Category: 2011
Summary: I created a prototype of Learn.Ember.js, an interactive tutorial application for web developers who want to learn about Ember.js. Along the way I was reminded that one of the most useful things about HTML5 is that it helps us to blur the app vs. document distinction in useful ways. Oh, and by the way, […]
What was Earth like 2.8 billion years ago? The first life was emerging on the planet. The Sun was weaker than it is today, but geologic evidence shows that the climate was as warm (or warmer) than it is today. Was Earth colder because of the weak Sun, or warmer, as geologic evidence suggests? How […]
The Concord Consortium has received a $2.5 million grant from Google.org to pave the way for digital curricula that model the “textbook of tomorrow.”
About 33 million years ago, the Earth abruptly went from being warm and wet to having Antarctic ice cover. Only 23 million years after the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, a time of some of the warmest temperatures on Earth, ice covered the surface. What happened? According to a recent study by scientists at Yale and Purdue universities, […]
Harvard Education Press has just published a new book, New Frontiers in Formative Assessment, featuring chapters by Dan Damelin, Kimberle Koile, and Paul Horwitz.
The book is edited by Concord Consortium board member Pendred Noyce and her colleague Daniel Hickey.
New groundwater and soil moisture drought indicator maps produced by NASA are available on the National Drought Mitigation Center’s website. They currently show unusually low groundwater storage levels in Texas. The maps use an 11-division scale, with blues showing wetter-than-normal conditions and a yellow-to-red spectrum showing drier-than-normal conditions. (Credit: NASA/National Drought Mitigation Center) The map […]
There have been some interesting posts recently demonstrating and discussing control of devices beyond the keyboard. First, every casual gamer’s dream has now come true: you can play Angry Birds using your brain as a controller. The implications for reaching an even higher vegetative state state of flow are simply staggering. Second, one story that […]
A team of astronomers led by scientists at the California Institute of Technology have found 18 planets orbiting stars more massive than our Sun. Finding planets is becoming more and more routine with the Kepler telescope, but these planetary discoveries help to answer questions about planetary formation–and raise other questions about planetary orbits. The scientists […]
We put the last clock radio in our house in the Goodwill pile last week. Seeing it sitting on the pile to go downstairs was a surprising revelation for me. Somehow it felt wrong for a reason I couldn’t place. Then it hit me: a clock radio was my first real gadget purchase. For those […]
What caused the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM)? About 56 million years ago, Earth’s temperature was a lot warmer than it is today–as much as 21°F higher than today (see the graph). Earth’s temperature is rising today, likely because of human emissions of greenhouse gases. But 56 million years ago, there were no human emissions; there […]