My Beauty Best Teacher

• Ready, Set, Invent! The Google Science Fair is Launched | MindShift

  Google Science fair is open. The only Google product you have to do is to use a Google site. The science fair is open. Take a look at this if you're a science teacher. 
  
  "This year, Google is taking the “global” aspect of the contest seriously, allowing submissions in 13 different languages (last year’s were only accepted in English). The company will also select 90 regional finalists — 30 from the Americas, 30 from the Asia-Pacific region, and 30 from Europe and Africa. It’s about “guaranteeing more global coverage,” says Maggie Johnson, Google Director of Education and a Google Science Fair judge."

  tags: flatclass globaled

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

In the Economist:

MUCH has been written about the rise of the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and the shift in economic power eastward as Asia outruns the rest of the world. But the surprising success story of the past decade lies elsewhere. An analysis by The Economist finds that over the ten years to 2010, no fewer than six of the world’s ten fastest-growing economies were in sub-Saharan Africa...[continue reading]

Merry Christmas everyone! Here is something you probably didn't know about Christmas:

On December 25, Christians around the world will gather to celebrate Jesus’ birth. Joyful carols, special liturgies, brightly wrapped gifts, festive foods—these all characterize the feast today, at least in the northern hemisphere. But just how did the Christmas festival originate? How did December 25 come to be associated with Jesus’ birthday?

The Bible offers few clues: Celebrations of Jesus’ Nativity are not mentioned in the Gospels or Acts; the date is not given, not even the time of year. The biblical reference to shepherds tending their flocks at night when they hear the news of Jesus’ birth (Luke 2:8) might suggest the spring lambing season; in the cold month of December, on the other hand, sheep might well have been corralled. Yet most scholars would urge caution about extracting such a precise but incidental detail from a narrative whose focus is theological rather than calendrical.

The extrabiblical evidence from the first and second century is equally spare: There is no mention of birth celebrations in the writings of early Christian writers such as Irenaeus (c. 130–200) or Tertullian (c. 160–225). Origen of Alexandria (c. 165–264) goes so far as to mock Roman celebrations of birth anniversaries, dismissing them as “pagan” practices—a strong indication that Jesus’ birth was not marked with similar festivities at that place and time. As far as we can tell, Christmas was not celebrated at all at this point.

Finally, in about 200 C.E., a Christian teacher in Egypt makes reference to the date Jesus was born. According to Clement of Alexandria, several different days had been proposed by various Christian groups. Surprising as it may seem, Clement doesn’t mention December 25 at all. Clement writes: “There are those who have determined not only the year of our Lord’s birth, but also the day; and they say that it took place on (May 20 in our calendar), or (March 21), or (April 21), or (April 15), or (April 20 or 21).”

Clearly there was great uncertainty, but also a considerable amount of interest, in dating Jesus’ birth in the late second century. By the fourth century, however, we find references to two dates that were widely recognized—and now also celebrated—as Jesus’ birthday: December 25 in the western Roman Empire and January 6 in the East (especially in Egypt and Asia Minor). The modern Armenian church continues to celebrate Christmas on January 6; for most Christians, however, December 25 would prevail, while January 6 eventually came to be known as the Feast of the Epiphany, commemorating the arrival of the magi in Bethlehem. The period between became the holiday season later known as the 12 days of Christmas.

So, almost 300 years after Jesus was born, we finally find people observing his birth in midwinter. But how had they settled on the dates December 25 and January 6?

The first theory is popular (based on existing pagan celebrations) but doesn't hold up under further analysis- early Christians rejected pagan connections and tried to be different, and there isn't even a hint mentioned that Christmas was based on pagan traditions until the tenth century. So I reject this theory and instead point you towards the second (lesser known) one:

Around 200 C.E. Tertullian of Carthage reported the calculation that the 14th of Nisan (the day of the crucifixion according to the Gospel of John) in the year Jesus died was equivalent to March 25 in the Roman (solar) calendar. March 25 is, of course, nine months before December 25; it was later recognized as the Feast of the Annunciation—the commemoration of Jesus’ conception. Thus, Jesus was believed to have been conceived and crucified on the same day of the year. Exactly nine months later, Jesus was born, on December 25.

