Education and Science Research

Social Bookmarking services are not only used for search engine optimization purposes. Initially, such web sites appeared as convenient services for ordinary Internet users who wanted to share links to favorite web sites with other Internet users. But in course of time, it appeared the social bookmarking can be very helpful in various industries, business areas, Internet services etc.

Recently social bookmarking have become very popular in education. These days Internet Technologies are used everywhere, including colleges, high schools and universities. Students are given assignments to be electronically submitted. Online media are used to prepare college papers, essays, researches etc. Social bookmarking has become an effective way of communication between professors and students.

In order to explain how social bookmarking works in education it is necessary to say a few words about bookmarking itself. So, bookmarking services are websites that allow users publish and share links to various Internet resources: web pages, web sites, articles, blog posts, music and video files, online videos etc.

Now let’s imagine such a situation. A professor assigns students with writing of a research paper on a certain topic. Instead of writing a list of works to be sited on a blackboard, he or she shares links posted at his/her bookmarking account. Thus, all a student needs to do is to visit a certain bookmarking website and click on links to get access to various sources of information and scientific resources.

A professor may even create a personal web page where assignments and requirements are regularly updated. Besides, students may share interesting web sites and articles they manage to find on the research paper topic by posting them to their bookmarking account. This is absolutely free and so much convenient!

Besides, professors, teachers and instructors may use social bookmarking websites to see what information other teachers use in the studying process. It is very easy to find relevant bookmarks as most of them are tagged with keywords and have description.

It seems these days that we are watching the government regulators ***** down on Wall Street with the new Financial Reform Law, and their theory is that they will now have the power to enforce regulations and prevent another global economic meltdown or disintegration of the US economy plunging us into a near depression rather than our “shallowed-out” business-cycle recessions. Is that possible? No, and let me tell you why.

Consider if you will after the big S and L Crash many years back, junk bond challenges, Enron fiasco, or the mortgage crisis. If you will recall each time more regulations were put into place, did they stop the next round of nonsense? NO. After Enron we watched one of the largest Accounting Firms crash and burn, remember Arthur Anderson, and then we ended up with new accounting standards and Sarbanes-Oxley, but did that stop the next crisis? NO.

Now we have a new Financial Regulatory Reform Bill, after the mortgage meltdown, which crashed Wall Street and the Global Economy. And with fire in their veins we have regulators and the Department of Justice looking for heads to roll, why? To show they are doing something of course, and bring back consumer and investor, small business, and foreign institutional investment confidence. Will it work? Yes, it might bring back confidence at first, but the law of unintended consequences will make it worse.

Now then, let’s switch gears and talk a little about regulation in our great nation, let’s talk about the truth, the façade, and the incestuous relationship between law-makers, corporations, banks, and those who perhaps really do need regulation but are essentially assured of not get any. Only their competitors will be regulated in the future, as those bigger culprits and their lobbyists did most of the work on forging these new regulations and making things best for them and their way of doing business, while creating barriers to entry for the rest of the industry.

Not long ago, I talked to a self-proclaimed expert in “Fair Value Accounting” which is his profession, and then we got to talking about education and costs, and the recent regulatory attacks on Private Corporation Style Colleges such as; Kaplan, Apollo Group, Corinthian Colleges, University of Phoenix, DeVry, Capella Education, and Career Education, as per a Wall Street Journal article on August 17, 2010 entitled “For Profit Schools Fret Over Repayment Test – Department of Education Report Gives Bad Grades to Some Institutions and Its Proposed Regulations Could Crimp Their Aid – and Profits,” which was written by Melissa Korn.

My acquaintance actually had an MBA from a Private for-profit college, and this has helped his career, but it wasn’t cheap, and he’ll be paying that off for a while he indicated. He believes that the governments attacks on for-profit company colleges and learning institutions is justified and I believe it’s not. And do not believe that the US regulators are being fair, otherwise they’d shut down half of the colleges and Universities in our nation.

Are some for-profit private company colleges underperforming, perhaps, but it certainly couldn’t be any worse than our overall education system; K-12 and colleges and so, some, I agree, but not all, and the Universities do it too as they promise all their students; “We place 90% of our graduating class with the top fortune 500 companies!” and then the students go into hock on the student loans etc, but when the economy took a hit, all bets were off, regardless of where the kids went to school, maybe with the exception of Harvard, Yale, MIT, Stanford, Wharton, etc. they may have had a better chance, but there are plenty of horror stories there too, law students unable to get work, with an Ivy League law degree? The success ticked of a lifetime, or so it’s been said.

There was a great article recently in the news on this topic, I recommend you look it up and read it; “What they Are Doing After Harvard,” which was an interview with Wendy Kopp by Naomi Schaefer Riley in the Wall Street Journal. And that very same day was another article in the “Economic Times of India,” entitled; “Harvard is a Waste of Money!” Apparently, to attack the for-profit education sector is a little insincere of our regulators, and so, that I guess is another side of the argument, and the cost Holy Toledo, that could take a while to pay off.

