University of Maryland’s Center for Complexity in Business

The Center had its third annual complexity in business conference today here in DC and it was excellent. The keynotes were delivered by Felix Reed-Tsochas and Uri Wilensky. The breakout talks that I saw were uniformly excellent.

It’s great to have two excellent complexity centers (including our own) here in the National Capital Area.

Pearson and Google taking on Blackboard?

From the Chronicle, here. As I mentioned in a recent post, I’m getting geared up to use Facebook for the course I’m teaching next semester. But these two companies collaborating are going to present a real challenge to Blackboard.

From my viewpoint, the key advantage to using Facebook to teach is that there is virtually no learning curve for your undergraduate students and very little for faculty.

But we’ll see….

Biowarfare threat to the US–latest report

From ScienceInsider, the news blurb is here. The report card is from the bipartisan, WMD center. The conclusion is not positive.

I would simply add that in the decade since the anthrax attacks here in the US, the cultural memory has dimmed a bit, with societal anxieties now centered on the economy.

PBS’s Frontline series recently featured The Anthrax Files in collaboration with Propublica and McClatchy. One of my close colleagues and I were discussing the remaining uncertainties about the case yesterday at the Cosmos Club.

Keep calm and carry on, I suppose.

Powerpoint in teaching

I’m teaching NEUR 327 in the Spring. That’s one of the core neuroscience courses for the undergraduate major, Cellular, Neurophysiological and Pharmacological Neuroscience. I’m inclined to ignore Blackboard and teach using a combination of Facebook and Google tools. I’m also leaning towards minimizing the use of Powerpoint just because of its tendency to make the eyes roll upwards into their sockets.

Quite seriously, the use of Powerpoint for creating slides, is dangerously oversold, at least from the standpoint of pedagogy, as distinct from a research talk. I can’t decide whether it’s the formulaic slide lay-outs or the inane animations that arouse my distaste. Or perhaps it’s the ubiquitous use of images and graphics that are only tangentially related to the subject matter at hand….

As for Blackboard (the pretty much ubiquitous electronic learning platform across many colleges and high schools)…..I find it clunky–especially in comparison to Google’s collaborative tools and what one can do creatively on Facebook.

Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal on the fix we are in

A dark view of where we are these days….it’s here.

Money quote:

Most of our political leaders are not engineers or scientists and do not listen to engineers or scientists. Today a letter from Einstein would get lost in the White House mail room, and the Manhattan Project would not even get started; it certainly could never be completed in three years. I am not aware of a single political leader in the U.S., either Democrat or Republican, who would cut health-care spending in order to free up money for biotechnology research — or, more generally, who would make serious cuts to the welfare state in order to free up serious money for major engineering projects. Robert Moses, the great builder of New York City in the 1950s and 1960s, or Oscar Niemeyer, the great architect of Brasilia, belong to a past when people still had concrete ideas about the future. Voters today prefer Victorian houses.

Postdocs organize at MIT

This good news from Science Careers Blog, postdocs at MIT are forming a organization not unlike their student counterparts. All of this is important because, as with doctoral students, postdocs are engines of science. We count them, as we do graduate students, to access the vitality of a research university’s science enterprise. They deserve a “share” of shared governance.