October 2012

The recent surge of investment and energy in education technology is bringing a new wave of tools to schools across the country. But determining which options are most appropriate and effective for specific classrooms is becoming an increasing challenge for teachers and administrators. Education blogs and newsletters, as well as social platforms such as Edmodo and Schoology, are helping educators discover new products and services. But a proposal recently presented to the nonprofit Hamilton Project calls for a Consumer Reports-like independent third party to evaluate and rate new learning technologies. Submitted by two business school professors, Duke University’s Aaron Chatterji and Northwestern’s Benjamin Jones, the nonprofit program, called EDU STAR, would quickly and rigorously assess new learning tools and then report the results to the public. Their goal is to encourage innovation in ed tech by reducing buyer uncertainty on the part of the schools and lowering the cost of marketing for entrepreneurs.

Iran has unblocked access to Gmail as of October 1; Google's popular worldwide email service was placed under a HTTPS block on September 24. But while Iranian internet users can now use Gmail securely, the Iranian government has announced plans to enact . Mohammed Reza Miri of Iran's Telecommunications Ministry told the Mehr news agency that the Gmail blockage was an unintended consequence of a new censorship regime for YouTube. “Unfortunately, we do not yet have enough technical knowhow to differentiate between these two services. We wanted to block YouTube and Gmail was also blocked, which was involuntary […] We absolutely do not want YouTube to be accessible. That is why the telecommunications ministry is seeking a solution to fix the problem to block YouTube under the HTTPS protocol while leaving Gmail accessible. That will soon happen.”

In the current economic climate, it is vital that we seek out ways to keep and create jobs locally. As consumers and businesses continue to grow more reliant on broadband and wireless technologies, updating today’s outdated laws becomes even more vital.

Current laws were put in place in a different era where Americans were literally shackled to their homes by phone cords. Today, nearly a quarter of American homes have no “home phone,” while another 15 percent consider their wireless phones to be their primary line. Government must match the private sector’s enthusiasm for improving productivity and efficiency. We must modernize our regulatory system if we are to position our economy for success in the 21st century. Properly done, we can produce better regulatory outcomes and a stronger American economy.

In the last few months, Facebook has made significant changes to the way advertising works on its site. As some predicted, Facebook’s going public and needing to drum up more revenue has resulted in the company dipping its hands deeper into users’ data to monetize it. More than that, those hands are starting to pull in data from outside of the Facebook kingdom. Privacy engineer Joey Tyson lays out the three big “innovations” in Facebook advertising from the last few months in a Facebook blog post, and argues that the company “carefully designed our versions of the features with your privacy in mind.”

Here’s what’s changed:

1. Advertisers aren’t just targeting ‘your type anymore.’ They’re actually targeting you.
2. Advertisers can now target people with Facebook ads based on their Web browsing and searching outside of Facebook.
3. Facebook is tracking what users buy in stores so it can tell advertisers that their ads work.