Innovation: The Who's Where's and How's

We are all feeling a little squeezed now days. We can thank our friends in Wall Street and our lax governmental institutions for that. The later have simply been debased by our ever present and amazingly effective lobbying monarchy. If that was not bad enough, there is another more worrisome monarchy emerging around the concept of big data. For those uninitiated, big data is all the data that is being collectively captured by all of us as we go about our day using our diverse technologies. This means your actions on the web, on your mobile devices, in your cars. It means data generated by your credit card activities, your shopping patterns, your health care patterns. Everything is now 'capturable' and available for analysis. All these data points are now available to the content providers and of course our spy agencies like the NSA. Some of these data points are innocuous, perhaps, when viewed independently. But they are immensely powerful when triangulated and analyze

I just completed my second online course and I must say, I am addicted. What a wonderful experience to learn on one's own time and communicate and exchange ideas with brilliant people all over the world. There are many fascinating facts about MOOC (massive open online course) starting with how easy it is to adapt to the format which is largely video based.  For both my courses I used: www.coursera.com. Both courses were taught by professors who were new using MOOC but both were able to adapt their teaching styles and were quite effective in conveying knowledge via video. Another aspect of the experience is the sheer size of the numbers of online students. In the first course something like 25K students signed up and actually started and while I do not know how many finished, I recently read that only 10% complete the course and do the work required to earn a certificate of completion. Everything you do in MOOC is measurable and since class participation is a big part of the exp