One Blog for the Kids!: Barack Obama

Showing posts with label Barack Obama. Show all posts

Friday, March 6, 2015

Success Is Not Just About Smarts

English: Logo of One Laptop per Child (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I like this article. Not that it disregards technology, but it enforces the truth, that with or without technology, our basis for success is not only intelligence. I mean, being smart gives you a headstart, but grit - fortitude and determination, coupled with persistence, and all of the other good values - these what makes the basis for making it good in life. But then again, it is not a guarantee...
-----

TOM BRADY

Technology has been promoted as the great equalizer in education. Initiatives like One Laptop Per Child and Massive Online Open Courses were supposed to democratize learning, but when the $400 laptops given to poor children around the world broke, and failure rates of some MOOCs were as high as 75 percent, reality set in.

Though many believe that computers can shrink the education gap, research shows that giving students from poor families online access is more likely to widen the divide, Susan Pinker reported in The Times. Jacob Vigdor and Helen Ladd, economists at Duke University in North Carolina, tracked a million disadvantaged middle-school students for five years after they were given networked computers and found “a persistent decline in reading and math scores,” they wrote. The scores of boys and African-Americans dropped drastically because many used their machines to play games, surf social media and download entertainment.

The same thing happened in the One Laptop project, with children spending less time on their homework than before, researchers found.

New findings suggest that educators should focus more on low teacher-student ratios, early intervention and character traits.

Chicago has introduced an intensive program where black and Latino boys work two on one with a tutor, and participants have ended up as much as two years ahead of students who haven’t gotten help, David Kirp wrote in The Times. This math success also has put them on track to graduate, helped them engage in school and made them less likely to be arrested for a violent crime.

Many programs address the time between birth and age 3, but the teen years may be just as important. Laurence Steinberg, a psychologist at Temple University in Philadelphia, points out in his new book that neuroscientists have realized that adolescence, like early childhood, Is a “period of tremendous ‘neuroplasticity,’ ” during which the brain changes through experience.

The Time’s Nicholas Kristof wrote that early help for disadvantaged children not only reduces inequality but also can save public money. He quoted James Heckman, a University of Chicago professor and Nobel Prize-winning economists, who says the cheapest way to reduce crime is to invest in early childhood programs. Mr. Heckman has calculated that to get the same reduction in crime by adding police officers would cost five times as much.

“Early education” includes counseling at-risk pregnant women not to drink, smoke or take drugs, and then after birth, helping them breast-feed and read to the child. These help, Mr.Kristof wrote, “apparently because the first few years are the window when the brain is forming and when basic skills like self-control and grit are developed.”

At some schools, grit, self- control and curiosity are now part of the curriculum. Scientists say personality could be more important than intelligence when it comes to success in school.

Arthur E. Poropat, an Australian psychology professor, cites data showing that a tendency to be “diligent, dutiful and hardworking,” and qualities like creativity and curiosity, are more predictive of student performance than intelligence. This is good news, Dr. Poropat wrote in a paper last year, because “personality has been demonstrated to change over time to a far greater extent than intelligence.”

“We probably need to start rethinking our emphasis on intelligence,” he told The Times.

Mandy Benedix, who teaches a class on grit at Rogers Middle School in Pearland, Texas, told The Times: “We know that these non-cognitive traits can be taught. We also know that it is necessary for success. You look at anybody who has had long-term sustainable success, and every one of them exhibited at some point this grit, this tenacity to keep going.”

Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, The New York Times International Weekly, February 28, 2015

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Taking Ride On Air Remains Elusive

English: A Hoverboard (or hover board) is a fictional hovering board used for personal transportation Français : Le Hoverboard est un skateboard volant du futur (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

English: I drew this diagram using xfig. It's a crude schematic of how to assemble my next hoverboard prototype. I do not have a version posted online. I release this image into the public domain. -- WillWare 18:26, 18 July 2006 (UTC) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

BY CONOR DOUGHERTY

LOS GATOS, California – A lot of things can hover. There are helicopters. There are hovercraft. But for the last three decades, a generation of engineers and movie fans have been waiting for something else: a hovering skateboard like the one in “Back to the Future Part II.”

