Those that have read my blog know that I do get on my soapbox from time to time about the state of education in the United States.  I can't help but be concerned about the future for America's young adults.  Too many students are not opting to stay in school to continue their education. If U.S. students continue their lack of motivation in pursuing an education, I can't help but be gloomy on America's place in the 21st century as a world leader.

Taking a different viewpoint, BusinessWeek recently posted an article on academics in the United States stating that U.S. schools are not doing that bad.  The schools could be doing better, but they're not terrible.  The article uses the Two Million Minutes documentary as its backdrop.  The BusinessWeek author points out that academic performance doesn't always dictate the sucess a person may have in the world of business.

Here is your chance to help out the academic scholars figure out what open source is all about. Lara Thynne, a PhD candidate at Deakin University Australia, is running a survey to be used in examining the motivation of open source users when it comes to participating in open source projects and using open source software. Ms. Thynne's difficulty is that she is needing around 1500 completed surveys and hasn't quite connected with the open source communities to "get the job done".

I encourage anyone in the open source community to take some time and fill out the survey. Personally, I found the survey interesting by what questions she chose to ask in her survey and maybe more interesting which questions she may have left out of the survey. She claims the survey takes only 5 to 10 minutes, but to be honest it took me a full 15 minutes (maybe I'm just slow). I am not sure how much traffic the server can can handle, so if you can't make a connection right away you might want try again at a later time. The link to the survey is: https://dcarf.deakin.edu.au/surveys/oss/ .