"Teaching is the profession on which all other professions depend". You can read here an article and hear the interview of Prof. Linda Darling-Hammond stating the top-five ways to change education.
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Well, I am a bit older than that... A very interesting and inspiring TEDx talk by Michael Ignatieff, a Canadian academic entitled "if I were 25 and Greek".
Video In this article from the Independent a radical reform of the Finish educational system is discussed. Cross-subject topics, co-teaching and a very different way of learning. The school of the future!
You can read the whole article here You can find here a book entitled "Direct Methods for Limit and Shakedown Analysis of Structures: Advanced Computational Algorithms and Material Modelling". This book covers all the latest progress in Direct Methods of plasticity. Articles in this book examine various materials and how to determine directly the limit state of a structure, in the sense of limit analysis and shakedown analysis. Apart from classical applications in mechanical and civil engineering contexts, the book reports on the emerging field of material design beyond the elastic limit, which has further industrial design and technological applications. Readers will discover that “Direct Methods” and the techniques presented here can in fact be used to numerically estimate the strength of structured materials such as composites or nano-materials, which represent fruitful fields of future applications. Leading researchers outline the latest computational tools and optimization techniques and explore the possibility of obtaining information on the limit state of a structure whose post-elastic loading path and constitutive behavior are not well defined or well known. Readers will discover how Direct Methods allow rapid and direct access to requested information in mathematically constructive manners without cumbersome step-by-step computation. Both researchers already interested or involved in the field and practical engineers who want to have a panorama of modern methods for structural safety assessment will find this book valuable. It provides the reader with the latest developments and a significant amount of references on the topic. The 7th chapter of this book concerns my work during my research stay at IAM-RWTH Aachen on the proposal of a new starting point strategy for shakedown problems that significanlty reduces the required solution time. On a future post I will explain more about that topic.
Deutsche Welle (DW) published the list with the 10 most popular Universities in Germany for foreign students. RWTH Aachen, the largest technical university in Germany is ranked 4th. After spending some months working in RWTH, I highly recommend it! An excellent working/studying environment with increasing international recognition.
Wearing glasses, walking faster or slower than average "normal walking pace", using a middle name or lying about having read classic books makes you look smarter. This article in the Atlantic gathered information from recent research papers about the perception of intelligence.
Youth unemployment in Europe is unacceptably high (55% for Greece), but what are the main causes for this? Is the current educational system a part of the problem? This very interesting report (Education to Employment: designing a system that works) from McKinsey and Company states out some key facts regarding education and employment. 45% of employers in Greece believe their employees lack of skills can cause significant problems to their business. On the other hand only 31% of Greek students believe their post-secondary studies helped them improve their employment opportunities and only 18% believe they received sufficient information on their field of study. However, according to the report there are proven ways to improve the current situation and specific suggestions are made. For more information you can follow the links above to the report.
Greek Universities in free fall (Griechische Unis im freien Fall), thats how this article describes the dramatic situation in our universities. Budget cuts, librares and labs without equipment, doctorate students without financial support. I can only confirm this tragedy and hope for change...
In this link you can find the schocking results of a study* regarding racial and gender discriminations in Universities. The researchers emailed 6500 professors pretending to be students. The mails contained the same message but a different name in order to signal a different gender and race (i.e. Black, Hispanic, Chinese, Caucasian). Women and minorities had a significantly lower response rate (25% gap) than white males. Discrimination is high in business (25%) schools but lower in humanities (5%). For engineering the gap was 13%. Another interesting result was that for fine arts there was a -11% reverse discrimination. You can find more information and all the results in the study (follow links provided).
* Milkman, Katherine L. and Akinola, Modupe and Chugh, Dolly, What Happens Before? A Field Experiment Exploring How Pay and Representation Differentially Shape Bias on the Pathway into Organizations (April 23, 2014). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2063742 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2063742 |
Kostis
PhD student @ Civil Eng. Dept. - Aristotle University of Thessaloniki - Greece Archives
August 2018
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