Online education replacing physical colleges at a record pace

Educators have known that the online revolution would eventually envelop the physical classroom, but a torrent of near-revolutionary developments in the past month are proving that change is coming quicker than anyone imagined. In just 30 days, the largest school system in the U.S. began offering credit for online courses, a major university began awarding degrees without any class time required, and scores of public universities are moving their courses online. The point at which online higher education becomes mainstream is no longer in some fuzzy hypothetical future; the next president’s Secretary of Education will need an entire department dedicated to the massive transition.

 

 

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Wind power tops new electricity generation in U.S. for 2012

The US remains second to China, which had 62,000 MW of installed wind power at the close of 2011.

According to the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), wind energy was the single largest source of new electricity generation capacity in the U.S., during 2012.  With 13,124 MW of new infrastructure, wind accounted for 42 percent of all new capacity, from renewable sources or otherwise, according to a press release put out by the organization.

 

 

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Medicare crackdown seems to be slowing down hospital readmission epidemic

 Medicare has begun punishing hospitals with hefty fines if they have too many readmissions.

There are more than 1 million Americans who wind up back in the hospital only weeks after they are released for reasons that could have been prevented — a revolving door that for years has seemed impossible to slow.

 

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Four-fifths of all antibiotics are consumed by the meat industry

Livestock consumption of antibiotics reached a record nearly 29.9 billion pounds in 2011.

The Food and Drug Administration, last year,  proposed a set of voluntary “guidelines”designed to nudge the meat industry to curb its antibiotics habit.  Since then, the agency has been mulling whether and how to implement the new program. Meanwhile, the meat industry has been merrily gorging away on antibiotics—and churning out meat rife with antibiotic-resistant pathogens—if the latest data from the FDA itself is any indication.

 

 

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Yandex surpasses Bing in the world’s top search engine rankings

Logo for the Russian search engine, Yandex.

The biggest search engine few people have ever heard of. is probably Yandex.  According to Search Engine Watch,  the Russian search engine has surpassed Microsoft’s Bing in the world’s top search engine rankings.  Search Engine Watch got its data from ComScore.

 

 

 

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The search for data scientists grows frantic as startups produce more data

There are nowhere near enough “data scientists.”

It is currently accepted that the people who understand Big Data – the enormous datasets of information being collected with nearly every click of every computing device on the planet – will rule the roost in the future. If you can predict behavior by measuring and monitoring people’s machines down to an almost atomic level, you can make both your customers and your shareholders much happier.

 

 

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Why do Americans love the iPhone but hate Android

Americans prefer the iPhone over Android.

Americans overwhelmingly prefer iPhone over Android while the rest of the world has overwhelmingly embraced Android.  According to IDC, Android has a 75% market share in smartphones, versus 15% for Apple, worldwide.  But in the U.S. the iPhone still rules.  Sixty-three percent of smartphone sales at Verizon and 84% of smartphone sales at AT&T are the iPhone.

 

 

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