An interesting read appeared on Ars Technica to underline the one year anniversary of Edward Snowden action: An essay concerning a post-Snowden utopia: Stop the surveillance state
Snowden, one year later (From Ars Technica)
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Category Archives: General stuff
Exams vs Learning or Yin vs Yang?
Not so long ago, we were having an open exchange among the Faculty of our department on learning and evaluating how new concepts were acquired by students. In particular, we exchange on the value of frequent testing (quizzes) versus the famous “finals”. This interesting article was pointed out to me Tests That Teach | Arts & Sciences (and of course this always interesting Sir Ken Robinson on Ted Talks, about creativity and the fear of making mistake e.g. exams!), which seems to indicate that the type of exams, and their frequencies, you used in your class is impacting learning…
Diversity in evaluation methods used in probably the key in both being able to gage the level of understanding and knowledge retention of students and, at the same time, make sure that each and everyone can also get frequent feedback in order to apply course corrections…
Google announced Classroom!
Google Classroom is a mix between Google Drive, Facebook and DropBox in one package for your classroom. Is this enough to make you want to use it?
Will Ununseptium now officially be named by the International Unions of Pure and Applied Physics and Chemistry?
Element 117 independently “created” by a group from GSI, who was able to reproduce previous results using Ca on Bk (Berkelium!). It is off course unstable and its decay time is “relatively long”, in the tens of milliseconds range 😉
Man vs TV
Seen in a presentation at a conference and meant as a transition (and I assume also a critic!) … Quite telling!
Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarisation telescope in Antarctica found first direct evidence of cosmic inflation
In case you have missed it, an official announcement of the experimental detection of gravitational waves were experimentally was made yesterday by the BICEP2 collaboration. Press release by the Havard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics can be found here and further coverage here.
A very interesting video explaining the phenomena can be found here on the Space Travel Foundation Blog.
One of the great thing about a scientific theories and models is that not only should it be able to explain one or more known phenomena but it should be able to have some predictive components (which allows to prove or disprove the model/theory!). The detected waves are part of the predictions made by the inflationary model. While the absence of the waves would mean that the theory is wrong (in part or completely), the experimental observation (if confirmed) is a vindication of the model.
To be followed but extremely exciting.
Ruminating... 