There is no anti-bullying office in schools. There is just a principal and, if she or he is lucky, a vice-principal. Every time a parent comes forward with a complaint, it needs to be investigated. In a world in which conflict is often conflated with bullying (as anecdotal reports suggest), that job becomes impossible. And instant answers (or even accurate fact-finding) are not always possible.

All young people have a right to a safe environment – but not a bubble. Adults need to keep a watchful eye for rampant victimization – but not to police each conflict in the playground. Bullying is dangerous, but a loss of adult perspective creates an anxiety that has its own dangers.

My son arrived on his first day in school in Canada wearing the "wrong clothes", speaking with the "wrong accent" and heavily indoctrinated by us and his school in England that violence was a no no.

He was bullied relentlessly for several days. But hid his problems from us. But one afternoon he came home to find my mum at our house. He burst into tears and told her all. She was not sympathetic! "What did you do to defend your self?" she asked. "Nothing" he sobbed.

"Well tomorrow when you are being pushed around - you have to punch him in the face as hard as you can"

The next day came. The chief bully's henchman was pushing James and calling him names. James now in tears warned him to back off. The henchman laughed and pushed more.

James landed a haymaker in his mouth - teeth through the lip and gallons of blood.

He was never bullied again. Of course these days James would have been punished by the school.

I am not condoning bullying. But saying that we have to encourage kids also to stand up for themselves. We face bullies and conflict all our life. As kids it can be brutal. But the worst lesson is to tell our kids that they are helpless and depend on adults for their safety.

However ghoulish, it is a world we will all soon get to know well, argues Gross: owing to medical advancements, cancer deaths now peak at age 65 and kill off just 20 percent of older Americans, while deaths due to organ failure peak at about 75 and kill off just another 25 percent, so the norm for seniors is becoming a long, drawn-out death after 85, requiring ever-increasing assistance for such simple daily activities as eating, bathing, and moving.

This is currently the case for approximately 40 percent of Americans older than 85, the country’s fastest-growing demographic, which is projected to more than double by 2035, from about 5 million to 11.5 million. And at that point, here comes the next wave—77 million of the youngest Baby Boomers will be turning 70.

Quick back-of-the-envelope calculation, for Baby Boomers currently shepherding the Greatest Generation to their final reward? Hope your aged parents have at least half a million dollars apiece in the bank, because if they are anything like Mama Gross, their care until death will absorb every penny. To which an anxious (let’s say 49-year-old) daughter might respond: But what about long-term-care insurance? In fact, Gross’s own mother had purchased it, and while it paid for some things, the sum was a pittance compared with a final family outlay of several hundred thousand dollars. But how about what everyone says about “spending down” in order to qualify for Medicare, Medicaid, Medi-Cal, or, ahwhich exactly is it?

Unfortunately, those hoping for a kind of Eldercare for Dummies will get no easy answers from A Bittersweet Season. Chides Gross: “Medicaid is a confusing and potentially boring subject, depending on how you feel about numbers and abstruse government policy, but it’s essential for you to understand.” Duly noted—so I read the relevant section several times and … I still don’t understand. All I can tell you is that the Medicaid mess has to do with some leftover historical quirks of the Johnson administration, colliding with today’s much longer life expectancies, colliding with a host of federal and state regulations that intertwine with each other in such a calcified snarl that by contrast—in a notion I never thought I’d utter—public education looks hopeful. Think of the Hoyer lift that can be delivered but never repaired, or the feeder who will not push, or the pusher who will not feed.

But it gets worse. Like an unnaturally iridescent convalescent-home maraschino cherry atop this Sisyphean slag heap of woe, what actually appears to take the greatest toll on caregivers is the sheer emotional burden of this (formless, thankless, seemingly endless) project. For one thing, unresolved family dynamics will probably begin to play out: “Every study I have seen on the subject of adult children as caregivers finds the greatest source of stress, by far, to be not the ailing parent but sibling disagreements,” Gross writes. Further, experts concur, “the daughter track is, by a wide margin, harder than the mommy track, emotionally and practically, because it has no happy ending and such an erratic and unpredictable course.” Gross notes, I think quite rightly, that however put-upon working parents feel (and we do keeningly complain, don’t we—oh the baby-proofing! oh the breast-pumping! oh the day care!), we can at least plan employment breaks around such relative foreseeables as pregnancy, the school year, and holidays. By contrast, ailing seniors trigger crises at random—falls in the bathroom, trips to the emergency room, episodes of wandering and forgetting and getting lost. Wearied at times by the loneliness of the daughter track, Gross writes, in a rare moment of black humor:

I know that at the end of my mother’s life I felt isolated in my plight, especially compared to colleagues being feted with showers and welcomed back to work with oohs and aahs at new baby pictures. I was tempted, out of pure small-mindedness, to put on my desk a photo of my mother, slumped in her wheelchair.

