Global sales of wearable devices will exceed 10 million this year, up 32.8 percent over 2015, according to a new forecast from International Data Corp. (IDC). That total will more than double by the end of the forecast period, 2020, to hit 237.1 million shipments if the company’s prediction holds true.
“Watch and wristband shipments will reach a combined total of 100 million shipments in 2016, up from 72.2 million in 2015,” according to a news release. “Other form factors, such as clothing, eyewear, and hearables, are expected to reach 9.8 million units in 2016 and will more than double their share by 2020. This will open the door for new experiences, use cases, and applications going forward.
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman When he was young, Kaufman had central auditory processing disorder, which made it hard for him to process verbal information in real time. He was asked to repeat third grade because he was considered a “slow” learner.
Kaufman thinks the traditional IQ test does a good job of measuring general cognitive ability, but says it misses all the ways that ability interacts with engagement. An individual’s goals within the learning classroom and excitement about a topic affect how he or she pursues learning, none of which is captured on IQ tests. Worse, those tests are often used to filter people in or out of special programs.
FOUR PRACTICES TO CULTIVATE CHILDREN’S CREATIVITY
allowing more solitary reflective time in kids’ schedules. Whether it’s the constant demands on attention at school or in after-school activities, there often isn’t enough time in a child’s day when she can switch off the executive functioning network and tap into the imagination network.
“We support obsessive passion, but not harmonious passion,” Kaufman said. He defines harmonious passion as a core part of people’s identity that makes them feel good about themselves. Harmonious passion is characterized by flexible engagement, where a child can abandon the pursuit if it isn’t paying dividends.
give young kids a diverse set of experiences in order to increase the chances of inspiration. “Lots of things add meaning to our lives,” he said.
educators, parents, and policymakers need to reset their mindsets around student ability. “Kids who think differently are not appreciated in our school system at all
it’s even worth measuring imagination, but Kaufman believes that measurement is important so researchers can see how changing behavior affects creative achievement. But he hopes the measurements are never used as another sorting mechanism.
My note: Kaufman makes a new call for an old trend. The futility of testing is raging across the United States K12 system. Higher education is turned into the last several decades (similarly to the United States health care system) into a cash cow. When the goal is profit, then good education goes down the drain. Cultivating children’s creativity cannot happen, when the foremost goals to make more money, which inevitably entails spending less cash (not only on teacher’s salaries).
Ransomware is a type of malware that restricts access to the infected computer system in some way, and demands that the user pay a ransom to the malware operators to remove the restriction. Some forms of ransomware systematically encrypt files on the system’s hard drive, which become difficult or impossible to decrypt without paying the ransom for the encryption key, while some may simply lock the system and display messages intended to coax the user into paying. Ransomware typically propagates as a trojan, whose payload is disguised as a seemingly legitimate file.
The organizers encourage submissions that approach this theme from a variety of perspectives under three major topic tracks:
Education & Workforce Development
Information Technology
Innovation & Entrepreneurship
The aim of the Fifth 21st Century Academic Forum Conference at Harvard is to encourage and facilitate research initiatives that address the future of education, the workforce, and life at large. Our conferences are attended by a global audience of academic researchers, practitioners, policy makers and others interested in addressing important issues affecting education and public policy.
Truth and Power, the final episode of which airs tonight on Pivot. Directed by Brian Knappenberger.
Knappenberger, who directed the feature-length documentary The Internet’s Own Boy, about the late Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz.
Social Media Has Helped Activists Reclaim the Narrative
it’s not just activists who are benefiting from new technologies. Knappenberger spends nearly half the series carefully explaining the myriad ways governments and corporations use digital tools to surveil social movements. From examining the cell-phone tracking technologies used by law enforcement to uncovering how repressive regimes work with American tech companies to thwart social movements, the series offers up a smart meditation on the threat of digital surveillance on political dissent
It’s a problem Knappenberger illustrates in the “Activists or Terrorists” episode, where he unpacks how “Ag-gag” laws were passed under pressure from corporate lobbying and have made it illegal to film or photograph inside any animal farm without consent of the facility’s owner.
“Prisoners for Sale,” the seventh episode, explores the story of two inmates-turned-journalists who started an independent publication to document systemic failures of the prison industrial complex.
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More on technology and civil disobedience in this IMS blog
It’s become increasingly common for hackers to sell compromised streaming accounts for services like Netflix, HBO, and Spotify on the dark web — a section of the internet only accessible from a special web browser. These account passwords are often recovered from phishing attempts, a hacking method that involves tricking someone into giving up their account info to what appears to be a legit source.
Berg, M., & Seeber, B. (2016). Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy. University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division.
