Interesting article in Sunday’s New York Times entitled, “Lots of Little Screens: TV Is Changing Shape,” tells about new TV and video production companies that are forming to take advantage of a growing demand for video on the internet.

The articles says, “According to Move Networks, a company based in Utah that provides online video technologies, more than 100,000 new viewers jump online every 24 hours to watch its clients’ long-form or episodic video. During the first two weeks of November alone, more than twice the number of Americans were watching TV online than in the entire month of August.”

And, the article says, “Inexpensive broadband access has done far more for online video than enable the success of services like YouTube and iTunes. By unchaining video watchers from their TV sets, it has opened the floodgates to a generation of TV producers for whom the Internet is their native medium.”

Excerpts from the article:

• The command-and-control economic model of traditional television is being quickly superseded by the market chaos of a freewheeling and open digital network.
• The shift is proving quite inspirational to digital media entrepreneurs. “What absolutely convinced me to start a company in this area was when I realized just how large the disruption was,” said Kip McClanahan, the co-founder and chief executive of ON Networks, an online studio in Austin, Tex. “It touches everything — how video content is created and monetized, how it’s distributed and consumed. And it’s a half-trillion-dollar market, if you include the advertising that supports it and the revenue associated with subscriptions, tickets and so on.”
• (The huge internet market) provides plenty of room for experimentation. Many flavors of technology and programming are being tested, as are some changes in traditional revenue models.
• Vuze, based in Palo Alto, and Joost, based in Leiden in the Netherlands have developed proprietary software that must be downloaded to view their video programming. In addition to providing programming from established brands like PBS, Showtime, the BBC and A&E, the start-ups encourage new producers to make deals with them and upload new programs to their sites.
• Vuze, Joost, Blip and ON all share as much as 50 percent of their revenue with the content producers, regardless of distribution medium. “If that model existed today, writers wouldn’t be on strike,” said Mr. McClanahan.

“Lots of Little Screens: TV Is Changing Shape,” was written by Denise Caruso and appeared in The New York Times, Sunday, December 2.

Noted education expert, Linda Darling-Hammond, in an interesting blog at The Forum for Education and Democracy, says, “We need to encourage our schools to teach and evaluate the higher-order thinking and performance skills that leading nations emphasize in their systems, and this requires major changes in No Child Left Behind.”

Excerpts from Linda Darling-Hammond’s blog:

• A key problem for the United States is that most of our tests aren’t measuring the kinds of 21st century skills we need students to acquire and that are at the core of curriculum and assessment in high-achieving countries.
• The United States is falling far behind other nations on every measure of educational achievement. In the latest international assessments, the United States ranked 28th out of 40 countries in math – on par with Latvia – 20th in science, and 19th in reading, even further behind than a few years ago. In addition, these other countries surpass us in graduation rates and, over the last decade, in higher education participation as well.
• Although 60 percent of our high school graduates go off to college, only half of these are well-enough prepared to graduate with a degree – far too few for the knowledge economy we now operate. So, while our own youth are often unprepared for modern employment, Silicon Valley lobbies for more H-1B visas to bring in skilled workers to fill high-tech jobs.
• Our multiple-choice tests – which focus the curriculum on low-level skills – are helping us to fall further and further behind. Another part of the problem is that the standards used to guide teaching in many states are a mile wide and an inch deep: Most high-achieving countries teach (and test) fewer topics each year and teach them more thoroughly so students build a stronger foundation for their learning.
• Whereas students in most parts of the United States are typically asked simply to recognize a single fact they have memorized from a list of answers, students in high-achieving countries are asked to apply their knowledge in the ways that writers, mathematicians, historians and scientists do.
• Students in other countries also complete required assessments like lab experiments and research papers that help evaluate student learning in the classroom. These assessments, which together count at least half the total examination score, allow the testing of complex skills that cannot be measured in a two-hour test on a single day. They ensure that students receive stronger learning opportunities. And they give teachers timely information they need to help students improve – something that standardized tests that produce scores several months later cannot do.  These assessments in other nations are not used to rank or punish schools, or to deny promotion or graduation to students. (In fact, several countries have explicit proscriptions against such practices.) They are used to evaluate curricula and guide professional learning – in short, to help schools improve.
• By asking students to show what they know through real-world applications of knowledge, these other nations’ assessment systems promote serious intellectual work that is discouraged in U.S. schools by the tests many states have adopted under No Child Left Behind.
• Studies confirm that as teaching looks more like testing, U.S. students are doing less writing, less science, less history, reading fewer books, and even using computers less in states that will not allow their use on standardized tests.

From Linda Darling-Hammond’s article: No Child Left Behind: Changing the Way We Think About Learning

I ran on to this article by J. Bradford DeLong, professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley, assistant US Treasury secretary during the Clinton administration. The sub-headline for this article caught my attention: A fallen greenback could mean economic turmoil, or it could trigger an economic crisis. Economists are having trouble predicting the outcome because investors are not behaving rationally

“The falling US dollar has emerged as a source of profound global macro-economic distress. The question now is how bad that distress will become. Is the world economy at risk? There are two possibilities. If global savers and investors expect the US dollar’s depreciation to continue, they will flee the currency unless they are compensated appropriately for keeping their money in the US and its assets, implying that the gap between US and foreign interest rates will widen. As a result, the cost of capital in the US will soar, discouraging investment and reducing consumption spending as high interest rates depress the value of households’ principal assets: their houses.

The resulting recession might fuel further pessimism and cutbacks in spending, deepening the downturn. A US in recession would no longer serve as the importer of last resort, which might send the rest of the world into recession as well. A world in which everybody expects a falling US dollar is a world in economic crisis.

By contrast, a world in which the US dollar has already fallen is one that may see economic turmoil, but not an economic crisis. If the US dollar has already fallen — if nobody expects it to fall much more — then there is no reason to compensate global savers and investors for holding US assets.

On the contrary, in this scenario there are opportunities: the US dollar, after all, might rise; US interest rates will be at normal levels; asset values will not be unduly depressed; and investment spending will not be affected by financial turmoil.

Of course, there may well be turbulence: When US wage levels appear low because of a weak US dollar, it is hard to export to the US, and other countries must rely on other sources of demand to maintain full employment. The government may have to shore up the financial system if the changes in asset prices that undermined the US dollar sink risk-loving or imprudent lenders.

But these are, or ought to be, problems that we can solve. By contrast, sky-high US interest rates produced by a general expectation of a massive ongoing US dollar decline is a macroeconomic problem without a solution.

Yet so far there are no signs that global savers and investors expect a US dollar decline. The large gap between US and foreign long-term interest rates that should emerge from and signal expectations of a falling US dollar does not exist. And the US$65 billion needed every month to fund the US current-account deficit continues to flow in. Thus, the world economy may dodge yet another potential catastrophe.

That may still prove to be wishful thinking. After all, the US’ still-large current-account deficit guarantees that the US dollar will continue to fall. Even so, the macroeconomic logic that large current-account deficits signal that currencies are overvalued continues to escape the world’s international financial investors and speculators.

On one level, this is very frustrating: We economists believe that people are smart enough to understand their situation and capable enough to pursue their own interests. Yet the typical investor in US dollar-denominated assets — whether a rich private individual, a pension fund, or a central bank — has not taken the steps to protect themselves against the very likely US dollar decline in our future.

In this case, what is bad for economists is good for the world economy: We may be facing a mere episode of financial distress in the US rather than sky-high long-term interest rates and a depression. The fact that economists can’t explain it is no reason not to be thankful.”

Printed in the Taipei Times on Monday, December 3