Never let a good crisis go to waste. That is the adage that universities should take to heart as they confront the threats of the Trump administration. Because the reality is that universities have been lost for decades and require dramatic changes if they want to survive at all in the future. Here are a series of major issues that universities urgently need to address:Frontal teaching, high stakes testing, even traditional essays are all outmoded. The rapid progress of AI is making many of t...

Early next year I will be giving a talk on the challenges and opportunities arising from the current transformation of economy and society by technology and technology enabled globalization. I am rapidly realizing though that I don’t have nearly enough time to chase down all the primary research to validate (or invalidate) some of my thinking. Here are some of the questions I am most interested in: 1. What is the foundational math of a Basic Income Guarantee? That is comparing some of the cur...

Halloween is coming up. But if you really want to scare yourself, I suggest you read this interview with an associate director at the CDC about the “end of antibiotics.” Essentially we are not only seeing more bacteria that are resistant to absolutely every medication we have but these bacteria are now spreading outside of hospitals and are more rapidly sharing their genetic antibacterial immunity with other much more common bacteria. In the meantime there are no (as in zero) new antibiotics ...

As previously announced, I have self-published my MIT PhD thesis. Today’s post is about the first paper, which is titled “Information Technology and Firm Size” which – as the rather plain title suggests – examines statistical evidence of the impact of the increased use of IT on firm size. Before starting any analysis of data it helps to have a hypothesis and so the question is should we expect to see larger or smaller firms? Unfortunately, there are many different ways that computers might im...