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Does education lack perspective more than funding?

admin — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 16:51:49 +0000

By Lou Covey
Editorial Director, Footwasher Media

Is learning from the past the key to the future, as philosopher Georges Santayana believed? A former Lockheed-Martin CEO thinks so.

In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Norm Augustine, an IEEE Fellow who served as Lockheed-Martin’s CEO from 1996 to 1997, said that the problem with US education is not a lack of focus on science and engineering, or even economics, but on history and communication skills.

Taking aim at STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education is a well-worn road for industry executives and gets fairly big headlines.

Earlier this past year, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, took a minute from a fairly long speech

Schmidt talks down UK education

in the UK to slam the UK education system for not encouraging science and math students . As a result, most every member of the media in the UK and many in the US ignored 99 percent of Schmidt’s text and focused on those four paragraphs out of 200 What was missed almost entirely in the coverage was the real focus of the speech: fostering innovation to boost the world economy. Even Augustine had piled on previously in a January 2011 Forbes Magazine piece blaming the lack of spending on science and technology education, as well as a lack of spending on energy technology, as reasons for the seeming dearth of innovation in the US. He claimed that the West spends more on potato chips than on energy research. According to recent data and the, however, Augustine’s later position might have more validity.

When discussions arise about the state of education the focus is always on the current cuts in education from an individual level – local, state and federal, but the discussions rarely look at the whole. And that “whole” paints a very different picture.

According to UNESCO, total education spending worldwide now exceeds $7 trillion, just for 2011 alone. Total public spending on education in the United States is 24 percent of that total for 4 percent of all students in the world from elementary to graduate school – close to $2 trillion this year. Even with the cuts in the past decade, this total is greater than the totals of any other country in the world. In fact, the US spends more than the next five countries combined. The Institute for Energy Research estimates that The US also spends 7 times more on alternative energy technology than on fossil fuel, according to the Energy Institute of America, and 70 percent of what is spent on alternative energy is in the form of direct grants, while 90 percent of the spending on oil is in the form of loans that are repaid. (By the way, the US spends $6 billion a year on potato chips and $70 billion on alternative energy research.)

So it’s not a lack of money spent on education or innovation. Augustine points out that the National Assessment of Educational Progress shows that scores on STEM subjects (sciences, technology, engineering and math) for US high school students scores, while low according world standards, are not the students’ lowest scores. Surprisingly enough, their best subject is Economics. Their worst score is in History.

“A failing grade in history suggests that students are not only failing to comprehend our nation’s story and that of our world, but also failing to develop skills that are crucial to employment across sectors,” he wrote. “Having traveled in 109 countries in this global economy, I have developed a considerable appreciation for the importance of knowing a country’s history and politics.”

What seems clear is that the West is not getting what it pays for in education. That is not a reason to reduce funding, but it is a good reason to reexamine the educational priorities.

What did the Google Chief say about the quality of UK school curriculum? Find out at: www.element14.com

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Funambol founder celebrates Apple’s iCloud

admin — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 15:33:10 +0000

Fabrizio Capobianco, founder of cloud services startup Funambol, was quite excited about Apple’s iCloud announcement, saying “it’s about time” they realized the real value. Funambol’s products show up in multiple consumer products, primarily mobile phones connecting users to cloud services invisibly. Most of us don’t know that we are using Funambol-enabled devices… except for Apple products. But that lack of relationship doesn’t bother Capobianco, because it just means that anyone who wants to compete with Apple’s technology, needs to talk to Funambol. New Tech Press did. Here’s the interview.

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Five companies you might have missed at ESC-SV 2011

admin — Fri, 06 May 2011 01:02:06 +0000

The Embedded Systems Conference, especially the Silicon Valley edition, is an eclectic collection of cutting edge technology. This year, ESC-SV 2011 was no exception. Yes, there were the regular software, RTOS, component and design services companies, but there was also significant presence of distributors like DigiKey and element14 that were drawing a lot of attention.

On the periphery of the exhibition were the companies that lack the marketing resources of the major players and while most were satisfied by the amount of customer traffic, they were a little wistful about the lack of attention they were getting from the press. Luckily for them, New Tech Press was there, and boy did we find some cool companies.

So here are five of the companies that weren’t among the usual suspects at ESC, and that you might have missed.

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Doochoo looking to make the web more democratic

admin — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 23:42:21 +0000

Doochoo, an Italian social media company now located in San Francisco, has set it’s sites to be the “semantic wikipedia” of opinion on the web. It recently launched Pick1.com on it’s platform for the purpose of helping people do everything from choose a restaurant for a group of people to discussing political decisions. Doochoo’s opinion collector provides real-time tangible poll results through the Internet; a dynamic tool for knowing what people think about things that may change the world, change your next decision, or simply entertain you… while, at the same time, providing valuable data to advertisers and brands. This interview is sponsored by Silicon Valley Link

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Web 2.0 gems amid TechCrunch roar

loucovey — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 15:16:33 +0000

By Lou Covey, New Tech Press Editorial Director

A couple of weeks ago, New Tech Press attended TechCrunch Disrupt, looking for some companies that were not getting the buzz at the conference, but making Web 2.0 accessible to no-geek types. We found several. This link to the video interviews takes a look at five of them — Poken, Caplinked, Rseven, Urban Spoils, Yapper and Ovia. A couple of others weren’t around when we came by with the video camera but nonetheless were worth mentioning here: Bubbalon and Ark.

Ark makes it possible for online shoppers to designate a portion of their purchases to their favorite charities. Organizations can apply to be covered by Ark, or supporters can apply for them, and Ark will check them out, give them a certification, and then the option will show up on the Amazon, or EBay shopping window. This is not necessarily a new idea, but other options force the donors to choose from a list created by someone else. Ark democratizes this process by opening it to all organizations.

Bubbalon, on the other hand, is a little more self-serving… but pretty cool nonetheless. There is a fake group on Facebook that is supposedly trying to get a “dislike” button on the platform and lots of people think that’s a good idea. Bubbalon has taken that idea and run with it way beyond just a boring “dislike.” They make a button that can actually rate anything, like a survey asks you to rate something from 1-10. Then it takes all the various ratings and averages them. This provides a more interactive experience for the user, and a more valuable marketing information source for the object of the review. You don’t have to know how to write a clever review, just slide a button up or down and rate something from Atrocious to Awesome.

This tech could give Yelp a run for it’s money. So maybe Yelp should buy them. Like now.

This report sponsored by Dehood.com

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