The Industry Standard is running a long feature article about univirsities pimping their names by offering courses through “online universities.” One hopes that a Duke MBA obtained through an online course doesn’t count the same as one obtained by actually attending classes and interacting with other students. Actually, what really bothers me about all this is the idea of higher education falling into the hands of for-profit companies. The quickest route to profit is attracting more students, and handing out more degrees. It’s a slippery slope toward turning university degrees (perhaps even from prestigious universities) into worthless pieces of paper.
Microsoft’s showed a profit of 2.19 billion dollars on 5.38 billion dollars in revenue for the last quarters. That’s a 41% profit margin for the monopoly, if you’re counting.
Here’s a story in the local paper about the project I worked on for the better part of 1999. Unfortunately, I wasn’t interviewed.
The Wall Street Journal has an article about email killing conversation. If the author thinks email is bad, wait until she tries out instant messaging.
Hey, they made AltaVista look even more like all of the other search engines. Enemies of distinctiveness rejoice!
A survey revealed that a lot of doctors are willing to lie to HMOs to get them to authorize tests and procedures that they feel their patients need. I wish someone would publish a list of those doctors so that I could switch to one of them.