Ireland sets €2bn goal for international education industry by 2020

6,000 Years of Urbanization in 3 Minutes

Watch 6,000 Years of Urbanization in 3 Minutes

Max Galka at Metrocosm has taken the most comprehensive dataset
on cities and made it come alive in a new video.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/yKJYXujJ7sU?rel=0

Published on Jun 15, 2016
This map visualizes the history of urban settlements over 6,000 years.

The data shown in the map comes from a Yale-led study published earlier this month in Scientific Data, which compiled the most comprehensive dataset on historical urban populations to date.

The data has a number of limitations and is “far from comprehensive.” Certain parts of world are better represented than others, and some well known cities do not appear until centuries after they were founded. That said, it is the first global-scale collection of pre-1950 urban populations, and a good starting point for future research.

Source and full-screen version.

 

 

How Stories Told Of Brilliant Scientists Affect Kids’ Interest In The Field

Researchers found that students perform better in science where they read stories about how famous scientists struggled rather than when they read stories about what those scientists achieved.

Read the full article here!                

Histography, a remarkable way of loving history

“Histography” is interactive timeline that spans across 14 billion years of history, from the Big Bang to 2015. The site draws historical events from Wikipedia and self-updates daily with new recorded events. The interface allows for users to view between decades to millions of years.

http://histography.io

 

The perils of “Growth Mindset” education

An interesting article Alfie Kohn recently published in Salon.com:

The perils of “Growth Mindset” education: Why we’re trying to fix our kids when we should be fixing the system
How a promising but oversimplified idea caught fire, then got coopted by conservative ideology

Please click on title or photo to read the article.

Our world in data

Thanks to Larry Ferlazzo for the hint and the link, here’s an excellent site
on highly relevant data by Max Roser: http://ourworldindata.org

 

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The world’s languages on one map

Langscape is an interactive map of the locations of 6400 of the world’s languages. And it provides amazing insights. Here is an article from The Week explaining it pretty well, it includes a video showing its many cool features:

Click to read original article

 

And this is what LANGSCAPE (http://langscape.umd.edu) looks like:

Explore and enjoy!

 

Playing and listening, the magic difference

How playing an instrument benefits your brain

– Anita Collins

 

Between having a basic command and holding a conversation

We’ve just discovered a great blog by Jakub Marian, we’re adding him to our blogroll right away!
And we’d like to point your attention to this recent article:

“Some native English speakers’ attitude towards learning foreign languages can be summarized as “why should I learn a foreign language if pretty much everybody speaks English?” While it is true that English is among the most commonly learned second languages in the world, only a small percentage of the world population are able to speak it at a conversational level.”
… read the article here !!!

 

Heartbleed, explained

Can’t top that one. It’s genius.

http://xkcd.com/1354/

 

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