If the american's could get medicines, books, degrees at much lower prices, maybe medical research would not be so costly in the first place... The cost of medical research is primarily composed of paying doctors, nurses, lawyers, politicians, clerks, programmers etc artificially inflated salaries so that they can afford education and healthcare. Maybe these corporations will drop the price of healthcare and education to compensate for lower incomes as more people become unemployed by competing with other countries.
Maybe this could be a crowd sourceable feature. Someone on mechanical turk or crowdflower or 99 designs could take a photo and create your character and send the design back to you which you can print later.
Wow at last we can have our flying cars that don't need fuel... Just kidding.
Can a minimally powered aircraft on mars or venus do this without spending a dime on fuel or panels for flight? That would be a cool technology demonstration getting the whole world shocked. And we could throw all kinds of exotic material like carbon fiber and thin strong foils and kites coz getting these beasts there would be way more costlier than building them. I see very interesting short term future possibilities for this. Maybe even an X-Prize for this would help.
I did not go through the stats course from udacity, but went through the build your own robotic car class. I would like to say the opposite of what the author of this article says. The conventional education system is designed to suit people who lean deductively. They prefer to "stand on top of concepts they know"... Then there are people who like to learn by dabbling. People who learn by tinkering. Such people find too much formalism annoying.
Think of it like this... If your child is trying to stand up and walk, dont try to get its gait perfected. Let it enjoy the success of barely standing and moving a few steps forward. I would say "every child has the right to enjoy this moment"... Not just the Usain bolt's and the ballet dancers. I think irrespective of the subject, the initial learning event is just scaffolding. I don't think the best ballet dancer remembers any part of how she actually learnt to walk.
When I attended the robotics class, I left knowing that "Multiplying gaussians is a cool thing" I figured the skeleton of how particle filters work. Will I drive a car for which I wrote the code. Absolutely not. Will I ask my enemy to sit in a car for which I wrote the code? Absolutely not. But I still got something. Something beyond frustration of being less than "super genius". I left saying "hey that is neat". Tomorrow when I invoke a Kalman filter in say OpenCV, I will feel less insecure about the abilities of that "magic black box". To me the robotic car became a "product of extreme passion created by brilliant hackers" than "mysterious devices created by other worldly geniuses"
If I wanted definitions I would look up Mathworld or something better. If I am going to write a paper on genetics, I am not going to use a stats 101 lecture notes as my reference. But here exists a phase in my learning where I actually do not care about the difference in dividing by N or N-1 or N+1. What the guys obsessed with formalism do is that they make that phase such a huge pain, that I bother not to cross it.
I get a way lot more "per hour invested" or "per dollar invested" from online education. From my point of view. That is the major disruption. The barrier to exploration has been almost eliminated. I could dabble with writing science fiction and then take a peep at anatomy.
Somethings like "A guy walked in and it was left in the video" is a positive sign. It shows that they are a scrappy startup creating a minimum viable product. If people start using this product even without the polish, it indicates real value. This is a standard startup practice. Better production quality means fewer classes and slower growth and less data for analytics. So I actually congratulate them for not obsessing with stuff like Video quality. Do you have any idea how google looked when it was released?
Does it have its shortcomings? Yes it does. Am I glad such alternatives exist to "Colorless, Odorless, Tasteless, Expensive Credentialling". Between Stanford or MIT and an online course I would definitely go to the Physical school. But between a tier 2 Indian Univ, I would prefer an online education and use a university only for a credential.
Khan Academy releases open source teaching material and is funded by Gates foundation. Probably some day they may support textbooks too... Any reason why not?
Open Government Platform (OGPL) is being developed by nodal agencies from both the countries (National Informatics Centre, Department of Electronics & IT, Government of India and Office of Citizen Services & Innovative Technologies, General Services Administration, U.S. Government).
To know more about the participating organizations visit following links
Some day, Owning a computer that cannot be bricked by govt or "Intellectual Property Owners" at their whim will regulated like the brewing of alcohol. You will have to pay through your nose to run even lame apps. Maybe even your government can get a cut so that it can go chasing weapons of mass destruction using the money extorted from the gullible masses.
github. Write code that others would love to clone ;-). Fork other projects and improve them to grok awesome ideas and practices. OSS in general not just github...
We seem to be discussing pros and cons of nuclear. But is this assertion of reasonably extractable uranium from sea water even true? Considering the source to be theregister, what I would like to know is whether the energy available as per the paper is really as big as claimed? or is it just clever math? Keeping aside the issue of waste disposal, are the costs really that low or is the cost cleverly buried elsewhere?
Geoffrey Landis suggested that: Although the surface of Venus is an extremely hostile environment, at about 50 kilometers above the surface the atmosphere of Venus is the most earth like environment (other than Earth itself) in the solar system. It is proposed here that in the near term, human exploration of Venus could take place from aerostat vehicles in the atmosphere, and that in the long term, permanent settlements could be made in the form of cities designed to float at about fifty kilometer altitude in the atmosphere of Venus. Source: http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/2003002...
TED and HN provides me better "entertainment" and some knowledge than TV. For learning there is stuff like Coursera, Udacity etc. But I still wished there was something between entertainment and academics. I hope some entrepreneur jumps into this area and creates an awesome solution. It may not make him a billionare. But his/her impact on humanity would be truly great.