Brian Gongol
Lots of North Platte removed from flood zones
Rosie Jetson becomes a professor
A commissioned report on the future suggests that robots, artificial intelligence, and other forms of computing will take up the task of training and educating us in much of what we now view as down time. Some of that will take time. But technology is already turning our conventional expectations of education upside-down. Take, for instance, the fact that you can view more than 2,000 lectures from the Indian Institute of Technology for free on YouTube, or that you can take 1,800 non-credit courses for free over the Internet from MIT. Progress is already being made at a rapid clip in this field, but it is far from certain that every community will use it equally well. States like Iowa, which have low population density but excellent public universities and good Internet access available across much of the state, ought to be right in front of this educational parade of the future, offering low- or no-cost opportunities to their taxpayers to gain accredited degrees from home. After all, the text message revolution has arrived for people in their 30s and 40s, so it's not as though we're a nation of technophobes.
Creepy Google cameras have done a lot of traveling lately
A quick look at the Google "Street View" maps shows that they've been taking pictures of lots and lots of places lately. Related: Google Health is now a public tool.
