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Clinton: Moocs may be key to a more efficient US system

11 April 2013 | By Chris Parr

Former president says online courses could drive down costs

Source: Jaguar PS / Shutterstock.com

The way higher education is delivered in the US needs to undergo a “dramatic change”, which could be driven by the accreditation of massive open online courses, according to the nation’s former president Bill Clinton.

At public colleges and universities, the cost of tuition has been rising above the rate of inflation for more than a decade, and although the federal government has increased its funding for students in a bid to reduce levels of student debt, this has been negated by a drop in average family incomes.

“A lot of people will have student debt that goes beyond the federal student loan programme. I think the only sustainable answer is to find a less expensive delivery system,” Mr Clinton told Times Higher Education.

“You’re going to see a dramatic change because we simply can’t continue to have the cost of university education go up at twice the rate of inflation every decade when wages are flat and aid programmes are not keeping up.”

Pointing out that student debt in the US had risen by 58 per cent in the past seven years, Mr Clinton said that the “next big step” in driving down tuition costs could be “figuring out some way of validating the merits of these online courses”.

“A lot of universities are now participating in online courses, in Moocs…the whole delivery system is in the process of changing, and there has to be some way of saying which online courses give you what you need to know to be certified,” he said.

“[Reducing college costs] has become more urgent because so many public schools have lost a lot of their public aid because of the budget problems in various states.”

Mr Clinton was speaking to journalists ahead of the Clinton Global Initiative University event, which took place at Washington University in St Louis last weekend.

His comments come as a row builds in California, sparked by a Democratic state legislator’s proposal to allow Mooc providers and for-profit colleges to fill gaps in public provision.

Meanwhile, Moocs have been criticised by speakers at a special symposium held in honour of Philip Altbach, director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College.

In his address to the event, held at the institution on 5 April, Professor Altbach said Moocs were “somewhat overhyped” and might take longer than expected to find their place in the global academic system.

He made the point as part of a wider critique of globalisation in higher education, which he said had created “chaos” because of a brain drain of talent from the developing world to developed English-speaking countries.

Professor Altbach also said that governments did not have the money to support the huge expansion in student numbers, which was one of the reasons why tuition fees had increased and why the idea of higher education as a public good had been “greatly weakened”.

chris.parr@tsleducation.com

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Article originally published as: Clinton says Moocs may be the way to build a more efficient US system (11 April 2013)

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It’s possible to add self-driving features to future cars for, oh, $150. Seriously. Scientists at Oxford University in England have built a self-driving car around a front-mounted laser scanner. When it sees a roadway it’s capable of navigating, it alerts the driver, who can press a button to give control to the car. Compared to go-anywhere Google self-driving cars, the self-driving car from Oxford dons the role only after comparing the current road to a precise, on-board 3D map of roads it knows about. No GPS is involved. A team at Oxford added self-driving capabilities to a Nissan Leaf.

The all-electric Leaf uses a front-mounted laser scanner, no GPS. In comparison, Google self-driving cars employ a roof-mounted, 360-degree scanner and GPS to verify location. So far, the Leaf has been tested on roads around Oxford at speeds up 40 mph and can stop for pedestrians. According to The Guardian newspaper, “Rather than using the GPS navigation system, which can be unreliable in cities where ‘urban canyons’ caused by buildings block signals, and only accurate to a few metres, the British-developed system uses 3D laser scanning allied to computer storage to build up a map of its surroundings — which is accurate to a few centimetres.” The self-driving system kicks in when it recognizes where the car is, by comparing its surroundings with stored, on-board 3D maps.

The project is led by professor Paul Newman, head of Oxford’s Mobile

Robotics Research Group in the Department of Engineering Science. One of the group’s interests is making vehicles and robots get around when GPS can’t help. “At present many autonomous robots rely on pre-produced maps or GPS to find their way around,” Newman’s bio notes, “but GPS isn’t available indoors, near tall buildings, under foliage, underwater, underground, or on other planets such as Mars — all places we might want a robot to operate.”  The research group’s chief achievement seems to be the creation of the FABMAP algorithm, which uses a combination of machine learning and probabilistic inference to compare the current view of a scene with every scene stored in memory.