On PEI by 2036 there will be 12,000 widows aged 85 or older.

I will be 86 myself if I live that long.

My poor mum right now is an invalid and quite dotty aged 83. She has the benefit of my late Da's pension. If we did not have that.......

I have no magic plan - but I do know this - we cannot just hope for the best. The aging of our population will be an immense drain on the public purse, the private purse and on the few productive people left to care for us all.

We have never faced such a situation before - so we cannot know what to do now.

But we must talk - we have to talk about this in families and in our community. Only by talking about this enough will some answers emerge.

If we say nothing....

The ratio of the number of people aged 20 to 64 to those aged 65 and over will fall from about 4.4:1 in 2010 to 2.2:1 in 2050. The number of people receiving basic federal pensions will almost double over the next 20 years, from 4.7 million in 2010 to 9.3 million by 2030.

This key statistic is the one that we all have to be mindful of. Never in the history of mankind have we lived in a society with more old than young. Our society is based on the the normal of the old being a few who fade away.

On PEI - this will be even more extreme. For not only do we have more old but look at our young today. Do most of them look up to the task of reinventing our society? Have we prepared them properly?

So long as PEI lives on the welfare of the Feds we are in trouble. To be ready for what is to come - we have no choice but to aim to be a truly resilient society.

That means an economy based on the small in a network. An economic model based on who we really are. Not one where we wait for the next 30 job phone centre or for our weeks on the road.

With an economy based on the small and one based on having a local food and energy system - we can do OK - I think better than OK - for many young will want to come here and be part of this.

So now is the time for us to look at the real forces that affect us.

Ask what does it mean to have 50% of the population over 60?

Ask what does it mean to have all our taxes consumer by health care?

Ask what it means for Islanders to pay the same total for oil as we pay in taxes?

If we all can talk about this - then we can stop simply hoping that it will be all right. Then we can use the native ingenuity of Islanders to find ways out of this

I have every confidence that if have the right conversation that Islanders can do this.

Meanwhile, Apple has shown us what it will do to get around the need for carriers. What do the carriers provide? Access to cell networks based on certain protocols used by each carrier, mostly permitting voice but having some data capacity.

But the FCC is about to open up the so-called ‘white space’ to WiFi technology, permitting signals to penetrate walls and carry over much wider distances. It provides a way to get free, high speed broadband Internet access to large parts of the US. It may become very easy to access the Internet without needing any cell access – no need to access the cell networks of any carrier for data.

Think about watching streaming movies or TV from anywhere? That is the sort of data that can be pushed through.

As for voice, what has Apple just come out with, that it is putting on every mobile device and possible every hardware device it has – FaceTalk, the ability to carry on voice conversations with video over WiFi! It is based on an open standard that may appear on almost every mobile device.

So then why would you need the cell phone carriers at all? I could do everything a cell phone does for less money and with greater speed using an iPod Touch. Why would Apple need to work with ATT ever again? Heck, it could even deploy some ‘White-Fi’ networks itself and circumvent Verizon totally. Would I pay a small monthly fee – say $10 – to access the Apple WhiteFi network, one that would me to do voice, data, movies, music, etc. from almost anywhere? Yep.

I would expect cell phone carriers to try and be part of the deployment of these technologies, but their relationship with their customers will be quite different than now, where they pretty much control all access.

Apple may have just demonstrated how customers can route around the phone carriers, getting around their slow data systems and their fragmented marketplaces where the companies really care more about their own profit than their customer.

I can get everything I might possible need for a mobile device simply through WiFi access. With WiFi access pretty much ubiquitous, why would I want cell, which would be slower and more costly.

