State of American women
The White House dropped a statistics-stuffed report compiling reams of federal data about the state of American women today.
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Pathways to Prosperity – Is College the Only Option for Career Success?
Students need more options to career success.
Despite decades of efforts to reform education, and billions of dollars of expenditures, the harsh reality is that America is still failing to prepare millions of its young people to lead successful lives as adults. Evidence of this failure is everywhere: in the dropout epidemic that plagues our high schools and colleges; in the harsh fact that just 30 percent of our young adults earn a bachelor’s degree by age 27; and in teen and young adult employment rates not seen since the Great Depression.
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Turtles Use Earth’s Magnetic Fields as a Navigational System
A Loggerhead turtle with tracking device.
Scientists Nathan Putman and Ken Lohmann have determined that turtles can navigate across entire oceans by using the earth’s magnetic fields to determine their longitude and latitude. To test this hypothesis, they used a special water tank that permitted them to alter the magnetic fields inside. They then placed the turtles in the tank to see how they would respond to simulations of different locations…
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Clock Built to Tell Time on Other Planets
Telling the time one planet at a time.
Alexander Avtanski designed a clock that can be adjusted to keep time on many different planets based upon each one’s rotation period — at the same time. Here’s what sets this clock apart from other extraterrestrial clocks, according to its builder…
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IKEA Instructions for Stonehenge
IKEA in archaeology.
What was the purpose for Stonehenge? Was it a calendar, an observatory, or a sacrificial site? These suggestions by archaeologists assume that it was a completed design instead of a project left half-finished because the assembly instructions were provided by IKEA. Justin Pollard, John Lloyd and Stevyn Colgan composed a cartoon illustrating this explanation…
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Kids Who Skip School in California Are Tracked by GPS
A student holds his hand-held GPS, which will help track his whereabouts and will help him stay in school.
Frustrated by students habitually skipping class, police and school officials in Anaheim are turning to GPS tracking to ensure they come to class.
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Tennessee College Bucks the Trend by Lowering Tuition
Sewanee, a Tennessee liberal arts college.
For those who wonder how college tuition costs manage to keep rising year after year, apparently defying laws of economic gravity, Sewanee, a liberal arts college in Tennessee, has an answer: they can’t. On Wednesday, Sewanee announced that it will cut its $46,000 annual bill for students by 10 percent in the fall.
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Fixing The Official Kilogram
Fixing the problem with the kilogram.
The “reference kilogram” is a lump of metal in France — the kilo being the only metric measurement not based on some objective standard. A project is underway to replace the kilo with something independently reproducible: perfectly spherical balls of based onCarbon-12. Incidentally, these new kilos would also be “the roundest objects in the world.”
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Book Uses Colored Thread Between Pages To Make Hyperlinks
Hyperlinks on paper.
Maria Fischer’s “Traumgedanken” book is a collection of “literary, philosophical, psychological and scientifical texts” about dreams. The book uses threads pierced through the pages and affixed to other pages to make physical hyperlinks between ideas.
Post-Secondary Education Does Not Guarantee Critical Thinking Skills
Critical thinking skills not a guarantee.
A post-secondary education won’t necessarily guarantee students the critical thinking skills employers have come to expect from university grads, says a recent study.
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For-Profit College Loans Hit a 25% Default Rate for Repayment
One quarter of students defaulted within 3 years of starting repayment on their college loans.
About one-quarter of students who took out federal loans to attend for-profit colleges defaulted within three years of starting repayment, according to a new federal analysis.
Emotional Health of College Freshman Has Declined to Record Low
The economy has added to the stress, not just because of financial pressures
on their parents but also because the students are worried
about their own college debt and job prospects.
The emotional health of college freshmen — who feel buffeted by the recession and stressed by the pressures of high school — has declined to the lowest level since an annual survey of incoming students started collecting data 25 years ago.
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