In 2010, I attended a the New Media Consortium's summer conference and Peter Smith's presentation "The End of Scarcity: Can We Handle It?" Part of the presentation focused on America's current intellectual capacity and how quickly we could fall behind China and India as those nations continue to birth dozens of children for every one in America. As he mentioned in the session, in China's high schools, the top 20% outnumber America's entire class of graduating seniors. As a result, we're at risk of being outperformed based on sheer numbers - a real issue we must deal with in order to retain our place in a world economy.

Smith makes the point we must maximize every American's potential and offer a range of programs capable of providing skill mastery through easily accessible and time-flexible learning opportunities. What changes might we see to maximize opportunity? Here are two articles providing a look at the future of education and post-secondary education specifically.

John Lennon was gunned down 34 years ago. If still alive, he would be 74 years old. In 2011, one of Lennon's former housekeepers sold one of Lennon's teeth at an auction in England. The winning bid belonged to Dr. Michael Zuk, a Canadian dentist. Zuk is making headlines this week by admitting plans to have Lennon cloned from DNA remaining in the tooth and raising the resulting child as his own. It brings up many questions, including the morality of cloning someone famous and who owns your DNA once you pass on.

Humans have issues with data. Data on its own is hard to turn into information, which we can understand much more easily. Weather data is a great example, as it is both a global and local phenomenon impacting almost every day of our lives. If my phone's weather app presented data, I would receive information about regional climates as far as the Arctic and Gulf of Mexico. It would be difficult for most anyone but a meteorologist (amateur or otherwise) to make an accurate prediction using this data.