With Coursera and MIT’s EdX programs paving the way, more colleges are jumping into the world of online learning. The project, known as a “massive open online course,” or “MOOC”, is profiled in the NYT: The mechanical MOOC will not be as tightly structured as the free courses now offered by leading universities like Harvard, Berkeley, […]

As the dust settles after the Pussy Riot show trial and the world of fair-weather activists moves on to the next fashionable Twitter-fueled cause, Via Meadia awaits some kind of definitive polling to tell us how Russians perceived the verdict.The Levada Center, a reliable non-governmental polling agency, did perform several polls in the runup to […]

Yesterday we reported that Japan’s Ambassador to China would be replaced, in a hardening of Japan’s stance in the Senkaku/Diaoyu dispute. Japan is now also replacing its ambassadors to South Korea and the United States as well, completely retooling its diplomacy. The Daily Yomiuri has the story: The government plans to appoint Vice Foreign Minister […]

If Congress fails to reach agreement on a deficit reduction plan (which looks increasingly likely), automatic budget cuts—to the tune of $1.2 trillion—will kick in on January 2, 2013. The cuts may become a key issue for voters in northern Virginia, whose jobs depend on government contracts, and there is an interesting partisan twist. Defense […]

Science never ceases to amaze. George Church and Sri Kosuri of Harvard’s Wyss Institute have managed to pack about a thousand times more data into DNA than ever before, reports ExtremeTech. The bioengineer and geneticist recently encoded about 5.5 petabits (about 700,000 gigabytes, to use a more familiar unit) of data in a single gram of […]

The Pentagon may soon be trimming its workforce. What if the private sector isn’t ready to receive the veterans who will soon be looking for work? A new poll shows vets are anxious about this very question. The Washington Post reports: Among the most striking findings of the Veterans’ Employment Challenges study, released last week, […]

It’s currently illegal for Western universities to establish their own campuses on Indian soil, but this doesn’t mean that these schools aren’t finding ways to reach Indian students.In an innovative educational practice dubbed “twinning,” Western and Indian universities are teaming up to give Indian students new course offerings at an affordable price: Twinning, where participants […]

Western expertise in fracking is already well on its way to sparking an energy revolution in America. Can it do the same for an energy-hungry China?Anglo-Dutch energy giant Shell Oil is determined to find out. In March, Shell secured contracts to co-produce shale gas in China and has pledged to invest at least $1 billion […]

A fascinating piece in last Sunday’s New York Times provided a clear picture of how automation is changing the world: This is the future. A new wave of robots, far more adept than those now commonly used by automakers and other heavy manufacturers, are replacing workers around the world in both manufacturing and distribution. Factories like the […]

By Chris MeadWhat is real?Is it our sometimes harried daily lives, or is it what we sometimes see when we leave town or otherwise shake up our routine? I’m at the beach with my family trying to make sense of things.The trouble began on day one of vacation, Friday. A Wall Street Journal reporter had […]