And with public or private colleges and Universities there is that big issue of competition, so we know they don’t like competition, they like monopolies such as the text book scheme they got going where you pay $250 for a text book that you need for the class. I recommend that you read; “Textbooks Up Their Game,” an article by Jeffrey A. Trachenberg which also appeared in the WSJ. Maybe the Universities should also stop complaining about the eBook reader textbooks cramping their style, while they reconsider their dismal performance before encouraging the regulators to attack for-profit corporations who are picking up their slack in the marketplace?

You see, the attacking of for-profit college companies is inexcusable and pathetic, it’s just regulators attempting to show they are doing something, but are they really going to make colleges guarantee jobs for those who graduate in the market place, or come up with some baloney fair-value assessment of what a college education is worth? I mean we still have Universities claiming that those who graduate will earn over 1.5 million dollars more in their lifetime, and yet, those studies have never been peer-reviewed to the point the regulators are asking private company colleges to do now.

And how many of those colleges can claim that 90% of their graduates in 2008, 2009, 2010, or 2012 went to work for the top 500 companies in America or that those students will make 1.5 million more over their lifetime earnings? And if someone is smart enough to jump through all those hurdles, hell, they’d have been successful in whatever they did anyway, they hardly needed college to make them successful in life. It’s a big façade, and the truth is Universities will become less relevant as time goes on, if they don’t radically change the way they do things. So, why is the justice department protecting an old dinosaur?

It’s all about Politics my friends!

What Say You about All This?

What is the true fair-value of an education, and what is the market-to-market value on that, quick, quick give us the answer, we command you?!?

References:

Wall Street Journal, “Packing for College 2010 Style; Hidden Financial Traps are Snaring Even the Best and Brightest on Campus – and their parents. Here is How You Don’t Flunk Money 101,” by Karen Blumenthal. Wall Street Journal, “Taking Schools Into Their Own Hands,” by Joy Resmovits. WSJ, “For-Profit Schools Put in Detention,” Rolfe Winkler. WSJ, “Needs Improvement: “Where Teacher Report Cards Fall Short,” by Carl Bialik. “Higher Education – How Colleges are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids and What We Can Do About It,” Published by Times Books, New York, NY, pp 271, 2010, ISBN: 978-080508-734-5. “American Can Compete,” by James Gooch, Michael L. George, Douglas Montgomery, published by the Institute of Business Technology, Dallas TX, 1987, pp 182, Library of Congress Number; 86-083329. “Creativity in Higher Education,” Edited by Albert B. Friedman, by Claremont Graduate School Printing, Claremont, CA, 1964, pp.55. “Using Quality to Redesign School Systems – The Cutting Edge of Common Sense,” by Peggy Siegel and Sandra Byrne, Jossey-Bass Publishing San Francisco, CA and ASQC Quality Press, Milwaukee, WI, 1994, pp. 168, ISBN: 1-55542-649-2.

Note: the author of this quick article has read over 400 research papers, and 50 books on education over the last 5-years alone, and has also obviously experienced the public school system k-12 and college, as well as for-profit education.

Objective
The aim of this experiment is to find out which method can be used for cooling a soda can beginning from room temperature.

Introduction
This is one of those science fair experiments that will teach you about heat transfer by conduction, convection, radiation and evaporation. You must do some research to find out what these terms mean before you go ahead with your experiment.

Conduction: When heat is transferred from one molecule to the other without the molecules being subjected to mass movement.
Convection: The transfer of heat when mass movement occurs.
Radiation: When heat is given out in the form of waves, visible or invisible.
Evaporation: When liquid molecules turn to vapor, carrying off heat.

There are several science fair experiments based on the above concepts.

If you want to cool a soda can, your best bet would off course be the fridge, but you must know that objects in the refrigerator and the freezer get cooled mostly by convection (and partially by conduction). The air molecules inside your refrigerator are spread over a larger area as compared to liquid molecules. So what about objects placed in close contact with liquid? Liquid is much denser than air and would interact with molecules of objects in contact with them to a greater extent. There is a clue hidden in my last sentence, which will help you later.

Materials
Cans of soda kept at room temperature (12 numbers), digital thermometer, ice cubes, two styrofoam cooling boxes, water, plastic wrap and a timer.

Procedure
Fill a Styrofoam cooler box with ice only. Fill another Styrofoam cooler box with equal amount of ice, but this time mix water with it. Use a digital thermometer and measure the beginning temperatures of each of the following arrangements:
Your freezer Your refrigerator The Styrofoam cooler filled with ice The Styrofoam cooler filled with ice-water The soda inside each can at room-temperature (seal the cans with plastic wrap immediately)
Now three cans each containing soda must be placed in the following arrangements:
Your freezer Your refrigerator The Styrofoam cooler filled with ice The Styrofoam cooler filled with ice-water
Science fair experiments require that accurate written records should be kept of each finding. So note the beginning time of each arrangement.
Check the temperature of the liquid (soda) in each can in each arrangement every 5 minutes and record the time and the temperatures.
The experiment is over once the temperatures stops changing.
Calculate the average temperatures of the three cans in each arrangement for every time point.
Make a joint bar graph of the elapsed time on the x-axis and the average temperature the soda on the y-axis. Graphs made during science fair experiments speak volumes about your results, and about the effort you have put in. Just one look at the graph can reveal much more information than numbers can reveal.

