I have not looked at the current numbers, but as of December 2006, could you guess what the most popular podcast in the Higher Education section of iTunes was?
Turns out it was from a high school teacher in Long Island discussing the Byzantine Empire.
Talk about leveling the playing field (just like the intarweb has done to research salaries across the country).
I mention this because a friend of mine sent me a WSJ article today (”Yale on $0 a day“), which discussed the continued growth of high-quality material placed online for free or at a low price. It turns out Yale has now jumped on the pioneering bandwagon: taping and releasing videos of undergraduate lectures onto the web por gratis.
And again, like MIT and others, they do not feel these substitute for the direct, invaluable interaction between students and teachers. This may be temporarily true for some specialties, but is it the case for all?
Will the wide consumption of such podcasts eventually eliminate redundant teaching positions at other institutions — after all, why continue paying for circular overhead when you could just outsource lectures to gregarious instructors with an army of teaching assistants?
And it has already happened with text books and curriculum methods (e.g., some of the classes I took at the management school were modeled after the Harvard case-study approach)… perhaps those on the vocational, self-taught track can take advantage of it too.
Not really.
However, back in 2003 he was granted a patent on the prestin molecule. Prestin is a protein found in the inner ear of every mammal.
Oddly enough, it turns out that 20% of the human genome is patented by someone. This of course leads to problems for, among others, drug researchers who cannot create vaccines targeted at specific genetic defects without permission/royalties on patented genes.
In fact, there is a whole slew of problems that were recently addressed in an informative article in the NY Times entitled Patenting Life — which was written by controversial author Michael Crichton. [Note: one of the more humorous comments regarding his piece was at Slashdot]
One of the biggest problems with being allowed to patent biology is that quite simply: no human invented it, let alone the individual(s) laying claim to it. Sure they may have discovered it, but would that not open up the floor to debate on who owns the rights to mitochondria, T-cells, or heaven forbid: proteins found in semen?
The tie in with prestin is that, as the New Scientist noted, “it may be 10,000 times more efficient at generating power than the best manmade material.”
If Dallos owns an artificial monopoly on it, what could be the negative consequences of his judicious enforcement upon the technology sector?
Unfortunately this looming issue will continually come back to hinder technological and potentially life saving progress, and will invariably effect individual freedoms — after all if you are currently not allowed to do what you want with your own organs, what won’t you be allowed to do with your itty bitty genes?