In a few years, it may be very likely that the use of WiFi ‘White-Fi’ systems will negate the need for ANY cell phone carrier, at least the need for the specific handsets to use on specific networks. These open standards would negate much of the mostly unfair competitive advantage of the wireless companies. Selling hardware for specific access to specific networks will be a thing of the past. We will buy the hardware we like and it will be able to access the networks that we need to provide us with the data and content we want.

The iPod Touch would be able to do more with less cost than any smartphone now sold by a carrier.

And then we will be able to use the devices without ANY relationship with a wireless carrier. I’d like that.

Expect some huge lobbying efforts by these companies as they try and hold onto the last vestiges of their business models.

I think Richard is seeing something here - with OS5 and soon Mountain Lion - Apple users will not be tied anymore to their Phone carriers.

The adding regional Wifi could put the Apple users outside the reach of the ISP's.

Interesting times

Specifically, in early 2010 austerity economics — the insistence that governments should slash spending even in the face of high unemployment — became all the rage in European capitals. The doctrine asserted that the direct negative effects of spending cuts on employment would be offset by changes in “confidence,” that savage spending cuts would lead to a surge in consumer and business spending, while nations failing to make such cuts would see capital flight and soaring interest rates. If this sounds to you like something Herbert Hoover might have said, you’re right: It does and he did.

Now the results are in — and they’re exactly what three generations’ worth of economic analysis and all the lessons of history should have told you would happen. The confidence fairy has failed to show up: none of the countries slashing spending have seen the predicted private-sector surge. Instead, the depressing effects of fiscal austerity have been reinforced by falling private spending.

Furthermore, bond markets keep refusing to cooperate. Even austerity’s star pupils, countries that, like Portugal and Ireland, have done everything that was demanded of them, still face sky-high borrowing costs. Why? Because spending cuts have deeply depressed their economies, undermining their tax bases to such an extent that the ratio of debt to G.D.P., the standard indicator of fiscal progress, is getting worse rather than better.

Meanwhile, countries that didn’t jump on the austerity train — most notably, Japan and the United States — continue to have very low borrowing costs, defying the dire predictions of fiscal hawks.

Now, not everything has gone wrong. Late last year Spanish and Italian borrowing costs shot up, threatening a general financial meltdown. Those costs have now subsided, amid general sighs of relief. But this good news was actually a triumph of anti-austerity: Mario Draghi, the new president of the European Central Bank, brushed aside the inflation-worriers and engineered a large expansion of credit, which was just what the doctor ordered.

So what will it take to convince the Pain Caucus, the people on both sides of the Atlantic who insist that we can cut our way to prosperity, that they are wrong?

Time to think anew about the role of banks. We bow down to their power because we think that there is no alternative - but there is and it is us!

Today banks are no longer in the business of lending money to productive efforts. Today banks have no skin in the game of the communities that they say they serve.

They are isolated from what happens in the real world.

I don't think that we can bring them back - for I think that they are isolated in the same way that all bureaucracies become isolated at the end of the cycle.

All bureaucracies in the end serve themselves first.

But credit is an ancient practice long rooted not in a bureaucracy but in communities. The early exchanges were clubs of merchants who used a central ledger. Even the lowly General Store worked as a hyper local credit extender - it invested in its local community.

The modern world was financed into being not by banks as we know them today but by groups of people who used their money to grow the place and the economy that they lived in. They were linked in totally to the results. They had a vested interest in what happened.

The web is starting to offer us many of the social mechanisms that merchants and general stores used to have. We are seeing tools that can help us mobilize our own money to back people and projects that directly affect us.

There is a lot of money in play here.

Every year $90 million of PEI's savings leave the Island and go to the Casino that is now the world markets and so funds the bonus pool of the bankers.

What if we only diverted 10% of this to investing at home? We surely could not do worse that putting it in the Casino that is the market now.

Time to try a few experiments here where we invest in each other - invest in work that Islanders do that bring benefit to us all.

Watch this space

Crisis Lessons

“The lesson to be learned from Iceland’s crisis is that if other countries think it’s necessary to write down debts, they should look at how successful the 110 percent agreement was here,” said Thorolfur Matthiasson, an economics professor at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik, in an interview. “It’s the broadest agreement that’s been undertaken.”

Without the relief, homeowners would have buckled under the weight of their loans after the ratio of debt to incomes surged to 240 percent in 2008, Matthiasson said.

