Along the Atlantic coast of New England, the clambake became a seasonal rite built from the materials at hand. Stones were gathered along the shore and arranged into a hearth; driftwood and firewood were piled high and burned until the stones held an intense heat. Rockweed, cut fresh from the water, was spread across them, releasing clouds of salt steam. Clams, lobsters, fish, corn and potatoes followed, layered carefully and covered with more seaweed and canvas so that the whole feast cooked together.
The work itself was part of the occasion. Someone tended the fire, someone hauled the rockweed, others prepared the food, set tables or watched the children near the water. Hours of preparation ended in a meal eaten outdoors, often within sight of the tide that supplied it—a practical choreography of shore, fire, water, food and fellowship repeated through generations of New England summers.
We first posted this prospect in May 2022, months before generative artificial intelligence displaced blockchain as the principal technological anxiety of the education industry.
Blockchain has not disappeared; its ambitions have narrowed toward credentials, records and decentralized governance while artificial intelligence has raised the larger question of what the university—and perhaps the teacher—is for.
Blockchain threatened the university’s machinery.
AI threatens to interrogate its purpose.
The blockchain proposition asked: Do we still need a centralized institution to maintain records, confer credentials, distribute money and establish trust?
The AI proposition asks something considerably more uncomfortable: What are students paying the institution and faculty to do when machines can teach, explain, translate, draft, assess, search and increasingly conduct portions of research?
15 February 2025
Gm! 🟧
🎨Focus on the art not the noise 🙌
PORDALS, pushes the boundaries of minimalism and narrative through a micro-to-macro approach, the smallest unit of measurement for digital color is a pixel. Inscriptions magnify the canvas to a visible size on Bitcoin. We create… pic.twitter.com/wsWNEqfZBq
Blockchain is a decentralized, immutable, and transparent digital ledger that securely records and verifies transactions across multiple computers or nodes. It operates through a network of participants who collectively validate and store each transaction, creating a chain of interconnected blocks. Each block contains a unique cryptographic hash that links it to the previous block, ensuring data integrity.
The distributed nature of blockchain eliminates the need for intermediaries, increases security, and fosters trust among participants. It has applications beyond cryptocurrencies, enabling efficient and reliable solutions in various industries such as finance, supply chain management, healthcare, education and accreditation.
John Domingue | TEDxOpenUniversity:
“I believe that with blockchain technology we can create a radically new type of university: a DAO University. A DAO is a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation which operates with no central control and no humans in the loop and are based on Smart Contracts: pieces of computer code on a blockchain which can represent and enact financial and legal contracts. ”
Miguel de Cervantes (Don Quixote): “Ladran Sancho, señal que cabalgamos”
“Let the dogs bark Sancho, it is a sign that we’re moving forward.”
Blockchain is built so that the system keeps the data across several nodes that form a consensus on the exact position of the data. This storage method is different from the cloud, where data remains in one location and is easily accessible to an individual as a whole.
We find relatively few public consultations presented by accredited standards developers in the human resource domain; surprising because human resources are the largest cost center in nearly every industry. Alas, manufacturers, insurance and conformance companies remain the strongest voices; the “wicked problem” we describe in our ABOUT.
Even before the circumstances of the pandemic inspired a revisit of large government politics and cultural mashing in education communities in the United States we could hear the first footfalls of disruption when ANSI catalyzed the creation of a related entity in 2014, described in the link below:
The proper business of the education industry overall — and the ~$500 billion facility segment we track — is preparing the workforce everywhere to contribute to national economic priorities. There is a strong cultural component in the human resource domain — i.e. branding — the topic of another post. For now, we simply suggest that much of the economic activity of education communities is devoted to building a cohort (or guild) that creates an emotional bond that hastens learning and a continual desire to self-educate to remain part of the cohort.
At the moment, the WORKCRED program at this point in its development, appears to provides guidance to conformance and compliance organizations among its members. The user-interest in the education facility industry, at least dependent on a skilled workforce as any economic sector, and welcomed to participate. We identify the initiative here and will keep a weather-eye out for commenting opportunities on draft consensus products emerging from it. The link below should provide a more detailed overview of the program until a “commentable consensus product” suitable for incorporation by reference into legislation is released.
Of course, there will be cultural competition among the guardians of the cohort.
Organizations with their own credentialing enterprises for skilled trades, ICT, software engineering, etc. — are encouraged to communicate directly with the WORKCRED staff (CLICK HERE).
Construction keeps on rocking and rolling on our campus. Soon, music will be filling the halls of the Surack-Sweetwater Music Industry Building. pic.twitter.com/us9Ppj7fNO
— Purdue University Fort Wayne (@purduefw) June 4, 2026
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Open agenda; Not Too Organized. Whatever anyone wants to talk about. We do meet once a month like this. Use the login credentials at the upper right of our home page.
If we were running that upgrade of the dining facility at the business school — instead of Sodexo — we would complete it in six months. Alas, by some strange bureaucratic configuration, the project is taking 24 months. Until then we meet at the Golf Course on the South Athletic Campus where, admittedly, parking is easier.
