the miniature golf course was, adjacent to the projected SEAS site. Turns out Harvard opened it in 201 0 as a community benefit, along with a batting cage. “Given the success of the ice rink, we wanted to host another community-friendly attraction, as we continue our search for a long-term tenant for this property,” said Katie Lapp, Harvard’s executive vice president. “The Field and Fairway is yet another example of how Harvard is constantly looking for ways ...Hard on the heels of yesterday's report about SEAS moving to Allston, I just happened this morning to do some cross-campus teaching myself, at the Medical School. Well, the students learned from me, but I wasn't teaching in the usual sense. I was a clinical specimen. Thomas Michel teaches MCB 234 , Cellular Metabolism and Human Disease, which is offered jointly by FAS and (under another number) HMS. There are about 70 students in the class, 20 undergrads, some FAS grad students, and some medical school ...What has been the subject of some buzz and quiet rumors came fully out of the bag at today's FAS meeting. SEAS, or at least most of it, will be moving to Allston. We'll be going into a building on the south side of Western Ave near HBS and the i-Lab, now only partly finished and awaiting a construction restart. The primary driver for SEAS is the need to expand the faculty and lab space and the difficulty (impossibility, maybe) of doing that in Cambridge. Several of my colleagues spoke today, expressing ...Like most members of Patriots nation, I was not emotionally invested in yesterday's game. But I am glad the Ravens won, because I am glad Matt Birk, after 15 years in the NFL, has a Super Bowl ring. I am not sure I ever met Birk, though I certainly watched him play for four years. But I have some warm feelings for him, because I quoted him in a testy piece I wrote for the Crimson in 1999, after the newspaper had run a ridiculous story about how Harvard was assigning too much homework, and that was getting ...Harvard released a letter from Dean Michael Smith Friday presenting what most likely will be the final public word on the so-called “cheating scandal.” Harvard Magazine does an excellent job summarizing and glossing the letter, and noting what it does not say as well as what it does. (The full text of Dean Smith’s letter is included in the HM article. The editor also seems to have been able to clarify some of the letter’s ambiguous language about numbers.) The New York Times coverage includes some ...A few weeks ago I blogged a review of Susan Crawford's important book Captive Audience about how awful broadband service is in the US--barely extant in some places, with one or maybe two providers elsewhere. (See Jell-O and US Broadband Inferiority .) The lack of competition in densely populated areas, and the lack of regulations or incentives from the government to force service to be diffused in rural areas, mean that with very rare exceptions, service in the US is much slower that it is in many ...The story that appeared in the Boston Globe about the "cheating scandal" a few days ago (behind a paywall, sorry) spent a certain amount of time on the perceptions of accused students that they were involved in an adversarial rather than educational process with the University. I was reminded that it has been more than thirty years now since the educational philosophy of the Administrative Board was laid out by then dean of the College John Fox, in his Annual Report. It is an excellent report--and ...In discussing the case of Aaron Swartz and Carmen Ortiz, a colleague asked a reasonable question: is what Carmen Ortiz did, threatening decades of imprisonment but offering to settle for six months IF Swartz would forgo a trial, anything new? Haven't there always been plea bargains like this? Perhaps the statutes are vaguer, as the CFAA certainly is, and perhaps the law is having more trouble these days keeping up with technology. But is the bargaining leverage any different than it ever was? I am grateful ...I paused while in the Northwest Building today to admire the Ichthyosaurus skeleton hanging over the stairway (at least, that is what I assume it is -- couldn't find any identifying legend) Orca skeleton hanging over the stairway. [Fixed 3 Feb 2013. Thanks to my informant!] The reason I spent a bit of time looking at it on this particular occasion was because I wanted to find the rib I broke (first rib, left side) and where I broke it (in the back, just below the shoulder blade). I also cracked the ...John Sununu has a terrific, apolitical column in the Boston Globe today entitled A Crisis of Values at MIT , about the Aaron Swartz case and what it says about changes in the "campus culture" at MIT. His observations about culture apply much more broadly. Colleges have become, much more than they once were, captives of rule systems, their own and those that governments push on them. Professionalism in higher education administration now means sticking to the rules, even when they make no sense in the ...Carmen Ortiz, the US Attorney with responsibility for the Aaron Swartz case, is taking a lot of heat for her role. A petition is calling for her dismissal, and there are predictions that her once-promising political career is finished. As Globe columnist Kevin Cullen says this morning , … Ortiz is doing herself no favors by refusing to explain at length decisions made in a case that raises legitimate concerns about antiquated laws and government overreach in the digital age. … It isn’t too much to ...A bit of a grab bag here, but lots of important stuff is now coming out. Tim Wu has a terrific piece in the New Yorker about the over-prosecution in the Swartz case and how, under current federal law, the prosecutors have the discretion to turn any of us into criminals. As defense attorney Harvey Silverglate said in the title to his book, we could all be charged with Three Felonies a Day , at the discretion of an ambitious federal prosecutor. As Wu says of Swartz and the JSTOR caper, The act was ...Forbes reports that a site has posted the blueprints for 3-D printing a high-capacity bullet magazine of the kind that may soon be banned. They are simple spring-loaded boxes, after all. So people with access to 3-D printers can make their own. 3-D printers are available in many college engineering labs and prices are dropping rapidly---the low end is now in the $1000 range. Makes you think that technological disintermediation and personal empowerment are definitely mixed blessings.Yesterday I asked , in the context of the tragic suicide of Aaron Swartz, " what was MIT's rationale for going after Swartz for exactly the kind of hack at which the Institute has traditionally winked?" Hallelujah. MIT has asked itself the same question, and has chosen to answer it, not by referring the matter to its lawyers and communications professionals for an analysis of the risks and rewards of various public postures, but by asking a beloved, student-friendly, information-libertarian professor to ...Aaron Swartz was the 26-year-old Internet freedom activist who committed suicide on Friday, as the date approached for his trial on federal charges. Swartz was charged on several counts after he allegedly downloaded a bunch of scientific papers from JSTOR via a connection he established in an MIT wiring closet. It was a peculiar act --- Swartz was a fellow at Harvard and could have accessed the papers in an authorized way. I leave it to others to speculate on the symbolic significance, but it's pretty ...Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate , by Greg Lukianoff, draws on the files of FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) to document the infringement of free speech at American colleges. It's an exhaustive catalog -- at least I hope it is exhaustive; I'd hate to think that misguided administrators somewhere could come up with any forms of censorship beyond those enumerated. It's also a very readable account, with chapters on freshman orientation, student ...A couple of observations about the Journal News publishing online a map of gun ownership, and all the high drama that has followed (now the newspaper is hiring armed guards). First, if there is a problem, isn't the problem with the law that makes the names and addresses of licensed gun owners public information, not with the newspaper that decides to publish public information? Now it is a favorite theme of mine that what used to be "public," in the sense that you could go to town hall and make an ...I don't usually use this blog for personal stuff, but I think it might be helpful to others if I told my holiday travel story. No movies about tropical vacations interrupted by typhoons, please. When my children were younger, we went to Aruba several times over winter break. We love the island --- easy to get to, reliable sun, sea, and sand, safe, friendly, and neither too large nor too small. So we decided to go back for Christmas this year, with my wife and younger daughter. We stayed at the Divi golf ...As you drive from east to west across the US, there is a meridian in the breadbasket, somewhere in the eastern Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas, where gelatin salads start to appear in the supermarket deli cases. In the prairies it is not only acceptable but fashionable to serve molded, multicolored Jell-O with grapes, pineapple, and heaven knows what else arranged inside it. Once you get over the Continental Divide the fashion fades out. It's not a thing on either coast. How did this get started? It's not an ...Continuing an old series. …[E]ven if we sacrifice the letter of the old Bachelor of Arts degree, we should strive to preserve its spirit. This spirit is threatened at present in manifold ways,---by the upward push of utilitarianism and kindergarten methods, by the downward push of professionalism and specialization, by the almost irresistible pressure of commercial and industrial influences. … The time is above all one for careful thinking and accurate definition. This, it is to be feared, will prove ...I just filled out a recommendation web form for a student applying to a PhD program at Stanford. The form informed me: "The applicant has waived their right to view this recommendation." I don't mean to pick on Stanford -- I bet those from other top schools have adopted this convenient barbarism also. I will watch.The idea: Don't give them. So reports the Yale Daily News . Admirably stating the obvious for the benefit of faculty who, in New Haven as in Cambridge, apparently can't be counted on to figure it out for themselves, [Dean of Yale College Mary] Miller and Graduate School Dean Thomas Pollard urged professors who use take-home final examinations to consider switching to an in-class examination. Though the University has traditionally discouraged take-home exams, Miller said, she wanted to re-emphasize other ...There has been a little chattering among a few of my faculty colleagues about child care -- how limited and how expensive the options are. Of course this is an issue that affects staff as well as faculty, but to begin with I want to think about it just from the perspective of the faculty. The Harvard-affiliated day care centers (not actually run by Harvard -- each is on Harvard property, but is corporately independent, with its own board of directors) offer convenience if you work at Harvard but (I am ...Spotted in the Harvard Business School parking lot, among the manicured lawns and carefully landscaped bushes, as I was walking from the garage to the Yale game yesterday. Maybe they meant "Really"?Would someone who is better at math than I am please tell me whether I am crazy to regard this statement, from the Harvard Management Company's annual report , with extreme skepticism? To maintain purchasing power, HMC’s investment professionals aim for a long-term annualized rate of return of approximately 8 percent, so the endowment appreciates even after a normalized 4.5 percent to 5 percent distribution rate. Two questions. 1. Who else in this business is these days distributing 5% on the theory ...We did not hear as much in the 2012 election cycle about the national communications infrastructure as we did in 2008. In the interim, the FCC adopted some some Net Neutrality rules -- providing that service providers such as Verizon can't pick and choose what to deliver to your house, or indeed whether it wants you as a customer. Verizon wasn't happy, but the issue didn't make much campaign news. Over the summer Verizon appealed the new rules, and the decision now rests with a federal court. Verizon has ...The Chronicle of Higher Education Wired Campus Blog (sorry about the paywall) reports that a publisher of e-textbooks is going to offer professors a new feature: The ability to monitor students as they read and report back to the authorities. Those details are what will make the new CourseSmart service tick. Say a student uses an introductory psychology e-textbook. The book will be integrated into the college’s course-management system. It will track students’ behavior: how much time they spend ...A grand lede for a silly story. It's connected to the previous post in that both illustrate this principle: Technology makes lots of things possible. The fact that things are possible and legal doesn't make them good ideas. Sometimes we need to take a step back and exercise some judgment based on principles to which technology itself does not speak. OK, with that out of the way, here is the story: UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON LIMITS REPORTERS' LIVE TWEETS DURING GAMES. Huh? Well, you know the riff about ...Some time in the 1980s when I was teaching a big introductory computer programming course, one of my TFs brought to my attention two programs that seemed to be copies. They were submissions by two students in his section. I asked the two students if they could explain the similarities and they claimed they could not. They had not communicated or discussed their papers. In fact, they had never met each other and neither even recognized the other's name. Students confronted with their sins often initially ...After reading my last blog post, an alum in the financial world sent me this note, quoted by permission: Isn't the bigger story that no one has been willing to take any responsibility for the mistakes and the overreaching that occurred in the past decade? Especially galling to me is the loss of institutional memory and the new paradigm that says nothing counts before 2010. The alum is right, of course. Everything is about how we keep moving forward as we recover from the financial collapse at the end of ...Harvard Magazine has a clear, comprehensible translation of the recently released Harvard financial report. The Campaign is going to be important, because revenue is not going up (if you set aside now-exhausted stimulus funding, research funding is hardly growing at all, and undergraduate tuition receipts are going down, inflation-adjusted, though continuing ed and executive ed are showing healthy growth). Reading the grim news, one can't help wonder about the continuing expansion in non-educational ...This really is oddly prescient, whether you think it is fair or not! Oh for the days when politicians could give campaign speeches in whole sentences.I'm headed to Asia for some intense lecturing. Here is the quick rundown on the schedule. 