democratization

The digital age has made what was was once obscure visible. In ways we never could before, we can quantify the world -- make it knowable to us, comprehensible to us -- by gathering data and identifying patterns and generally converting experience into information. Read More »

There has been enormous talk over the past few years of open data and what it can do for society, but proponents have largely come to admit: data is not democratizing in itself. This topic is hotly debated, and a nice summary of the viewpoints is available in this PDF containing articles by noted experts. Read More »

An emerging form of scholarship is getting a running start at McMaster, with strong support from a forward-looking couple who had a special understanding of the power of learning. Read More »

Most people I work with in medicine have never heard of GitHub . For the unfamiliar, GitHub is an online repository, which is an essential tool used by computer programmers to store their programming code.  It has a number of virtues, including giving users the ability to track multiple versions of their code... Read More »

Juliana Rotich, a speaker at Design Indaba 2014, has a remarkable eye. Show her a map of undersea broadband cables connecting to Africa, and she points out that they still follow the sea routes that helped make Africa a continent of colonies not so many decades ago. Read More »

The new darling of the online educational community is Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The example which figures most prominently in the popular imagination is the Khan Academy, though its founder says otherwise, noting that MOOCs are merely online transplantations of traditional courses, while Khan Academy offers something different. Read More »

During the Thursday morning keynote at HIMSS13, the national coordinator for health IT, Farzad Mostashari, MD focused on the nation's broken healthcare system, while delving into a range of topics. Read More »