The Shared Services crisis….

I first heard about this issue about a week ago mainly because of my alumni connection to the University of Michigan. Turns out the issue is happening at UT Austin also. The Chronicle has the story here.

The macro picture is that public universities are looking for every last cent in efficiencies as they struggle to find a sustainable business model for the future. The big picture is described pretty accurately with regards to Berkeley here, hat tip to Tyler Cowen.

Chomsky at his best…according to Fish

In today’s NYT, here. Chomsky gave three lectures at Columbia mostly not on politics. His theory of deep grammar in the brain as the substrate for language has always been attractive to me. The other important notion is that language isn’t some app added onto the “thought OS”, rather it is thought.

But there’s one Chomsky zinger during the Q and A that Fish thought noteworthy:

Educational reform, he said, is “a euphemism for the destruction of public education.”

And we’ll leave it at that…

Major news out of NIH…

Story is behind the firewall at the Chronicle, here. Short version–in a time of scarcity, NIH is taking a serious look at the Howard Hughes model of funding people as opposed to projects. All well and good, but my sense is that the potential budget deal developing in Congress may ameliorate some of the suffering…either by removing the sequester for the NIH or by allowing greater flexibility about where the cuts take place. Stay tuned…

Water crisis respite…

Newly discovered fresh water reserves under the continental shelves, story here.

The discovery has the potential to be quite significant since fresh water is both an absolute requirement for human life and, to this point, limited in supply.

Off to Spain…

I’ll be in Madrid this week where I’ll be attending a conference on potential future human trajectories stemming from advances in both life sciences and information technology.  Which brings up the subject of my friend Steve Kotler’s new book, The Rise of Superman–it’ll be out in March. I’ve read the draft manuscript, it’s very good.