Image: Telegraph The apparently sagging quality of the American education system is a topic of much debate. Most of us are aware that our place as one of the world’s preeminent educators is slipping — but the decline is especially sharp in the subjects of math and science. Miller-McCune has a piece on why this may be. It contains nuggets like this: “Only 28 percent of teachers consistently present the evidence for evolution as a unifying theme in biology,… Read the full story on TreeHugger
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Image: CleanTechnica There was something of ruckus last week when Newt Gingrich proposed that we abolish the EPA , and replace it with an agency that by and large already exists. The Newtster was probably trying to cash in on the anti-regulatory sentiment so popular these days, but it looks like he may have overshot: A recent poll reveals that 77% of Americans think that “Congress should let the EPA do its job”. 61% of Republicans feel the same way. W… Read the full story on TreeHugger
Continue reading …The woman behind the Planned Parenthood sting that resulted in an employee getting fired is a 22-year-old anti-abortion activist named Lila Rose. She’s made headlines before , but nothing to this extent, and it’s a safe bet we’ll be hearing more from the founder of the group Live Action, writes Libby…
Continue reading …How bit.ly data shows the unrest in Egypt – and the internet shutdown | Strata conference 2011
February 2, 2011 No Comment
bit.ly data scientist Hilary Mason explains how the unrest in Egypt – and the shutdown of the country’s internet – are reflected in the site’s statistics The unrest in Egypt – and the shutdown in the country’s internet activity – is reflected instantly in our data from the country. You can see what happened here at the end of January: The first graph shows clicks from Egypt on bit.ly links. It’s a simple line plot with each point indicating cumulative clicks per hour, and you can see the precipitous drop-off – from around 20,000 per hour to almost zero – when the majority of Egyptian ISPs shut down and a smaller drop-off just before February 1st when Noor, the last operating ISP, shut down. Finally, we see that connections have been restored and in the last few hours traffic has returned to almost normal levels. The second graph show clicks from anywhere in the world on URLs that contain content related to Egypt. It’s in UTC and not normalised by timezone, which shows that people around the world have consistently been interested in the topic over the last week. Interestingly, these results are reflected too in Arbor’s statistics from Egypt which measured activity across 80 networks . More data Data journalism and data visualisations from the Guardian World government data • Search the world’s government data with our gateway Development and aid data • Search the world’s global development data with our gateway Can you do something with this data? • Flickr Please post your visualisations and mash-ups on our Flickr group • Contact us at data@guardian.co.uk • Get the A-Z of data • More at the Datastore directory • Follow us on Twitter Egypt Internet guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Journalists captured the riveting scene as thousands of supporters and opponents of President Hosni Mubarak battled in Cairo’s main square Wednesday. (Feb. 2)
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Older people with large waistlines, high blood pressure, and other risk factors for a condition called metabolic syndrome may be at greater peril for experiencing memory loss, a new French study suggests.
Continue reading …Android 3.0 ‘Honeycomb’ can encrypt all your data, needs a full hour’s charge
February 2, 2011 No Comment
Diving through the Motorola Xoom’s sweet, sweet blend of Android 3.0 , we found an interesting perk — there’s an “Encrypt Tablet” option buried in the settings page, intended to secure all your personal data with a password or PIN. While a handy Google rep couldn’t tell us which cryptographic standards the OS uses, he did tell us the feature is part of Honeycomb as a whole, not a Motorola exclusive, so we’re sure to see the option in other business-minded Android slates to come. Oh, and Google asks that all you sysadmins stay tuned, as the company’s whipped up an API that lets you enforce policy restrictions upon your peons as far as encryption is concerned. Just make sure they remember to keep the tablet charged. See a close-up after the break. Continue reading Android 3.0 ‘Honeycomb’ can encrypt all your data, needs a full hour’s charge Android 3.0 ‘Honeycomb’ can encrypt all your data, needs a full hour’s charge originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Feb 2011 18:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink
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CAPTION: Actor Ryan O’Neal, longtime companion of Farrah Fawcett, donates her iconic red bathing suit to the Smithsonian on what would have been Fawcett’s 64th birthday. (Feb. 2)
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Click here to view this media Susie wrote about this Monday and Ed Schultz did a nice job of walking the viewers through how the hedge fund managers on Wall Street did their part in contributing to the riots we’re seeing in Egypt and across much of Africa by contributing to the severe spikes on the cost of food. Here’s Susie’s post if you missed it — The Era Of Cheap Food Is Coming To An End. Blame Wall Street Hedge Funds. . And here’s more from Democracy Now — The Food Bubble: How Wall Street Starved Millions and Got Away With It . It’s a shame it takes the kind of turmoil we’re seeing in Egypt and Tunisia and the possibility of the entire Middle East blowing up in protest for our corporate media here in the United States do finally be doing some of the reporting normally reserved for shows like Democracy Now or networks like Al Jazeera.
Continue reading …Few now remember that 1979 and 1980 were the nation’s worst economic years since the Great Depression. Reagan saved America from Jimmy Carter economics: he brought inflation down from 13.5 to 4.1 percent; unemployment, from 9.5 to 5.2 percent; the federal discount rate, from 14 to 6.5 percent. Under Reagan, the number of jobs increased by almost 20 million; median family income rose every year from 1982 to 1989. It was the greatest peacetime expansion in American history. Charitable giving more than doubled, to more than $100 billion in 1988. But the media elite’s first drafts of history ignored the good news and highlighted the bad news. In a study of almost 14,000 network stories on the economy during three one-year time periods – July 1 to June 30 in 1982-83, 1984-85, and 1986-87—Virginia Commonwealth University professor Ted J. Smith III found that as the economy improved, the amount of network TV coverage shrunk and grew more negative in tone. The ratio of negative to positive stories aggressively increased even as economic indicators improved, from 4.9 to 1 in 1982-83 to 7.0 to 1 in 1986-87. When an economic indicator grew better, the networks began covering it less so they could focus more on unhealthy economic signs. For instance, as the unemployment rate fell from 10.6 percent to well under 6 percent by 1987, the number of stories on employment plunged by 79 percent while reports on the growing trade deficit soared 65 percent and stories on the homeless jumped by 167 percent. The media had a theory to prove: Reaganomics was a dramatic failure.
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