When did baby strollers get so high-tech? The Origami stroller power-folds itself open and shut at the touch of a button and has a built-in generator that charges the battery with every step you take. You can even choose to add options like powered speakers for your MP3 player, daytime running lights, or an adapter [...]

Harvard University has the biggest endowment
Average college endowment returns plummeted 18.7% last year, the worst decline for higher education since the Great Depression, a report says.  Overall, higher education endowments fared better than other indexes; the widely used S&P 500 was down 26.2% over the same period, the 12 months ending last June 30. And, [...]

Indian students not safe in Australia
Avoid Australia – that’s the clear warning to students planning to study Down Under, issued by the Indian government.  On the ground, the government’s warning apart, the unending attacks and two deaths resulting from it have clearly rattled admission seekers and students already studying there.

The Ecorium Project, South Korea’s planned nature reserve, is a stunner. The 33,000 sq. meter park includes a wetland reserve and  a wild plant area. The structure will comprise a series of connected domes, each of which contains its own greenhouse.

Sponsored by the National Ecological Institute of South Korea and designed by Samoo, the Ecorium Project [...]

The six most vunerable areas for colleges
After looking at all the signals, there is no other way to describe it. Colleges are under attack.
Several legs of the financial stools upon which they are sitting have been kicked out from under them, forcing higher tuition rates on an already cautious base of consumers. But money is [...]

Stress affects success at school
Parents who push themselves too hard at work may harm their children’s chance of success at school.  Research shows that mothers and fathers with career burnout pass on their feelings of disillusionment at home. Their offspring are more likely to lose interest in schoolwork.
 

China will have a $123 trillion economy by 2040. By then, the country will account for 40% of the world’s gross domestic product and be “superrich.” The American economy, by way of contrast, will produce only 14% of global output. And Europe? The E.U. will claim just 5%. So says Robert Fogel, and he has [...]

1.4 million turn out to take post-graduate exams
China’s three-day national post-graduate examination started Saturday, attracting 1.4 million registered applicants in total, a record high number since 2001 and a 13 percent increase over 2009.
 

When the family budget started feeling the recession’s pinch last year, Angela Allyn and her photographer husband, Matt Dinnerstein, pulled their three kids out of Chicago-area private schools and enrolled them in Evanston, Ill., public schools.
 

If you’re gearing up for a job search now as an undergraduate or returning student, there are several bright spots where new jobs and promising career paths are expected to emerge in the next few years.
 

Ghostwriters, the whores of modern academia
Many university students under pressure are turning to the Internet for help – not for research, but to find someone to write their reports for them.  So common is this phenomenon that a new research paper from Wuhan University in Hubei province estimated that university students spend up to half [...]

Reporting from Washington – The unemployment rate dropped last month for men and women, blacks and whites, lifting hopes that the long dry spell in the jobs market may be coming to an end. But for recent college graduates and other young adults, the labor situation didn’t just remain dire — it got worse.
 

MIT has launched a new $5 million, 5-year project to build intelligent machines. To do it, the scientists are revisiting the fifty year history of the Artificial Intelligence field, including the shortfalls that led to the stigmas surrounding it, to find the threads that are still worth exploring. The star-studded roster of researchers includes AI [...]

Flour is not as innocuous as it may seem. Like other carbohydrates, it’s really just a tiny chain of sugars at heart. And (as anyone who’s ever made s’mores knows) sugar can light up like a dried-out Christmas Tree that’s been exposed to an electrical spark…

An artistic rendition of a virtual dictionary.

Guess what? Google has it’s own dictionary now.
Google has quietly rolled out its own online dictionary, complete with multilingual support and accompanying photos. The new site was first discovered by the LA Times Tech Blog, and you can access it at Google.com/Dictionary.
It works exactly as you’d expect: type in a [...]

The Ocarina
Welcome to an orchestra of the 21st century. iPhones are being used as musical instruments in a new course at an American university.
 

When Holden Thorp, the chancellor of the University of North Carolina, was looking for ways to cut the university’s budget, he did what many executives in private industry do — hired a management consultant.
 

A late-night class on writing, ending at 2:30 a.m., at a community college in Boston
Winston Chin hustles on Tuesdays from his eight-hour shift as a lab technician to his writing class at Bunker Hill Community College, a requirement for the associate’s degree he is seeking in hopes of a better job.
 

Do you like to block the world out completely when you’re working at your desk? Copenhagen-based design team GamFratesi has created a prototype for a sleek, dinosaur egg-like work environment that they call Rewrite. It reminds me of those cubicles they had at my grad school library, except they’re a lot nicer-looking.

Low-income Americans with no more than a high school education appear more likely to get vaccinated against H1N1 swine flu than people with more money and better schooling, according to a poll released on Friday.   A telephone survey of 3,003 U.S. adults conducted by Thomson Reuters found that 49.8 percent of people with lower education [...]

Students use digital materials instead of traditional textbooks
The dread of high school algebra is lost here amid the blue glow of computer screens and the clickety-clack of keyboards.   A fanfare plays from a speaker as a student passes a chapter test. Nearby, a classmate watches a video lecture on ratios. Another works out an equation [...]

On any given day, nearly 23 percent of all young Black men ages 16 to 24 who have dropped out of high school are in jail, prison, or a juvenile justice institution in America, according to a disturbing new national report released today on the dire economic and social consequences of not graduating from high [...]

Featured product at the Colorado Inventor Showcase 2009
ZipLS is an educational software system that will be sold to schools and individuals. The software uses a drill and practice approach primarily aimed at rote memorization and problem solving. Current subjects include math facts, math problems, geography, spelling, and foreign language vocabulary.
 

Women have been earning the most college degrees
What started as a “man-cession” is turning into a “Great He-pression.”  The unemployment rate for men is running 2.7 percentage points higher than for women — a “just unprecedented” spread, according to economist Mark Perry at the University of Michigan at Flint.

Dorm life has become a central part of the
college experience, but may soon go away
Students starting school this year may be part of the last generation for which “going to college” means packing up, getting a dorm room and listening to tenured professors. Undergraduate education is on the verge of a radical reordering. Colleges, like [...]