25 October, 9:30am, Korean Educational Development Institute, Seoul: "Higher Education in the Age of the Internet" 26 October, 10:00am, Keimyung University, Daegu: "The Moral Role of Higher Education" 29 October, 12:15pm, Asia Society, Hong Kong: "Globalization of Education, US and Asia" (panel discussion) 29 October, 3:00pm, Hong Kong Science Park: "Innovation and Venture Acceleration in the Digital Era" 30 October, ...Survivors of the culture wars will remember D'Souza's 1991 anti-political-correctness manifesto, Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus. His career as a a conservative had begun suitably enough a decade earlier while he was an undergraduate at Dartmouth College. He continued to publish best-selling books, which I suspect were (unlike IE) read mostly by those who already accepted their affirming bottom lines: Capitalism is good, patriotism is good, Christianity is good, Ronald Reagan ...We often talk about the "Harvard Family," a phrase that rings hollow to some who find Harvard expressing the family love more passionately during fundraising season than other parts of the year. But after you've been teaching for awhile, it is impossible not to have a family love for people you knew years before, when they (and you) were younger and less formed. Santayana expresses beautifully the joy of working forever with the young, and yet seeing some of them in their maturity. "W hile we are young," ...I suggested in a post below that take home exams, if we are going to continue to offer them, could become a graver exercise if they were centrally administered using standard software, which would limit the time available for a student to complete the exam. It turns out that software already exists. The Registrar uses it to administer placement exams , which freshmen now take before they arrive in Cambridge. So all that needs to be built to implement my suggestion is a policy change.In a series of posts on this blog a year ago ( here , here , and here ), I raised my worries about the "kindness pledge" that incoming freshmen were invited to sign. In the original plan, the signatures would be posted in the entryway of the dormitory, so that those who refused to sign would be known to the members of the entryway. This year there was no pledge, but there was sensitivity training instead. I didn't pay much attention to it, but Harvey Silverglate and Juliana DeVries have a good analysis ...A couple of the commenters on my Huffington Post piece about the "cheating scandal" (really more of a course administration scandal) have expressed puzzlement over the idea of a "take home exam" and the amateurish way this one was administered. As one of my colleagues noted below in response to one of my posts on this topic, take home exams absolutely have their place. So to leave for the moment my sense that the blame being cast on the students should be shared and hence diminished, let me make some ...Almost my first reaction when I heard about the so-called "cheating scandal" at Harvard was that with that many cases, there must have been something wrong with the way the course was run. With all the difficulties in adjudicating 125 disciplinary cases, each implicating the reputation and career of an actual human being, I hope Harvard will be able to avoid being influenced by its worries about its own reputation. That would make it even less likely to look in the mirror and ask what it was about its ...5pm update: The Bureau of Study Counsel has fixed its broken link and the excellent collaboration guide is now accessible. It would not be surprising if confusion and fear about collaboration prevailed among Harvard students this fall, due to the large penumbra cast by the investigation of the Congress course. The investigation involves not just students who had cut-and-pasted but others who report that they had talked to each other, or talked to their TFs in a group, or worked in study groups prior to the ...In response to the last post, several people (including a commenter below) have mentioned to me that take-home finals are not new to Harvard. And they are common at other universities, and indeed in other Harvard schools. So what is different about the College that such a disaster could occur? First, to fill out the history. Yes, professors have been giving take home exams during Reading Period for years, probably with increasing frequency. Since what happens during Reading Period is not centrally ...Much ink has been spilled about the significance of the cheating alleged to have occurred in Harvard's "Introduction to Congress" course. There has been such a run on high moral dudgeon that the supplies must be running short. What does this unprecedented scandal say about the ethics of youth, about their eroding sense of intellectual property in the Internet age, about the blurred line between collaboration and copying? I suggested in a previous post that a deeper issue might be that large courses are ...(Added: Those who are unaware of the cheating allegations at Harvard could read this quick summary from Bloomberg . It isn't the most complete--the Globe and the NYT have reporting that is fuller, but behind a paywall.) Though I have weighed in on other blogs with some reactive comments about the Harvard cheating issue, I have been reluctant to go on the air or to launch an offensive since my knowledge of the course is limited. I have read some but not all of the news stories, and have talked to a student ...Harvard baseball coach Joe Walsh died yesterday at the age of 58 . Probably he had a heart attack; his death was sudden and unexpected. I got to know Joe when I was dean; I tried to get to know all the coaches, because they are sometimes the most important teachers Harvard students have. Of course I don't mean to put baseball strategy on the same plane with econometrics. I mean that the coaches are among the few people at Harvard who understand that their job is, in part, to build character, and who have ...Unlike previous posts in this sequence, which have been century-old observations that seem very fresh today, this one seems hopelessly anachronistic, alas. Like the captain of industry, or the political ruler, [a university president] must have skill, capacity, and knowledge; must be inventive and constructive in his thinking; and must welcome care and responsibility. His inducements to laborious and responsible service are, however, different from those which are effective with other