Iceland’s $13 billion economy, which shrank 6.7 percent in 2009, grew 2.9 percent last year and will expand 2.4 percent this year and next, the Paris-based OECD estimates. The euro area will grow 0.2 percent this year and the OECD area will expand 1.6 percent, according to November estimates.

Housing, measured as a subcomponent in the consumer price index, is now only about 3 percent below values in September 2008, just before the collapse. Fitch Ratings last week raised Iceland to investment grade, with a stable outlook, and said the island’s “unorthodox crisis policy response has succeeded.”

People Vs Markets

Iceland’s approach to dealing with the meltdown has put the needs of its population ahead of the markets at every turn.

Once it became clear back in October 2008 that the island’s banks were beyond saving, the government stepped in, ring-fenced the domestic accounts, and left international creditors in the lurch. The central bank imposed capital controls to halt the ensuing sell-off of the krona and new state-controlled banks were created from the remnants of the lenders that failed.

As Greeks buckle under the strain of meeting the demands of the Bankers - Iceland offers surely a better alternative?

I cannot see any way that Greece can live with what they have now - can you?

The province of P.E.I. has chopped $500,000 from its capital budget for upgrading information technology for schools.

Parents are asking to have the money reinstated. Maureen Kerr, a parent and an IT consultant who works in Island schools, told CBC News Friday the equipment students are working with is already inadequate.

"They had very little storage space. They were often quite slow, so the kids would be running to class to try to get on the good ones," said Kerr.

At the computer lab at Prince Street School in Charlottetown there are 24 machines. They are government hand-me-downs. Every few years, they get replaced with more recent government hand-me-downs.

The $500,000 in the budget was meant to provide faster internet access and smart TVs for schools. Kerr said it's not an area where cuts can be afforded.

"It's just 21st century skills that they have to have in the world," she said.

We can complain - but can we do better than that? I am thinking why have they done this? The answer is the demands of the Health Care budget. Without a real effort at prevention and from us to take back control of our health - these kind of cuts are inevitable.

Health Care costs today are abut 78% of PEI's total taxes. When I arrived here in 1995 they were 35%.

In 2015 if they continue to grow at this rate they will be 100%.

So Minister Doug Currie is absolutely correct when he said this weekend that we have to look to prevention.

This will be hard to do - as we all grew up believing that health was a government and not a personal role.

But in the meantime what about our kids in school?

There is no money in Government. They have to cut the easy things to cut and this is easy. So what can we do?

I think that we as a community can come together and work to help our kids. There are many of us with computers and knowledge. There are people like Mo Kerr who are good at teaching this to kids.

Just as we have to take charge of our health cannot we start to take charge of the education of our kids too? Can we not step up and act as a community?

262,000 views in 4 days!

Will Holland College have the balls to do this?

A woman who was 45 in 2010, earning $43,500 a year, will pay taxes that will reach a value of $87,000 by the time she retires, assuming the money is invested at an annual interest rate 2 percentage points above inflation, according to the Urban Institute analysis. But on average, the government will then spend $275,000 on her medical care. The average is somewhat lower for men, because women live longer.

When only a few people were old - the system could work but when the majority of us will be old this is what faces us as a society.

We have to start talking about this as a community - government can only follow. Any politician that says that we have to find another way or to cut will be voted out right now - but within 5 years the PEI Health budget will exceed all the tax revenues of the Province.

We see cuts to the School IT budget now. Imagine you were making budget decisions on the 5th floor? What would you have to cut in the next 5 years?

There is a way out.

The illness that we suffer from mainly are chronic illnesses such a Type 2 Diabetes, heart disease and cancer. These can be prevented and mitigated mainly by changes in what we eat and how we live.

There is a way forward in prevention. It will be hard work - for who finds changing these things easy? But what is the alternative?

We live in a society enamored by passive entertainment and increasingly invested in the virtual experience. Fewer of us have jobs that show us the tangible results of our efforts. Rarer still are full claim on a project or creative license in our work. It leaves a gap, I think, in how we live – in how we exercise the innate physical and creative abilities that make us human.

