Online education in India

You might find this article in Businessweek interesting. Quoting the article:

Online education addresses some of India's shortcomings: a dismal education system, limited reach, and a severe paucity of faculty. "Even students from smaller engineering colleges feel they can now access the same courses our top students are exposed to," says Kanan Moudgaliya, head of the distance learning initiative at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Mumbai.

The efforts to boost graduate education have begun right at the top. India is booming, and as new industries such as retail, real estate, and infrastructure grow, the talent crunch grows, too. In 2003, New Delhi made education a priority, boosting spending from 3% of gross domestic product to 5%. Upgrading the quality of higher education was key to its agenda. That's when the IITs and the leading business schools went online with their courses. There's both Web-based education, which puts course material online for students to download, and there's virtual learning ...

Peer to Peer traffic growth on the Internet

This picture is worth a thousand words ... taken from this presentation.

Graceful E-mail Obfuscation

The web site "A List Apart" has many articles of interest to the SIS community. This article talks abut the "human" problems arising with hiding e-mail addresses on the web to escape spam, and a potential solution (in some technical detail).

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End of analog cellphones

After the recent post about the "beginning of the end of paper", this news item about the imminent demise of analog cellular telephony is timely. The Advanced Mobile Phone System (AMPS), the first generation (1G) cellular telephone technology, was rolled out in Chicago around 1983 and has lasted for roughly 25 years.

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Beginning of the end of paper?

This article in the NY Times has been a topic of some discussion in the hallways at SIS. And, it comes with this cool graphic:

Quoting the article:

After rising steadily in the 1980s and ’90s, worldwide paper consumption per capita has plateaued in recent years. In the richest countries, consumption fell 6 percent from 2000 to 2005, from 531 to 502 pounds a person. The data bolsters the view of experts like Mr. Kahle who say paper is becoming passé.

Businesses like Fujitsu and Hewlett-Packard that focus on transforming print documents into digital data are beginning to exploit a largely untapped market.

A paperless world isn’t automatically a boon for the environment, though. While these digital toys reduce dependence on one resource, they increase it on another: energy. Some devices are always plugged in, eating electricity even when not in use, and gobbling huge amounts of power when they are. Others, like digital cameras and laptop computers, use electricity while they are recharging.

And the shift might not happen as fast as some technology gurus predict. The paperless office, which some experts had said would be the norm by the 1990s, has so far failed to materialize. Employees are reckless about printing long e-mail messages, reports and memos, largely because the company picks up the bill for the laser printers, photocopiers, ink and paper.

But at home, where printers are slow, noisy and devour expensive ink cartridges, people are more cautious about hitting the “print” button. What little paper comes into the home — receipts, bills, invitations — can be scanned and then shredded. Filing cabinets can be emptied, the data kept, the paper gone.

So is this a boon for personal archives or not?

Offshoring Not As Big A Deal As Many Believe

You might find this item interesting. Basically, the article points to some reports saying that this is less of an issue than many claim it to be.

12 Crackpot Ideas...

This article from Infoworld talks about 12 ideas that could transform the enterprise. Included are the semantic web, e-books, desktop web applications, and AI - not to mention the "total information awareness"  idea from the DoD.

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