According to Newman, installing the hardware and software on the Nissan Leaf costs about £5,000 (USD $7,620) on top of the cost of the car, which is dirt cheap for a self-driving research vehicle. He envisions self-driving cars being viable in 15 years and the cost could be as little as £100 ($152). As cars change from mechanical controls to drive-by-wire (steering, brakes, throttle), existing car designs would be cheaper to adapt.

A colleague, Martin Spring of Lancaster University, told The Guardian that self-driving cars could change transportation in a big way: The car could be a room on wheels where occupants do what they want while under way; no need for a designated driver. Headlamps wouldn’t be necessary, perhaps not even streetlights. (Unless you wanted to give jaywalkers a fighting chance.)

The Google Lite of self-drivers

The Oxford concept, then, takes a more cost-conscious route to self-driving. It wouldn’t work all the time, but it could work for the bulk of long drives, especially limited-access highways. At the same time, the scanner and 3D maps go far beyond what are likely to be the first so-called self-driving cars that would stitch together existing technologies: adaptive cruise control, lane keep assist, and blind spot detection. That would be enough to self-drive on limited access roads but it would still need a hands-on driver to take back the wheel if a deer or pedestrian darted onto the highway, or if a box fell off a truck. And it’s a reminder that we have to work out liability issues.

Now read: Google: Self-driving cars in 3-5 years. Feds: Not so fast.

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Sitting U.S. President Ford was visiting San Francisco in 1975 when a woman attempted to shoot him. A former marine named Oliver Sipple grabbed the gun, preventing the assassination attempt. When the press began contacting him, he asked that his sexuality not be discussed. While Sipple was very active in the gay men’s scene in the Castro, he was not out to family or work. But Harvey Milk, a famous gay rights activist, chose to out him so the public could see that gay men could be heroes, too.

The cost to Sipple was devastating. The White House distanced itself from him, his family rejected him, and he sunk into a dark depression. He gained massive amounts of weight, began drinking profusely, and died at the ripe young age of 47. Many around Sipple reported that he regretted his act of heroism and the attention resulting from it. But for Harvey Milk, the potential social good from using Sipple’s story far outweighed what he perceived as the costs of outing him.

This is a hard moral conundrum, in part because Sipple was clearly a “good” guy who had done a good deed. But what if he wasn’t? What are the moral and ethical costs of outing people and focusing unwanted attention on them?

Two weeks ago, Gawker journalist Adrian Chen decided to unmask the infamous Reddit troll “Violentacrez” as Michael Brutsch. When Chen contacted him, Brutsch did not attempt to deny the things he had done. He simply begged Chen not to publish his name, citing the costs that publicity would have on his disabled wife. Chen chose to publish the piece – including Brutsch’s pleas and promises to do anything that Chen asked in return for not ruining his life. As expected, Brutsch lost his job and the health insurance that paid for his wife’s care; Chen reported this outcome three days later. Many celebrated this public shaming, ecstatic to see a notorious troll grovel.

Although none of his actions appeared to be illegal, it’s hard to call Brutsch a “good” guy. He had created settings where people could share deeply disturbing content. He enticed people to reveal their ugliest sides. In many ways, Brutsch was a classic troll, abusing technology and manipulating the boundaries of free speech to provoke systematic prejudices and harassment for his own entertainment. He got joy from making others miserable.

Unmasking as a Way to Regulate Social Norms

There are many different reasons to unmask people, out them, or make them much more visible than they previously were. Sometimes, the goal is to celebrate someone’s goodness. At other times, people are made visible to use them as an example … or to set an example. People are outed to reveal hypocrisy and their practices are made visible to shame them.

In identifying Butsch and shining a spotlight on his insidious practices, Chen’s article condemns Butsch’s choice of using the mask of pseudonymity to hide behind actions that have societal consequences. Public shaming is one way in which social norms are regulated. Another is censorship, as evidenced by the Reddit community’s response to Gawker.

