LearnEO! is a creation of the European Space Agency. From the LearnEO! website:
LearnEO! is an Earth observation education project funded by the European Space Agency. Its aim is to increase the understanding of satellite data from ESA missions and show how these can be used to tackle environmental problems in the real world.
The project will develop hands-on training resources for use primarily (but not exclusively) by teachers and students at upper high school to university level.
From the NASA ARSET website:
The goal of the NASA Applied Remote SEnsing Training (ARSET) is to increase the utility of NASA earth science and model data for policy makers, regulatory agencies, and other applied science professionals in the areas of Health and Air Quality, Water Resources, Eco Forecasting, and Disaster Management.
The two primary activities of this project are webinars and in-person courses. Continue reading
John Green is an author I had not heard of before seeing the quote above. (If you follow the link in the preceding sentence he’s got a video which expands – much less cynically – on his statement above.) Public education is a good thing for everyone. Invest in it. Treat students and teachers with respect.
Once upon a time the animals decided they must do something heroic to meet the problems of a “new world” so they organized a school. They had adopted an activity curriculum consisting of running, climbing, swimming and flying. To make it easier to administer the curriculum, all the animals took all the subjects.
The duck was excellent in swimming. In fact, better than his instructor. But he made only passing grades in flying and was very poor in running. Since he was slow in running, he had to stay after school and also drop swimming in order to practice running. This was kept up until his webbed feet were badly worn and he was only average in swimming. But average was acceptable in school so nobody worried about that, except the duck.
From boston.com (emphasis mine):
U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren said Saturday she is shocked that the federal government is earning an estimated $66 billion in profits from student loans originated between 2007 and 2012.
The Democrat from Massachusetts was reacting to a Government Accountability Office report Friday. A previous Congressional Budget Office report estimated that the government will pocket an additional $185 billion in profits on new student loans made over the next 10 years.
‘‘This is obscene. The government should not be making $66 billion in profits off the backs of our students,’’ Warren said in a statement. ‘‘This report reinforces what we already knew — instead of investing in our children and their futures, the government is squeezing profits out of our young people and adding to the mountain of debt they will spend their lives struggling to repay.’’
Warren and eight other U.S. senators committed to wring government profits out of student loans and address a $1.2 trillion in outstanding student loan debt they say is crushing families and putting a strain on the economy.
‘‘We cannot bury our heads in the sand and pretend the profits don’t exist, or use accounting tricks to make them disappear,’’ Warren said. ‘‘It’s time to end the practice of profiting from young people who are trying to get an education and refinance existing loans.’’
Yes, the government is running a significant deficit and should be looking for additional revenue sources but treating student loans as a profit center is just gross.
UPDATE: Continue reading
Christopher Lydon will be back on WBUR Thursday nights starting tonight! Years ago he hosted a morning program on BUR, The Connection, which was the best radio show I’ve ever listened to. The show covered just about every topic you could imagine and Lydon was a great host – got good guests and actually did his homework before the show so that he and his guest could have an intelligent on-air conversation. He took the job very seriously. The Connection started off as a local program then went national after a few years – still had a Boston focus though. Anyhow, Lydon was let go after he and the station couldn’t negotiate a new contract. The new host was decent but the show wasn’t nearly as good as when Lydon was host. Lydon went off to create Radio Open Source, which is what BUR will be broadcasting on Thursday nights. I listened to a number of episodes when it was internet only – all good – but tuning in required I go a bit “off the beaten path” so I didn’t listen often. In contrast, BUR is my default station. I’ll be glad to hear Lydon and I’m glad he’ll be getting a wider audience again. He’s an excellent journalist.
Archive of The Connection broadcasts here. (I think Lydon’s last broadcast was March 9, 2001.)
James Joiner (via The Weekly Sift):
Last night, NBC News ran a feature comparing students in the United States to their counterparts overseas, which, to be honest, isn’t very well. So poorly, in fact, that it appears the trickle down dumbing down has reached someone in the NBC infographic studio, as their art for the piece proudly proclaimed that we’re 26th in math, 17th in reading and… Wait for it… 21th in science. We suppose this could just be someone behind the scenes with a sense of humor, but with scores like those the odds are probably against it – not that we could figure the odds if we wanted to. Maybe they were working phonetically and had a lisp?
Offered by Coursera:
Global Warming: The Science of Climate Change:
This class is an introduction to the science of global warming for students without a science background. Students will examine the evidence surrounding climate change from a variety of perspectives and approaches, and, in the process, gain a multidisciplinary understanding of the scientific process.
The instructor is University of Chicago professor David Archer. I registered the other day. This will be interesting. I have no experience with on-line education. In addition to an on-line class being a new experience, I should know most of the material very well but I also expect I’ll discover some big gaps in my knowledge. (It’ll be interesting to learn where those gaps are and to try to fill them.)
Additional detail on the class from Coursera’s website:
A little while back I expressed a desire to see a poll of voters asking whether they knew about the plunging federal budget deficit. Just as a reminder, here’s what the CBO numbers for the recent past and projections for the near future look like:
Well, Hal Varian of Google got in touch with me, and said,”We can do that!” So he put together a Google Consumer Survey; it’s still ongoing — results here — but here’s what it looked like this morning:
I’m sure someone will quibble about the wording; and yes, the CBO numbers are as % of GDP rather than nominal values (but those would look the same). But I don’t think there’s any real question here: the public has no idea that the deficit has been falling like a stone. A solid majority of voters think it’s still going up, and hardly anyone knows that it’s going down.
There’s another takeaway here too: The deficit is down but the economy is still just treading water. So, with the deficit coming down as it is, why aren’t great things happening? Krugman addresses the counterproductive nature of implementing deficit reduction measures (“austerity”) in a depressed economy in a later post, A Tale of Two Flat Countries.