sorts of leader. A ...Some interesting resonances here! John Dewey, reflecting on the growth in the bureaucracy of the university and the way it interferes with teaching and learning: The university must expand in order to be true to itself, and to expand it must have money. The danger is that means absorb attention and thus possess the value that attaches alone to the ultimate educational end. The public mind gives an importance to the money side of educational institutions which is insensibly modifying the standard of ...These two come from papers delivered at a convention in New York City in 1830, which was considering the formation of what became New York University. On student evaluations of faculty. To refer a Professor solely or chiefly to his popularity with the students for his supper would be dangerous in all branches, which are not of a very positive and distinct nature, as, for instance, anatomy. A Professor of history might make his lectures popular, nay, he might treat generally parts of history, which are more ...I have been doing some reading about higher education and am again struck (as I was while writing Excellence Without a Soul) how the same problems keep coming around, rephrased every thirty years or so as new discoveries and new insights about the state of higher education. And even the same solutions! I am going to post quotations every now and then as I run across them. From "Quack-Doctoring the Colleges," by William Bennett Munro (Professor of Municipal Government at Harvard), Harper's Magazine , ...All the world seems to be abuzz about the Anne Marie Slaughter piece in the Atlantic, Why Women Still Can't Have It All . Driving around today I flipped between NPR and CNN; Slaughter was on both. It's a terrific piece, very smart in its analysis of the subtle pressures on women who raise children and work in high-stress professions. I found several of her observations very familiar: Women in two-career marriages are considered bad mothers if they fail to do the very things for their husbands are ...Sometimes commas are a good idea. Sorry for falling for this bit of Photoshopping. I should know better! See comment below. (Thanks, Dick!)I thought that might get your attention. While preparing a talk on privacy I gave earlier this week at the Harvard Club of Concord, MA (thanks for the warm reception!), I thought I would see how much Harvard itself is involved in enabling the data aggregation industry. My colleague Latanya Sweeney had introduced me to a new tool called Collusion and my curiosity provided an opportunity to try it out. Collusion is an add-on to the Firefox browser that makes painfully clear the extent of tracking and data ...Last summer I published a short guide to the game of baseball, illustrated with photographs and decorated with quotations from newspapers using baseball terminology metaphorically. This year I decided the world need an edition specifically oriented toward the 2012 elections, so visitors from abroad can learn about politics and baseball simultaneously. It is amazing how nearly every baseball term has gotten used in the last couple of years to signify something that one of the presidential candidates has ...TheStreet.com reports that " Elsevier's upside potential looks capped," in part because of the success of the open-access movement in universities. there is no room for top-line expansion given tight university library budgets, and no room for cost-cutting in an industry where the labor of academic researchers, editors, and peer reviewers is provided, literally, for free. Critics note that even the functions provided by Elsevier - journal layout and reviewer coordination - are often outsourced or poorly ...Spellcheck does not catch all mistakes. From a commencement program at the University of Texas. Read carefully! As soon as someone noticed, they printed up another batch, but it was too late for the audience -- the programs had been distributed. The school apologized through several media -- alas, the Tweeted apology may not have helped matters much.For a time, Apple banned used of the word "jailbreak" from its app store and music library. I suppose it was trying to weed out apps for compromising the security of its phones and its music service, iTunes, since that's what "jailbreak" refers to in a certain community. Of course it is ordinary (if colloquial) English in other contexts to -- for example the name of an album by Thin Lizzy, and the name of an episode of the Roy Rogers show which I probably watched when I was 9 years old. The album and the ...(I blogged a bit about this earlier . This is an expanded version.) I have gotten a lot of amusement lately from the fact that one of Mark Zuckerberg's prototypes for Facebook was a little network called Six Degrees to Harry Lewis. Mark, who knew me because he had taken my theoretical computer science course, constructed the network by scraping the archives of the Harvard Crimson and linking names that were mentioned in the same news story. As former dean of the College, I was the maximum degree node. On ...Here is an answer not anticipated in the collection I co-edited by that name: To train economists to help Peter Thiel, who has declared higher education to be a worthless bubble. Thiel Capital wants only applicants who have a "High GPA from top-tier university," thank you very much.Thanks to my brother Dick for this.NYU has a Shanghai campus . When challenged as to whether free speech and free inquiry could really take place at NYU Shanghai, NYU's President Sexton said , “I have no trouble distinguishing between rights of academic freedom and rights of political expression. These are two different things.” So then, are the words "New York University" academic or political speech? The latter, apparently, according to the Chinese Internet censors. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education , China’s Internet ...and not in a good way. On April 19, a panel entitled " Singapore UnCensored" was held at Yale, in the aftermath of strong faculty reaction against the creating of the Yale-National University of Singapore campus. There is much to say about that arrangement, and many reasons for skepticism; Jim Sleeper has pulled together a series of critiques into one mammoth compendium, Yale Has Gone to Singapore, but Can It Come Back? A fuller analysis on my part will have to be for another time. For the moment I just ...I have gotten used to the Death of Distance--that I can monitor instanteiously the power output of my home photovoltaic system from Hong Kong, and that I can listen to Red Sox games rolling across the Dakota prairies. Of course, the death of distance cuts both ways. I can bring my local environment with me, but most of the time I opt to live in a generic average American culture, listening to CNN of MSNBC on my satellite radio, with no sense of the happenings or gossip in Boston. Now time is dying too. ...Yesterday I had a very enjoyable visit to Lynchburg, Virginia, where I was the Turner Lecturer in the Humanities at Lynchburg College . That is a lovely liberal arts college with about 2500 undergraduates in the same town as Jerry Falwell's Liberty University -- a very different place! I spoke on the Moral Mission of Higher Education and got a nice reception