Opinion

When Summify came on the content curation scene last year, I was instantly enamored with the service. Keeping up with vast amounts of tweets and Facebook updates can easily become a full-time occupation for folks like myself who are regularly "plugged in." Summify provided a daily email of the best bits of the social media day. Sadly, Summify was acquired by Twitter. Most likely, Twitter wants to use Summify's service as a way to boost readership and potential ad revenue. (Although, the whole thing reeks of the Facebook Camera / Instagram situation…) What the acquisition means for users is that what was once a great product is now no longer available.

When you have to travel for conferences or research, the change of place and space can lead to some deeper questions about where we are.

There is a function in math called the “Greatest Integer Function,” which assigns a value to every number that is the largest integer less than or equal to that number. For example, the numbers 1, 1.2 and 1.9 would all have a value of 1 for this function. As you can imagine, this leads to a graph that looks a lot like a set of stairs, and is the typical example used when describing what a “discontinuous” function looks like. I found myself thinking of this over the past week, as I watched my daughter move up a grade in school.

What happened to me when I had a chance to meet one of my writing heroes.

Elizabeth Popp Berman considers the negative consequences of portraying the value of higher education primarily in terms of boosting the economy.

Congress and the White House are deadlocked over expensive ways to keep the interest rate low on some student loans for a year. Jason Delisle offers a long-term alternative that would help more students and cost the government nothing.

I ventured onto campus today, something I rarely do. But I had research to conduct -- the sort of research that required a library with printed books, the sort of research I couldn't do online. (Shocking, I know.)

In response to yesterday’s post about what college should cost, several people answered by saying something like “just add up what you need to provide a good education and divide by the number of students.” Which sounds reasonable enough, until you reflect on the word “need.”