What happens when, as a result of social media, vigilantism takes on a new form?

Yet, how do we as a society weigh the moral costs of shining a spotlight on someone, however “bad” their actions are? What happens when, as a result of social media, vigilantism takes on a new form? How do we guarantee justice and punishment that fits the crime when we can use visibility as a tool for massive public shaming? Is it always a good idea to regulate what different arbiters consider bad behavior through increasing someone’s notoriety – or censoring their links?

As the Gawker/Reddit story was unfolding, another seemingly disconnected case was playing out. In a town outside of Vancouver, a young woman named Amanda Todd committed suicide a few weeks after posting a harrowing YouTube video describing an anonymous stalker she felt ruined her life. The amorphous hacktivist collective known as “Anonymous” decided to make a spectacle of the situation by publishing personally identifiable information on – “doxxing” – Todd’s stalker. They identified a 32-year-old man, enabling outraged people to harass him. Yet it appears they got the wrong person. Earlier this week, Canadian police reported that Todd’s stalker was someone else: reportedly a 19-year-old.

Needless to say, this shift in information doesn’t relieve the original target of the public shame he felt from Anonymous’ pointed finger. It doesn’t wipe his digital record clean. He has to deal with being outed – in this case, wrongly – going forward.

The ‘Koan’: Technology as Tool and Technology as Weapon

By enabling the rapid flow of information, technology offers us a unique tool to publicly out people or collectively tar and feather them. Well-meaning people may hope to spread their messages far and wide using Twitter or Facebook, but the fast-spreading messages tend to be sexual, horrific, or humiliating.

Gossip is social currency. And in a networked world, trafficking in gossip is far easier than ever before.

The same tactic that trolls use to target people is the same tactic that people use to out trolls.

When someone’s been wronged – or the opportunity arises to use someone to make a statement – it is relatively easy to leverage social media to incite the hive mind to draw attention to an individual. The same tactic that trolls use to target people is the same tactic that people use to out trolls.

More often than not, those who use these tools do so when they feel they’re on the right side of justice. They’re either shining a spotlight to make a point or to shame someone into what they perceive to be socially acceptable behavior. But each act of outing has consequences for the people being outed, even if we do not like them or what they’ve done.

This raises serious moral and ethical concerns: In a networked society, who among us gets to decide where the moral boundaries lie? This isn’t an easy question and it’s at the root of how we, as a society, conceptualize justice.

Governance and the construction of a society is not a fact of life; it’s a public project that we must continuously make and remake. Networked technologies are going to increasingly put pressure on our regulatory structures as conflicting social values crash into one another. In order to benefit from innovation, we must also suffer the destabilizing aspects of new technology.

Yet … that destabilization and suffering allow us, as a society, to interrogate our collective commitments. The hard moral conundrums are just beginning.

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For some time now I have been interested in the question to what extent 'we' should allow, or tolerate anonymity on the internet. When is it a protection and when is it an abuse? It reminds me of the some of the debates that took place around the introduction of the secret ballot; no one now would argue against the secret ballot, but at the time many objected to the idea that a voter need not take any public responsibility for how they voted. John Stuart Mill, for one, objected to the secret ballot.

10/12/2012 10:53 AM

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It's Stunning! Why Has Cape Wind Been Delayed for 11 Years?

SustainableBusiness.com News

Even we were fooled!

All these 11 years, we thought Cape Wind - the first offshore wind farm in the US - was being held back by concerned citizens that didn't want the wind farm to despoil their views or ruin the ecology off the coast of Cape Cod in Massachusetts. 

After all, the group that was behind the lawsuits and relentless pressure has such a nice conservationist sounding name - Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound.

It turns out there's just one man behind that organization - Bill Koch, one of the Koch Brothers!!

"This is a battle where powerful, entrenched dirty energy interests have pitted themselves against emerging clean energy. It is a fight for the people of Massachusetts to have the green energy jobs they want and the home-grown energy they need, when they need it," says John Kassel, president of the  Conservation Law Foundation, which just launched the website, Cape Wind Now, to expose Koch.  

