Today yet another international comparison reaffirmed that the United States is failing to prepare its students to compete successfully in the new flat world. PISA, the Program for International Student Assessment, was administered to 15-year-old students last year by the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development). This is a highly respected group whose conclusions […]
From xkcd: http://xkcd.com/263/ Question: How can we trust ourselves (or scientists) to know the truth about anything? Answer: We look at the evidence. Scientists back up their claims with evidence. If the evidence doesn’t fit the claim, then the claim is rejected and revised. New evidence can result in changes to long-held understandings about how the […]
Pollution has its benefits. With fewer particulates being released by smokestacks and cars, there are fewer aerosols in the atmosphere. Fewer aerosols means that more solar radiation hits the ground. With more sunlight hitting the Earth, the Earth warms up–faster than many scientists had initially predicted. Calculations by Jan Magnus, Bertrand Melenberg, and Chris Muris, […]
Our Sun has bursts of activity that occur in an 11 year cycle–some periods of lots of activity and some periods of low activity. The Sun provides the radiation that heats the Earth and makes it habitable for us. So when the Sun is more active, the Earth should get warmer, right? Wrong. New research, […]
Figure 1: Designing a building withEnergy3D.We have come close to release an alpha version of Energy3D, a computational building science laboratory for simulating energy flow and designing energy efficiency. This program will allow you to design a buil…
So many things to give thanks for. The Concord Consortium family had our own Thanksgiving this week, complete with turkey, stuffing and cranberries. We were happy to welcome a few new friends and a number of old friends, and have a great time. One way we showed our thanks was through our Thanksgiving tree, highlighting […]
Mashable.com featured our work heavily in its article today on 8 Ways Technology is Improving Education. Among other areas, the story cited our work with models and simulations, probes and sensors, and online assessment as examples of how technology has the potential to transform education. It’s humbling to see so many examples cited in so […]
Mashable.com features the Concord Consortium’s projects as some of their 8 Ways Technology is Improving Education
Climate scientists are working intently on models that can forecast what Earth’s climate might be like in the future. The evidence points towards a warmer future, thanks to increased greenhouse gas emissions from humans. So why are climate scientists studying the distant past (paleoclimate), long before humans roamed the planet? Well, it turns out that […]
For years we have been using several layers of Java, Java Native Interface, and native driver code to support common access to sensors from multiple Probeware interfaces from different vendors. We’ve been calling these layers the org-concord-sensor framework. Our Java/OTrunk framework which has supported many kinds of interactive educational activities uses the org-concord-sensor framework to […]