Teaching code skills to your little kids... A necessity ?

58th curiosity tip to wake up your brain !

I have no idea if we should consider this article as helpful or scary in terms of kids education ...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeana-lee-tahnk/neat-products-for-teachin_b_7138030.html

This article by the HuffingtonPost deals with "how to teach coding to your kids".

They especially present "cool toys to learn coding starting at 3 year old"

The good size of this "educational" program is that it also shows how girls should feel engaged in this process, and, more generally, how to improve the logical analysis and thinking spirit.

Good share, good day,
T.

Eduardo Saenz de Cabezon : Maths is forever (and his speech is amazing)

Hi, curious people ! 57th (already!) day of curiosity for the blog !

Today, I want to share this inspiring talk by Eduardo Saenz de Carbzon. In this TED Talk, Eduardo Saenz de Cabezon shows how unlucky we are that all mathematicians are not like him !

The art of appreciating maths is real, and he knows how to share this feeling !

 

Good share, good day !
T.

Earth Day 2015 !

57th curiosity day today !
Today, 22nd of April 2015, we celebrate the "Earth Day". Even if that should be a perpetual thought, it's always a good thing to have some exterior pressure to do something great for our environment today.

Over here, it will be some gardening !


And don't forget all the good things this special day brought since 1970: :
- EPA creation (environment protection agency)
- "Clean Air" law approval
- "Clean Water" law approval
- "endangered species" law approval
- first sensibilisations to recycling
etc, etc, ...

And you, anything planned ? 

T.

Lack of organs: worse and worse ... donate !

56th day of curiosity and e-learning !

Good thing, bad thing, up to you to react  !

In France, a big debate is surfacing, since it "just" took 39 years for people to realize that organ donations were actually considered as "a priori volunteered" for everyone who dies. (It's just not applied)

To go past the political side of the current debate, here is a well-made infography about the stat of organ donations in france http://www.dondorganes.fr/002-la-penurie-d-organes:
- in 22 years, organ donations increased by 45% (large spectrum of allowed donators explains this).Therefore, logically, an increase in surgery operations
- However, unfortunately, one number erases this good news : 8800 people were waiting for an organ donation in 1993, and now it's over 18 000 !

The lack of organ donations is a real thing here in France !


So what is the situation in your country ? How easy is it to declare yourself as a volunteer donator ?

T.

Numeric tools in school: losing memory ability ?

D55 on this curiosity blog!

Today, I saw again another article talking how much we should increase the rythm of numerization in the school environment. …

I must admit that I'm not 100% convinced by this position.
To be honest :
- I'm sure that there are very good ways to use the internet and a computer to provide tools adapted to school, education and learning.
- especially, recording lectures, allowing them to be shared in many languages, heard, and repeatable IS A GOOD THING
- BUT our memory can be affected by the method chosen: handwritten sentences might be easier to process for our brain, compared with computer screens.

AND THAT'S WHAT I THOUGHT UNTIL THIS STUDY!



A very serious manuscript in which the students were reaching the highest scores when typing their notes, especially during a lecture context !
And you, how do you teach / learn in lectures ?
T.

How computers (can't) deal with RGB !

54th Day of curiosity and lifetime for this page :)

Today, I'll share such a GREAT video by minutePhysics. This guy is just awesome in simplifying maths and physics, and I keep being impressed about how cool the subject becomes !

So, for a 4'-long interesting story about the tricks (and errors) about how your computer is producing the colors, just follow this link !

 

To keep the curiosity growing, 1 share of my page = 1 happier koala in the World !
T.

Crowdsourcing in science : Save the World (or nearly do it)

53rd day for the curious people !

Today, I propose that we talk about crowdsourcing in science, or "how the crowd can work massively to reach a goal". This notion developped recently fast in advertisement and publicity-making.

However, the "citizens doing science" notion appeared few years ago and has so far been a big success for several projects. 

No need to be an expert in most of the cases : human beings are just naturally so good to recognize patterns and written sentences, what computers are not. And also, crowdsourcing opens a broad opportunity for worldwide gathering of information, which is not available with normal study laboratories fundings.

**** information collecting **** 

Numerous blogs are already existing where people exchange about the animal species they observed during their last hikes. There is a crowdsourcing projects based on this big success around nature observation:

-  http://www.ispotnature.org/communities/global : Did you spot a fish, a bird, an insect in the back of your garden or during a recent trip around the World ? Then just take a picture of it and share it on ispotnature, and someone will give you an identification of what you spotted ! 

**** Recognition **** 

The human brain is way above any computer in terms of shape, pattern and writing recognition. Several projects are using our natural high abilities in the domain to help science !
- http://www.galaxyzoo.org/  : a website where astronomers (beginners to confirmed) are invited to observe space pictures and sort spatial objects by shape/class and categorie (age, ...): the best helpers will even been given pictures with unidentified galaxies, that they will be the first to discover on Earth ! ! 

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReCAPTCHA: 

You surely did encounter these distorted numbers and letters when trying to connect at your favourite website. Just learn know that Google has been developping recaptcha with a precise idea in the back of their mind : you actually (willingly or not) helped Google to digitize all the e-books of google that couldn't be read or translated directly via the computer force ! 

**** Donation of time ! **** 

Yes, we are talking about calculation time donation. As your computer is never using 100% of its capacity, you can actually donate the non-used power of your computer when it's switched on so that a lab or a project calculates with it. Several domains are using a lot of calculation power and need these donations (Bio-Medical studies, Climate, ...). The results of these calculations are always publicly displayed for the scientific comunity. .

If you want to participate, here is a list (non-exhaustive) of projects which can use your help and lending them a bit of your computer power that you don't use anyway: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_projects

**** Conclusion ****

Crowdourcing in science showed its success in 2010 when more than 200k people partcipated to the "World Water Monitoring Day" and gave information of their neighbour rivers.

There is a big chance that with the development of the social networks, the science crowdsourcing has a bright future in front of itself.

Good share, good day ! 

T. 

Thought of the Day (week, month ...)

D52, and a simple thought...

« Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.» - Nelson Mandela

Good curiosity day to all of you !

T.