from a good audience. I gave a list of all the reasons why colleges and universities have a hard time prioritizing the exercise of moral courage, and ...I am sitting here watching the Knicks and Mavs play. The Mavs have just gone on a run with Lin on the bench. Without Lin, the Knicks have stopped moving the ball--they seem to be just bringing it down the court and heaving it up from the outside, mostly missing. By now pretty much everything that can be said about the Lin phenomenon has been said. And yet, I have not heard anyone say this: Lin did not "come out of nowhere." By that I don't mean that Harvard is not chopped liver. I mean that Lin was a very ...Spurred by the interest of some journalists and bloggers (see The Alternate Reality Facebook that Almost Happened ), I did some more digging in my email archives to see if I could document the path from the earliest electronic face books at Harvard to early 2004 when Mark Zuckerberg took matters into his own hands. I come away with a general feeling that whether or not Facebook was "invented" by any of the three Harvard claimants (the Winklevosses and Aaron Greenspan as well as Zuckerberg), it emerged in a ...After talking to a reporter about the Harvard culture around the time Mark Zuckerberg was here, I dug out some old email to jog my memory about the early efforts to move the Harvard House face books online. These were printed brochures with basic information and photos of members of each House, students and resident staff and tutors, which had long been used to create House community. It seems that some Houses started to create online versions of their Face Books around 1996, while I was dean, and I was ...Since writing Excellence Without a Soul, I have been arguing that undergraduate education should try to make students better people. That is, I think moral education is part of college education. I don't mean recitation of the Ten Commandments or a return to parietal rules in dormitories. For starters, I mean that when there the university itself is caught up in an ethical dilemma, it should be discussed as though there just might be a right and a wrong of it. A variety of arguments have been used in ...The Berkman Center-sponsored seminar on December 5 was a great success. I met new allies and we got good questions from the audience. One of them in particular, from Jonathan Zittrain, stimulated a lot of followup discussion offline. If you would like to watch the video, it has now been posted here .A student writing in the Crimson suggests that the standard FAS applied to Professor Swamy should be applied to Professor Mansfield as well.The Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted yesterday to approve the Summer School catalog. Ordinarily this vote, and the comparable vote on the annual catalog, are pro forma . I don't ever remember a discussion of such a motion, much less a challenge. But yesterday the motion to approve the catalog was amended to exclude the courses of one Subramanian Swamy, an economist. Swamy taught in the Summer School this past summer, and had caused a controversy, not for anything he did in his classes, but for an ...Harvard has changed a lot since Larry Summers became president barely a decade ago. But some things never change. Unfortunately, one of those things is that Bob Rubin is still a Fellow--that is, a member of the small governing board that is the legal Harvard Corporation, the President and Fellows of Harvard College. In early 2010, I wrote about Rubin and Summers in the Huffington Post. The article was called Robert Rubin, Larry Summers: Will the Harvard Shadow Elite Bankrupt the University and the Country? ...How can schools and colleges help create a better citizenry? In 2011, this is a very touchy issue. Questions of civic responsibility are easily politicized. Listening to politicians of different parties interpret the Constitution, you might wonder whether they are reading the same text; no wonder educational institutions, so sensitive to inclusivity and avoiding politics, seem to prefer service programs to civic disputations. Voting rates are abysmally low, and educated people will tell you proudly of the ...I fear that for a variety of reasons, American governments, and especially the federal government, are increasingly willing to infringe Constitutional guarantees of freedom of thought and of speech. Sometimes the assault is head on, on stages that are brightly lit by politically spotlights. Sometimes the assaults are apparently minor skirmishes, at hard-to-notice spots in remote regions of the bureaucracy. Here are three I have noticed this week. The first is the Stolen Valor Law, about which George Will ...Mark Zuckerberg paid a visit to Harvard with much fanfare today. He presented himself very well at the session I attended, in the newly renamed Farkas Hall (AKA the Hasty Pudding Theater, AKA the New College Theater). The session began with David Malan, who was acting as moderator, reading part of an email exchange between me and Zuck in January 2004 entitled "Six Degrees to Harry Lewis." We all had a good laugh about this as one of the germs of Facebook, though Mark noted that it was really a different ...Harvard released its annual financial statements last week. You can download the whole report here or just read Harvard Magazine's summary here . (Try to find a story about it on the Gazette site. I couldn't, though I came up with a nice story about my colleague Michael Mitzenmacher's work on Yelp data privacy problems, another about the Digital Public Library of America, and a third about Mark Zuckerberg coming to town, so I can't complain!) The Crimson has a straightforward account . The headlines cite ...A letter in the current Harvard Magazine , by an astronomer at UCLA, prompts me to blog about my photovoltaics. Professor Jura has described his experience here . I live in an old house in Brookline, perhaps half a mile from the Brigham and Women's hospital. One day I noticed that, in spite of the houses around us, the flat roof on the garage has a pretty clear southern exposure. After getting in a contractor and running some financial models, I determined that a PV installation would pay for itself in ...I have to be honest: I have never been a big fan of "service learning," when it involves the admixture of academic obligation with pressured volunteerism. In the essay Ellen Condliffe Lagemann and I wrote in What Is College For?, we take a dim view of the way it had displaced civic education rather than embodying it. But the continuing official commentary on the freshman kindness pledge has reminded me to say that the right way to get students to be more kind is to model kindness ourselves, to honor those ...Brian Kernighan's terrific book about computation and communication for the layman is out. It is called D is for Digital and is a bargain at $14.95. It's modeled on Physics for Future Presidents, and is a worthy analog in the realm of the digital. Brian wrote most of it while he was on sabbatical at Harvard last year so I had the privilege of reading drafts, and it is everything I would expect from him -- clear, funny, thoughtful, and containing quite a few profound analytical insights that enlighten the ...Just out is a collection of essays based on lectures in Harvard General Education courses. It's called The Harvard Sampler: Liberal Education in the Twenty-First Century . As originally conceived, it was a collection of last lectures in these courses, but that turned out to be rather tasteless given that there was a best-selling book about a professor's actual last lecture in life. So instead I and a number of other far more luminous Harvard professors were invited to write up whatever we wanted based on ...I just tried to pull up an article from the Globe. I got a page with the explanation below. If I click the Sign Up link, I am given the opportunity to pay to see the online content. I get home delivery. As far as I can see, I WILL be able to get online content free, but not until tomorrow, when I am able to "link" my online and paper accounts (which I thought I had already done, but there seems to be no way to log in). If I want to see anything today or tonight, I have to pay. Which of course I won't do, ...Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, former dean at HGSE and now professor at Bard College, included me in a series of fascinating roundtable discussions about higher education. A number of the participants in that roundtable have written essays about higher education and the collection is being published by Teacher's College Press. The book is entitled What is College For? The Public Purpose of Higher Education . It is now available for pre-ordering from Amazon (click on the title to go to Amazon). Book will not be ...In 2006, in Excellence Without a Soul, I noted that the first "Take Back the Night" rally at Harvard took place in 1980. I continued, From this point on, the issue of rape flared up on a schedule approximating the four-year cycle of college generations—sometimes emerging after three years in the background, sometimes after five, but not every year. Different circumstances bring the issue to the fore in different years, and each time the college community starts from a different place in responding. ...Dennis Ritchie has died. Ritchie bears more personal responsibility than any one else for C and Unix, and hence for their many derivatives. The world would be a VERY different place had he not created these things. His passing also makes me remember the days when one or two people could change the computer world. Some may argue that is still the case, but I am not so sure. Too much legacy code now. It is harder to take a clean sheet of paper and start over, as Ritchie did. I love James Grimmelmann's ...I think the canonization of Steve Jobs is getting a little tiresome. I actually thought that within a day of his death, but restrained myself out of respect. De mortuis nil nisi bonum. The statute of limitations having now run out, I'd like to add a few words. First on the plus side. Jobs was a design genius. His resolute insistence on simplicity and cleanliness wasn't a new thing in technology, but it was a new thing in computer technology. The over-complication of Microsoft software created a huge target ...Both by Lewis Hyde, relevant to a case being argued before the Supreme Court today: the Constitutionality of the US law restoring copyright to foreign works that had fallen into the public domain. The citations from American history and the examples of copyright abuse are breathtaking. The Genius of Free Governments Hold the Line: Stop Copyright Rendition!The Globe Corner Bookstore is dead as a physical bookstore anyway. If I remember correctly Harvard gave it some preferred treatment as other book emporia (including the Harvard University Press store) closed. But it just couldn't last. In other news, I was interested to see that the "Fleeting Expletives" case, FCC v. Fox, is back on the Supreme Court docket. The last time around, in 2009, the Court upheld the FCC's censorship rights on somewhat technical grounds but noted that the case might come back on ...The Asian Review of Books reviews Baseball as a Second Language here . For those just coming to this subject, the book is available here . (Amazon will have it available eventually, but it takes several weeks to turn up in Amazon's index.)The freshman pledge has by now gotten rather more attention than it deserved. Among those commenting on it are Virginia Postrel (Bloomberg), Andrew Sullivan (Daily Beast), Ross Douthat (NYTimes), Josh Rothman (Boston Globe), Carly Weeks (Toronto Globe and Mail), and the Edmonton Journal . I would not have brought it up again had I not run across this priceless clause from the Constitution of the Lawrence Base Ball Club, Harvard's first "New York Rules" baseball team. The Constitution is dated November 3, ...We have heard so much about jobs and the need for a workforce educated for the computer age, I couldn't get this out of my mind. Last Saturday I went on my weekly supermarket run. At the deli counter I asked for "six-tenths of a pound of turkey." The deli man, who was in his twenties, replied, "What's that? Two-thirds?" This struck me as an odd response. The scale is digital, after all, unless the display he sees is different from the one that faces the customer. His response suggested that he did not know ...I was party to a weird event this afternoon. I was attending a panel discussion at Harvard. There were three panelists and two moderators sitting at a table in the front of the room, and the room was overcrowded, maybe 125 people with only about 100 seats. I arrived exactly at 5pm and took one of the few seats that was available at that time, which was in the first or second row, next to the end. About 10 minutes later, a few minutes after the first speaker started to speak, a quite elderly woman walked ...Another Take on the Freshman Values PledgeThe Huffington Post has a piece taking my worries about the pledge to another level. And anyone following this ought to read the Christakises' piece in the Crimson and the comment thread attached to it. I don't agree with everyone who agrees with me, by the way. I am glad the display of the signed pledges has been abandoned, and appreciate the good judgment of the College on this decision.An interesting book by that title has just been published. The authors are Clayton Christensen of HBS and Henry Eyring, an administrator at BYU-Idaho. The book provides parallel histories of the evolution of these two universities, Harvard and BYU-Idaho. BYU-Idaho is an LDS-church affiliated institution, and I was surprised when I learned that my rendition of Harvard history in Excellence Without a Soul seems to have influenced the authors. It's quite a good account of why change is hard in higher ...I think for the first time in history, Harvard is "inviting" all freshmen to sign a pledge. This is what it says: Class of 2015 Freshman Pledge At Commencement, the Dean of Harvard College announces to the President, Fellows, and Overseers that "each degree candidate stands ready to advance knowledge, to promote understanding, and to serve society." That message serves as a kind of moral compass for the education Harvard College imparts. In the classroom, in extracurricular endeavors, and in the Yard and ...I've had a Prius for about two years now, mostly commuting the short distance to work. But one of the reasons I bought it was to drive cross-country when I had the time, and this summer was the time. I