Although we tend to think of our pre-Neolithic ancestors as living a life stuck in the dirt with no sense of the arts or any other “refinement,” we’re far off course in that assumption. Artistry is indeed an anthropological indicator of modern behavior, but evidence of these inclinations date back tens of thousands of years before the Agricultural Revolution. Our Paleolithic ancestors were creating jewelry from eggshells and bone fragments. They were sewing clothes with animal sinew. They formed vessels and wove baskets. They created paints and dyes. They chiseled spear heads from metal so brittle few of us can even imagine the deftness required. They meticulously whittled shafts for the most aerodynamic, accurate spears. They designed vast stretches of nuanced cave art.

As anthropologists suggest, these inclinations toward craft and artistry were selected for. They increased the survival chances of individuals and their communities. A skilled spear maker added obvious value. Yet those who could design jewelry or other adornment introduced “material metaphors” and “social technologies” that enhanced kinship relationships and community identity as well as expanded the terms of inter-band negotiation.

Artistry then was usable if not practical. Today, Western society has largely segregated art to an aesthetic corner. It may represent life but doesn’t intersect much with it. However, individuals still practice crafts handed down to them by family or community members. Likewise, many traditional societies continue to pass down the art forms and crafts as “collective wisdom” that help define their distinctive cultures.

A recent study (PDF) conducted by the University of California Davis Center for Reducing Health Disparities recently highlighted “the link between traditional artistic practices and mental and physical health.” Although examining such an association isn’t a simple or clear cut task with the methods of standard research, interviews suggested traditional handicraft bears positive impact on measures like “interconnected mind-body awareness,” “spiritual and emotional growth; physical vigor; strengthening of personal and community identity; and mitigation of historical trauma” as well as therapeutic “distraction from illness” and “enhanced respect for elders.”

Dr. Sergio Aguilar-Gaxiola, director of the Center for Reducing Health Disparities, explains that several “protective factors” are at work here. The practice of traditional arts, particularly as they’re handed down within a cultural community, affirms “intergenerational involvement” and “community engagement.” As Amy Kitchener, executive director of the Alliance for California Traditional Arts, notes, cultural practices are “embedded in everyday life, in ceremonies and family rites of passage” for many traditional groups and have long played a meaningful role in the concept of personal wellness. According to the researchers, traditional handiwork also enhances more individual-based factors like “resilience” and “self-efficacy.”

The study, I think, underscores far more than the power of acculturation. Many of us partake in handicraft arts with only personal interest or perhaps familial, but not necessarily cultural affiliations. Nonetheless, there’s still a gratification that comes from its connection with tradition. We understand that we’re one in a long line of individuals who have practiced the art for decades, centuries, even millennia. The urge to create – what is useful and tangible – is deeply human. There’s something about it that releases stress and brings us back to center.

A brighter future awaits those of us who work now to go home to being who humans are designed to be. If we eat what we are designed to eat, inhabit our bodies and the world as we are designed to and live in social settings that we are designed to - we will be healthy and happy.

This applies to what we do. We are designed to make things - more as an artist or an artisan.

Our world today is far far away from this zone. We eat shit. We live indoors and we do nothing with our body. We live in relative social isolation and we work in slave conditions. And most is us make nothing.

I keep thinking of Dorothy trapped in OZ. All she had to do really to Go Home was to want to go there.

And you?

In the new research, scientists studied mice that are unable to make fatty acid synthase (FAS) in the intestine. FAS, an enzyme crucial for the production of lipids, is regulated by insulin, and people with diabetes have defects in FAS. Mice without the enzyme in the intestines develop chronic inflammation in the gut, a powerful predictor of diabetes.

"Diabetes may indeed start in your gut," says principal investigator Clay F. Semenkovich, MD. "When people become resistant to insulin, as happens when they gain weight, FAS doesn't work properly, which causes inflammation that, in turn, can lead to diabetes."

First author Xiaochao Wei, PhD, and Semenkovich, the Herbert S. Gasser Professor of Medicine, professor of cell biology and physiology and director of the Division of Endocrinology, Metabolism and Lipid Research, collaborated with specialists in gastroenterology and genome sciences to determine what happens in mice that can't make FAS in their intestines.

"The first striking thing we saw was that the mice began losing weight," says Wei, a research instructor in medicine. "They had diarrhea and other gastrointestinal symptoms, and when we looked closely at the tissue in the gut, we found a lot of inflammation."

Initially, the researchers thought that the mice became sick because of changes to the mix of microbes that naturally live in the gut, where they help digest food and synthesize vitamins.

