This is a great time lapse video by Harru no’ stæsj (best viewed in the slowed down mode). It fast forwards from ca 1000 AD until 2003, showing Europe’s shifting borders, alliances, unions, territories, occupied land etc.
Stuart A Yeates commented on Facebook that it needs to have every entity linked to the appropriate page in wikipedia. I can think of lots of other ideas that could be built on top of this – be great if Harru no’ stæsj were to release the original photos somewhere. (Thanks to @rjnicolson for the link).
I am delighted to have been invited to evaluate the MOLE project proof of concept application and tools. The project involves 22 countries from around the world working together to build a platform independent set of tools aimed at learning collaboration and information sharing on mobile devices for aid workers.
I am particularly interested as the sort of tools they are talking about in the video are very similar to the tools I hope we will be building and testing in the Learning layers project, due to start later this year.
Howard Rheingold says: “I was very excited by Anya Kamenetz’s book, DIY U, which I highly recommend, and her free ebook, The Edupunk’s Guide! I’m also very interested in what Anya is doing with P2PU and teaching people, helping people, learn to be self learners. Her work serves as a bridge between blended learning and peeragogy. I previously wrote about Shelly Terrell and personal learning networks. Kamenetz has introduced the idea of the ‘personal learning plan’ in the course she taught at P2PU.”
CATASTROIKA – ENGLISH SUBTITLESvon infowar
Do you want to understand what is happening in Greece. This is a must watch video. “On April 26, 2012 at 20:00” says the press release “let’s turn off the TV and turn to an alternative source of information. The creators of Debtocracy, a documentary viewed by millions of people around the world, present their new production, entitled CATASTROIKA, on the website www.catastroika.com.
The documentary uncovers the forthcoming results of the current sell-off of the Greek public assets, demanded in order to face the country’s enormous sovereign debt. Turning to the examples of London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow and Rome, CATASTROIKA predicts what will happen, if the model imposed in these areas is imported in a country under international financial tutelage.
Slavoj Zizek, Naomi Klein, Luis Sepulveda, Ken Loach and Greg Palast talk about the austerity measures, the Greek government as well as the attack against Democracy on Europe, after the general spreading of the financial crisis. Academics and specialists like Dani Rodrik, Alex Callinicos, Ben Fine, Costas Douzinas, Dean Baker and Aditya Chakrabortty present unknown aspects of the privatization programs in Greece and abroad.
Just like Debtocracy, CATASTROIKA is co-produced by the public, which contributed both financially and with ideas to its creation. The documentary will be available free of charge, under creative commons license. High-resolution files will be available for TV and cinema broadcasts in various languages”
I spend a lot of time at the moment looking at how we can interpret and explain labour market data, especially for use in careers. Universities are a sensitive area of policy in the UK, and particularly in England, with an increase in fees of up to £9000 a year from this September. Inevitably, young people – and parents, are increasingly wondering if it is worth it in terms of future careers.
Strangely the big fall off in applications is from mature students who will be less effected as many of them will not hit the ceiling for repayments of the students loans being made available to pay the fees.
Thus, I suspect, it is perception rather than immediate hard economics which is driving people to apply or not.
Yesterday, the Office of National Statistics (ONS) published a new report – Graduates in the Labour Market 2012 – based on the latest statistics from the Labour Force Survey. And in a very welcome development, they published a video on Youtube to accompany the PDF report. The Guardian newspaper highlighted the main results of the4 report:
More than a third of recent graduates are employed in low-skilled jobs, official figures show.
In the final quarter of 2011, 35.9% of those who had graduated from university in the previous six years were employed in lower-skilled occupations, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said. This compares with 26.7%, or just over one in four, in 2001.
In the same period, the number of recent graduates in the jobs market has grown by 438,000 to around 1.5 million in 2011.
Jobs categorised as low-skilled by the ONS include hotel porters, waiters and bar staff, and retail assistants.
The report may be masking the extent of graduate unemployment however, as the unemployed figure excludes those on work experience or internships many of which are short term and, controversially, unpaid.
The one figure which surprised me in the video was the concentration of graduates in London and the South East. I suspect this reflects the role of the London and the South East as the centre for banking and finance, most of which jobs require a degree. Conversely those regions with a lower percentage of graduates are mainly focused on manufacturing industry. Whilst these industries require skilled workers, degrees may not be so important. I would be very interested to see a comparison between pay and employment of graduates and skilled workers (without a degree – for instance with an apprenticeship). Unfortunately the way in which The Labour Force Survey collects data around qualifications makes it very difficult to make any meaningful comparisons. Yet, especially for young people from working class backgrounds, that may be a key choice for them in coming years.
And whilst the present English government is attempting to increase the number of apprenticeship places, there have been persistent criticism over the quality of those apprenticeship places (see this recent BBC report), with many so called apprenticeships consisting of short courses in the retail and service industries – just those very areas where so many recent graduates are ending up!
