First Blog

Maybe a trifle depressing... If our students entered college with anything at all in their heads, that neon sign on their foreheads blinking “Program Me” would be turned off. The essence of tabula rasa . It is one thing to come to college with an open mind, quite another to come with an empty mind. The stupid make the easiest converts. In governmental public education policy, we see only the curriculum, class size, evaluation merry-go-round. From failure to failure and back again. Personal anonymity? You ain’t got it no more.   Everything  known about you floats in a data ocean , accessible to anyone - for a fee. Years from now, this time will be referred to as when the New Stupid triumphed in America.

I have long, as in long-in-the-tooth, tried to determine changes in the American society over several decades of observing. Today’s topic about is about one of them, lies and liars.   First, technology dominates the world scene, but reliance on knowledge has been diminished by instantly recovered resources. “Let’s look it up on the WIKI,” is a statement we often hear and rely upon.   Me too. So many say “I’ll look it up if I need it,” not understanding if they don’t know (of) it, they will not know to look it up.   Many machines dominate our world, most of which we cannot understand.   Repair your TV?   Impossible.   This skill was lost nearly 50 years ago.   However, not technological in any way is a rarely mentioned advent of all large civilizations, is that of large numbers and anonymity and loss of community. Anonymity allows countless outrages against us – from terror to thievery, and even to perversion.   Indeed, anonymity al...

Everyone these days is flying up to the cloud, for storage of files (dropbox, onedrive, etc). for transmission of information, for communication.  Yet, I am suspicious.  When posting information to one of these free or even private clouds, there is an organization behind the service, often a free service.  No service is in business to simply "give" to the client a valuable portal toward information transmission of any kind. Once a file is up there on the cloud, someone has access, someone wants to know what you are doing, someone wishes to mine the information for advantage.  Someone wants to and needs to pay their electric bill.  Information must be exchanged for cash, influence, or other value. There is a consequence of payment, whether it be so benign as to determine products that may be of interest, to understand confidential aspects of your life, your family, your company, or your government. Private servers are subject to hacking. Public servers are th...

Anonymous Lost.   Does anonymity even exist any more?  I prepared a survey for my students on how they are viewing my course so far.  Simple innocuous questions they are.  And it is really anonymous. But will any of them actually believe it is anonymous ?  With so much data piracy, scanning, recording, sneaking and peeking these days, the whole concept of anonymous may be vanishing. This variation on John Milton's (1608-1674) , Paradise Lost is simply an update to modern times.  Clearly paradise has been lost, but it may be that anonymity is (going, going) gone as well.  I use to believe I could live under the radar, thinking whatever I said would be too unimportant for anyone to take note of.  But today with big data and unlimited storage, I feel that whatever I write will be scanned or read with an eye to key words - most revealing about the message. Hopefully, I am remain under the radar with my "nobody" status well in tact. I ...