In collaboration with Jeffrey I. Gordon, MD, director of the Center for Genome Sciences and Systems Biology at the School of Medicine, they looked more closely at gut microbes in the mice.

"The mice had substantial changes in their gut microbiome," Semenkovich says. "But it wasn't the composition of microbes in the gut that caused the problems."

Instead, Wei says, the mice got sick because of a defect in fatty acid synthase. The mice without fatty acid synthase had lost the protective lining of mucus in the intestines that separates the microbes from direct exposure to cells. This allowed bacteria to penetrate otherwise healthy cells in the gut, making the mice sick.

In a further collaboration with Nicholas O. Davidson, MD, director of the Division of Gastroenterology, the researchers found gastrointestinal effects resembling some features of inflammatory bowel disease. Other investigators studying humans with ulcerative colitis had previously made the unexplained observation that colon biopsies from these patients have low amounts of fatty acid synthase.

"Fatty acid synthase is required to keep that mucosal layer intact," Wei says. "Without it, bad bacteria invade cells in the colon and the small intestine, creating inflammation, and that, in turn, contributes to insulin resistance and diabetes."

Inflammation and insulin resistance reinforce each other. Inflammatory substances can cause insulin resistance and inhibit the production of insulin, both of which interfere with the regulation of blood sugar. In turn, insulin resistance is known to promote inflammation.

Further study showed that the ability to build the thin, but important, layer of mucosal cells was hindered by faulty FAS.

That the gut is so important to the development of diabetes makes sense because many people with the condition not only have faulty FAS, but they also frequently develop gastrointestinal difficulties, Semenkovich says.

"Abdominal pain and diarrhea are some of the most common problems we see in people with diabetes," he says. "We could only connect these 'dots' because other experts at the university could help us link what we observed in these mice to what occurs in patients with diabetes and inflammatory bowel disease," Semenkovich says.

Semenkovich and Wei say much more study is needed, but they say that FAS and a key component of the intestinal mucosa called Muc2 may be potential targets for diabetes therapy. They now plan to study people with diabetes to see whether FAS is altered in a similar way, producing damage to the mucosal layer in the intestines.

We are closing in now on the breakthrough that will transform health care. We now know for instance that ulcers are not related to stress but to our gut flora. There is a growing body of work that is showing the linkage between aurtism and gut flora.

Now we are seeing the link to diabetes.

So then we have to ask what are are we doing to cause so many to have such a poor ecology in their gut? We know the answer to that as well - a diet too high in grains.

The University is Dead – Welcome to the New Education Movement
Universities are based on a model thousands of years old, ridiculously expensive (WHY?), inefficiently time consuming, and generalized top-down for the average student of subject A, B, or C, i.e., here’s what we got, aim it at the students and you’ll hit a good lot of them with a shotgun blast of education! Granted medicine, welding, and other hands-on practices for now remain tied to this model, but for the rest of us, the market is shifting in a big way.

The New Education Movement.
Pay next to nothing, learn efficiently at your own pace, focus on what you want/need and enrich with electives of your choosing. Of course there have been plenty of online degree granting programs out there for a while, but they haven’t been taken all that seriously, and those of us with a traditional four-year (or more) university-based degree have kinda scoffed at them from our ivory tower of, well, let’s see… debt and unemployment?

Now the degree game is changing too, and programs like Udacity and MITx are getting into the certificate-granting side of things. Ahhh, diplomas. How quaint.

Here are more than a few more points to consider:
Can a Free Online Education Land You a Job?
Coverage of MITx going live.
[SINGULARITY HUB ARTICLE]

MIT Announces MITx Education Initiative
This AND of course the OpenCourseWare program. Free MIT syllabi – that’s right.
[MITx - MIT OCW]

The Khan Academy
Sal Khan’s rapidly growing YouTube education revolution. Because data.
[KHAN ACADEMY - WIRED ARTICLE ON KHAN ACADEMY]

Apple’s iPad Aims to Revolutionize Education
Article from CIO
[CIO]

Udacity
Sebastian Thrun, tenured Stanford CS professor, quits to start online education company.
[UDACITY - ZDNET ON UDACITY]

Why You Should Root for College to Go Online
Atlantic article on that.
[ATLANTIC]

Academia.edu
Think the academic journal cartels are an outmoded impediment to getting research out in the world and accelerating scientific development? Yes. How about 1 million-plus researchers publishing their work openly online?
[ACADEMIA.EDU]

