Quizam is a new way for study that might come in handy for students.
It's a computer-based tool that utilizes time-tested quizzing methods that makes it easy for students to learn in an environment where their learning curve is accelerated. Learning is accelerated because the mechanism for recall, repetition and feedback reinforce memory.

It's versatile and can be accessed any time, by anyone! It prepares students for standardized tests, focuses on skills improvement and real-time assessment. It's the perfect tool for review, remediation and advanced work, K-12 through adult.

The program is freely downloadable (until 31 Dec. 2006) on the Internet, or available on a CD ROM, which is a benefit to schools in remote areas around the world. A six-month pilot study of seventy-one schools world-wide is underway, and results from the study will be available in early 2007.

What are the benefits ?

• Supports technology in the classroom initiatives, enabling an innovative way of teaching and learning.
• Helps teachers use assessment data to inform real world lesson planning.
• Increases parent-teacher communication.
• Encourages student participation and 'peer-to-peer' learning.

Quizzes include everything from English grammar, French verbs, math, science and social studies - to trivia quizzes, a boat license quiz, even a Cessna 172 Aircraft Checkout quiz. Quizam(R) is unique in that every time a person repeats a quiz, a different set of multiple choice questions appear. The program randomly chooses the possible answers and challenges the user each time.

The program was developed by Russ Rossi, a computer programmer for twenty-five years and father of five children, the program began out of the need for helping his kids with homework.

Labels: education, free, technology

Edmonton recently became focus of international attention in the growing field of nanotechnology, with the University of Alberta at the forefront since the new National Institute of Nanotechnology (NINT), a partnership between the National Research Council and the U of A, officially opened their new facility in June 2006.

Pointing to the increased investment in this type of research at the U of A, Dr. Jillian Buriak, the Chairman of Inorganic and Nanoscale Materials at NINT said “Canada has at least on a national level put its eggs into one basket, and that basket is here” ... read more

Labels: education, short-news, technology

The Pew Internet and American Life Project said in a report Monday that 20 percent of Americans obtain most of their science information from the Internet, compared with 41 percent who cited television. Newspapers and magazines were each credited by 14 percent, and radio by 4 percent.

So, the internet still ranks second to TV as the principal source people get their science news. While it’s no wonder that the tech savvy crowd gets their science news from the net, it's surprising see that the normal, average man also get his news from Internet.

Labels: education, web

A new science building totaling nearly 130,000 square feet in size at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will be named after businessman .

Max Carrol Chapman, Jr., a UNC graduate, donated $5 million toward the new Carolina Physical Science Complex being built at UNC. The new science building, totaling nearly 130,000 square feet in size at the University of North Carolina will be named after businessman, Chapman Hall.

The total complex will cost $205 million and is the largest construction project in UNC’s history. It will include high-technology laboratories, classrooms, lecture halls and libraries. Five buildings will be constructed.

The first phase of the complex, including the Chapman building, opened this semester.

Chapman Hall includes a rooftop observatory deck for astronomy students and faculty and a remote observing control room for telescopes UNC uses in partnership with the countries of Chile and South Africa. It also has vibration-free space for electron microscopes; laser labs; teleconference rooms with shielding to avoid electronic interference; Institute for Advanced Materials, Nanoscience and Technology.

Labels: education, technology

E-tech invasion of farmlands
Science in the farm sector getting a new avatar as 'Farmology' is not far because of convergence of IT in agriculture. Consider this anecdote ... read more

US could lose its tech edge to China and India, execs fear
In the late 1950s, when the Eisenhower administration authorized $1 billion toward science research and ... Those kids might also be the founders of tomorrow's tech giants ... read more

More than 100 Students Compete in Robotic Lego Event
Michigan State University hosted a very colorful competition Saturday. More than 100 area students came out to "nanoquest" to use their science skills to make their robot come alive. Organizers say the programmable Lego projects are a great way to get students interested in high-tech ... read more

Philanthropist uses fortune for next-generation science
FRED KAVLI: The retired tech entrepreneur, called a "visionary": a retired technology entrepreneur putting his stamp on science-research centers ... read more