The hoverboard is fiction, the vision of screenwriters who created the film about Marty McFly, a teenager who travels from 1985 to 2015, and uses a floating skateboard to flee a gang of bullies.

Ever since, various garage tinkerers and physics professors – and more recently, top engineers at Google – have tried to replicate it.

In California, Greg and Jill Henderson allowed a reporter to stand atop a magnetic skateboard that can float a couple of centimeters above a copper surface. The Hendersons have poured their life savings into the technology and are hoping to create industries based on this science.

Dustin Rubio, 39, an electrician who grew up skateboarding and saw “back to the Future Part II” when he was a teenager, is not thinking quite that big. This year, Mr. Rubio turned “a leaf blower, some plywood, some plastic and duct tape” into a small hovercraft that his daughters used to glide down the driveway at his home in Napa, California. “I was like I’m just gonna make something funny and see if it works,” he said.

But Mr. Rubio’s invention is not really a hoverboard. Bob Gale, who wrote the “Back to the Future” trilogy, said that in his imagination the hoverboard floats on a magnetic field similar to magnetic levitation trains.

This has been extremely difficult, mostly because of Earnshaw’s theorem, which states, more or less, that repelling magnets are tough to balance. One way is to use a track to hold the magnetic skateboard in place.

Last year, Rich DeVaul, a senior engineer at Google X, the company’s research division, and Dan Piponi, a Google mathematician, got as far as a fingernail-size piece of carbon that could hover above a lattice of small magnets.

They remain confident they could have built a board, but are less confident they could have found a use for it. “We weren’t sure exactly what big problem we were solving except for this global lack of hoverboard skate,” Mr.DeVaul said.

It turns out Mr.Henderson was working on this very thing. In the back of his office, there is a copper halfpipe that may be the first hoverboard skate park.

Mr. Henderson became enamored of hover technology in 1989 after the Loma Prieta earthquake, thinking that if you could make buildings float, you could build cities to better withstand earthquakes.

Two years ago, he started his company, Arx Pax, hoping to develop magnetic technologies and license patents. The Hendo hoverboard is not yet for sale. But the Hendersons have started a campaign to raise $250,000 on Kickstarter, the crowd-funding site.

Mr. Gale said that when he and Robert Zemeckis wrote “Back to the Future II,” they envisioned a future of pedestrian-friendly downtowns ad flying skateboards.

Mr. Zemeckis told an interviewer that the technology was real, prompting an avalanche of letters from boys like Dave Mertes.

Mr. Mertes, now a 36-year-old clothing designer in Seattle, said he was crushed when it turned out that Mr. Zemeckis was joking. “I was like, oh, the director just said it was real. How can I get one?”

Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, November 1, 2014

Saturday, June 27, 2009

US House passes historic climate change bill

Posted: 27 June 2009 0751 hrs

Activists hold signs as they participate in a rally on climate change in Washington DC. (file pic)

WASHINGTON: The US House of Representatives on Friday narrowly passed historic legislation to limit pollution blamed for global warming, handing President Barack Obama a major, hard-fought victory.

By a 219-212 margin, lawmakers voted for the first time in US history to limit heat-trapping carbon emissions and shift the US economy to cleaner energy in a move backers said will create jobs and restore Washington's shaky leadership on climate change ahead of global talks set for December.

Obama immediately hailed the vote, telling reporters at the White House that it amounted to "a victory of the future over the past" as well as "a bold and necessary step".

"The American people are demanding that we abandon the failed policies and politics of the past; we no longer accept inaction; that we face up to the challenges of our time. And today, the House has done exactly that," he said.

The "American Clean Energy and Security Act" aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 17 per cent from 2005 levels by 2020, and 83 per cent by 2050, create "green" jobs, and wean the US economy from oil imports.

The bitter, day-long debate pitted supporters who argued the bill would put a shine back on the battered US economy and foes who described the measure's more than 1,200 pages as a grim recipe for long unemployment lines.

"Just remember these four words for what this legislation means – jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs. Let's vote for jobs," Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi exhorted her colleagues minutes before the vote.

Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner warned the measure would send energy costs skyrocketing and denounced it as "the biggest job-killing bill that has ever been on the floor of the House".

