Good summary of problems with higher education in California

This five minute video shares some scary facts about problems with higher education in California universities:


California students are spending more than students in other states and getting less.

Hat tip: Instapundit

Homeschool is much better than normal regular school

At minute 3:22 Tanishq explains "Homeschooling is much better than normal regular school."



For Tanishq a normal public school would have been soul destroying.

His mother has a great line:  "Sometimes when people ask what do you do for your fun time, he says I just learn, and people just don't understand that."


And the professor had a great observation about how there are so many programs for students which are learning impaired or hearing impaired, but there is nothing which really addresses those who are truely gifted.

Hat tip:  Althouse

Interesting proposal for higher education

I'm not sure how this is going to work out, but it should be interesting. Governor Walker and UW System Announce Revolutionary Online Degree Model is proposing:

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The unique self-paced, competency-based model will allow students to start classes anytime and earn credit for what they already know. Students will be able to demonstrate college-level competencies based on material they already learned in school, on the job, or on their own, as soon as they can prove that they know it. By taking advantage of this high quality, flexibility model, and by utilizing a variety of resources to help pay for their education, students will have new tools to accelerate their careers. Working together, the UW System, the State of Wisconsin, and other partners can make a high-quality UW college degree significantly more affordable and accessible to substantially more people.

“This new model for delivering higher education will help us close the skills gap at an affordable price to get Wisconsin working again,” said Governor Walker. “As states across the country work to improve access and affordability in higher education, I am proud to support this exciting and innovative University of Wisconsin solution.”
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Check out the rest of the press announcement for details.

At one level I think this is a good idea.  People shouldn't have to pay exorbitant amounts of money to get credit for something they already know, or could learn faster and cheaper on their own.

One the other hand I'm afraid that the higher education bureaucracy is so established that it will be almost impossible to have meaningful reform.

Hat tip: The Foundry

Cool science: Gloves that translate sign language into speech

This is pretty amazing - Ukrainian Students Develop Gloves That Translate Sign Language Into Speech:

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There is no dearth of impressive student projects here at the finals of Microsoft’s Imagine Cup in Sydney, but one of the six finalists that caught my attention was a project called EnableTalk by the Ukrainian team QuadSquad. There are currently about 40 million deaf, mute and deaf-mute people and many of them use sign language to communicate, but there are very few people who actually understand sign language. Using gloves fitted with flex sensors, touch sensors, gyroscopes and accelerometers (as well as some solar cells to increase battery life) the EnableTalk team has built a system that can translate sign language into text and then into spoken words using a text-to-speech engine. The whole system then connects to a smartphone over Bluetooth.
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July 10 - Update:

Ukrainian Students Win Microsoft’s Imagine Cup With Their Sign Language-To-Speech Translation Gloves

A fun flash mob - Som Sabadell

Janine found this video:

Reminder - send in a post for the next Carnival of Homeschooling

Remember to send in a post about homeschooling for the next Carnival of Homeschooling. The Carnival of Homeschooling will be held tomorrow at Home Grown Mommy.

This will be the 341st edition.

Go here for the instructions on sending in a submission.  It appears  Blog Carnival is broken again so please email your entry directly to CarnivalOfHomeschooling@gmail.com.


As always, entries to the Carnival of Homeschooling are due Monday evening at 6:00 PM Pacific Standard Time.

I have a reminder mailing list. If you would like email reminders, please tell me.

Interesting article on Grade Inflation and Accreditation in Higher Education

Paul Rahe makes some interesting points in Grade Inflation & Accreditation in Higher Education.  The article starts with:

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When I returned from my sojourn at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland on Tuesday after having the catheter out the previous day, I found a pile of mail waiting for me – the usual bills, a get-well card from a kind nephew, and so forth. Among the items was an issue of Inside Academe, which is published by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA: www.goacta.org) – an outfit that serves a watchdog function with regard to the madness that has American higher education in its grip and that seeks to interest alumni and trustees in setting things straight.