In our recent article about research that shows Offshore Wind Turbines Could Power Entire East Coast,  we said, "the sole offshore wind project approved by the federal government thus far - Cape Wind - continues to meet with opposition from local residents concerned about the impact on views and property values." Yes, we were fooled. The last thing the Koch Bros want is for that much renewable energy, which could make a dent in their fossil fuel profits.

The Cape Wind Now website features detailed accounts of the Alliance's relentless efforts to block Cape Wind, including its most recent scheme of quietly funding the Town of Barnstable's anti-Cape Wind litigation, says Karen Wood of the Conservation Law Foundation in Cape Cod Today.

"The Alliance pumped $355,000 into a special gift account established by the Town Council for the sole purpose of funding its Cape Wind litigation," she says, "with the funds to be 'managed and expended according to the wishes and instructions of the donor.'"

Despite having lost nearly every lawsuit, appeal and administrative challenge - even prompting a congressional inquiry into the Federal Aviation Administration's fourth straight determination that Cape Wind does not pose a threat to air traffic safety - its efforts continue to delay Cape Wind from being built.

Organizations that support Cape Wind include the nation's biggest environmental groups:  Greenpeace, Sierra Club, National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council, Oceana, the Conservation Law Foundation, the Audubon Society, Toxics Action Center, Environmental League of Massachusetts, as well as labor and public health groups.

The $1 billion, 468 megawatt project would be built 4.7 miles off the coast of Massachusetts in Nantucket Bay. It would supply 75% of the electricity for Cape Cod and the Islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket - more than 200,000 homes.

Here's some more illuminating information from ClimateProgress.

by Michael Conathan

It's not even halfway through October, but Bill Koch has already put on his Halloween costume. This year, the black sheep of the billionaire band of brothers has decided to "trick or treat" as an environmentalist.

Yesterday, the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound - a group established by Koch and his cronies to wage war on Cape Wind, the first offshore wind farm proposed in U.S. waters - dredged up an old lawsuit against the project. The frivolous nature of this latest tilt at the project's offshore windmills is enough to make even Don Quixote blush.

This time, the plaintiffs allege the turbines would violate the Endangered Species Act, creating unacceptable risks to protected birds, sea turtles, and the north Atlantic right whale. What they fail to acknowledge is that any potential negative effects from the wind farm's construction have already been looked at over and over again during the project's 11 year trek through the regulatory process. The Environmental Impact Statement finalized by the Department of the Interior in 2009 carefully considered endangered species and determined that Cape Wind would not pose any population risks.

Perhaps most galling was the Alliance calling out the Sierra Club in its press release as an organization that has "sounded the alarm" about Cape Wind. The Sierra Club is, in fact, a vocal supporter of the project. In August, the Club released a report, "Clean Energy Under Siege," detailing the carefully executed campaign launched by Koch and other oil and gas industry leaders against Cape Wind and the rest of the clean energy economy. The Sierra Club has also joined the Conservation Law Foundation in launching Cape Wind Now, an initiative with the goal of combatting the endless stall tactics from Koch and the Alliance.

Koch's environmentalist costume comes with a lofty price tag. As a co-director of the Alliance, he has been one of its biggest donors since its inception in 2003. According to the Sierra Club's report:

• as of 2006, he had contributed more than $1.5 million to the cause. If those contributions have held steady over the years, that would mean he's approaching $5 million of personal money spent opposing the project.
  
• in 2009, his company Oxbow Energy, paid virtually the entire salary of the Alliance's President, approximately $150,000.
  
• Oxbow also spent more than $600,000 to lobby the FAA against approving Cape Wind.

Why? In addition to protecting his investment in dirty energy, Koch also owns a massive, oceanfront mansion in a country club community on Cape Cod with ample views of the area of the Sound where the project will be constructed, Koch has openly opposed the project even though from his mansion, the turbines would appear as tiny twigs on the horizon.

And then there's also that other matter of preventing a commercially-proven, immediately available renewable source of energy from gaining a foothold in a region desperate for additional power capacity and establishing itself as a legitimate alternative to the Koch brothers' precious oil, gas, and coal.

