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Showing posts from August, 2019

No, Finland isn’t ditching traditional school subjects. Here’s what’s really happening

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/03/26/no-finlands-schools-arent-giving-up-traditional-subjects-heres-what-the-reforms-will-really-do/ Plans to overhaul schools in Finland — whose students have been at or near the top of international exams for years — have sparked stories in the media saying that traditional subjects, such as math and history and art, will be abandoned. A recent story in the British newspaper the Independent, for example, had this headline: “Finland schools: Subjects scrapped and replaced with ‘topics’ as country reforms its education system.”  Alas, the stories are overblown, according to Finnish educator and scholar Pasi Sahlberg. In this post, Sahlberg explains what is actually happening in Finland. Sahlberg, one of the world’s leading experts on school reform and educational practices, is a visiting professor of practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is the author of the best-selling “ Finnish Lessons :

What Finland is really doing to improve its acclaimed schools

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/08/30/what-finland-is-really-doing-improve-its-acclaimed-schools/ Finland has been paid outsized attention in the education world since its students scored the highest among dozens of countries around the globe on an international test some 20 years ago. And while it is no longer No. 1 — as the education sector was hurt in the 2008 recession, and budget cuts led to larger class sizes and fewer staff in schools — it is still regarded as one of the more successful systems in the world. In an effort to improve, the Finnish government began taking some steps in recent years, and some of that reform has made for worldwide headlines. But as it turns out, some of that coverage just isn’t true. A few years ago, for example, a change in curriculum sparked stories that Finland was giving up teaching traditional subjects. Nope . You can find stories on the Internet saying Finnish kids don’t get any homework. Nope. Even amid its

Software Engineering Grads Lack the Skills Startups Need

https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-institute/ieee-member-news/software-engineering-grads-lack-the-skills-startups-need Today’s software engineering programs teach students traditional skills tailored to large employers—subjects like software processes, software analysis, project management, and software management. But startups and next-gen technology companies expect a dynamic and in-depth understanding of the software ecosystem and its tools from new graduates. They want grads who can build scalable systems and program for large-scale, distributed, data-intensive systems that leverage cloud computing. Unfortunately, the standard software engineering curriculum—even at top-tier schools—places little emphasis on these skills, according to IEEE Senior Member Nitish M. Devadiga . Devadiga is the author of “ Software Engineering Education: Converging with the Startup Industry .” The study, published in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library , compares the current state of software en

Possible Detection of a Black Hole So Big It ‘Should Not Exist’

https://www.quantamagazine.org/possible-detection-of-a-black-hole-so-big-it-should-not-exist-20190828/ lack hole physicists have been excitedly discussing reports that the LIGO and Virgo gravitational-wave detectors recently picked up the signal of an unexpectedly enormous black hole, one with a mass that was thought to be physically impossible. “The prediction is no black holes, not even a few” in this mass range, wrote Stan Woosley , an astrophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in an email. “But of course we know nature often finds a way.” Seven experts contacted by Quanta said they’d heard that among the 22 flurries of gravitational waves detected by LIGO and Virgo since April, one of the signals came from a collision involving a black hole of unanticipated heft — purportedly as heavy as 100 suns. LIGO/Virgo team members would neither confirm nor deny the rumored detection. Chris Belczynski, an astrophysicist at Warsaw University, previously felt

The Myth of Consumer-Grade Security

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/08/the_myth_of_con.html The Department of Justice wants access to encrypted consumer devices but promises not to infiltrate business products or affect critical infrastructure. Yet that's not possible, because there is no longer any difference between those categories of devices. Consumer devices are critical infrastructure. They affect national security. And it would be foolish to weaken them, even at the request of law enforcement.

JBS: The Brazilian butchers who took over the world

https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2019-07-02/jbs-brazilian-butchers-took-over-the-world If you eat meat, you probably buy products made by one Brazilian company. A company with such power it can openly admit to having bribed more than 1,000 politicians and continue to grow despite scandal after scandal. And you’ve probably never heard of it. Meat is now the new commodity, controlled by just a handful of gigantic firms which together wield unprecedented control over global food production. The Bureau has been investigating the biggest of all: JBS, a Brazilian company which slaughters a staggering 13 million animals every single day and has annual revenue of $50bn. When it comes to scandals, you can take your pick — during its rapid rise to become the world’s biggest meatpacker, JBS and its network of subsidiaries have been linked to allegations of high-level corruption, modern-day “slave labour” practices, illegal deforestation, animal welfare violations a

Study identifies main culprit behind lithium metal battery failure

Study identifies main culprit behind lithium metal battery failure https://jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/news_releases/release.sfe?id=2850 San Diego, Calif., Aug. 21, 2019 -- A research team led by the University of California San Diego has discovered the root cause of why lithium metal batteries fail—bits of lithium metal deposits break off from the surface of the anode during discharging and are trapped as “dead” or inactive lithium that the battery can no longer access. The discovery, published Aug. 21 in Nature , challenges the conventional belief that lithium metal batteries fail because of the growth of a layer, called the solid electrolyte interphase (SEI), between the lithium anode and the electrolyte. The researchers made their discovery by developing a technique to measure the amounts of inactive lithium species on the anode—a first in the field of battery research—and studying their micro- and nanostructures.

