After an all nighter watching India lose pretty badly to Australia in World Cup Cricket semifinals, I am beginning the healing process. One of the things that will make me heal quickly is for Australia to lose to New Zealand in the finals. Given that the New Zealanders already beat the Aussies once in this tournament and won their semi finals in a dramatic fashion, I am hopeful that they will clinch the finals. I know most of you don’t care about cricket, sorry, but remember I am going through healing.
I was invited to watch a demo of yet another software product that we are looking at that will help us with affordable care act reporting requirements. (As a side note, ever wonder when these regulations will stop adding to the cost of Higher Ed?) In light of this demo, I was thinking about our experiences in purchasing third party software and it immediately dawned on me that “Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics” is so appropriate parallel to software.
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We can point to so many different success stories in the open source world. I have a long list of favorites, but some of the top ones are: Linux, Apache, Drupal, Moodle, Hadoop and R. I have personally benefited from all of this tremendously and at Wellesley we use Linux, Apache, Drupal and R. We also use Sakai, which is another open source software. I am taking a course titled “The Analytics Edge” from MIT and loving it. As a part of this, I am cracking away at R. It is such a brilliant system, which has matured so much in the past two years. I have been involved in data modeling in collaboration with my wife for quite some time and was looking at R to replace SAS for . The last time I seriously looked at it was 2 years ago, but ruled out on lot of counts. But, the progress in the past couple of years has been tremendous and along with R Studio, a GUI front end to it, it is awesome.
Along the similar lines, I wanted to talk about eduroam, another brilliant idea. It is one of those collaborations amongst higher ed that works great. As I have written several times before, collaboration in higher ed a lot of times is simply more talk than action. Here is one where it is a tangible collaboration that we can all point to and be proud of.
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It is fair to say that the financial crisis in 2007-2008 affected higher ed in ways that no one would have predicted a few years ago. It exposed several structural issues in our space and there have been numerous calls for the need to make significant changes. The word “disruption” came into play a fair amount and I would say Clayton Christensen’s “Disruptive Innovation” had something to do with it. The cost of higher ed is often cited as the reason why we need a serious disruption, rightfully so. However, no one offers any magical answers to solving this problem, which can be frustrating. One of my colleagues remarked “people have always complained that the Colleges cost too much money”. There is some truth to this. You can look at the trends in tuition, fees and board here and here. The latter one is pretty comprehensive and I suggest you look at all the data. Data will be interpreted in different ways because the topic is complex. Besides, aggregate data typically tells a very different story than data for a particular person. You may be paying for your children’s college a lot of money and based on your personal situation your story may be so different than what the reported aggregate data may be telling. However, if you you look here, the key points talk about some salient points and the important note says how the net price a student pays after taking into consideration of grant aid and tax considerations has been trending lower.
Regardless of all of this, we, in higher ed, collectively feel that we are at a point in time where disruptions are inevitable. I think some of the recent events should serve as a reminder that we are not immune to disruptions and the more we accept and prepare ourselves, the better our future will be.
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I do not have an iPhone, sorry! However, there are a couple in my family who do, so I am aware of the apps and advances in that arena. I have been following the Apple Pay technology with a lot of interest. The fact that it is is touch free (“contactless”) is cool in itself, but I am very impressed by the thought that has gone into securing the information from start to finish. The web page titled “Apple Pay security and privacy overview” clearly explains how the technology behind Apple Pay works. I strongly suggest that you read it. In simple terms, a device and credit card specific “secure element” is stored on your iPhone. When you are at a place that accepts this form of payment, using Near Field Communication (NFC) technology, the iPhone and a payment terminal communicate. After you enter your passcode on iPhone, it then transmits a dynamically generated encrypted information that contains the secure element for the credit card you choose, along with a few other information (presumably, the vendor name, the actual charge etc.). This data is received by the bank or the payment network, which then verifies all of this information and accepts the transaction. The key to all of this is that the information is secure, encrypted and is stored on your device as well as the bank. No one else, including Apple and the vendor has access to this information except perhaps in transit, but without the appropriate keys to decrypt, the information in such a short transit is not useful.
Samsung has come up with Samsung Pay, which is very similar, but has one advantage over Apple Pay. It also can communicate with the traditional magstripe terminals. Google is rumored to be revamping its Google Wallet to measure up to these. It is fair to say that most of us are not ready to use these and continue to use traditional methods of using the credit cards in the stores as well as through online. There have been numerous breaches where, because the stores retain our information, they have been stolen. Credit card companies are getting better and alert us of fraud detection, which sometimes can be annoying (because of legit charges) and they tend to arrive at the most inopportune moments, such as when you are just about to embark on a trip. I would love to transition to one of these more secure methods asap. In the meantime…
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