The pitched political battle over a central plank of Obama's platform now shifts to the US Senate, where the prospects for action this year are uncertain and where outspoken foes of the House approach wield considerable clout.

"Now it's up to the Senate to take the next step. And I'm confident that in the coming weeks and months the Senate will demonstrate the same commitment to addressing what is a tremendous challenge," said Obama.

Senate Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid hailed the House's "courageous step" but warned "the bill is not perfect" while vowing to "pass bipartisan and comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation this fall".

The bill, the fruit of months of tough negotiations, would create a "cap-and-trade" system limiting overall pollution from large industrial sources and then allocating and selling pollution permits.

The Democratic-crafted bill would require utilities, by 2020, to get 15 per cent of their electricity from renewable resources – solar, wind, geothermal, and biomass – and show annual energy savings of five per cent from efficiency measures.

The European Union plan calls for getting 20 per cent of all electricity from renewable resources by 2020.

Obama, who spent part of the day courting wavering lawmakers, said as he met with German Chancellor Angela Merkel hours before the vote that he hoped the United States was reasserting its role after letting Europe lead for years.

"The United States, over the last several years, has not been where we need to be. We're not going to get there all in one fell swoop, but I'm very proud of the progress that's being made," he told Merkel at the White House.

Obama also vowed to work with rising economies that are also major polluters, like China and India, amid worries that the bill may hamstring the US economy and send jobs fleeing to countries that lack similar restrictions.

"India and China will not shatter their own economies with this sort of scheme, and it's nonsensical for America to impose a job killer like this on ourselves," said the number two House Republican, Representative Eric Cantor.

The US Environmental Protection Agency estimates that implementing the legislation would cost 80-111 dollars per US household per year, while the Congressional Budget Office says it would run about 175 dollars.

- AFP/so

From ChannelNewsAsia.com; see the source article here.

US House passes historic climate change bill

Posted: 27 June 2009 0751 hrs

Activists hold signs as they participate in a rally on climate change in Washington DC. (file pic)

Obama immediately hailed the vote, telling reporters at the White House that it amounted to "a victory of the future over the past" as well as "a bold and necessary step".

Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner warned the measure would send energy costs skyrocketing and denounced it as "the biggest job-killing bill that has ever been on the floor of the House".

The bill, the fruit of months of tough negotiations, would create a "cap-and-trade" system limiting overall pollution from large industrial sources and then allocating and selling pollution permits.

The European Union plan calls for getting 20 per cent of all electricity from renewable resources by 2020.

- AFP/so

From ChannelNewsAsia.com; see the source article here.

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Automakers go green with eco-friendly cars

By Rachel Kelly, Channel NewsAsia | Posted: 03 June 2009 2045 hrs

Japanese couple consider a hybrid car

SINGAPORE: Governments, companies and individuals worldwide are gaining interest in issues related to climate change, and becoming more environmentally aware. And this is taking business down a new path.

Japanese car maker Toyota announced on Wednesday it will be leasing 200 plug-in hybrid cars by the end of the year in Japan to boost sales of green cars.

Over in the US, President Barack Obama has just signed a new bill aimed at increasing gas mileage and decreasing green house gas pollution for all new trucks and cars sold in the US.

The move will force US car makers to dramatically boost the efficiency of cars and trucks by 2016.

The programme begins with car models made in 2012.

Meanwhile, China has already announced plans to become the world's largest producer of electric cars, with US$1.5 billion ($10 billion Yuan) package for research and development.

Cash rebates of up to US$8,800 will also be on offer for electric car purchases.

Over in Japan, the major car brands have been picking up speed when it comes to hybrid vehicles. They want to tap into the growing popularity of hybrid cars.

Just last month, Nissan saw orders for its eco-friendly cars jump 30 per cent on year.

Toyota has received pre-sales orders of more than 80,000 vehicles for its remodelled Prius hybrid.

Interest in green vehicles in Japan may have been boosted by the government's new tax incentives for low-emission cars.

This is a growing trend worldwide, with more countries offering tax incentives for such cars and imposing emission caps.

And soon, owning a green vehicle will move from being a trend to a must. - CNA /ls

From ChannelNewsAsia.com; see the source article here.