POSTED BY MARTIN KICH What follows is the lead item in last night’s Overnight Technology newsletter from The Hill: Highlights from Zuckerberg’s Interviews: CNN: Zuckerberg said the company was open to some regulation. “Actually, I’m not sure we shouldn’t be regulated.” “I actually think the question is more ‘What is the right regulation?’ rather than ‘Yes…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Our relationship with technology—and, in particular, technological advancements that are on the horizon and that promise major and not entirely predictable changes in how we conduct our daily lives—has always been ambivalent at best. But the newsletter teaser for an article in the Los Angeles Times on the inevitability of human…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following is the text of a petition to the Higher Learning Commission signed by elected officials and community leaders from across Indiana and the Midwest, joined by thousands of faculty members and students at colleges and universities across Indiana and the Midwest. The petition calls on the Commission to reject…
BY TARIQ KHAN My name is Tariq Khan. I am a father of three young children, a U.S. Air Force Veteran, and a PhD candidate in History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I spend most of my time juggling parenting duties with researching and writing my dissertation, though I can sometimes be found…
BY JOERG TIEDE Over the course of the last year, targeted online harassment of faculty has emerged as a significant threat to academic freedom. Fueled by websites such as Professor Watchlist, Campus Reform, and College Fix, campaigns of threats and harassment are directed against faculty members for what they are reported to have said in…
BY NANCY LONG In 2014, the AAUP joined a nationwide effort to obtain an exemption to the copyright laws that protect authors’ rights to fair use in the digital age. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) imposes criminal and civil liability on creators who circumvent technologies like encryption that protect copyrighted works. This poses a problem…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The following excerpts are from Ben Tarnoff’s article, “Tech’s Push to Teach Coding Isn’t about Kid’s Success—It’s about Cutting Wages,” which has been published in The Guardian in September: Computer science courses for children have proliferated rapidly in the past few years. A 2016 Gallup report found that 40% of American…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Writing for Business Insider, Sam Shead has been tracking an escalating dust-up between Oxford and Cambridge Universities over which elite institution provides a better environment for digital start-ups. The two institutions have obviously been competing in academics, athletics, and many other areas for centuries, and this competition over digital start-ups existed…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This chart is from the Bureau of Labor Statistics: The list is surprising in the following ways: Of the 30 occupations on the list, 22 are what are traditionally considered “blue-collar” occupations. Of those 22 “blue-collar” occupations, all have been major sources of employment for decades: 7 are in general…
BY AARON BARLOW In early 2016, I shared on this blog a statement by a tenured professor recently fired by the University of California at Riverside. One of the comments, by a former colleague of the ex-professor, accused me of posting his statement solely as “clickbait.” I chuckled, but the accusation rankled: the Academe blog…