Just remember, Massachusetts, when the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound comes ringing your doorbell all dressed up as an environmental group, you better take a peek behind the mask. Otherwise, the trick will be on you.

++++

Michael Conathan is the Director of Ocean Policy at the Center for American Progress. This article first appeared on their Climate Progress website.

Check out Cape Wind Now:

Website: www.capewindnow.org/

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Reader Comments (3)

Author: Not Koch Date Posted: 10/12/12 08:51 PM	There are A LOT of us that care about the sanctity of Nantucket Sound. We would support Wind anywhere else. It just doesn't belong here. There are MANY of us who don't support this project -- but it's easier to dismiss if you paint it as one man's whim.
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Author: The Rest of Us Date Posted: 10/13/12 03:49 PM

I am sure there are other people on Nantucket Island, home of the ultra exclusive, who joined Koch's organization, or have been persuaded by its false agenda. "Not Koch" says they are for wind anywhere other than off the "Sanctity of Nantucket Sound." Not in our priviledged back yard. To which I say, how vile. How many pristine environments have the Koch's and others destroyed -- and continue to destroy - in the process of accumulating their incredible wealth? Koch's are heavily invested in tar sand extraction. You have seen pictures of the devastation in Alberta, Canada? Mountain top coal removal? Poisin rivers from toxic chemical dumps from their paper plants? Deforestation. Yet these beautiful windmills, nothiing more than a distant blip on the horizon from shore, nothing different than a very distant ship or sailboat on the water...is just unexceptable -- because they own it all, and won't have it in their back yard. The jobs for Massachuetts, the enormous boon to citizens for fuel-free, clean energy for millions of people again blocked by a handful of selfish wealth with money interests in fossil fuels.

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Author: ackboy Date Posted: 10/13/12 03:58 PM

I have no love for Bill Koch, but in this instance, I'm on his side. Nantucket Sound is the wrong place for this project. There's no guarantee that the power generated would stay in this area. The power would be sold to whomever would pay the highest price. This article is correct that one of the biggest right wing nut jobs is spending a ton of money to quash it, but there are a lot of people living on the Cape and Islands who are in agreement with him. I'm a liberal who doesn't want to see the Sound despoiled with windmills. If you'd like to say this is a NIMBY post, you're correct. There's nothing wrong with not wanting to see a beautiful, unspoiled place looking like some areas where there are oil rigs erected.

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Finsbury Park residents will soon benefit from better education services and community facilities, as the redevelopment of Crouch Hill Park reaches its final stages.

Islington Council has invested £16.5million to regenerate and transform the formerly neglected and little used metropolitan open land at Crouch Hill Park in the north of the borough.

Once the redevelopment is complete, local residents will have beautiful parkland and education services on their doorstep.

•The Cape Youth Project will reopen in November, offering after-school and weekend play facilities, adventure play and a wide range of activities for children and young people.

•Ashmount Primary School - currently based in an outdated building in Archway - is being relocated to the Crouch Hill site.  The new state of the art building will open its doors to pupils after the Christmas holidays, and will be the first carbon neutral school in the country. 

•Better community facilities, including a completely re-landscaped park and a new multi-use games area are opening to the public in December 2012.  Improved lighting and entrances mean the park will be safer and more accessible, while a new ramp and pathways will provide wheelchair access.

•A new building for Bowlers Nursery at Crouch Hill was the first of the developments to be completed in August, offering day-care and education for the under-fives.

Leader of Islington Council, Cllr Catherine West, visited the Crouch Hill site last week.  She said:

"We're on the side of our residents and this development will transform the area for the local community.  My memories of the Crouch Hill site are of a neglected park area that most local residents didn't want to use, as it was blighted by graffiti and fly-tipping.  Young people at the Cape were also using a building that was in desperate need of updating. 

"Though there are still a few months to go before the development is complete, it's clear how impressive the final transformation will be - from the new first class buildings for Ashmount Primary School, The Cape and Bowlers Nursery, to the re-landscaped park and community facilities."

In 2011 the plans for the new Ashmount School were awarded a BREEAM Outstanding rating (BREEAM is an environmental assessment method and rating system for buildings) in recognition of its sustainable design, the low impact materials being used on site and its sophisticated energy systems.  The new Crouch Hill Park Energy Centre will provide zero carbon energy to nearby affordable housing Coleman Mansions as well as the school, nursery and youth centre.

Crouch Hill Park is a nature reserve, home to birds, invertebrates and bats, including some species that are locally uncommon or declining. In order to protect these and encourage more species to populate the area, the new Ashmount School design includes a brown roof, climbing plants on walls, an area of planted grassland and wildflowers and more woodland.

Willmott Dixon was contracted by Islington Council to carry out the redevelopment of Crouch Hill Park in 2010.  Chris Tredget, managing director at Willmott Dixon in North London, said:

"We are immensely proud of our work with Islington Council to show how it's possible for new schools to have minimal impact on the environment. Thanks to the leadership and strategic thinking shown by Islington, together with the knowledge and learning we've gained from Crouch Hill Community Park, it will be possible to replicate this and deliver zero carbon schools across the UK to the benefit of pupils, staff and local communities."

Really interesting looking group...

[T]he difference between creative and less creative individuals comes into play mostly when there is ambiguity in the situation at hand and, with it, more room for justification… Put simply, the link between creativity and dishonesty seems related to the ability to tell ourselves stories about how we are doing the right thing, even when we are not. The more creative we are, the more we are able to come up with good stories that help us justify our selfish interests.

via brainpickings.org

This explains a whole lot.

The government has hit back against comments from former BT CTO Peter Cochrane that it is ‘visionless' in its attempt to implement broadband across the UK, by insisting that it has a clear plan.

Meanwhile, BT has slammed Cochrane over his demand for fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) broadband, arguing that there is not enough demand for the service.

Further reading

• Former BT CTO slams UK's 'visionless' broadband plans

• House of Lords select committee slams UK broadband rollout

• Ambition deficit threatens UK broadband goals

• Report: Superfast broadband to make UK economy £20bn in 15 years

Last week, in an interview with Computing, Cochrane labelled minister for culture Ed Vaizey's comments that 2Mbit/s broadband would be sufficient for UK citizens as "dumb" and suggested that Vaizey did not understand the need of fast broadband.

In response, a Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) spokesman explained that broadband was "essential" to achieving the government's top priority of sustainable and balanced economic growth

"Our target is for 90 per cent of homes and businesses in each local authority area to have access to superfast broadband by 2015. For the remaining homes and businesses located in areas that are either remote or geographically challenging we have set a target of access to at least 2Mbit/s – ensuring that virtually every premise in the UK will have a broadband connection," he told Computing.

Cochrane had encouraged the government to "sit down and put together a business plan for the nation", arguing that otherwise decisions would make no sense and "waste vast amounts of money". He also said that BT had no reason to invest in the network, suggesting that it should be the government forking out for FTTH broadband capability.

"The government is providing £530m to make this happen. This investment is unlocking considerably more from local authorities and the private sector," responded the DCMS spokesman.

"The suggestion is that the government lacks vision and doesn't understand the necessity of broadband and this is hampering the UK economy – [our] response makes clear that this is not the case," he added.

Last week, Cochrane also laughed off suggestions that there was no need for FTTH.

"There is a lot of misinformation – I've heard people ask why the UK needs FTTH, as although it provides 100Mbit/s to the home it ‘only' gives 10Mbit/s upload, but this is a stupid statement," he said.

In response, BT insisted that the speeds it looks to deploy will be fast enough for customers and emphasised that there was not yet a big enough demand for FTTH.

"We strongly disagree with the claim that broadband speeds won't be fast enough; speeds of up to 80Mbit/s will be widely available," a BT spokesperson told Computing.

"While FTTH on demand will be on hand for anyone who needs even faster speeds, there are currently no consumer services that require hundreds of Mbit/s and no evidence of widespread demand for FTTH, so our approach makes sense. The network is future proof without the need for [an additional] £30bn to be spent," he added.