On the third page was an article that caught my eye. It begins:

America’s higher-education accreditation system is broken. The current system – which forces schools to be certified by regional accreditors in order to receive federal money – was created to safeguard taxpayer dollars. But today it safeguards mediocrity and the status quo.

Once a school receives accreditation, it hardly ever loses that status, but new schools – especially innovative schools – often find it prohibitively difficult to obtain accreditation. The system misleads parents into believing that accreditation equals quality, and it wastes piles of money. Christopher Eisgruber, provost of Princeton University, testified that renewing accreditation can cost a single college or university over $1 million and hundreds of hours of staff time.

The claims advanced in these two paragraphs, in fact, understate the problem. The accreditation system was originally set up by colleges and universities with an eye to separating the sheep from the goats so that parents could have some idea of what they were getting into. The federal government had nothing to do with it. But the old order was hijacked a long time ago, and in the process yet another instrument was created for the micro-management by the federal government of entities that would not otherwise fall under its jurisdiction. The maneuver is simple. To get federal funding, a school must be accredited, and to get accreditation they must meet certain standards.

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Hat tip: Instapundit

Statistics on the traffice for the Carnival of Homeschooling Images

About four years ago our readers selected three images to represent the Carnival of Homeschooling. I set things up so people who wanted to help support the carnival could copy some HTML code to their blog or web site. The image would appear, along with a link back to the carnival.

I renewed my account with PhotoBucket and checked the statistics.



The small image right now averages about 300 downloads a day.


 
The medium image is a touch closer to 650 downloads a day.



And the large image is in the 1200 downloads a day range.

If you want to see the statistics two years ago check out this post.

Nice commentary on "The Declaration of Independence"

I like Randy Barnett's The Declaration of Independence Annotated.

He has some good thoughts about what The Delcaration of Independence means.

Hat tip: Instapundit

John Adams - Declaration of Independence

Another good video to watch - John Adams - Declaration of Independence:

Remember School House's Shot Heard Round the World America Rock?

Another appropriate video for July 4th - Shot Heard Round the World America Rock.

A good video to watch on July 4th

I'm amazed by what the Founding Fathers went through to create this great nation:

The education of the Founding Fathers

Janice Campbell has a nice post on The Education of the Founding Fathers.

Advice for new homeschoolers

Richele has Ten Pieces of Advice for New Homeschoolers.

And Sarah also has 10 Pieces of Advice for All Homeschoolers, New or Old.

One of the problems with freedom of speech

From Dan Galvin's Thought For The Day mailing list:

Where there is a great deal of free speech,
there is always a certain amount of foolish speech.
-Winston Churchill

Good TEDx talk: Jullien Gordon on Driving School for Life

I've asked my daughters to watch this - TEDxMidwest - Jullien Gordon: Driving School for Life:




Here is Jullien Gordon's web site.

Hat tip: Instapundit

We live in an amazing world

I find this exciting: Graphene Can Improve Desalination Efficiency by Several Orders of Magnitude, Can Do Pretty Much Anything:

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Graphene. It can be stronger than steel and thinner than paper. It can generate electricity when struck by light. It can be used in thin, flexible supercapacitors that are up to 20 times more powerful than the ones we use right now and can be made in a DVD burner. It’s already got an impressive track record, but does it have any more tricks up its sleeve? Apparently, yes. According to researchers at MIT, graphene could also increase the efficicency of desalination by two or three orders of magnitude. Seriously, what can’t this stuff do?

Desalination might sound boring, but it’s super important. Around 97% of the planet’s water is saltwater and therefore unpotable, and while you can remove the salt from the water, the current methods of doing so are laborious and expensive. Graphene stands to change all that by essentially serving as the world’s most awesomely efficient filter. If you can increase the efficiency of desalination by two or three orders of magnitude (that is to say, make it 100 to 1,000 times more efficient) desalination suddenly becomes way more attractive as a way to obtain drinking water.
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Hat tip: Instapundit

Interview with Glenn Reynolds on the Higher Education Bubble

I frequently checkout Instapundit, by Glenn Reynolds.  One of the topics he writes about is the high cost of higher education.  The cost of going to college has risen twice as fast as inflation for decades.

