Five Interesting Things: Today’s Scan Hits
Here are five indicators, observations or articles that caught the eye of FA futurists today.
- In the wake of the Boston bombings, the website Reddit is providing a new example of the potential power — and perhaps potential abuses — of crowdsourced intelligence gathering, as users track down multiple views of people carrying specific backpacks in the crowds at the race.
- Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Mamet’s decision to self-publish his next book could signal that self-publishing is moving from unsigned and lesser known authors to established ones.
- Researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne announced this week that they had developed a new lithium-ion microbattery that is 2,000 times more powerful than competing batteries and charges nearly instantly. If scaled up for commercial production, it could mean even smaller electronic devices with far longer charge lives. A paper with technical details was published in the latest issue of Nature Communications.
- The U.S. Department of Education has approved financial aid for Southern New Hampshire University’s College For America. What makes this interesting is that CFA is the first Department of Education-approved curriculum that does not use credit hour to measure student achievement. Rather than require a student to put in a specific amount of time, the program allows students to learn at their own pace, testing them on their proficiency.
- Researchers uncover a flawed Excel formula in a cornerstone 2010 economic paper that is the foundation of current efforts to curb public debt levels and enact “austerity” policies. With the analysis corrected, the empirical link between high debt levels and low economic growth largely evaporates.