Herb Rubenstein, Brent Green, Arjun Sen and Mike Cote at the Startup Junkie Underground
Monday’s Startup Junkie Underground featured ZenMango President Arjun Sen on “Winning Big in a Down Economy.” Sen, bringing experience from retailers including Einstein Bagels and Papa John’s Pizza, began by highlighting the core mantra of his consulting firm: “Guest experience enhancement.” Sen’s [...]

 Music Phone
Design firm Pilotfish unveiled on Monday plans to make an advanced music phone, hoping to tap untested demand for music editing on the go. (Pics)

Do You Hear What I Hear?

65-year old Toshiko Fukuda of Hyogo Prefecture, Japan, lost her husband to asbestos on April 17th last year. Her husband, Motoo, was diagnosed with mesothelioma in 2006, probably from the steel pipe factory he worked at. He got worker’s comp, but the disease ultimately destroyed his lungs and left him [...]

 
68% of students who use Facebook have a “significantly” lower grade
Fresh research has confirmed what many parents and teachers already feared: social networking sites are damaging students’ academic
performance.

YouTube EDU
College too expensive? Try YouTube. It might seem counterintuitive to look for higher education alongside Avril Lavigne music videos, but the video-sharing site has become a major reservoir of college content.

Dry ice vs. soap 
I’m sure we all still fondly remember sitting in our high school science classes, marvelling at how cool liquid nitrogen is. I mean, it freezes anything in seconds – what’s cooler than that? You’ll be surprised – in this week’s video selection we take a look at some of the even cooler [...]

Chocolate calculator 
Bad at math? Gorge on chocolates before you attempt your next examination.

People using the “Conversation Clock” 
Karrie Karahalios can show a child with Asperger’s Syndrome when he’s lost in a conversational riff or a taciturn spouse when he doesn’t speak very much.

 
Harshvardhan Nawathe won India’s “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” in 2000.
The film “Slumdog Millionaire,” in which a poor Indian boy wins a quiz show, won eight Oscars. The country is home to a man with a similar story — Harsh Nawathe, who became a millionaire in 2000 as a TV contestant. Today he is [...]

 
A robot named Cosmo has become six-year-old Kevin Fitzgerald’s unlikely ally in his uphill everyday battle with developmental difficulties.
At a strip mall clinic in suburban Maryland, Kevin is at the unlikely intersection of new efforts to treat symptoms of autism, cerebral palsy and other developmental disorders with robotics and computer work.

Neil Strauss has a new book, “Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life”, which reveals the secrets of people who in a hypothetical apocalypse will be roasting your femur over oil barrels. He made this video showing how to make a knife from a cigarette for Danger Room. Too bad my cigarettes use cotton filters.

In search of a future for Brentwood, CA … and the U.S. work force
Raymond Alvarez:  Earthquakes, a great flood, fires – seemingly nothing could stop the rocking ’90s and California’s Contra Costa County, an area bounded by high tech companies to the south and industrial giants in the north.
Then came the fourth horseman of the [...]

The Fab Four

A Liverpool university has launched a Masters degree on The Beatles, popular music and society. Liverpool Hope University claims the course is the first of its kind in the UK and “probably the world”.
The course looks at the studio sound and compositions of The Beatles and how Liverpool helped shape their music.
Mike Brocken, [...]

Makes me think of that Guinness beer commercial that has the tag line that is “Brilliant”
Reading Japanese isn’t easy – even for the Japanese.
Take Prime Minister Taro Aso. He’s made so many public blunders that an opposition lawmaker tried to give him a reading test during a televised session of parliament.
The Japanese leader bungled the [...]

 
Monday’s Night with a Futurist offered perspectives on “Next Generation Learning” provided by Michael Cushman. To Cushman, the opportunity for improved learning and training derives from the historically static nature of education combined with the potential offered by the increased pace of technology development. While “our founding fathers were born with the same technology they [...]

 
 
While children look up to and aspire to be like a positive family member or peer, they are more likely to imitate traits of other role models — including negative role models, which can lead to behavioral problems, according to a Kansas State University researcher.

 
 Abby Brown, the sixth grade teacher who designed the stand-up desks
From the hallway, Abby Brown’s sixth-grade classroom in a little school here about an hour northeast of Minneapolis has the look of the usual one, with an American flag up front and children’s colorful artwork decorating the walls.

 
 Yes, there is still money out there for investment!
Seed capital is the early stage money needed to get most businesses off the ground. It is considered a high-risk investment, but one that can reap major rewards if the company becomes a growth enterprise. This type of funding is often obtained in exchange for an equity [...]

 
 
A new study in the Journal of School Health found that physically fit kids scored better on standardized math and English tests than their less fit peers.

 
 VDI
The time to call-off the unforgettable memories of the DaVinci driving simulator has come. Virtual Driver Interactive dares to offer a highly interactive atmosphere for learning driving via its “VDI Driving Simulator” that puts you in the shoes of a driver.

 
 
Across the University of Colorado at Boulder campus students are sharing answers, checking their responses to questions against those of their neighbors and making adjustments to those answers in hopes of earning a better grade.

 
Parental education is a strong predictor of socioeconomic status and children’s educational environment. Nevertheless, some children continue to experience reading failure in spite of high parental education and support for learning to read.

 
What does a teenage brain on Google look like? Do all those hours spent online rewire the circuitry? Could these kids even relate better to emoticons than to real people? These sound like concerns from worried parents. But they’re coming from brain scientists.

 
The next time you are reading a book, or even as you read this article, consider the words that you are seeing. How do you recognize these words? Substantial research has shown that while reading, we recognize words by their letters and not by the general shape of the word. However, it was largely unknown [...]

 
 Terracycle
When I think about good companies that have education, people and the environment in mind, one of the companies I think about first is Terracycle.