Glenn just released a book on this topic: The Higher Education Bubble. 

I enjoyed this interview of Glenn on the topic:



This was posted at PJ Media.

This week's Carnival of Homeschooling is up

Karen is hosting this week's Carnival of Homeschooling at Homeschool Atheist Momma.

This is the 340th edition of the carnival!

The theme is:  Momma's Musing Moments About Homeschool

The carnival starts:

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Parents of homeschoolers must own up to at least one things we all have in common: we worry. We want the very best for our children and we do everything we can to ensure that.

We research, read, discuss, debate, web surf, try new things, nearly going crazy trying to keep up with the newest statistics on homeschooling, not to mention the newest curriculum and material choices out there. The groups. The trips. The CASH spent. The doubts...

We fret and doubt and hope...and then it happens...the evidence!
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If you’re frugal, you don’t need to earn as much as everyone else.

Kristen makes an excellent point in If you’re frugal, you don’t need to earn as much as everyone else.  Well worth reading.

I once heard "That it isn't just the size of the stream that is important; it also important to have a big dam."  The point just earning lots of money doesn't help if you spend it as fast as you earn it.  Retaining a sizeable portion of what you earn and investing it pays huge dividends.

Hat tip: Renae Deckard

Lap-on-a-chip update

I have blogged a few times about new technology called Lab-on-a-chip.  Currently in development this product will allow cheaper blood diagnostics. A Forbes article I read years ago speculated that eventually we'd have dozens or hundreds of tests on a single silicon chip for pennies and you could run tests every day, at the same time you take your vitamins. There are a number of dieases and conditions that if you catch them early are much more manageable.

Nano nod for lab-on-a-chip is a recent article about this technology:

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Each post performs its own genetic test, meaning you can not only find out whether you have malaria, but also determine the type of malaria and whether your DNA makes you resistant to certain antimalarial drugs. It takes less than an hour to process one chip, making it possible to screen large populations in a short time.


“That’s the real value proposition—being able to do multiple tests at the same time,” Acker said, adding that the Domino has been used in several recently published studies, showing similar accuracy to centralized labs.
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They are looking at a box that sells for $5,000, and each chip will cost only a couple dollars.  This isn't quit the home model version, but we are getting there!

The Amazon Effect

The Amazon Effect is a good article about the book publishing industry and the changes we've had over the last couple decades.  The article is long, but worth reading. 

The article starts:

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From the start, Jeff Bezos wanted to “get big fast.” He was never a “small is beautiful” kind of guy. The Brobdingnagian numbers tell much of the story. In 1994, four years after the first Internet browser was created, Bezos stumbled upon a startling statistic: the Internet had been growing at the rate of 2,300 percent annually. In 1995, the year Bezos, then 31, started Amazon, just 16 million people used the Internet. A year later, the number was 36 million, a figure that would multiply at a furious rate. Today, more than 1.7 billion people, or almost one out of every four humans on the planet, are online. Bezos understood two things. One was the way the Internet made it possible to banish geography, enabling anyone with an Internet connection and a computer to browse a seemingly limitless universe of goods with a precision never previously known and then buy them directly from the comfort of their homes. The second was how the Internet allowed merchants to gather vast amounts of personal information on individual customers.
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TED Talk: Bruce Schneier on The Security Mirage

Bruce Schneier has some good thoughts about security:



Here is the TED Talk summary:

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The feeling of security and the reality of security don't always match, says computer-security expert Bruce Schneier. At TEDxPSU, he explains why we spend billions addressing news story risks, like the "security theater" now playing at your local airport, while neglecting more probable risks -- and how we can break this pattern.

From Dan Galvin's Thought For The Day mailing list:

To finish first,
you must first finish.
- Rick Mears

Latest Homeschool Showcase

The latest Homeschool Showcase is up at Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers.