Open-education partners hope to save students $10 million by 2015 Taking aim at the high cost of commercial textbooks, Rice University-based publisher OpenStax College today announced a partnership with open-education pioneer Lumen Learning that is projected to save students $10 million over the next two years by facilitating the adoption of free, online textbooks by colleges and universities. The new partnership will combine OpenStax College's free textbooks with Lumen Learning's support services to help higher education institutions and faculty members successfully transition to using readily available "open-educational resources" (OER). "Although a growing number of free, high-quality educational materials are available, many instructors and academic leaders are uncertain about how to begin taking advantage of these resources," said David Harris, editor-in-chief of OpenStax College. OpenStax College provides peer-reviewed, open-education textbooks that meet the scope and sequence requirements of many college courses.
60+ Free Books on Big Data, Data Science, Data Mining, Machine Learning, Python, R, and more Here is a great collection of eBooks written on the topics of Data Science, Business Analytics, Data Mining, Big Data, Machine Learning, Algorithms, Data Science Tools, and Programming Languages for Data Science. By Brendan Martin, (LearnDataSci). Pulled from the web, here is a great collection of eBooks. While every single book in this list is provided for free, if you find any particularly helpful consider purchasing the printed version. The authors spent a great deal of time putting these resources together and I’m sure they would all appreciate the support!
Privacy on the Blockchain Blockchains are a powerful technology, as regular readers of the blog already likely agree. They allow for a large number of interactions to be codified and carried out in a way that greatly increases reliability, removes business and political risks associated with the process being managed by a central entity, and reduces the need for trust. They create a platform on which applications from different companies and even of different types can run together, allowing for extremely efficient and seamless interaction, and leave an audit trail that anyone can check to make sure that everything is being processed correctly. However, when I and others talk to companies about building their applications on a blockchain, two primary issues always come up: scalability and privacy.
Open Data Study Substantial social and economic gains can be made from opening government data to the public. The combination of geographic, budget, demographic, services, education, and other data, publicly available in an open format on the web, promises to improve services as well as create future economic growth. This approach has been recently pioneered by governments in the United States and the United Kingdom (with the launch of two web portals, www.data.gov and www.data.gov.uk respectively) inspired in part by applications developed by grassroots civil society organizations ranging from bicycle accidents maps to sites breaking down how and where tax money is spent. In the UK, the data.gov.uk initiative was spearheaded by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. The report finds that in both the U.S. and U.K., a three-tiered drive was at play. The three groups of actors who were crucial to the projects' success were:
TheBigClean If you'd like to help organise a Big Clean event near you, please add your name and location to the list below! We will then add this to the website www.bigclean.org Planning will be discussed on the Big Clean list. Berlin Dublin strategy: textbook costs to zero Holding a whiteboard, the University of Maryland, College Park students scrawled their complaints and posed for a picture. "My name is Justin and I spent $114 on ONE textbook," a student wrote. "My name is Jeff and I spent $736 on textbooks," wrote another. The images, posted online by the Student Government Association in recent months, are designed to highlight the rapid rise in the price of college textbooks over the past decade. This semester, the University System of Maryland is exploring ways to bring that cost to zero with "open-source" electronic textbooks — the latest experiment in changing the way students in Maryland and across the nation are taught.
The Reputation Economy - Reputation UK It determines the best opportunities to grow your business, whether your bank will lend you money, whether your landlord will accept you as a tenant, which employers will hire you and how much your customers will pay you. In The Reputation Economy, Michael Fertik, CEO of Reputation.com, explains how you or your business can optimize your digital reputation to succeed and prosper in a world where your reputation is as valuable as the cash on your corporate or personal balance sheet. Maximize the value of your real and deserved reputation. Who should hold the keys to our data? In March 2007, Nick Pearce was running the thinktank the Institute for Public Policy Research. That month, one of his young interns, Amelia Zollner, was killed by a lorry while cycling in London. Amelia was a bright, energetic Cambridge graduate, who worked at University College London. She was waiting at traffic lights when a lorry crushed her against a fence and dragged her under its wheels. Two years later, in March 2009, Pearce was head of prime minister Gordon Brown’s Number 10 policy unit.