drove out to our summer place in northwest Montana, and back. I thought I'd offer a few observations for the benefit of anyone who likes long drives. Reliability. The car complained about nothing the whole way, nor did I find much to complain about. Oil and coolant levels were the same at the end of the trip ...Head over to the Baseball as a Second Language blog at B2Lbook.com to participate in the conversation about the book!I've written a little book to help people unfamiliar with baseball understand the way baseball language gets used in American English. I got the idea from explaining the game to international students at Harvard. The book (78 pages, including about a dozen photographs) is called Baseball as a Second Language and it's available for $9.99 from Lulu.com by clicking here . (Eventually, Amazon will list it and other booksellers will also have it in their database, but apparently that takes 6-8 weeks.) Hope you ...There has been a lot of press lately on a plan to increase the use of license-plate reading cameras by Massachusetts police. The state will pay for the equipment, on the understanding that the data will be shared with state and national law enforcement. The notoriously liberal town of Brookline, where I live, is tied up in knots over it ( see the Globe ), in part because the hated TV cameras already installed actually helped solve a horrible crime in Coolidge Corner a couple of years ago. The issues are ...Choose a location on the map, click on the dot representing a newspaper published there, select the language you want to read it in, and bingo! there it is. I just had a look at today's news from Helsinki . OK, using Google Translate does not produce perfect translations--is there really a "National Coalition Party vice chairman of of young rape opinions"? Still, it's amazing, quick, and free. And the original ads appear, so there is even some chance the newspaper will make some money by providing its ...Young folks, Peter Thiel will pay you $100,000 not to go to college. Well, may pay you $100,000. First you have to be under 20 years old. Then you have offer up an idea in competition with others, and agree to accept Mr. Thiel's mentorship. And then you have to agree to drop out of college for two years (or not go in the first place). Before I launch into the reasons why I am dubious, let me acknowledge that this is not a terrible idea on the face of it. A "gap year" off before starting college is fairly ...The Commencement issue of the Crimson has several pieces, including one I wrote, about Harvard's beloved minister. If you wonder what I was thinking about when I described Peter's engagement with Harvard's moral mission, you could read the story, also in the Commencement Crimson , about Harvard and Libya .On page 287 of Blown to Bits, we discuss the incestuous relationships between the regulators and the regulated in the world of information flows. And then there is the revolving door. Most communications jobs are in the private sector. FCC employees know that their future lies in the commercial use of the spectrum. Hundreds of FCC staff and officials, including all eight past FCC chairmen, have gone to work for or represented the businesses they regulated. These movements from government to private ...On Friday the Boston Globe reported that Monitor had decided it should have registered as a foreign lobbyist for some of its Libya work, and will do so now. The reporter contacted me for a comment, but I couldn't come up with anything newsworthy to say, since I don't know anything about the Foreign Agents Registration Act or the like. So my only presence in that story is a vague " some have called on president Drew Faust to warn professors that their outside work must adhere to standards of truthfulness," ...The New York Times reviews Idea Man, Paul Allen's autobiography. (Such a nuisance that these links now disappear behind a paywall.) The reviewer states, Allen had the original idea for Microsoft. The two worked the same breakneck schedule in those feverish weeks when the company was born. Yet Gates wrote the program that served as Microsoft’s first product, whereas Allen did the less glamorous work of creating the tools Gates needed to do his job. I am not sure what that means. As I blogged earlier , the ...Blown to Bits has been published in Chinese. Even without being able to read Mandarin, I conclude this is a bowdlerized edition, as the screen shots on pp. 154-155 of the original seem not to appear in the Chinese edition, and in fact Chapter 4 seems to have been truncated. Those screen shots are the results of Google searches for "Falun Gong" using Google.com and Google.cn.All kinds of cool information has been pulled off the thumb drives and laptops that the SEALs seized during their raids. And it was translated very quickly from (presumably) Arabic. Which leads me to suspect that his laptops were not encrypted, or at least not using any very strong protection system. Ah well, even Sony made that mistake .Chameleon Press in Hong Kong has published in book form the four major lectures I delivered during my January visit.I continue to hear from people I respect that the Harvard president should never criticize a professor publicly. I also hear from a great many more people I respect that she should, under the circumstances at hand. One reasonable argument I am hearing in response to my previous post is that what Minow said to the law student was wrong, so my use of this example to justify my argument that Faust should speak up is poorly grounded. I happen to agree that Minow was wrong, so the real point of this example was ...The Crimson quotes two professors on the question of whether President Faust should remain mute on Professor Porter's work for the Libyan government and his characterization of that state as a democracy. Stanley Hoffman doubts that the president should "whip him in public." Jeffrey Miron thinks that " if the president started taking a stand on faculty activities or positions, there would be an endless series of issues to address." I have no quarrel with Professor Hoffman. I never asked for any punishment, ...I made a brief appearance on the Emily Rooney Radio Show at noon today, April 11, to talk about the Harvard and Libya business. I was confused by the title of the person who contacted me and did not realize until I arrived at WGBH that it was a radio appearance. In any case, here is a link to the show .I think this is a first for me--having my opinion confirmed in a Globe editorial .Business Week picks up the controversy and puts it in perspective, and quotes my question. I expect to appear on Emily Rooney's Boston Common on Monday, April 11 (Channel 2 in Boston, 7pm). This will be my fourth or fifth appearance on this show, I think, starting back a decade ago when she did a short segment on students running businesses out of their dorm rooms . See above for update.I have gotten many messages today (I was ushering at Prof. Gomes' service this morning, I apologize to those of you I have been unable to acknowledge). Most people have been generous and supportive. The issue was reported in the Boston Globe and I did brief interviews on WBUR and WBZ radio this morning. I did want to add a few comments on things that have been noted or implied