Cum Laude in Evading Bandits By Nicholas D. Kristof, Op-Ed Columnist,
The New York TimesIf colleges provide credit for dozing through an introductory Spanish class, why not give credit for a “gap year” in a Bolivian village? If students can learn about microfinance while sitting comatose in 9 a.m. lectures, couldn’t they learn more by volunteering with a lender in a Bangladesh slum?
So with summer starting, it’s up to students themselves to self-educate by setting off on their own. I hold my “win a trip” contest precisely to encourage such trips — I’m just back from visiting five West African countries with a University of South Carolina student. Yet when I encourage students’ wanderlust, questions invariably arise: Will I be safe? How do I avoid robbers and malaria?
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Can a machine change your mind?By Jane O’Grady,
Open Democracy“Can a machine read your mind?” – the title of a recent (February 2009) article in the
Times—is meant to be sensational but is similar to hundreds of other articles appearing with increasing frequency, and merely repeating a story that has been familiar for the last 50 years. “It’s just a matter of time’”is the assumption behind such articles—just a matter of time before the gap between physical brain-stuff and consciousness is bridged. The
Times article plays up the social interest angle of its story by describing experiments in which people’s brain activity is taken as proof of their guilt or innocence of crimes, or in which a computer ‘could tell with 78 per cent accuracy’ which of a number of drawings shown to volunteers was the one they were concentrating on ...
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By-the-Book Reader Meets the Kindle By Charles Mcgrath,
The New York TimesON a recent golf trip to South Carolina I showed off to the rest of the foursome by taking along my brand-new Kindle 2. No one seemed impressed that I had already stored on it practically all of Trollope and six volumes of Gibbon’s “History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” along with the latest Lee Child and Dennis Lehane. But I got a reaction when I pressed a button and the slim, envelope-size device read aloud to us, in a bossy, robotic female voice, from “Leadbetter’s Quick Tips: The Very Best Short Lessons to Fix Any Part of Your Game”: “As you step up to the ball, breathe through your nose, then exhale and whistle as you start the club back.” For the rest of the weekend my playing partner referred to the Kindle, somewhat warily, as “The Future.”
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