A recent graduate from Syracuse University sent me these links. They are great. I hope you enjoy them.

7 Billion: Are You Typical?

7 Billion, National Geographic Magazine

Interesting STEM links:

STEM a school’s offering…,
STEM Careers,
STEM Collaboration,
Journal of STEM, and
STEM Education Coalition

Want to see the visual possibilities of the future?

Check out this video on YouTube:

A Day Made of Glass 2: Unpacked. The Story Behind Corning’s Vision.

This should be Syracuse University!

How do we measure the value of an education? We want educators to help us create future leaders with exceptional drive, creativity, interpersonal skills, and ethics and we also need to create skilled and unskilled producers, but who should pay for the cost of education? How do we identify the children to educate – should this be based on their parent’s performance? Have we determined the ratio of leaders, skilled, and unskilled workers that we need to educate to keep our society healthy, wealthy, and civilized?

The web site “Measuring Worth” starts each page with Adam Smith’s quote:

“The real price of every thing, what every thing really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it… But though labour be the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities, it is not that by which their value is commonly estimated… Every commodity, besides, is more frequently exchanged for, and thereby compared with, other commodities than with labour.” – Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776

and goes on to explore the value of money. Does this mean the value of a product is based on the scarcity of the product, not the labor taken to produce it?

Businesses can measure the economic value by the output of a “skilled” employee. Should we associate factory workers with IT workers – software development, system administrators, database administrators? Are these employees the production workers in this century? Will we use the same calculations for the “knowledge” worker — statistician, business analyst, and educators? Could we come up with the production levels for these workers and then determine the true cost to educate them?

How should we determine a high school teacher’s salary and how much should we spend on a baseline for all students? According to “Education.com” Syracuse spends $17,141 per pupil. How do we measure the value of that expenditure – in graduation rates, employment rates, new business developed?

There are lots of interesting links with education information, but how to correlate all the data —

“CNY Vitals – Onondaga County”
“US News Education – Fayetteville-Manlius High School”
“Scribd – 2010 CNY Public School Graduation Rates”
“Education.com”
“A Life’s Value – As U.S. Agencies Put More Value on a Life, Businesses Fret”

where is that statistician when I need one? 🙂

Pecha Kucha was apparently developed for designers and architects because they can talk too much! I don’t think they are the only people talking to much. 🙂

“a link to a dynamic list of Pecha Kucha presentations

You can also check out Hans Rosling’s statistical view of the world at this URL: http://www.gapminder.org/. I recommend a visit to this site if you are interested in modeling and world statistics.

WIRED, written by science fiction author Douglas E. Richards, is about a brilliant genetic engineer who has figured out a way to give people savant-like capabilities by giving you a pill. The book is an action-thriller along with an interesting look at the possibilities of enhancing our brains.

I’d like to believe that enhancing the computing power of the brain, with its multidimensional abilities to match patterns, could help us find immediate solutions to wars, famine, and climate change. As quoted in the book:

“The brain is the last and grandest biological frontier, the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe. It contains hundreds of billions of cells interlinked through trillions of connections. The brain boggles the mind.” —James D. Watson, Nobel Laureate and co-discoverer of the structure of DNA.

Richards, Douglas E. (2011-07-12). WIRED (Kindle Locations 4878-4880). Paragon Press. Kindle Edition.

We seem to think that every problem can be solved with a rapid-fire pill, but would it be better is we could slowly change our brain using Neurofeedback (NFB)? Regardless of how we enhance our brains, are we ready for the unintended consequences as explored in Richard Douglas’ book?

Do you think Syracuse could be a bicycle friendly town? Some of the bicycles shown in “The ultimate utility bike competition” are certainly utilitarian and could help us move throughout hilly Syracuse.

I went to expressions.syr.edu this morning and asked to see a random site. I landed on COM 11722, a course taught by Renee Stevens. Professor Steven’s site is clean, crisp, user friendly and beautiful.

I also discovered that her students were reflecting on web sites — one of them identified Pixar’s web site for its simplicity and functionality, and I agree it is a sweet site.

Two nice sites in one morning – one supports learning and the other on brand development – do you see any similarities?

– Jenny