Phil Hansen: Embrace the shake

Hansen challenged himself to create art using unconventional materials (dandelion puffs, matches, live worms, hamburger grease) and canvases (a stack of Starbucks cups, his torso, bananas). The resulting time-lapse videos of his creative processes are his meta-art, showing that art is action, not just results. 

Through an integrated view of what sparks creativity, Hansen has devoted himself to teaching others the approaches to creativity that have changed both his outlook and his artistic endeavors. 

Hansen has just started a new project via Kickstarter, inviting people to share their stories of overcoming limitations with him. 

Anyone who calls him at  651-321-4996  and tells him their story will become a part of the work, the creation of which is watchable on a live feed.

How successful is your country?

Goldman in his recent study notes that the competitive strengths of companies often stem from the advantages of the countries they reside in.

These include a combination of resource availability (food, energy, mining and others), demographics, trade positioning, infrastructure quality and above all, the presence of strong, inclusive institutions that encourage innovation.

So, what follows is Goldman's attempt to map the various success drivers of the world’s countries.

Goldman divides the drivers into four categories:

Innovation
Patents per capita, R&D as a percentage of GDP, venture capital as a percentage of GDP and the birth rate of companies.

Institutions
Confidence in national institutions, days aken to enforce a contract, the cost of starting a business and the GINI co-efficient that measures income inequality.

Resources
Net crude oil exports/(imports) as a percentage of consumption, per capita food surplus/(deficit), copper + iron ore + aluminum surplus/(deficit) and retirees as a percentage of population.

Infrastructure
Transport (airports per capita, railways per sq km), electricity production per capita and internet penetration.
Italy again scores among the worst countries in Europe just after Greece; in brief its institutions are weak, Internet penetration is appalling and when it comes to enforce contracts; it is the worst country in Europe and far behind many third world countries like Nigeria or Kenya who rank much better than Italy on this aspect.


The overall scorecard...





and a close up on Europe... (click image for huge version)


Source: Goldman Sachs

Daphne Koller: What we're learning from online education

Daphne Koller is enticing top universities to put their most intriguing courses online for free -- not just as a service, but as a way to research how people learn. With Coursera (cofounded by Andrew Ng), each keystroke, quiz, peer-to-peer discussion and self-graded assignment builds an unprecedented pool of data on how knowledge is processed.

A country for old men

The column on the right is the figure to look into when evaluating how bad EU countries are doing. With the exception of Turkey (not in the EU) Italy is the worst country even above Greece when it comes to robbing an entire generation of their future.
NEET stands for "not in employment, education or training".
Practically it means that the most dynamic section of the population is not being developed and it is not contributing to the growth of the country.
Italy has always had a horrible record in developing young talents pushing the best and brightest out of the country or to the margin of society. Unfortunately with the crisis instead of capitalizing on the young it is pushing more and more of them to the brink.
Italy remains a country for old men, with an outdated mentality and little or no prospects of modernization to support the growth of a stalled economy.

Best of TED - Peter Norvig: The 100,000-student classroom

In the fall of 2011 Peter Norvig taught a class with Sebastian Thrun on artificial intelligence at Stanford attended by 175 students in situ -- and over 100,000 via an interactive webcast. An interesting speech if you want to learn more on how to attend free university courses online and how the education system is changing.
Worth checking also the following sites offering free university education open to everyone aand everywhere in the world.

Udacity: http://www.udacity.com/courses

EdX (MIT, Harvard, Berkeley) : https://www.edx.org/courses

Stanford: http://www.stanford.edu/online/courses/

Best of TED - Luis von Ahn: Massive-scale online collaboration

For those of us who really hate Captcha, worth watching how this annoying feature is now improving the world. After re-purposing CAPTCHA so each human-typed response helps digitize books, Luis von Ahn wondered how else to use small contributions by many on the Internet for greater good. At TEDxCMU, he shares how his ambitious new project, Duolingo, will help millions learn a new language while translating the Web quickly and accurately — all for free.

Dumber and Dumber

It seems education is in free fall together with the economy.
Reading scores reach an all time low!

Online Education Infograph

Check out this infographic from OnlineEducation.net about how the world of online learning has changed and grown over the years.



Via: OnlineEducation.net