DIY U
Anya Kamenetz’s online presence – promotes ideas from her book “DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education.”
[DIY U BLOG - DIY U AT AMAZON]

P2PU
A resource much more serious that its name sounds when you say it out loud. To quote: “Learn Anything With Your Peers. It’s Online and Totally Free.”
[P2PU]

If you don't believe that the university model is under terminal threat - delve in here

Perhaps the most debilitating consequence of the euro zone’s economic downturn and its debt-driven austerity crusade has been the soaring rate of youth unemployment. Spain’s jobless rate for people ages 16 to 24 is approaching 50 percent. Greece’s is 48 percent, and Portugal’s and Italy’s, 30 percent. Here in Britain, the rate is 22.3 percent, the highest since such data began being collected in 1992. (The comparable rate for Americans is 18 percent.)

The lack of opportunity is feeding a mounting alienation and anger among young people across Europe — animus that threatens to poison the aspirations of a generation and has already served as a wellspring for a number of violent protests in European cities from Athens to London. And new economic data on Wednesday, showing much of Europe in the doldrums or recession, does little to bolster hopes for a better jobs picture anytime soon.

Something has to happen with this pressure - youth unemployment and despair at this level will have to lead to a big change.

Riots will certainly continue - but what might be the big change in society? For the jobs are not coming back. They will get even more scarce.

If the work needs human hands it will go to China and if it can be done by a machine - such as check out our groceries - it will be done by a machine. Not even the last resort service McJobs are safe.

We are seeing a process that was last seen in the late 1700's when a new agriculture based on machines or large scale animal production that coud be shipped to London by canal and so capital meant that land owners no longer needed their workforce. Millions were forced off the land and went to the cities.

Coincidentally, factories also based on capital sprung up and the displaced people became over time the new industrial workforce.

I think we will see the reverse of this now. There is no hope in the cities for the young. But they can come to a place like PEI and set up and grow food and make things as artisans.

You may say that they are ready to do this - but the pioneers are here already.

Who but the elite can afford to live in the big city anymore as well?

The Tide of urbanism could be receding

Huge numbers of middle-class people are now able to make a living specializing in something they enjoy, including creating niche products for other middle-class people who have enough money to indulge in buying things like high-end beef jerky.

Economically, this was an expected outcome. The hot field of happiness economics argues, rather persuasively, that once people reach some level of comfort, they are willing — even eager — to trade in potential earnings at a lucrative but uninspiring job for less (but comfortable) pay at more satisfying work. Some research by the Chicago economist Erik Hurst suggests that half of entrepreneurs start businesses as much to pursue happiness as to make money.

When it comes to profit and satisfaction, craft business is showing how American manufacturing can compete in the global economy. Many of the manufacturers who are thriving in the United States (they exist, I swear!) have done so by avoiding direct competition with low-cost commodity producers in low-wage nations. Instead, they have scrutinized the market and created customized products for less price-sensitive customers. Facebook and Apple, Starbucks and the Boston Beer Company (which makes Sam Adams lager) show that people who identify and meet untapped needs can create thousands of jobs and billions in wealth. As our economy recovers, there will be nearly infinite ways to meet custom needs at premium prices.

The Maker Economy is emerging - China owns the mass market - we have no choice but to go down this road.

How do we help our students establish themselves as a “node” in a broad, global network of creativity and learning? Shouldn’t that be one of the fundamental questions that drives our work in schools right now?

The answers start, as always, with our own willingness and ability to go there. But they also start with transparently asking the big questions in our schools and communities. In light of the changes that the Web is bringing to our learning lives:

• What do we mean by learning?
• What does it mean to be educated?
• What is our value in a world filled with content and teachers?
• How do we best help students become patient, self-sufficient, sensitive, intelligent learners?

And finally this from George a couple of weeks ago:

When the education system is synchronized with the interests and passions of learners, the process is invigorating and tremendously motivating. However, when learners and educators have to fight the existing education system in order to learn and teach, it’s time for dramatic change.

Too many of us are fighting the system to learn and teach. We’re out of synch. If we’re not having these conversations in our communities, we really need to be.

All our lives it has been normal to have a centralized institution that is at the heart of what we need. This of course includes education but also health - energy - work and credit.