“Distractedness and fragmentation characterize contemporary academic life”
A number of factors. Over the last two decades, we’ve seen increases in class sizes, the casualization of academic labour, administrative bloating, the shift toward quantification of our time and our output. Pressures to publish, new technology, the downloading of tasks and the confusion it creates – these all have led to a situation where we spend less time talking face-to-face with each other and more time multitasking. There seems to be less sense of community and collegiality.
Digital humanities (DH) has been heralded as the next big thing in humanities scholarship and universities have been creating initiatives and new positions in this field. Libraries, too, have moved to create a presence in the digital humanities community, setting up centers and hiring librarians to staff them. This course is designed as an introduction for librarians or library school students who have little or no exposure to DH and wish to be better positioned to offer DH support or services in a library setting. Participants will read and discuss DH scholarship, learn about frequently-used software, and think about why and how libraries and librarians engage DH. While I will encourage participants to explore more complex computing approaches (and I will support those who do as best I can), this course does not presuppose computing skills such as programming or use of the command line and will not ask participants to do much more than upload files to websites or install and use simple programs. Participants should have an interest and background in humanities scholarship and humanities librarianship and while the readings will focus on activities in the United States, our discussions can be more geographically wide-ranging.
Objectives:
– A basic knowledge of what digital humanities is and how it effects scholarship in the humanities disciplines.
– Exposure to core tools and approaches used by digital humanists.
– An understanding of how libraries and librarians have been involved with digital humanities.
– Critical engagement with the role of librarians and libraries in digital humanities.
This class has a follow-up, Introduction to Text Encoding
John Russell is the Associate Director of the Center for Humanities and Information at Pennsylvania State University. He has been actively involved in digital humanities projects, primarily related to text encoding, and has taught courses and workshops on digital humanities methods, including “Introduction to Digital Humanities for Librarians.”
Read an interview with John Russell about this class:
You can register in this course through the first week of instruction (as long as it is not full). The “Register” button on the website goes to our credit card payment gateway, which may be used with personal or institutional credit cards. (Be sure to use the appropriate billing address). If your institution wants us to send a billing statement or wants to pay using a purchase order, please contact us by email to make arrangements: inquiries@libraryjuiceacademy.com
This course will introduce students to text encoding according to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines. Why should you care about text encoding or the TEI Guidelines? The creation of digital scholarly texts is a core part of the digital humanities and many digital humanities grants and publications require encoding texts in accordance with the TEI Guidelines. Students in this course will learn about the use-cases for text encoding and get a basic introduction to the principles of scholarly editing before moving on to learning some XML basics and creating a small-scale TEI project using the XML editor oXygen. We will not cover (beyond the very basics) processing TEI, and students interested in learning about XSLT and/or XQuery should turn to the LJA courses offered on those subjects. Participants should have some experience with digital humanities, as this course is intended as a follow up to the Introduction to Digital Humanities for Librarians course.
Objectives:
A basic understanding of digital scholarly editing as an academic activity.
Knowledge of standard TEI elements for encoding poetry and prose.
Some engagement with more complex encoding practices, such as working with manuscripts.
An understanding of how librarians have participated in text encoding.
Deeper engagement with digital humanities practices.
John Russell is the Associate Director of the Center for Humanities and Information at Pennsylvania State University. He has been actively involved in digital humanities projects, primarily related to text encoding, and has taught courses and workshops on digital humanities methods, including “Introduction to Digital Humanities for Librarians.” Interview with John Russell
Course Structure
This is an online class that is taught asynchronously, meaning that participants do the work on their own time as their schedules allow. The class does not meet together at any particular times, although the instructor may set up optional synchronous chat sessions. Instruction includes readings and assignments in one-week segments. Class participation is in an online forum environment.
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Spatial Data Analyst & Curator
University Libraries / U-Spatial
University of Minnesota
Overview
The University of Minnesota Libraries and U-Spatial (https://uspatial.umn.edu/) seek a knowledgeable and proactive Spatial Data Analyst & Curator to advance the Libraries’ efforts in the areas of geospatial projects, geospatial data curation and management, and digital spatial humanities. Residing in the John R. Borchert Map Library, the Spatial Data Analyst & Curator works under the management and direction of the University Libraries, which holds institutional responsibility for supporting the products and processes of scholarship through the collection, provisioning, and preservation of information resources in all formats and media. As such, the work of the Spatial Data Analyst & Curator uses a life-cycle data management approach to serve the specific needs of the spatial data creator/user community while ensuring that processes and methods employed are strongly aligned with enterprise strategies and systems.
Required Qualifications include a Master’s degree in library/information science from an American Library Association accredited library school, GIS-related field, or equivalent combination of advanced degree and relevant experience, as well as experience with geographical information systems, including/especially Esri’s ArcGIS software, experience with scripting languages, such as Python or JavaScript, and experience with metadata creation, schema, and management.