Labels: education, short-news, technology

Arizona City Council is set to approve an annexation with the University of Arizona to bring a resort hotel, a golf course and commercial development at the UA's Science and Technology park into the city. As part of the deal, the plans are to build about 600 homes at the Tech Park, which will be included in the annexation ... read more

Labels: education, short-news, technology

Educational uses include sites for government stats, news from the Department of Education, a class calendar (http://www.rsscalendar.com), quote of the day, government announcements, science news, keeping up with student blogs and ... read more

Labels: education, short-news, web

Five innovative ventures, including two from the Bay Area, won prestigious Tech Museum Award Wednesday night, hauling in $50,000 prizes as well as the promise of some Silicon Valley mentorship designed to bring the projects to a broader scale. The winners, unveiled at San Jose's Tech Museum of Innovation, include MBA Polymers Inc. of Richmond, a company that has developed an advanced, energy-efficient plastics recycling process; and San Francisco's Internet Archive, a nonprofit group in the Presidio with the ambitious goal of providing universal access to all knowledge.

Labels: education, short-news

Google CEO Eric Schmidt agreed to make a donation in Google name of $2 million to the Virginia Tech College of Engineering.

Paul Torgersen, former president of Virginia Tech, said that he approached Schmidt with the idea last spring. The contribution will be used to create the "Paul and Dorothea Torgersen Dean's Chair in Engineering" at Schmidt's request.

Labels: education, google, technology

Google Inc. has completed a new office in Pittsburgh and hired about 30 software engineers since it opened earlier this year.

The company will continue to hire workers to develop search tools at the Pittsburgh office, located on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University.

Andrew Moore, a former CMU professor who leads this office stated: "We're working on things that are really at the core of Google. We're very much a back-end office."

Engineers at the facility have focused their efforts on refining the processing of search requests, improving the search engine's ability to predict what information might be useful to users, and text analysis.

Labels: education, google

The University of Virginia will team with Google in a project aimed at making many of the school's library books more accessible to the public. UV is Google's ninth partner in the Google Books Project. Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, the University of Michigan and other leading research libraries also are part of the plan.

The Google Books Project digitizes books from major libraries and makes them searchable on Google Book Search.

The University President John T. Casteen III said "This is an historic moment! When Jefferson designed the university, he placed the library at its center. . . . Reaching out into the world . . . was central to his vision of what an American university must do to promote the knowledge that sustains personal freedom.''

The U.Va. libraries contained more than 5 million volumes and 17 million manuscripts.

Labels: education, google

A report from Futurelab suggests that the emergence of individuals learning and collaborating through social software such as blogs and wikis could lead to a new approach in education. This report forms part of their Opening Education series which is designed to open debate and stimulate new visions for education.

Read all report: Futurelab: Social software and learning

Labels: education, short-news, social

Enceladus is a bizarre and small world of white, circumnavigating peculiarly in Saturn's outermost ring. It measures at only 504 kilometres (315 miles) across, therefore defying its name as a giant of Greek mythology, and it has a luminous shell of ice that is immaculate with the exception of some odd-looking grooves and pockmarks from the latest space impacts.

While its exterior is a freezing nightmare, counter-intuitively, underneath the ice Enceladus appears to be quite pleasant. Fly bys via the US probe Cassini have displayed plumes of water vapor that escape from its surface, discharge crystal jets upwards for hundreds of kilometers (miles). One theory is that these "cryo-volcanoes" are sourced by a phenomenon called tidal heating.

Gravitational draw from giant Saturn and the nearby satellites of Dione and Janus clutches and extends the moon's geological interior, instigating resistance that heats the sub-surface water. However, astonishingly, Enceladus' hotspot can only be found in a polar region - at its south pole.

A couple of American space scientists feel that they have the answer for this. Spiraling bodies are mainly stable when most of their mass is close to the equator. Any reorganization of mass that is within a spinning object causes the axis of spin to be changed to unstable.