This idea appears in an anonymous Christian treatise titled On Solstices and Equinoxes, which appears to come from fourth-century North Africa. The treatise states: “Therefore our Lord was conceived on the eighth of the kalends of April in the month of March [March 25], which is the day of the passion of the Lord and of his conception. For on that day he was conceived on the same he suffered.” Based on this, the treatise dates Jesus’ birth to the winter solstice.

Augustine, too, was familiar with this association. In On the Trinity (c. 399–419) he writes: “For he [Jesus] is believed to have been conceived on the 25th of March, upon which day also he suffered; so the womb of the Virgin, in which he was conceived, where no one of mortals was begotten, corresponds to the new grave in which he was buried, wherein was never man laid, neither before him nor since. But he was born, according to tradition, upon December the 25th.”

In the East, too, the dates of Jesus’ conception and death were linked. But instead of working from the 14th of Nisan in the Hebrew calendar, the easterners used the 14th of the first spring month (Artemisios) in their local Greek calendar—April 6 to us. April 6 is, of course, exactly nine months before January 6—the eastern date for Christmas. In the East too, we have evidence that April was associated with Jesus’ conception and crucifixion. Bishop Epiphanius of Salamis writes that on April 6, “The lamb was shut up in the spotless womb of the holy virgin, he who took away and takes away in perpetual sacrifice the sins of the world.” Even today, the Armenian Church celebrates the Annunciation in early April (on the 7th, not the 6th) and Christmas on January 6.

Thus, we have Christians in two parts of the world calculating Jesus’ birth on the basis that his death and conception took place on the same day (March 25 or April 6) and coming up with two close but different results (December 25 and January 6).

So, there you have it- the reason why we today celebrate Jesus' birth on December 25. Merry Christmas!

Innovation Africa reports:

Timely access to information and advice about how to manage plant health problems can make the difference between success and failure. Since 2003, 12 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, have introduced community-based plant health clinics as a way of providing this advice to small-scale farmers.
Plant clinics have spread rapidly because they offer a cheap and practical alternative to more conventional approaches that can help only limited numbers of farmers. They operate in easily accessible public places and are widely used to identify the causes of plant health problems and to find solutions.

Continuing:

Community-based plant clinics have the potential to help farmers and contribute to making agriculture a successful business, especially in resource-poor countries where advisory services are often scarce, underfunded and beyond the reach of millions of smallholders. Plant clinics provide an opportunity to coordinate the efforts of extension, research, government regulation and input supply, to reach more people and to use existing resources more efficiently.

More here

Paul Collier in Foreign Policy writes:

Sure, some of Asia's "benign" autocrats have turned their ambitions to building strong national economies. But not in Africa and many of the other countries that I call the bottom billion -- quite a number of which crowd the upper reaches of the Failed States Index. There, the most common form of autocracy is anything but benign. These leaders not only neglect to build the economy, they actively avoid doing so.

He contends that:

Bad guys matter, and when they rule, they make weak states weaker. And the countless anecdotes are backed up by numbers: In a celebrated study, economists Benjamin Jones and Benjamin Olken looked at whether the death of a country's leader altered economic growth. It did, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. Recently, an Oxford colleague, Anke Hoeffler, and I sifted through their results again, distinguishing this time between democrats and autocrats. We found that in democracies, changing the leader does not change growth -- all leaders are disciplined to perform tolerably. But in autocracies, the growth rates are as unpredictably varied as the leaders' personalities. Here lies the difference between good leaders and great ones: Good leaders put right the policy catastrophes of bad leaders; great leaders, like the men who shaped the U.S. Constitution, build the democratic checks and balances that make good leaders redundant.

More here

Based on figures from a 1999 report by the GAO, Bill Clinton's trip to Africa cost $42.8 million dollars. He took 1,300 individuals (not including the Secret Service) and was gone 12 days. That works out to roughly $3.57 million a day. Based on this information, we can take some guesses at how much President Barack Obama's upcoming trip to India is going to cost US taxpayers.

First, Obama will only be traveling around Asia for 10 days (3 days in India, rest in Indonesia where he grew up, South Korea, and Japan), so let's lower the cost down to $35.7M. But he is taking over 3,000 people (including Secret Service), so let's guess on the lower side and just double the cost, to give us a price tag of $71.4M. Let's now adjust for inflation from 1999 to today- that will give us a price tag of about $91.07M.