Did you know that for more than 50 years, NIST called D.C. home? Due to the city’s rapid growth and the resulting noise and disturbances, NIST moved to rural Maryland. The area helped the campus to grow, and scientists could make their sensitive measurements without interference. pic.twitter.com/Yr15JKh3Ch
— National Institute of Standards and Technology (@NIST) September 22, 2025
NYC bagels & pizza owe their fame to the city’s tap water—soft, pure, and gravity-fed from the Catskills/Delaware watersheds. Discover how NYC delivers 1.1B gallons/day to 9M people, and why #NSFANSI standards help keep it safe. @NSF_Intl#SafeWater#NYChttps://t.co/IQlnLzpkiu
📣Inviting SMEs to have your say and shape a standard for the built environment.
Participate in the public consultation of PAS 1958, designed to support UK SMEs with data and information management and decision-making, facilitating the use of AI within the sector.
A massive number of colleges and universities have shut down within the last couple of years, or will shut down in the next few.
Many of these colleges have cited financial hardship or enrollment decline as reasons for closure. But what’s really going on? 🧵 pic.twitter.com/MoF1Iiejzd
We had so much fun celebrating the magic of this Swedish tradition by making flower wreaths, dancing around the maypole, enjoying a smorgasbord buffet and music with our American friends, families and allies here in DC. pic.twitter.com/NC9tEKa4RS
— Embassy of Sweden USA (@SwedeninUSA) June 21, 2024
In honor of Charles-Augustin de Coulomb’s birthday, we would like you to know that 1 coulomb is equal to the charge of 6.24 quintillion (billion billion) electrons! pic.twitter.com/VnrLu0Lb0P
— National Institute of Standards and Technology (@NIST) June 14, 2024
In honor of Charles-Augustin de Coulomb’s birthday, we would like you to know that 1 coulomb is equal to the charge of 6.24 quintillion (billion billion) electrons! pic.twitter.com/VnrLu0Lb0P
— National Institute of Standards and Technology (@NIST) June 14, 2024
📢📢📢
MSU Observatory will be open for public observing twice a month between April and September. Stay tuned for our public events schedule.. 🔭🌕🪐💫@MSUNatSci@michiganstateu
Video credit: EA Photography
Audio credit: Epicomposer pic.twitter.com/hGF9oEidqd
The IEEE P3119 draft standard is designed to help strengthen AI procurement approaches, using due diligence to ensure that agencies are critically evaluating the AI services and tools they acquire.https://t.co/ujVJxZqjEm@InstituteIEEE
— IEEE Standards Association | IEEE SA (@IEEESA) May 19, 2024
— Standards Michigan (@StandardsMich) May 25, 2024
The word #standard is commonly used in daily language, so much so that people do not always reflect on its definition. Learn how ASTM International’s Regulations Governing ASTM Technical Committees (aka “Green Book”) defines them. #standards See https://t.co/oSBmwh1lbXpic.twitter.com/ynk87XDr7D
— Standards Michigan (@StandardsMich) May 18, 2024
🏆 We applaud the brilliant minds shortlisted for the 2024 IEEE PES Power Engineering Education Committee (PEEC) Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award!
European monarchy is sometimes misunderstood abroad as government by hereditary rulers. In countries such as Norway, its more interesting function is almost the reverse: the family remains while governments come and go.
A king is a son before he is a sovereign, later a husband and father and, with luck, a grandfather. The public watches these passages across an entire lifetime. In return, the royal family appears at the passages of national life: schools opened, universities founded, ships launched, marriages celebrated, disasters mourned and the dead remembered.
The arrangement gives otherwise abstract ideas — nation, inheritance, duty, continuity — a human form. Haakon VII could lay a university foundation stone and, seventy-five years later, his grandson Harald could return to the same institution.
Its significance is therefore less political than temporal. A familial monarchy asks each generation to receive something, care for it and hand it on.
In contemporary America, beauty sometimes arrives in the dock accused of carrying an old accomplice: power.
The argument has a history. Standards called beautiful — in faces, bodies, buildings, painting and language — were often established when Western institutions were overwhelmingly European. What one generation
called proportion, harmony or refinement, another may therefore suspect of being merely preference hardened into authority.
But this leaves a larger question unanswered. Abuse of a standard does not prove that standards are impossible. Nor does the history of exclusion establish that beauty itself excludes.
A cathedral, a garden, a melody or a well-made room can move people who share neither ancestry nor politics.
Perhaps beauty is troublesome precisely because it makes a larger claim: that amid our differences, some things may still be worth admiring together.
New update alert! The 2022 update to the Trademark Assignment Dataset is now available online. Find 1.29 million trademark assignments, involving 2.28 million unique trademark properties issued by the USPTO between March 1952 and January 2023: https://t.co/njrDAbSpwBpic.twitter.com/GkAXrHoQ9T
