(Photo: Flickr.com/gpaumier)

Facebook is now a Fortune 500 company. [USA Today]

We still don't know the true identity of "Satoshi Nakamoto," the enigma who created Bitcoin. But we do know that he/she is likely filthy rich. [The Verge]

Checking in with the progress of the city's tech campuses. [New York Daily News]

"There are many problems with the assumptions behind the “big data” narrative (above, in a reductive form) being pushed, primarily, by consultants and IT firms that want to sell businesses the next big thing." [Quartz]

Linguists have identified a few words they say have been kicking around, in one form or another, for 15,000 years. It's a pretty obvious list: "fire," "mother," "not." [Washington Post]

Someday! (Photo: Cornell Tech)

Earlier this week, classes commenced for the inaugural batch of Cornell Tech masters students, of which there are eight. To get a sense of how the first week is going, we checked in late yesterday afternoon with vice president Cathy Dove, who sounded like a satisfied high school principal ready to prop her pumps on her desk: "I have to say, by far, this is the most rewarding and exciting milestone that we've hit," she said.

For now, the school is operating out of the Google-owned building at 111 Eighth Avenue. However, this "beta class" of masters students isn't exactly mingling freely with the upperclassmen in the Google cafeteria, contrary to our fondest Freaks and Geeks-inspired hopes. "For Google people to come to our space and for us to go to Google, we invite each other," Ms. Dove clarified. "These truly are different offices."

There will likely be no grand partnerships (romantic or business) born from serendipitous meetings in the library, in other words.

But the temporary home Cornell Tech has created for itself does probably have more in common with a startup than the average university English department. "Right now all of us sit in a very open floor plan," Ms. Dove said, though there are private rooms for meetings and phone calls (can't have those loud talkers driving everyone barmy). "It truly has an impact, this kind of layout, on collaboration," she added.

"It is, I agree with you, different from many traditional academic buildings that you would see on our main campus and on other campuses," Ms. Dove said. But hey, isn't abandoning Victorian design detritus the beauty of building a campus from scratch? And the plan is to replicate this sort of setup on Roosevelt Island as much as possible.

But the learning itself isn't too radically different from a traditional grad school. Monday through Thursday, students will attend classes, three of them technical and one taught by business school faculty. On Fridays they switch over to a practicum dubbed "entrepreneurial life," with visits from industry folk. This first semester, they'll also be assigned to projects dreamed up by groups like Artsy, Google and the Robin Hood Foundation.

"When you're used to working at an institution that's been around 150 years, sometimes things just happen and nobody really thinks about the fact that there's somebody somewhere thinking about making sure that this particular procedure is working well," she said.

"I'm sure we'll find some of those, but so far so good."

Professor Estrin.

The Entrepreneurial Egghead

Of all Mike Bloomberg’s many initiatives to turn New York into the Silicon Valley of the 21st century, one stands out as the centerpiece of his master plan: the applied sciences campus. After a battle royale with other schools including Stanford, Cornell emerged the winner with its proposal to build a Roosevelt Island satellite. Now, with classes scheduled to start in January, the city’s techies are left watching and waiting for graduates to fill all their open jobs.

Cornell insists its campus is designed to boost New York’s tech sector, and the school’s choice of open-source advocate Deborah Estrin as its first academic faculty member shows that’s more than mere talk.

The professor was poached from UCLA, where her work on embedded sensing networks landed her on lists like Wired’s “50 People Who Will Change the World” and CNN’s “10 Most Powerful Women in Tech.”

But more important than her research is the tone she’s already setting as a founding faculty member. Her commitment to open source—the principle that the fruits of technological research ought to be shared freely—should pique the interest of even the most reticent founders. “Open source is a shared good from which everyone benefits and on which tremendously successful commercial and social ventures are built,” she told The Observer. It also means even the city’s scrappiest startups might have a chance to build on breakthroughs that emerge from the school’s state-of-the-art labs, without ponying up for pricey licensing fees.

What drew her to the school, she said, was the promise of  “innovation that crosses all sorts of boundaries: the boundaries between academia and industry, theory and application, teaching and research, commercial and social good.” In fact, her current focus—personalized, mobile healthcare—could have implications for that lagging biotech sector city officials are so desperately trying to build.

Next: Ryder Ripps, Jonathan Vingiano and Jules LaPlace, OKFocus: The Merry Pranksters

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