In the case of Enceladus's, the big splotch of low-density material while either warm water or hot silicate at its rocky core would cause the moon to turn over. The spin axis would linger fixed, yet the splotch, which is known as a diapir, would wind up on the South Pole. This would explain both the geysers but so-called tiger stripes, or fault lines, in the ice that originate from the southern polar region and measure around 130 kilometers (80 miles) long. Enceladus may not be the only thing in being reoriented this way. A similar process could have happened on other small moons, such as the Uranian satellite Miranda, according to their theory.

Lear More About: Enceladus
Source: HalfLifeSource

Labels: education, science, space

New materials that can change the way light and other forms of radiation bend around an object may provide a way to make objects invisible, researchers say.

Two separate teams of researchers have come up with theories on ways to use experimental "metamaterials" to cloak an object and hide it from visible light, infrared light, microwaves and perhaps even sonar probes. Their work suggests that science-fiction portrayals of invisibility, such as the cloaking devices used to hide space ships in Star Trek, might be truly possible. Harry Potter's cloak or the Invisible Man of films and fiction might be a bit harder to emulate, however, because the materials must be used in a thick shell.



The concept begins with refraction--a quality of light in which the electromagnetic waves take the quickest, but not necessarily the shortest, route. This accounts for the illusion that a pencil immersed in a glass of water appears broken, for instance. "Imagine a situation where a medium guides light around a hole in it," Physicist Ulf Leonhardt of Britain's University of St. Andrews, wrote in one of the reports, published in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

The light rays end up behind the object as if they had traveled in a straight line.

"Any object placed in the hole would be hidden from sight. The medium would create the ultimate optical illusion: invisibility, Leonhardt wrote. "Such devices may be possible. The method developed here can be also applied to escape detection by other electromagnetic waves or sound." The theory is different from that used on modern "stealth" bombers, for example, which bounce radar off their surfaces so they cannot be seen. Instead, an object would be encased in a shell of metamaterials and they would create an illusion akin to a mirage, said David Schurig of Duke University in North Carolina, who worked on the second report. Metamaterials are composite structures that deliberately resemble nothing found in nature. They are engineered to have unusual properties, such as the ability to bend light in unique ways.

Like all physics, the invisibility idea requires a little imagination. "Think of space as a woven cloth," Schurig said in a interview Thursday. "Imagine making a hole in the cloth by inserting a pointed object between the threads without tearing them." The light, or microwaves, or radar would travel along the threads of the cloth, ending up behind the object without having touched it. "You just need the right set of material properties and you can guide light," Schurig said.

The Duke lab started working on metamaterials with a grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is part of the U.S. Defense Department. Such materials could provide super-light electronics in aircraft or cars, or highly efficient lenses. Working with John Pendry of Imperial College London, Schurig and David Smith at Duke came up with the idea of using these materials to bend light and other electromagnetic radiation.

"We are going to try to have an experimental demonstration of these effects. There are a few more steps to go. We are working on these steps," Smith said in a telephone interview. Anyone making such a cloak would have to choose what form of radiation one wanted invisibility from, Schurig said. The invisibility would work both ways--a person hidden from the visible light spectrum would have to use infrared or sonar or microwaves to see out, he said.

"If want to cover the whole visible spectrum, that would a tall order," Schurig said.

Labels: education, science, technology

Earth's atmosphere is warming faster over the subtropics than anywhere else, which could mean bigger deserts and more drought from Africa to Australia to the Middle East, researchers said on Thursday.

The fast-heating area girdles the globe at about 30 degrees north and south latitude, crossing the southern United States, southern China and north Africa in the Northern Hemisphere, and southern Australia, South Africa and southern South America in the Southern Hemisphere.

Based on 25 years of satellite data, researchers at the University of Washington also determined that the jet streams -- a pattern of westerly winds that help drive weather in both hemispheres -- have shifted about 70 miles toward their respective poles.

This is important because the jet streams mark the northern and southern boundaries of the tropic climate zones, said John Wallace, an atmospheric scientist and co-author of a research paper in this week's Science journal. The jet streams' shift toward the poles means the zones are expanding.