It is reasonable to assume that the Taj Mahal Hotel, where Obama plans to stay, is considerably more expensive than wherever Clinton stayed in 1999, and it is also reasonable to assume that the cost of moving warships off the coast of India for protection and hiring people to knock down coconuts so they don't fall on the President's head are costs that Clinton did not incur. Plus, we know that President Obama and his wife and retinue have a taste for the finer things (see my post Barack Obama's Wagyu Steaks) that Bubba did not really flaunt. Obama will probably try to get in a round of golf while he is there or maybe take in a cricket match, so add those costs to the total too. I'm not an economist, I think it would be reasonable to put a price tag on this trip of $200 million.

So the White House is correct and the Republicans are wrong. It is not going to cost US taxpayers who are battling a recession $200 million dollars a day that we don't have to send the President on a globe-trotting trip with all his buddies to live it up in 5-star hotels. It will only cost us $200 million overall.

For fun, check out Trillion with a T: How to Spend $1,000,000,000,000.00.

Suman Bery writing in the Economist:

With the two exceptions of Malaysia and Indonesia these countries did not enjoy rents from significant mineral resources. As such they were not subjected to the so-called “resource curse” of a struggle for control of these rents, the problems of an appreciated real exchange rate, and lack of competitiveness of the tradables sector. Also, at the time of their fast growth episodes, most of the Asian countries were well into their demographic transition, with the dependency ratio declining as the labour force expanded. This led to a rise in their saving rates, complemented in many cases by significant foreign aid.
As Angus Maddison pointed out a decade ago (in his "The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective") Africa’s underlying circumstances are much less favourable. (His discussion includes Mediterranean Africa, while I will restrict myself to sub-Saharan Africa.) Several of its major economies enjoy enormous mineral riches, which the world over pose tremendous problems for economic management. The prices for these minerals fluctuate violently in global markets causing volatility in revenues; the easy availability of mineral revenues inhibits the growth of a domestic taxation culture essential for the development of accountability to the citizenry; the struggle for illegal control of the mineral resources has been a source of fierce conflict and corruption; while the easy foreign exchange revenues the mineral exports make available boost the real exchange rate. This inhibits the growth of labour-intensive manufacture, which was the source of Asia’s growth.

More here

This is Africa reporting on efforts to bolster regional integration. A bugbear if there ever was one:

Africa accounts for just 3 percent of world trade today, and just 12 percent of that is internal. Underdeveloped transport and power infrastructure, as well as cumbersome regulatory environments and corruption also make it the world’s most expensive business environment. Dominated by fragmented and small economies, the continent lags well behind the likes of Asia, Europe and North America in terms of competitiveness – and as a consequence – struggles to attract large scale private investment outside of the extractive minerals and oil and gas industries.Addressing these challenges will invariably focus attention on Africa’s regional economic communities. While each geographical part of the continent has its own REC, one has quickly emerged as a model for integration; the East African Community. Having broken up in 1977, the EAC was re-established in 1999, and has since then taken significant strides towards building an effective economic and political framework for integration across its five member states – Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Burundi and Rwanda.

More here

Via Americans for Tax Reform:

Every year, the Americans for Tax Reform Foundation and the Center for Fiscal Accountability calculate Cost of Government Day. This is the day on which the average American has earned enough gross income to pay off his or her share of the spending and regulatory burdens imposed by government at the federal, state, and local levels.

In 2010, Cost of Government Day falls on August 19. Working people must toil 231 days out of the year just to meet all costs imposed by government - 8 days later than last year and a full 32 days longer than 2008.In other words, in 2010 the cost of government consumes 63.41 percent of national income.

Whenever you get into any argument with any liberal or Democrat about tax rates and the size of government and government finances, you need to ask that liberal or Democrat how much of a person's work and labor and investments in time and money and effort (referred to in the future as income) should the government take from them and give to someone else (government bureaucrats, connected interest groups, politically favorable charities, etc)? How much is too much?

You'll get two answers- that we are at the perfect rate right now (as if 63% is some sort of magical number), or that the rate is too high on the liberals and Democrats but not high enough of the conservatives and Republicans (or as they'll call it, the 'government-subsidized poor' pay too much, but the 'working private rich' don't pay enough). The magic number for liberals and Democrats is that they want 100% of your hard work to go to what they want to spend it on- they want to turn you into a slave of their interests and their desires. That shouldn't shock you- out of the hundreds of thousands of years that humans have been around, slavery has existed and thrived all but 150 of them (although slavery continues even today for women in Muslim nations and there is sex slavery in Africa and Southeast Asia). The real goal for Democrats and liberals is to make you a slave once more to the state, and have you work longer than 231 days out of the year for the state's interests.