Salah Kaprah Pendidikan Karakter di Sekolah

Oleh: Achmad Munjid Mendikbud dan Panglima TNI baru menandatangani kerja sama program penguatan pendidikan karakter. Ini kelanjutan dari program "Tentara Masuk Sekolah", kerja sama Mendikbud dengan Panglima TNI, pada 2017. Guna meningkatkan disiplin, semangat nasionalisme dan sekaligus menangkal radikalisme di sekolah-sekolah, personel TNI akan dilibatkan dalam pendidikan karakter siswa baru. Dari SD hingga SMA, di seluruh Indonesia. Caranya, antara lain latihan baris-berbaris dan tata cara upacara bendera. Dengan segala hormat kepada niat baik ini, menurut saya itu adalah kebijakan pendidikan yang salah arah, keliru orientasi, dan harus dikoreksi. Berpikir logis Tanggung jawab utama lembaga pendidikan adalah memastikan para siswa berpikir logis. Dengan begitu ia bisa jernih mengenali dan menyelesaikan masalah. Sayangnya, itulah yang selama ini tak cukup diurus sekolah-sekolah kita. Sekolah kita begitu sibuk mengurus perkara moral, kesalehan, ideologi, nasionalisme, kewira

How Removing One Maine Dam 20 Years Ago Changed Everything

https://therevelator.org/edwards-dam-removal/ The removal of the Edwards Dam on Maine’s Kennebec River helped river conservationists reimagine what’s possible. Turning Points February 11, 2019 - by Tara Lohan Wild, Incisive, Fearless. News Extinction Countdown Investigations Wildlife Climate Change Oceans & Clean Water Pollution & Toxins Public Lands & Protected Spaces Sustainability Ideas Essays Editorials Op-Eds The Ask Podcasts Culture Reviews Book Excerpts Turning Points Art About Contact Us Write for The Revelator Subscribe Welcome to the first edition of “Turning Points,” our new column examining critical moments in environmental history when change occurred for the better — or worse. M

Efisiensi Transportasi

Transportasi yang paling efisien adalah menggunakan sepeda, demikian menurut grafik berikut: Sumbu mendatar adalah massa benda dalam kilogram, sedangkan sumbu tegak adalah biaya transportasi dengan satuan kalori per gram per kilometer yang ditempuh. Manusia+sepeda ada di posisi paling bawah, jadi kalau menurut gambar tersebut, transportasi manusia dengan sepeda adalah yang paling efisien. Referensi gambar tersebut adalah dari tulisan "Bicycle Technology" karangan S.S. Wilson di Scientific American Maret 1973. Data versi lain dari artikel " The Challenge of Energy-Efficient Transportation " di situs https://www.cambridge.org/ Sumber: https://twitter.com/njanakiev/status/1158714348841439233

The Coming Boeing Bailout?

https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-coming-boeing-bailout Hi, Welcome to Big, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly. If you like it, you can sign up here . Today I’ll discuss how a merger in the 1990s ruined Boeing, and why the government will have to step in to save the company. Let’s start by admiring the company that was Boeing, so we can know what has been lost. As one journalist put it in 2000 , “Boeing has always been less a business than an association of engineers devoted to building amazing flying machines.” For the bulk of the 20th century, Boeing made miracles. Its engineers designed the B-52 in a weekend, bet the company on the 707, and built the 747 despite deep observer skepticism. The 737 started coming off the assembly line in 1967, and it was such a good design it was still the company’s top moneymaker thirty years later. How did Boeing make miracles in civilian aircraft? In short, the the civilian engineers were in charge. And it fell apart be

The Flawed Reasoning Behind the Replication Crisis

http://nautil.us/issue/74/networks/the-flawed-reasoning-behind-the-replication-crisis Here are three versions of the same story: 1. In the fall of 1996, Sally Clark, an English solicitor in Manchester, gave birth to an apparently healthy baby boy who died suddenly when he was 11 weeks old. She was still recovering from the traumatic incident when she had another baby boy the following year. Tragically, he also died, eight weeks after being born. The causes of the two children’s deaths were not readily apparent, but the police suspected they were no coincidence. Clark was arrested and charged with two counts of murder. The pediatrician Roy Meadow, inventor of the term “Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy,” testified at the trial that it was extremely unlikely that two children from an affluent family like the Clarks would die from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) or “cot death.” He estimated the odds were 1 in 73 million, which he colorfully compared to an 80:1 longshot winni