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Last week a colleague at Cornell asked me to give a talk to his class on intellectual property. I found myself explaining the historical dynamics behind the American Revolution, Constitution and a free-market political economy. "Unless you were a pirate," I said, "you could not trade anywhere in the world from England without a license." Another quote: "The first law to establish exclusive rights, a monopoly in copyright, dates back to 1557 when Elizabeth I squelched counterfeiters use the new technology, the printing press, to manufacture fraudulent documents for everything, including Royal charters to trade.

I love this question. A new correspondent writes: "Do you (or any of your wise and worldly readers) have any advice about looking for or finding clues to a college's culture, before you actually work there?"

I've seen a change in the students in my classes. And I wonder if that's a good thing.

Albert Einstein is said to have explained that he didn't memorize things that could be easily looked up. "[I do not] carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books," he said. "The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think." I cannot remember something unless I've written it down. Therefore, having ubiquitous capture is key to my everyday life. A key part of my ubiquitous capture system includes a reference bank where I can draw on previously found, researched or created items and integrate them into my workflow. I refer to this as my "memex."

We have too few books that feature designers who work in 24 hour (potentially magical) bookstores who can program in Ruby and who are obsessed with fantasy literature and data visualization.

Sometime in the past week I heard a line on a public radio program that has been running through my head: Women today can have it all, just not necessarily all at the same time. I wasn’t paying careful attention to the program, or time of day, so I don’t know to whom this quote should be attributed. It was only later that I remembered it and it resonated.

I want to write about the adjunct faculty who go above and beyond the call of duty. You need to tell me who they are.

For the last decade, higher education has spent considerable and increasingly scarce funds defending itself from the publishing and entertainment industry, which, if they are sincere in their belief that it is colleges and universities causing their problems, both faculty and students, they would do well to listen carefully to the comments yesterday.