My Kid Is an Honor Student at iTunes U

John Paczkowski — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 17:00:45 +0000

Downloads from Apple’s iTunes U program topped the 300 million mark today–a formidable feat for a virtual insitution of higher learning that’s just three years old. Today, roughly 350,000 audio and video lectures (and commencement speeches) are available for download from some 800 universities, among them Harvard, Brown, Berkeley, Stanford, MIT and Oxford. And that list is growing quickly as universities in China, Japan, Mexico and Singapore join the initiative.

A nice little bit of back-to-school marketing for Apple (AAPL), which likely has an eye trained on education sales as the new school year begins.

Twitter Users Talk About Themselves, Other Guys

Marisa Taylor — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 23:06:25 +0000

At this point, most everyone may know what Twitter is, but who’s using it, what they’re saying and who they’re saying it to are increasingly research fodder.

Lexicographers at Oxford University Press released findings today, based on 1.5 million tweets from January to April, showing that the average message was 15 words, with an average of 10.69 words per sentence and 1.4 sentences per tweet. Ten percent of tweets contain a question, says Oxford, publisher of the Oxford dictionary and other reference works.

“To get a full picture of the English language, compilers of current dictionaries need to incorporate all forms of communication into their research,” Judy Pearsall, Oxford’s senior publishing manager for English dictionaries, said in a statement. “A tweet is a message to the world, but it’s a short one: with just 140 characters to play with, we’re seeing different and sometimes very creative uses of language.”

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My Kid Is an Honor Student at iTunes U

Twitter Users Talk About Themselves, Other Guys