This worked quite well in the era of the mass market - but increasingly these institutions do not work for us - in fact they often work against us. AND they cannot be reformed.

But we can build a new network around them and is not this taking place?

This also offers many of us a new opportunity for work as well. My grand kids will need some one to host a conversation after they have done some math on the Khan Academy or as adults at MIT.

You and I need a host right now to help us change our eating habits to help us be healthy.

Many of us cannot cook - if we want to eat better we need help in a safe way to learn how to do this - Community Kitchen meets AA?

Tonight I go to a new "school" where I am going to learn how to run an urban farm - really intensive veggies - the group will help each other for none of us has done this yet. The value is in the hosting

What are we going to do about our kids at school right now on PEI who are shut out of the web? There is no budget for this so we will have to find a way to do this.

We don't have to get cross or be rude - we just need to start taking responsibility ourselves.

Tourism Charlottetown Inc. won't be running the interpretive centre about Confederation at Founder's Hall this year.

Tourism Charlottetown president Doug Newson said the interpretive centre that walks people through the history of Confederation is in need of a major overhaul.

"I think that the reality was that every product kind of has a shelf life. And we looked at it and said, with technology today, it's going to need a significant upgrade or renewal," said Newson.

If we are serious abut the value of Local Food on the economy and health of the Province - it is time to think about how this space can be used to give local food a real push.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), one of the world's top-rated universities, has announced its first free course which can be studied and assessed completely online.

An electronics course, beginning in March, will be the first prototype of an online project, known as MITx.

The interactive course is designed to be fully automated, with successful students receiving a certificate.

The US university says it wants MITx to "shatter barriers to education".

This ground-breaking scheme represents a significant step forward in the use of technology to deliver higher education.

Automated university

There are already online degree courses, but the MIT proposal is unusual in that it is inviting students anywhere in the world, without charge or prior entrance requirements, to study for a certificate carrying the MIT brand.

MIT wants to experiment with how much can be taught through online courses Pic: Jon Fildes

MIT, along with many other leading universities, makes its course material available online, but the MITx scheme takes this a step further by creating an accredited course specifically for online students.

So now it begins - a few top universities will go for the world's best students. In time they will discover how to do this well - and then why should you attend a university that demands that you live on campus - attend class on their schedule - with profs that are not the best for 10 times more cost.

OK this is some time in the future but not that long and it is inevitable.

University as a Place-based system is going to die as news organizations based on a printing press will die and for the same reasons

Today, if I were to design a program as an alternative to formal higher education, it would have four parts:

The Effective Self - Develop the habits and practices of successful people, understand the depths of who you are and what you want to contribute.  Actualize yourself.

Hackademics - Practice the basic and advanced skills required to participate in today’s information economy.  From Math and Programming, to Design and Communication, you’ll quickly pick up skills above and beyond any college curriculum.  

Common Experiences - Share adventures around the world, and visit pockets of great people and innovation across the globe.  Have jobs and experiences that connect you with both the world’s elite and the rest of humanity.  

Human Understanding - Learn the equivalent of a liberal arts education, developing a foundation of knowledge that bridges cultures and fosters meaningful connections across disciplines and boundaries. 

Back before Martin Luther - it was conventional wisdom that we would be dammed if we did not get absolution from the church.

Even for those that accepted Luther's idea at first had no idea of what they could do to be saved by themselves.

We too have totally accepted that we cannot get an education without the institution - so this advice is both timely and helpful. One day it will be commonplace

This is the new emerging food system - local food aggregated - sold direct.

If we on PEI bought 15% of all out food from our local farmers markets, we would tip the system.

A goal to shoot for. How much of your food bill do you spend buying food direct? 3 years ago for me it was maybe 5% Now it is 85%.

I spend less and eat better - it is not that hard

To see why a 4%-5% economic growth rate isn't sustainable, read on.

In the meantime, if a 4%-5% long-term economic growth rate isn't sustainable, what is?

1%?

Nope.

Wikipedia

Human population.

Even a 1% growth rate sustained over thousands of years would result in inconceivably humongous numbers.

Even a 0.1% growth rate would probably doom us in the end.

Basically, given the reality of finite space and resources, the only growth that is truly sustainable over the long-term is no growth.

So that's something to think about over your coffee.

Hard to refute this isn't it