Can mental health apps replace human therapists? (ChatBot) (more)

Rudy Rucker, having lost his Lap Top, notes I feel weird to be traveling without my laptop, though, I use it as a Mental Health tool, the journaling. I write my journals and revise them. By revising what I say I thought, I revise what I think, and make myself saner. Outboard Brain, Thinking Space.

The Emilia Romagna region in Northern Italy is one of the richest in Europe, known for its high-end car manufacturing. While Emilia-Romagna is one of the most economically successful regions in Europe, it is also one of the most cooperative regions in the world. Nearly two of every three of its 4.5 million citizens are members of a cooperative (CoOp). Cooperatives support around 30% of the region’s GDP, making it a stellar example of a large-scale cooperative economy. As with Mondragon Cooperatives Corporation in Spain, the cooperative economy is strongly bolstered by networked relationships which also make cooperatives more resilient in economic crises.

Brian Arthur interview http://www.dialogonleadership.org/Arthur-1999.html (more)

There's competition between the GRE and GMAT Standardized Test-s. The Educational Testing Service (ETS) administers the G.R.E. and used to do the same for the GMAT before losing the rights two years ago to ACT Inc. and Pearson. Now it is trying to get some of that business back, lobbying business schools to accept the G.R.E. as an alternative to the GMAT: more than 115 have agreed, including at Stanford University, MIT and Johns Hopkins.

Sebastian Thrum Virtual Learning Start Up (more)

see Annotation Systems, Highlighting And Annotating

aka Pearson Publishing, Pearson Education, Pearson Plc (more)

In a Fred Wilson post about KickStarter, the question came up about how to pay back (VC) investors if there's no M And A and no Liquidity Event (IPO). Fred said: secondary transactions and cash payouts are two of the most obvious options. (more)

cf Business Coach, Self Improvement (more)

Standardized Test vendor

Mark Widner (of LacunaStories) sees a number of problems with GeniusCom. (more)

Sugar Labs, spun off from OLPC, is joining GNOME. Sugar UI leverages many technologies from the GNOME stack, including the GTK+ widget toolkit and the Telepathy messaging framework. Large parts of the Sugar user interface were developed in the Python programming language with the GTK+ bindings. Sugar is packaged for several distributions, including Fed Ora and Ubuntu, and is distributed under the GNU's General Public License (GPL).

The cover story of News Week a couple issues ago was She Works, He Doesn't about Two Income Family-s who've become One Income Family-s due to the current recession, but now the man is home. Many such couples have simply decided that no matter how much lip service companies pay to "family friendly" policies, it's simply not possible to integrate two fast-track careers and kids without huge sacrifices. So they do a cold-eyed calculation, measuring the size and upside potential of each parent's paycheck, and opting to keep whoever's is larger. For the highest-achieving women, the trend is striking. Last fall Fortune reported that more than one third of its "50 Most Powerful Women in Business" have a stay-at-home man (it dubbed them "trophy husbands"). But this trend reaches women far below the executive-vice-president rank. (more)

Jon Udell: Our mission here at HypothesIs is to enable a conversation over the world’s knowledge. So far that’s been a public conversation. But some conversations need to flourish in private spaces. You’ve always been able to create private annotations that only you can see but, until today, not annotations visible only to a group. That’s what we’re launching today.

edX is a massive open online course (MOOC) provider. It hosts online university-level courses in a wide range of disciplines to a worldwide student body, including some courses at no charge. It also conducts research into learning based on how people use its platform. EdX differs from other MOOC providers, such as Coursera and Udacity, in that it is a nonprofit organization and runs on open-source software. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EdX (more)

Something startling is happening to middle-aged white Americans. Unlike every other age group, unlike every other racial and ethnic group, unlike their counterparts in other rich countries, death rates in this group have been rising, not falling. That finding was reported Monday by two Princeton economists, Angus Deaton, who last month won the 2015 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, and Anne Case. Analyzing health and mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and from other sources, they concluded that rising annual death rates among this group are being driven not by the big killers like heart disease and diabetes but by an epidemic of suicides and afflictions stemming from substance abuse: alcoholic liver disease and overdoses of heroin and prescription opioids. (more)

HypothesIs has hired Jeremy Dean to focus on the Ed Tech opportunities for Annotation. (more)

to change the color of something to make it stand out more for attention or retention (more)

an American novelist who is also host of the Peabody-winning public radio program Studio 360, a co-production between Public Radio International and WNYC. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Andersen (more)