Now amaze yourself by finding out which cooling arrangement was the fastest! Knowing that the freezer is not the quickest way to cool a soda can be quite a revelation to most people.

Fourth grade students are very energetic and their span of attention or concentration is very small. Above that, they want to observe, infer, predict and classify anything taught on science. Learning by doing is a good concept and it registers in their young minds and they can never go wrong in their examinations. For this, a lot of schools conduct fourth grade science fair. Here, all the fourth grade science fair projects will be displayed.

The children explain their fourth grade science fair projects, while the others watch these projects and learn. Teaching them in a play way method is very effective. Here are few fourth grade science fair projects for this age group.

Salt increases the density of water. Add four to five tablespoons of salt in a glass of water stir it nicely and float an egg. Also add little more luke-warm fresh water and check, the egg will float in-between the salt and the water. Try using sugar or flour in the water the egg will sink.

Which water is good for plants can be made as a project by selecting a pot with some seeds; one pot can be watered with tap water, the other pot to be watered with only rain water. Check the growth for seven weeks; the rain water watered pot is better.

Will plants grow with a liquid other than water can be done in an effective project by selecting four pots, Water the first pot with water, second one with vinegar, third one with orange juice and fourth one with milk. The result is the one with water grows the maximum, the one with vinegar dies as it is an acid, the one with orange juice and milk also grows but nowhere near as much as the pure source.

A fourth grade science fair project to test which environment is best for plants. Take three pots, one with sand, one with soil, and one with gravel and put few seeds in each pot, wet them at regular intervals and make a graph, the seeds in the soil grew the maximum.

Classification of mammals — Mammals are found every where. Polar bears in cold areas, camels in hot areas, moles live under the ground, bats live in caves and flies in the air and dolphins live in oceans. Fur and fat help them to protect themselves in cold regions and they sweat and pant to release their extra heat. A fourth grade science fair project can be made by cutting and pasting picture of mammals and their place of rest.

Sunflower house project: On the ground draw a square and plant sunflower seeds leaving enough space between two seeds all in the perimeter of the square, but don’t forget to leave a little space in the front side for the door. Once the sunflower plants grow one inch, plant bean seeds around each sunflower plant. As they grow the beans will climb up the sunflower stalks and create a wonderful playhouse for the children. In this way they learn the characteristics of creepers, flower plants, trees, shrubs etc.

Excellent features of sunflowers are we can get oil, easy to grow and a good bird feeder, Make a sun and a flower and label its uses.

Life cycle of a butterfly – egg, caterpillar, cocoon and then a beautiful butterfly can be made live in your garden.

A Bird house can be made in wood, to encourage birds to come and live. Observe the birds and their habits.

Instincts can be taught in a project form by showing baby birds open their mouth for food, baby turtles know to go to the sea when their eggs hatch.

Children at this age group should be given simpler fourth grade science fair projects to keep them occupied. Once they are occupied and disciplined, teachers job become easier to make them learn and enjoy schooling.

Years of in-depth research show clearly that children are more likely to succeed in learning when their families actively support them. When you and other family members read with your children, help them with homework, talk with their educators, and participate in school, homeschool or other learning activities, you give your children a tremendous advantage and a firm foundation and basis for learning.

Other than helping your child or children to grow up healthy and happy, the most important thing that you can do for them is to help them develop their reading and writing skills. It is no exaggeration to say that how well children learn to read affects directly not only how successful they are in their educational activities, but how well they do throughout their lives. When children learn to read, they have the key that opens the door to all the knowledge of the world. Without this key, many children are left behind. The foundation for learning to read is in place long before children enter the formal school arena and begin formal reading instruction.

You, as a parent, together with your family, help to create this foundation by talking, listening, and reading to your children every day and by showing them that you value, use, and enjoy reading in your lives. Participating in family-oriented activities and conversations subtly reinforces this foundation.

Most of the activities that make learning experiences out of the everyday routines in which you participate with your children use materials that are found in your home or that can be had free-of-charge from the local library. You design the activities to be fun for both you and your children as you help them to gain the skills they need to become readers and develop into independent little people. These activities often find their way into a child’s journal, either by way of scribbles, writing or pasting or drawing pictures.

I designed a journal with my own children in mind, knowing that in time with continued journal use, they will begin to plan their activities, vent their feelings and frustrations, note their own achievements, and diarise their happiness, hopes and dreams.

It is vitally important to stress that a journal is your child’s personal and private document and should be treated as such. It should be a place where your child can just “be”. A child should not be forced to show or display his or her journal. If he or she chooses to display her “work” that is entirely up to the child, but at all times he or she must be absolutely confident that this is his or her “space”. There is a level of “trust” between a person and their journal, even amongst adults. This trust should never be compromised or broken.

At the end of the journal or school year, whichever applies to you or your family, if your child chooses to display the journal, you will without a doubt immediately glean information regarding their interests, concerns, abilities, identify possibly areas of conflict. Most of all you will see how your precious child has developed as an individual in their thoughts, actions, reading and writing.