Myself, I'm increasingly resenting the fact that I work 231 days out of the year for someone else- I consider that a violation of my life, liberty, and protection of property on which this nation was founded. Even if the Republicans can retake the House and the Senate and the state governments and the Presidency, at best they can only hold the line at this point, which is not good enough for me. The Revolution is brewing.

UPDATE: Just to educate some of your liberal rubes who read my blog, the solution to these high taxes on individuals for being productive is not to tax businesses instead. A business has costs to run and sells goods and services, and if they sell those goods for more than they cost to produce, they make a profit. If taxes are increased on businesses, several things could happen; one, the business owner will pay for those increased taxes out of profits that he earned, which will give him less money to buy goods and services from others, will give him less money to reinvest in his business, and will lessen his desire to make profits by being efficient; two, the business owner will pay for the tax by raising the cost of the goods or services, which will cause overall inflation on everyone as goods and services become more expensive to consumers, lowering economic activity and inflicting harm on everyone; three, the business owner will raise his prices to pay for the tax but be unable to have customers buy the goods at the increased prices and therefore will go out of business; or four, the business owner will keep his prices the same, no longer make money on the business, and eventually be unable to pay his bills and his business will go under.

Those of you who see 'increase taxes on businesses' as a solution to tax woes are indeed idiots, or fools with radio shows named Tomm Hartman.

In the Economist:

Developing countries are becoming something else...engines of the world economy. Since 2008, says the World Bank, they have contributed almost all of what economic growth there has been. In the 1980s they accounted for 33.7% of global income, at purchasing-power parities. This year, the share will be 43.4%. The map above shows how the world would look if country size were adjusted in line with the projected GDPs of countries by 2015.
These trends have been going on a long time but the end of the great recession has speeded them up dramatically. Richer countries have not fully recovered: their income is still below what it was before the crisis. But in poorer ones—notably in Asia, the Middle East and Africa—income now exceeds pre-crisis levels by wide margins.

More here

G. Pascal Zachary writes:

To a greater extent than any of the other regional powers in global “football,” African star players leave their countries and sub-regions to play for higher-paying clubs elsewhere in the world, usually in Europe, which has the best and highest-paying club teams on the planet, and increasingly in Asia and the Middle East. The exodus of football talent from Africa mirrors the general “brain drain” from the world’s poorest continent. The outflow of footballing talent from Africa is singular; it impoverishes African sporting life – and civil life generally — in a more profound way than when Brazilian joins the Italian league, a German plays for Chelsea or a Japanese suits up for a Spanish club.

Continuing he asks:

what’s the damage from “football imperialism.?” I’d argue that even elite Africans in Africa still suffer from an inferiority complex, around race and place, which fuels brain drain and a lack of a “stake” in their own countries, where many talented people – from doctors to goal keepers to university professors – feel under-appreciated because they are under-appreciated. So club football is a kind of proxy for a dysfunctional modernization process in Africa, and in African cities especially.

More here

Jerry Guo reporting from Newsweek:

Many experts believe Africa, with its expansive base of newly minted consumers, may very well be on the verge of becoming the next India, thanks to frenetic urbanization and the sort of big push in services and infrastructure that transformed the Asian subcontinent 15 years ago. Just as India once harnessed its booming population of cheap labor, Africa stands to gain by the rapid growth of its big cities. Already the continent boasts the world's highest rate of urbanization, which jump-starts growth through industrialization and economies of scale. Today only a third of Africa's population lives in cities, but that segment accounts for 80 percent of total GDP, according to the U.N. Centre for Human Settlements. In the next 30 years, half the continent's population will be living in cities.

More here

Related articles by Zemanta

• Charisma Acey: Africa's Urban Transformation: Signs of Opportunity and Hope (huffingtonpost.com)
• Africa's GDP growth could reach 7 pct in 2011 (africagoodnews.com)
• Change beckons for billionth African (guardian.co.uk)

Last summer I decided to earn an extra few bucks by teaching a summer school class called Global Studies. Global Studies class is supposed to be a survey of the countries of the world, and touch on their geography, history, economic systems, and current political issues. It's a good class, and gives kids a nice introduction to world history, US history, comparative government, and geography. In my mind, I saw this class as an opportunity to teach kids about the history and issues facing every country in the world- oh, I know it would just be an overview, but it would still give me a real chance to teach kids. I was very excited to teach it at first. Then I met with the teacher who taught in full time during the year who showed me the way the class was supposed to be taught.

