* The modern university must reinvent itself to survive (2011-Mar-30) [theconversation.edu.au]
… Current debates about the university, in China and the West, have converged. Both traditions, the Confucian ethic and democratic education as modernization, are undermined by state-driven economic instrumentalism, by modernization simply reduced to enrichment. In both China and the West it is said by many observers that the university has ‘lost its soul’.
* High-Tech Flirting Turns Explicit, Altering Young Lives (2011-Mar-27) [NYTimes.com]
* Creative Destruction and Copyright Protection: Regulatory Responses to File-sharing LSE media policy project (2011-Mar) [_scribd_]
… Decline in the sales of physical copies of recorded music cannot be attributed solely to file-sharing, but should be explained by a combination of factors such as changing patterns in music consumption, decreasing disposable household incomes for leisure products and increasing sales of digital content through online platforms. …
* See it NOW: Vidyo conferences on iPad 2! (2011-Mar-15) [Vidyo Blog]
Yes, we know that iPad 2 owners may have to wait just a little longer to experience Vidyo’s HD (720p) multipoint video conferencing for themselves… but let it be known that Vidyo was, as always, the FIRST to demo HD multi-party video communications on an iPad 2.
* Who Says What to Whom on Twitter (2011) [Yahoo! Research]
We study several longstanding questions in media communications research, in the context of the microblogging service Twitter, regarding the production, flow, and consumption of information. To do so, we exploit a recently introduced feature of Twitter—known as Twitter lists—to distinguish between elite users, by which we mean specifically celebrities, bloggers, and representatives of media outlets and other formal organizations, and ordinary users. Based on this classification, we find a striking concentration of attention on Twitter—roughly 50% of tweets consumed are generated by just 20K elite users—where the media produces the most information, but celebrities are the most followed. We also find significant homophily within categories: celebrities listen to celebrities, while bloggers listen to bloggers etc; however, bloggers in general rebroadcast more information than the other categories. Next we re-examine the classical “two-step flow” theory of communications, finding considerable support for it on Twitter, but also some interesting differences. Third, we find that URLs broadcast by different categories of users or containing different types of content exhibit systematically different lifespans. And finally, we examine the attention paid by the different user categories to different news topics.
* Borders collapse: readers turn to e-books (2011-Mar-28) [The Age]
