Law Student Warns That Professors' Quest for Rights to Lectures Could Backfire Good interview article on the implications of academics claiming copyright over their scholarship... obviously, they own their own work, but expressing that in terms of copyright changes their work from something that is shared to a commodity that is sold. By Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 6, 2001.[Refer]

Publishers Envision Magazines As Brands" Shades of Naomi Klein! This article argues that magazines need to treat themselves as brands, not publications. This means that magazines will branch out into other industries. Educators should not think that they are immune from this trend: imagine not only driving schools branded by Car and Driver magazine, but geography classes offered by National Geographic, business schools offered by Fortune, and more. By Brian Steinberg, Dow Jones Newswires, November 6, 2001.[Refer]

The Next Society Throwaway article by Peter Drucker outlining in broad strokes the nature of the new knowledge economy and its implications for various sectors in society. Drucker predicts - and I agree, with caveats - the advent of universal and easily accessible post secondary education. There's more on this topic under the menu headed 'In this Survey' on the right hand side of the page - it's easy to miss but worth a skim. By Peter Drucker, The Economist, Niovember, 2001.[Refer]

Connecting Homes with Fibre-Optics More acronyms that might show up more frequently over the next few years - FttH stands for 'fibre to the home' and FttC stands for 'fibre to the curb.' Both concepts address what is now being called 'the first mile' issue: getting broadband access from the backbone to individual homes and businesses. FttH/C offers access that makes cable and DSL seem like ancient technology, providing speeds of up to 2.5 Gigabit per second (for FttH only). The initiatives are called 'first mile' because in a lot of cases communities and businesses are not waiting for telcos, but rather, are building and owning the systems themselves. There's no need to read the entire report (which is quite long and complex), but do read the management summary and the conclusion. Also scan the nation-by-nation list of projects and check out the list of abbreviations so you'll be in the know when people start tossing the alphabet soup at you. By . Verschuren and S. Passchier, GigaPort, August 29, 2001.[Refer]

May the Force/Boss Be With You, in 3-D Holographic online conferencing is now available. It's not cheap, but the fact that it exists at all points the way to a range of new applications. A Dallas company, Teleportec, has introduced technology to transmit holographic images of people over high-speed digital circuits. "He's life-size, he's making eye contact, and there's no latency between when his mouth moves and you hear the words." By Caren Chesler, New York Times, November 5, 2001.[Refer]

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