The research is not predictive, but does show a long-term trend, Wallace said by telephone.

If (this jet-stream shift) is going to stop and it just ends up being 70 miles, that's not a big deal, he said. But if it were to continue at the same rate over the next century, then that would amount to a couple of hundred miles and that would start to have significant effects.

ENCROACHING ON THE TEMPERATE ZONE

The dry subtropical climate regions, which contain some of the world's major deserts, could encroach into temperate regions, Wallace said. Areas such as the Mediterranean, southern Europe and the northern part of the Middle East could have a tendency toward more drought, Wallace said

The same might happen in southern Australia and South Africa, he said.

The study does not address whether this warming is due to the greenhouse effect or some other factor. It is different from previous models, which saw the fastest warming in the tropics, rather than the subtropics.

The greenhouse effect is seen as a major cause for global warming, in which so-called greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, swaddle the Earth like a blanket, keeping the sun's warmth.

Some greenhouse warming is natural, but many scientists believe that accelerated warming over the last century was caused by human activities including coal-burning power plants and the use of other fossil fuels.

Faster subtropical warming in the lower atmosphere, which moves the jet streams, could push storm tracks toward the poles, possibly reducing winter precipitation in places like southern Europe, including the Alps, and southern Australia, the scientists said in a statement.

Source: Reuters.co.uk

Labels: education, nature

Scientists at Duke and Rutgers universities have developed a mathematical framework they say will enable astronomers to test a new five-dimensional theory of gravity that competes with Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.

Charles R. Keeton of Rutgers and Arlie O. Petters of Duke base their work on a recent theory called the type II Randall-Sundrum braneworld gravity model. The theory holds that the visible universe is a membrane (hence "braneworld") embedded within a larger universe, much like a strand of filmy seaweed floating in the ocean. The "braneworld universe" has five dimensions -- four spatial dimensions plus time -- compared with the four dimensions -- three spatial, plus time -- laid out in the General Theory of Relativity.

The framework Keeton and Petters developed predicts certain cosmological effects that, if observed, should help scientists validate the braneworld theory. The observations, they said, should be possible with satellites scheduled to launch in the next few years.

If the braneworld theory proves to be true, "this would upset the applecart," Petters said. "It would confirm that there is a fourth dimension to space, which would create a philosophical shift in our understanding of the natural world."

The scientists' findings appeared May 24, 2006, in the online edition of the journal Physical Review D. Keeton is an astronomy and physics professor at Rutgers, and Petters is a mathematics and physics professor at Duke. Their research is funded by the National Science Foundation.

The Randall-Sundrum braneworld model -- named for its originators, physicists Lisa Randall of Harvard University and Raman Sundrum of Johns Hopkins University -- provides a mathematical description of how gravity shapes the universe that differs from the description offered by the General Theory of Relativity.

Keeton and Petters focused on one particular gravitational consequence of the braneworld theory that distinguishes it from Einstein's theory.

The braneworld theory predicts that relatively small "black holes" created in the early universe have survived to the present. The black holes, with mass similar to a tiny asteroid, would be part of the "dark matter" in the universe. As the name suggests, dark matter does not emit or reflect light, but does exert a gravitational force.

The General Theory of Relativity, on the other hand, predicts that such primordial black holes no longer exist, as they would have evaporated by now.

"When we estimated how far braneworld black holes might be from Earth, we were surprised to find that the nearest ones would lie well inside Pluto's orbit," Keeton said.

Petters added, "If braneworld black holes form even 1 percent of the dark matter in our part of the galaxy -- a cautious assumption -- there should be several thousand braneworld black holes in our solar system."

But do braneworld black holes really exist -- and therefore stand as evidence for the 5-D braneworld theory?

The scientists showed that it should be possible to answer this question by observing the effects that braneworld black holes would exert on electromagnetic radiation traveling to Earth from other galaxies. Any such radiation passing near a black hole will be acted upon by the object's tremendous gravitational forces -- an effect called "gravitational lensing."