The first unit that was to be taught in the class was Africa. I'd already done some background research for this class and put together a binder of stuff that I wanted to talk about with Africa- the geography of the area, an overview of the history of the continent, talk about the types of governments found on the continent, and finally expose students to some of the modern issues facing Africa. I told the other teacher all about my ideas, the projects I'd planned, the lectures I was going to give, the articles students could read, and all the fun stuff we'd learn.

The other teacher listened to me talk about my plans for the class with a bored look on her face. At the end of my excited talk about my lessons, she looked at me and said "that’s nice work, but this is how we teach this unit.” She was around 40, and had been teaching this particular class full-time for almost 20 years- about 200 kids a year went through her class, which means that she'd had time to touch over 4000 kids so far. The way that she taught this unit was to give the students a textbook that they were to use and a worksheet packet to work on. That's how she wanted me to teach the unit.

"Okay, we'll use the book and the worksheets, but I'd also like to talk about other things too," I said, disgusted, but needing the paycheck from this job.

"Good," she said, "I also spice things up in the class. Our department has approved the following additional materials to be used in addition to the textbook." She handed me packets about racial issues, articles about the bad effects of colonialism, biographies of 'great' African leaders like Mandala and Mogube, a lecture on shamanism, a project on apartheid, and pictures of rain forests. "This is it," she said, "at the end of this unit, make sure that students understand that Africa is poor, starving, illiterate, black, and hopeless due to the oppression of white colonial powers."

Stunned by the one-sided nature of this unit, I sat in silence. Mistaking my silence for approval, she continued "If you want to do something really fun, in years past we've set up a charity in school to divert money from rich spoiled white kids to the poor people of Africa."

I found my breath again, and somehow managed to keep my anger in check as I hissed "Isn't this all just rather empty jargon? Where is the educating about the real history of Africa? Why is no time set aside to study the true nature of political and economic systems in Africa? Isn't this class just one that perpetuates stereotypes and promotes a shallow understanding of the issues that Africa faces?"

The other teacher looked at me in surprise, and then she frowned, and said "Just stick to the curriculum and don’t change it.” With that, I was dismissed.

I took whatever this teacher gave me, threw it in the garbage, and taught the class the way I wanted it taught. My 20 kids learned the history, geography, economic and political systems, and current issues facing Africa, and then Asia, and then Europe, South America, and every part of the world.

The next year, I wasn't asked back.

Michel Amarger writes:

The musicals made in Egypt and Asia form a genre that is always highly popular with audiences in Africa. Yet the continent's filmmakers seem practically to ignore this art form, which has fed their own imaginations. What with the Egyptian musicals, Asian adventure films, and American productions, little place is left on Africa's screens for its local tales. However, even if African productions still face the same distribution difficulties on the continent, their singularity has developed and become more polished since Independence. It a priori seems paradoxical, therefore, that Africa's directors only rarely go down the musical route in cultures that are impregnated with music, song, dance, humour

More here

Image via Wikipedia

In Tree Hugger:

The Rights and Resources Initiative says that while about one-third of forest in Latin America and Asia are under community control, in Africa that rate drops to just 2%. With such a low rate of land tenure, and the current slow rates of reform, the report says it would take the countries in the Congo Basin 260 years to reach the level of land ownership reform achieved in the Amazon.

Why is this important? A number of reports, this on included, point out that without effective community involvement, protection of indigenous people's rights, and those of women, programs to stop deforestation and decrease poverty are seriously compromised.

More Here

In the Guardian Jeevan Vasagar reviews Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's The Settler's Cookbook:

I long for the day when an Asian history can be written without mentioning curry - but perhaps it can't be done. Here, food makes all the connections. For Alibhai-Brown's children, Africa is beautiful but distressingly violent and poor. Knowledge of its languages fades with time. But just as food crosses barriers between cultures, so it passes history down the generations to her son and daughter. The cuisine recorded here blends Africa and Asia: there are plantains with peanut curry, posho and rice. The first recipe is for fried mogo, cassava chips with salt and chilli, a hallmark of her people's cuisine. Its presence on an Indian wedding menu in Britain is a sure sign that the caterers are Ugandan Asians...[continue reading]