When Class Became More Important to a Child's Education Than Race
Sarah Garland, The Atlantic, September 5, 2013

Wealth (or lack of it) has become a more important predictor of educational success in the U.S. than race. Probably in most places it has always been more important. Wealthier parents can purchase more advantages - from libraries to tutors to summer camps - for their children, and may also value academic achievement more in the home. And as this article notes, one of the best ways to address the achievement gap is straightforward: "It’s an idea that Martin Luther King Jr. pushed in his later years, while planning a second March on Washington in 1967 to support his Poor People’s Campaign: Put more money directly into the hands of lower-income families." In my view, the gyrations over education reform, Common Core, and the rest are a long drawn-out process of avoiding that, of doing anything but putting money into the hands of the poor. 

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MyOpenID to shut down. Will be turned off on February 1, 2014
Zee, TheNextWeb, September 5, 2013

I was one of many to receive an email yesterday from Janrain CEO Larry Drebes announcing that its longstanding identity service MyOpenID will be shut down effective February of next year. The reason is simple: few people were using it, compared to the hordes using login services offered by facebook, Google, Twitter and others. As Janrain's blog shows, Facebook is winning the identity wars. Disappointing. But now if outsourced logins are becoming the future, I guess I'll need to learn how to integrate them.

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Wikipedia:WikiProject Open Access/Signalling OA-ness
Wikipedia, September 5, 2013

Wikipedia is seeking advice "on a system to signal the openness of references cited on Wikipedia." I have the same problem (but handle it differently). Every one of my posts has a reference; I make it a point to link only to openly accessible content - my links take you straight to the content, not to a login screen or subscription page. Wikipedia is less picky - and indeed, their policy of requiring a published reference almost guarantees that most of their sources will be offline or unavailable. What to do? Because clicking on a reference only to be greeted with a subscription screen is really annoying. So it would be nice to have a way to show whether a resource is openly accessible or not. A simple 'copy;left' or Creative Commons symbol won't do, because a lot of openly accessible resources aren't licensed that way. Personally, I like the open and closed access buttons,  and  respectively.

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What Does Udacity Do with Data?
Andrew Liu, Udacity Blog, September 4, 2013

This post doesn't really tell us what Udacity does with data (we can only imagine what it does with data, and I can't imagine it's entirely savory) but it does have some nifty diagrams. I especially like the user activity flow diagram (depicted along with this post). The trick with data is to get beyond the obvious categorizations ('is active', 'is dormant') to get to nuanced distinctions that predict genuine differences in behaviour. But this is likely always to be stochastic, which limits its applicability in the individual case.

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The Inertia of Bad Behavior: Still Misunderstanding NC
David Wiley, September 4, 2013

David Wiley calls me "completely wrong" and of course I reply. Only interesting to aficionados of the long-standing discussion between Wiley and myself on the NC clause. I would only add here: licenses, like laws, never prevent bad behaviour, and I would never claim they do. To overgeneralize somewhat, in good people, culture prevents bad behaviour, and in bad people, penalties prevent bad behaviour. The addition of the NC clause tells the good people what they should do, so they don't accidentally commercialize my work. And it raises the likelihood of lawsuits against the bad people. Not foolproof, but nothing is.

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