My two cents

How IBM Is Watching How You Shop Online

Where they gather that data is the IBM Benchmark. It’s a cloud-based digital analytics platform that soaks up digital information about how consumers respond to different ways of selling things online, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, all year long, from 500 different online retailers. IBM won’t name them — they joined the network under condition of anonymity — but Big Blue says the companies that participate include about half of the companies named on the Internet Retailer Top 100 list. A lot of the technology comes from Coremetrics and Unica, acquisitions IBM made in 2010.

From the archive, Renata Adler writes in defense of Big Bird and children’s programming in 1972: Read more

Google’s self-guided car could drive the next wave of unemployment John Naughton, guardian.co.uk

Advances such as the driverless car are no longer the stuff of sci-fi. They could soon make many human skills worthless

Almost without noticing it, our world crossed a significant threshold last week. Jerry Brown, the governor of California, sig…

Google Launches Free Tool To Let You Run Your Own Online Courses

Sensing the excitement from online education tools like edX, Google has just unveiled a (very beta) version of its own course building software. If you’ve ever wanted to run your own online courses, this might be worth your time.

Lego for girls, this time hardware-hacker style

One hacker has her own idea of what a Lego set for girls should be. If 10,000 people agree with her, the toymaker could find itself producing her hacker-focused design.

Kids learned to use e-readers quickly even though 43 percent of them had never used a computer before. Also, not surprisingly, they were quick to discover “the multimedia aspects of the e-reader, such as music and Internet features.”

Near-zero theft. Only two e-readers (out of 600) were lost in the whole study, partly because “community involvement was encouraged through e-reader pledges, community outreach programs, and support from community leaders.”

Kids got access to way more books. Before the study, primary-school students had access to an average of 3.6 books at home. Junior-high students had access to an average of 8.6 books at home and high-school students access to an average of 11 books. With the e-reader program, kids had access to an average of 107 book.

Primary school students’ test scores improved, but effects on older kids were less clear. The reading scores of primary-school students who received e-readers increased from 12.9 percent to 15.7 percent. But results for older kids were mixed.

Students sought out access to international news. “Amazon data revealed that students were downloading The New York Times, USA Today, and El País etc., demonstrating that students want to access a wide range of reading materials that were previously inaccessible.”

Kindles break too easily. Worldreader had not predicted how many Kindles would break: 243 out of 600, or 40.5 percent.