I would like to see the TED talks people start innovating a bit in terms of format. But there is no doubt that they provide great videos. And out of the latest crop – from TEDActive 2012 – I loved this one from Vijay Kumar about robots. maybe that’s because I have been fascinated by the potential of robots ever since I did a project working with Ford Motor Cars way back in 1992 and found the robots in the Valencia plant mesmerizing. The problem with robot research – like so many things – is that there is too little thought as to the potential of robots to help people and society. Instead, all too often, research is driven by profit and increasingly by the military.
In this respect it is good to see a lot of discussion about how the amazing new Raspberry Pi computer can be used to power Robots.
This is a critical issue. In this short nine minute video, Eli Pariser says “Your filter bubble is your own personal, unique universe of information that you live in online. What’s in your filter bubble depends on who you are, and it depends on what you do. But you don’t decide what gets in — and more importantly, you don’t see what gets edited out.”
This also applies to attempts to develop algorithm based systems for learning. We have to make sure that people are encouraged to challenging ideas, rather than just following the pathway of least resistance (which is yet another reason why I worry about simple taxonomy driven system).
This is a very neat piece of video editing by Luca Agnani highlighting the use of digital lighting and art. A good way to sart the New Year 🙂 (via Mariarosa di Nublia).
Posted in Multimedia, Video | Comments Off on Digital Showcase
In one of those curious cultural quirks, thousands of Germans will settle down this evening to watch the annual new years eve showing of ‘Dinner for One’, a 1963 comedy starring Freddie Frinton and May Warden. Why, no-one quite seems to know.
But now there is a remake The 90th Euro Rescue Summit – or Euros for No One by satirist Udo Eling who, according to the Daily Telegraph, “teamed up with state broadcaster ARD to rework the original, putting the French president’s head on butler James’ body, and the German Chancellor’s head onto the body of Miss Sophie.”
Unlike the original which is broadcast in English, the new version is in German. And for those of you whose German is not quite up to scratch the Daily Teegrapgh provides a helpful summary.
“Mrs Merkel follows the original Miss Sophie in assuming that her long-dead friends are there – whose drinks are all supped by the butler – and talks of former Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou and former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero.
She also reprimands an absent British Prime Minister David Cameron that “German will be spoken at the dinner.”
True to the original, Mr Sarkozy, the butler, drinks for all his mistress’ guests and gets increasingly inebriated, prompting Mrs Merkel to say: “Nicolas, think of your credit rating!” – a reference to the downgrades looming over France from international ratings agencies.
At the end he helps her upstairs for what in the original is referred to as “the same procedure as every year” and in the satirical version would be conducted without Eurobonds. The butler says to Miss Sophie he will do his best as ever, promising to give Merkel his “Triple A”.”
OK….this is a techy video. But it is important. In an age when large software companies are increasingly controlling the internet, YaCy has been developed as a free search engine that anyone can use to build a search portal for their intranet or to help search the public internet. YaCy developers say: “When contributing to the world-wide peer network, the scale of YaCy is limited only by the number of users in the world and can index billions of web pages. It is fully decentralized, all users of the search engine network are equal, the network does not store user search requests and it is not possible for anyone to censor the content of the shared index. We want to achieve freedom of information through a free, distributed web search which is powered by the world’s users.”
Forbes reports that Microsoft has obtained a patent for a “conversational chatbot of a specific person” created from images, recordings, participation in social networks, emails, letters, etc., coupled with the possible generation of a 2D or 3D model of the person.
This week, Twitter apologised for racial bias within its image-cropping algorithm. The feature is designed to automatically crop images to highlight focal points – including faces. But, Twitter users discovered that, in practice, white faces were focused on, and black faces were cropped out. And, Twitter isn’t the only platform struggling with its algorithm – YouTube has also announced plans to bring back higher levels of human moderation for removing content, after its AI-centred approach resulted in over-censorship, with videos being removed at far higher rates than with human moderators.
Gap between rich and poor university students widest for 12 years
The gap between poor students and their more affluent peers attending university has widened to its largest point for 12 years, according to data published by the Department for Education (DfE).
Better-off pupils are significantly more likely to go to university than their more disadvantaged peers. And the gap between the two groups – 18.8 percentage points – is the widest it’s been since 2006/07.
The latest statistics show that 26.3% of pupils eligible for FSMs went on to university in 2018/19, compared with 45.1% of those who did not receive free meals. Only 12.7% of white British males who were eligible for FSMs went to university by the age of 19. The progression rate has fallen slightly for the first time since 2011/12, according to the DfE analysis.
Quality Training
From Raconteur. A recent report by global learning consultancy Kineo examined the learning intentions of 8,000 employees across 13 different industries. It found a huge gap between the quality of training offered and the needs of employees. Of those surveyed, 85 per cent said they , with only 16 per cent of employees finding the learning programmes offered by their employers effective.
We will be at Online Educa Berlin 2015. See the info above. The stream URL to play in your application is Stream URL or go to our new stream webpage here SoB Stream Page.
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