in the email messages and elsewhere. Zeroth, for heaven's sake, this is about Michael Porter, not Roger Porter!! Several people ...At the FAS meeting this afternoon, April 5, I asked the President the following question. Madam President, Harvard rightly expresses its pride when a member of our community does something noble. I wonder if the university should not also express its shame when a faculty member disgraces the university. In 2006, University Professor Michael Porter, acting as a consultant to a firm he founded, prepared a report for the Libyan government. The report promised that the country was at “the dawn of a new ...Today's Wall Street Journal account of Paul Allen's book about Bill Gates includes the following passage: In the mid-1970s, when the two college dropouts were based in New Mexico, Mr. Allen says Mr. Gates asked for 60% of their partnership because of his greater contribution to the creation of software for running the BASIC programming language on an early PC, the MITS Altair 8800. Mr. Allen says he had assumed that their partnership was evenly split, but he agreed to Mr. Gates's request. I had taught Bill ...Thanks to one of my Bits students for sending this screenshot along to me. Google is experimenting with an encrypted version of its search engine, so if I were searching, say, for the location of tomorrow's anti-government rally, the government couldn't see that that is what I am searching for, even if it were scanning all my Internet communications. Sounds like a good idea. Aimed to grab some of the positive press that Facebook has been enjoying for its role in helping dissidents organize? That would be ...In the aftermath of the awful shootings in Tuscon, all the politicians are expressing sympathy and all are saying that nothing they or their partisans have ever said has anything to do with the acts of the alleged shooter, who is, they say, a nut case, pure and simple . During his campaign effort to unseat Giffords in November, Republican challenger Jesse Kelly held fundraisers where he urged supporters to help remove Giffords from office by joining him to shoot a fully loaded M-16 rifle. Kelly is a former ...Today's excellent report in the New York Times about successes in computer vision really only scratches the surface of what is happening. There are many, many tasks people do by watching or seeing that computers could do, imperfectly to be sure, but well enough to pay for themselves. I am thinking of things like watching for shoplifters (defined, say, as people who leave a store with more stuff than they entered with and did not go through a checkout process). I think one of the developing issues will be ...The New York Times has a good story on the business page about the Winklevoss twins and their effort to unwind the settlement they reached with Facebook.They claimed that they were deceived about Facebook's value when they signed the deal, and they are owed more than they got. I am of two minds about this. On the one hand, as a legal matter, it's pretty technical, and depends on who said what to whom and when. I don't think all the emails and text messages have been disclosed and heaven knows what the ...Writing in the New York Times, David Pogue has a roundup of his favorite technology products of the year. Many of them are pretty unsurprising, which doesn't make them any less useful--a wall plug that adds two USB jacks for power alongside the usual three-pronged 115VAC power sockets. But one I really love is an iPhone app that translates Spanish to English--not a big deal except that you input the Spanish by pointing the camera at a sign, and the output is an image of the same sign with the translation ...Daniel Ellsburg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, thinks so . Writing in today's Wall Street Journal , Floyd Abrams, who represented the New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case, doesn't. Abrams argues that Ellsburg was principled about revealing official wrongdoing but not injuring U.S. diplomacy. Assange, Abrams argues, is simply opposed to official secrecy in any form, and that, this view of how governments work being wrongheaded and naive, Assange is a bad guy. His acts have actually hurt American ...Here is something that annoys me. I am getting fewer and fewer holiday/Christmas cards. I am grateful to those who send them. Really I am. BUT, to those who are sending me cards: Would you mind putting your last name on the card somewhere? Or if not your last name, at least a photo of you, rather than just one of your children? I have two cards from people with names like "Sally, Jim, Rebecca and Alphonse." I have tried to look those names up in my mental rolodex but it isn't indexed that way. Sorry. It ...It is time to call out the Republicans, elected and unelected, for their rabid anti-net-neutrality rhetoric. They cast themselves as small-govenment conservatives, but really they are pro-big-business monopolists. They love small-government when it keeping it small limits consumer choice and creates artificial scarcity so the big businesses that pay their bills can become even more profitable without improving their services. Mitch McConnell's blast: " The Obama administration, which has already ...The New York Times has a not-bad story about one university's attempts to rationalize the grades its students receive. This is a much more subtle problem than most so-called conservative critics acknowledge. It would be easy to force a grading curve on courses above a certain minimum enrollment: just require faculty to turn in numerical grades, using whatever method they want that is monotonic (higher numbers representing better performance), and automatically curve the letter grades to achieve whatever ...Susan Crawford, who blogs brilliantly about communications technology and law, today quotes J.P. Morgan brilliantly: " The American public seems to be unwilling to admit . . . that it has a choice between regulated legal agreements and unregulated extralegal agreements. We should have cast away more than 50 years ago the impossible doctrine of protection of the public by railway competition." Amen. All the blathering about the government interfering in private enterprise by passing neutrality rules misses ...I will be traveling to Hong Kong in January to give a series of lectures. Here are the ones that will be open to the public: Lee Hysan Lecture, Chinese University of Hong Kong : Approaches to General Education. Monday, January 17, 16:30. Sir Run Run Shaw Lecture , Shaw College, Chinese University of Hong Kong: Civic Education in the Information Era. Wednesday, January 19, 17:00-19:00. Asia Society and Harvard Club of Hong Kong : Idea Economy 2011. Luncheon Talk, Hong Kong Club, Thursday, January 20, ..." Other groups warned that the rules would smooth the way for fast and slow lanes on the Internet. … Before the F.C.C. meeting even began on Tuesday, the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, said in a statement that the Internet 'should be left alone,' and that his colleagues would 'push back against new rules and regulations' next year. " -- New York Times story of December 22, 2010 on the FCC neutrality rules "A few years ago a man started a news bureau in Cincinnati. A correspondent in New ... |