"A good place to look for gravitational lensing by braneworld black holes is in bursts of gamma rays coming to Earth," Keeton said. These gamma-ray bursts are thought to be produced by enormous explosions throughout the universe. Such bursts from outer space were discovered inadvertently by the U.S. Air Force in the 1960s.

Keeton and Petters calculated that braneworld black holes would impede the gamma rays in the same way a rock in a pond obstructs passing ripples. The rock produces an "interference pattern" in its wake in which some ripple peaks are higher, some troughs are deeper, and some peaks and troughs cancel each other out. The interference pattern bears the signature of the characteristics of both the rock and the water.

Similarly, a braneworld black hole would produce an interference pattern in a passing burst of gamma rays as they travel to Earth, said Keeton and Petters. The scientists predicted the resulting bright and dark "fringes" in the interference pattern, which they said provides a means of inferring characteristics of braneworld black holes and, in turn, of space and time.

"We discovered that the signature of a fourth dimension of space appears in the interference patterns," Petters said. "This extra spatial dimension creates a contraction between the fringes compared to what you'd get in General Relativity."

Petters and Keeton said it should be possible to measure the predicted gamma-ray fringe patterns using the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope, which is scheduled to be launched on a spacecraft in August 2007. The telescope is a joint effort between NASA, the U.S. Department of Energy, and institutions in France, Germany, Japan, Italy and Sweden.

The scientists said their prediction would apply to all braneworld black holes, whether in our solar system or beyond.

"If the braneworld theory is correct," they said, "there should be many, many more braneworld black holes throughout the universe, each carrying the signature of a fourth dimension of space."

Source: Duke University

Labels: education, science

What began as a focused gathering on the implications of the Web becoming a platform has transformed into an industry event focused on the latest Internet innovations—the services, applications, businesses, and models—that are redefining the way companies do business and how people live.

In 2004, Web 2.0 focused on one big idea: The Web has become a platform, a foundation upon which thousands of new forms of business would emerge. In 2005, at the second annual Web 2.0 Conference, we focused on the idea of “Revving the Web” - with the platform in place, we highlighted emerging innovations, with a particular emphasis on the entertainment, communications and IT industries.

This year, we're thinking even bigger. It's clear that major swaths of the global economy are in significant flux. Now that the Web has become a robust platform with countless innovations driving its ongoing development, widespread disruptions in traditional business models are well underway. The telcos are under siege from VoIP and bandwidth hungry content companies. Entertainment and publishing companies are struggling with consumer-driven media and the attention economy. And the IT giants - Microsoft chief among them - are in a battle for their lives with the “give it away free and monetize it with ads” model of Yahoo! and Google.
The “Who's Who” of the Internet

Now in its third year, Web 2.0 has become the gathering place for business leaders of the new Web - it reflects and embodies the community - bringing together the best to discuss and debate the most important issues and strategies driving the Internet economy and what we might expect in the coming year.

* 50+ thought leaders and entrepreneurs slated to present in an interactive format stressing audience participation
* More than a dozen extraordinary thinkers and business leaders will present “High Order Bits” - ten minute stand-and-deliver presentations designed to provoke, delight, and amaze the audience
* Top executives from platform businesses will address the future of the Web in plenary sessions
* We'll focus on innovative new web technologies in our expert led-workshops
* Second Annual Launch Pad event featuring presentations by a select group of start-ups
* A variety of unique networking events including receptions, dinners and evening parties

The Web 2.0 Conference connects the leaders and technologists opening the Web's business opportunities. Conference attendance is limited to maintain an intimate setting and foster dialogue among all participants.
2006 Conference Topics will Include:

* Defining Web 3.0: What's Next?
* Collision of the Titans: Publishers v. Platforms
* Collective Intelligence or The Madness of Crowds?
* What Might Go Wrong in Web 2.0?
* Is the IPO Culture Over?
* Launch Pad 2.0
* The Tiered Internet: A Debate
* Web 2.0 in China
* High Order Bits
* Disrupting the Disruptors: Incumbents Strike Back
* Privacy and Trust: Who Owns Your Data?

More info: http://www.web2con.com

Labels: education, event, web