“Asia Blog spoke to Parata ahead of the launch of the Center for Global Education at Asia Society to discuss the importance of globally-minded future generations.”
When we as a global community confront the truly difficult question of considering what is really worth devoting our limited time and resources to in an era marked by such global catastrophe, I always find my mind returning to what the Internet hasn’t really been used for yet—and what was rumored from its inception that it should ultimately provide—an utterly and entirely free education for all the world’s people.
In regard to such a concept, Bill Gates said in 2010, “On the web for free you’ll be able to find the best lectures in the world […] It will be better than any single university […] No matter how you came about your knowledge, you should get credit for it. Whether it’s an MIT degree or if you got everything you know from lectures on the web, there needs to be a way to highlight that.”
That may sound like an idealistic stretch to the uninitiated, but the fact of the matter is universities like MIT, Harvard, Yale, Oxford, The European Graduate School, Caltech, Stanford, Berkeley, and other international institutions have been regularly uploading entire courses onto YouTube and iTunes U for years. All of them are entirely free. Open Culture, Khan Academy, Wikiversity, and many other centers for online learning also exist. Other online resources have small fees attached to some courses, as you’ll find on edX and Coursea. In fact, here is a list of over 100 places online where you can receive high quality educational material. The 2015 Survey of Online Learning revealed a “Multi-year trend [that] shows growth in online enrollments continues to outpace overall higher ed enrollments.” I. Elaine Allen, co-director of the Babson Survey Research Group points out that “The study’s findings highlight a thirteenth consecutive year of growth in the number of students taking courses at a distance.” Furthermore, “More than one in four students (28%) now take at least one distance education course (a total of 5,828,826 students, a year‐to‐year increase of 217,275).” There are so many online courses, libraries of recorded courses, pirate libraries, Massive Open Online Courses, and online centers for learning with no complete database thereof that in 2010 I found myself dumping all the websites and master lists I could find onto a simple Tumblr archive I put together called Educating Earth. I then quickly opened a Facebook Group to try and encourage others to share and discuss courses too.
The volume of high quality educational material already available online is staggering. Despite this, there has yet to be a central search hub for all this wonderful and unique content. No robust community has been built around it with major success. Furthermore, the social and philosophical meaning of this new practice has not been strongly advocated enough yet in a popular forum.
Continue reading “A Free Education for all the World’s People: Why is this Not yet a Thing?” »
“The biggest challenges facing the rich world today are persistent unemployment, widening income inequality, and accelerating climate change. … In Reinventing Prosperity, Graeme Maxton and Jorgen Randers take a radically different approach and offer thirteen politically feasible proposals to improve our world.”
Winfried Hensinger likes Star Trek. “It goes all the way back to primary school,” said the director of the Sussex Centre for Quantum Technologies in England. “I wanted to be science officer on the Enterprise, so I worked out in about grade five that I wanted to study physics.”
Today, his day-to-day work on abstract notions of quantum mechanics would make even Spock’s ears perk up.
Continue reading “Quantum computing will make your PC look like a graphing calculator” »
If I had to pick my least favorite subject in high school, it would be physics.
The concepts themselves were challenging. The math was even more challenging.
However, my views on physics quickly changed when my teacher mentioned the words “quantum mechanics.”
Continue reading “OPINION — Quantum physics provides new world perspective” »
“The whole model of education, of stuffing information into kids’ minds is very much obsolete, since we carry all the knowledge of the world on our belts… The knowledge we carry around with us is only going to get ever more rich, and it’s going to become more and more intimately integrated with our lives.” says Kurzweil.
While traditional education has revolved around rote memorization and standardized testing, the one-size-fits-all model of learning pales in comparison to passionately engaging in problems we’re personally interested in solving.
Continue reading “Kurzweil Says Passion Projects Are the Best Way to Learn” »
And, we all have heard all of the horrorr stories of a botch surgery or treatment performed by a MD who was a fraud. Well, our friends on the Dark Web are at work again in supplying anyone willing to pay fake diplomas & certifications. The challenge is how do companies and agencies validate? Something to ponder as we all know hackers can also forge educational records as well.
Criminals on the Dark Web (a lawless, unregulated part of the Internet) are supplying fake diplomas and employment certifications to anyone with a few hundred bucks.
According to Israeli threat intelligence firm Sixgill, people are even hiring hackers to penetrate university computer systems to alter grades.
Continue reading “Dark Web Criminals Supplying Forged Diplomas & Certifications” »
Saya is a computer-generated school girl created by Japanese artists Teruyuki Ishikawa and Yuka Ishikawa. She looks so detailed that she has broken past the uncanny valley, and she could herald a new era in CGI.
Japanese artists Teruyuki Ishikawa & Yuka Ishikawa (a.k.a Telyuka) have given birth to Saya, and she’s remarkable. But despite how realistic she may look, she’s not real. Rather, she’s a computer-generated rendition of a school girl.
Telkuya started the Saya project in 2015, and they have been working to constantly improve her—make her more detailed and more life-like.
New research suggests that nerve cells may be able to repair themselves by mobilizing mitochondria by removing a certain protein in cells. This may help combat neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s in the near future.
The Mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. We all know that. It causes reactions that generate adenosine triphosphate (ATP), a source of chemical energy in a cell. A typical animal cell contains 1000 to 2000 mitochondria. Yet, that’s not all we learned in high school biology. Remember that neurons or nerve cells do not have the ability to repair themselves once damaged? Well, these two facts have stirred quite a bit of interest.
Scientists have found out that nerve cell regeneration is possible. Researchers from National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in the US restored mitochondrial mobility in a group of mice and observed regeneration of nerve cells.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=benzXbi4zu4&noredirect=1
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