December 12, 2013 | New York Times

Silicon Valley’s bets on the digital currency Bitcoin keep getting bigger. A San Francisco company, Coinbase, announced on Thursday that it had raised $25 million from some prominent venture capitalists in the largest-ever fund-raising round for a Bitcoin company. Since its founding a little over a year ago, Coinbase has developed a reputation as one of the most reliable players in the often chaotic world of virtual currencies.

December 10, 2013 | Forbes

Crowdfunding is a trendy and cool buzzword. “Crowd” sounds sociable and “funding” is, of course, always good. But equity crowdfunding as contemplated by rules proposed by the SEC in late October is not promising. Because it sounds good, the term “crowdfunding” is applied, sometimes confusingly, to vastly different funding models, including “donation funding,” or through intermediary sites like CircleUp, provided all investors are “accredited” and “real” equity crowdfunding contemplated by the JOBS Act. This last model would allow non-public issuers to sell securities to anyone, regardless of their sophistication, net worth, or income, and no matter how risky, albeit in limited amounts and with many restrictions.

December 11, 2013 | New York Times

Two years after a Stanford professor drew 160,000 students from around the globe to a free online course on artificial intelligence, starting what was widely viewed as a revolution in higher education, early results for such large-scale courses are disappointing, forcing a rethinking of how college instruction can best use the Internet. A study of a million users of massive open online courses, known as MOOCs, released this month by the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education found that, on average, only about half of those who registered for a course ever viewed a lecture, and only about 4 percent completed the courses.

December 14, 2013 | Los Angeles Times

Her mother had lied to her most of her life, until a few months ago. That's when Carmen Figueroa, a veteran detective with the Arizona Department of Public Safety, became a foreigner in her own land — or what she thought was her own land. The 42-year-old got her driver's license in California, married in Texas and moved to Arizona, where she worked her way up the law enforcement ranks. She is not the first to go through this experience.