On the 14th and 15th of March last month, a category 5 storm, named Tropical cyclone Pam hit the Island nation of Vanuatu. The speed of the storm was measured at 155 mph. Days later, about 11 persons were reported killed, 70% of the population displaced.
Before the storm, Vanuatu was a tourist destination. Its people were subsistence farmers. It exported copra to New Zealand and Australia. Port Vila, the capital, was one of the poorest places in the South Pacific. Weeks after, the people are beginning to settle down to usual life. But, they need help. Tourism has to be revived by people spreading the word that Vanuatu is going to return to its usual beauty.
This is my contribution to helping Vanuatuans. This series of pictures, Vanuatu – Before and After, were creative commons photographs compiled from image repositories on the web, especially Flickr and Wikimedia Commons.
Dry coconut is used to make copra, a Vanuatuan export.
When Pasteur advocated rigorous washing in hospitals by doctors and nurses as a way to fight off infections, particularly during surgical operations, he was scorned. In the nineteenth century, many health professionals believed diseases were spontaneously generated, possibly influenced by the theory of evolution. Later, when it was proved that germs enter living organisms from the environment, hygiene and attention to washing and cleanliness took its position in medical practice.
That was a case where practice and concept (or theory) were mismatched. In such cases, education and public awareness campaigns are powerful tools for bridging the gap.
When the fact and idea doesn't match.Credit: Charlotte on Flickr
In a similar vein, bill shock prevention could be falling into that class. If you read this Syniverse bill shock prevention document, bill shock prevention has the mobile subscriber in mind. It enables subscribers to set spending and/or usage thresholds based on pre-established policies.
Unfortunately, a recent study has called its economic value into question. The study conducted by Mathew Osborne, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Toronto Mississauga, and Michael Grubb, an assistant professor of economics of Boston College, argues that the practice might be going contrary to the claims.
Bill shock prevention might be costing subscribers.
By sending timely SMS or email alerts to customers when plan threshold is about to be breached, mobile network operators hope to save their customers' money, make them happier and increase company revenue while protecting themselves against customer churn. It seems that is but a concept.
In reality, such SMS or email alerts induces a secondary behavior on the subscribers. It makes them to decrease their network usage, stop using the plan or switch to a wrong plan. All these makes the cost of usage more expensive for the subscriber.
It is estimated that the average subscriber cost increment when network operators implement bill shock prevention strategies is about $33. Calculate this by the subscriber base of each mobile operator and you’ll understand why this is possibly an externality the society might have to address.
To bridge the gap, subscribers have to be more educated on their plan usage details. They should have access to summaries of past usage, to weekly and monthly usage histories. "Perhaps a better avenue is policy that helps consumers do a better job of forecasting their usage," they posit.
Whatever the case, this externality is not common to network operators only. Utility companies, banking overdrafts and health insurance do fall into this category of mismatches which might have to be addressed.
Are you human or a bot?Credit: Phil Whitehouse on Flickr
Mobile phones are ubiquitous. One of the allures of mobile phones is that they are personal. A smartphone can store zillion details about its owner in ways never imagined before. Furthermore, mobile phones have extended their use to virtually every aspect of our lives - from making calls to financial transactions. It is then imperative that we take the security of mobile devices as much as important as desktops and laptops. Protecting mobile devices against malware or malicious software implies preserving our privacy.
A research team at the University of Alabama at Birmingham have devised a malware detection technique that is simple and akin to captcha verification on computers. The technique involves the detection of hand gestures common with three primary smartphone services like calling, tapping and snapping using motion, position and ambient sensors to give the phone protection against attacks by malware.
Captcha was invented to prevent bots from adding urls to search engines. It is a test used in computing to determine whether the user is a human or not. Malware cannot perform common user gestures which is a familiarity on mobile devices or smartphones, such as tapping, dragging the screen etc; this distinction was used as a security advantage for identifying malware from human gestures whenever a phone attempts making calls, or is performing tasks that involve human gestures.
By the way, the user gesture is one of the weak security points of smartphones. They put themselves at risk by downloading apps that are insecure, or they just click “yes” to an ad without extensive verification. The research team is using this weakness to advantage.
In the future we could see secured gesture techniques extended to commercial grade smartphones and also to other areas of smartphone use, such as sending SMS or email.
When a prepared teacher walks into a classroom his aim is to make the students active participants in the learning process. That is what engagement is about. Engagement of students in active learning brings about predictable outcomes – increased achievement in standardized test scores and assessment, reduced dropout rates and enrollment in challenging courses. Student engagement should cut across the three dimensions of learning, hence, affective, behavioral and cognitive, whether at the classroom or school level.
Active student participation is a learning good.Credit: Woodleywonderworks on flickr
How does a school, administrator or teacher measure the frequency of his/her students’ engagement?
According to research from student motivation and psychology, when students participate in class, they could be driven by many factors. One of them is the desire to cooperate in the process and learning, so that the teacher, the oppressor, should not bother them. This is what a teacher wants to avoid. Another is to put the maximal effort without any external compulsive force to show exemplary academic behavior. This latter is a good in a class.
Another reason why an engagement measuring tool is important is that children learn across different developmental stages. The learning predisposition of kindergartens, elementary school, middle high and senior high school students are different. It is known that elementary and kindergarten school pupils are more attuned to affective or emotional learning styles more than high school students.
To fill this knowledge gap in measuring engagement, Ze Wang, associate professor of educational, school and counseling psychology in the College of Education at Missouri University, MU, along with other colleagues produced a classroom engagement inventory (CEI) tool.
The classroom engagement inventory or CEI tool measures student engagement in both the classroom and school level. School level engagement is a prompt for teachers and educators to test why students chose or exempt themselves from out-of-school learning; it measures their interest in schooling at a holistic level. Classroom level engagement would answer questions such as: what can teachers do to make their students participate more in class activities, how can a teacher’s teaching effectiveness be evaluated, how can teachers know and understand how their students perceive them, and understand the relationship between engagement and learning.
The CEI tool has been shown by studies to be consistent and validated. It has been consistent whether the students or pupils have variable characteristics such as ethnicity, income of the family, age, subject and gender. According to Ze Wang, the goal of a tool like CEI is to lead the teacher and students to greater learning.
You can download a copy of the research.
Procrastination, to put off doing something, especially out of habitual carelessness or laziness. Some people allow panic, complicated tasks, fear and nervousness to get over them, and delay doing that important job. Procrastination is not a problem when it happens once, but it becomes so when you repeat it again and again that it becomes a habit. As the cartoon below shows.
Created on Bitstrip.com. See the full image.
This is the time to take control of your life. Step back and ask yourself: "Am I allowing situation and complications to get over me?" "Do I put off doing important things and rush over them just seconds to the deadline?" Many people have lost opportunities of making a significant progress in life because of the weakness of procrastination.
If you see yourself under the spell of procrastination, try to imagine yourself under the spell of taking action, of approval by others who trust in you and are inspired by you. Which image do you desire?
Comments in the comment box below, please!
Credit: Flickr.comCan you draw the Apple logo? When some UCLA undergraduates were asked to test their memory of the ubiquitous Apple Logo, they failed the memory test.
I want you to pass. Take the test.
Hold your breath! Now Click to enter!
If you cannot draw the logo, take a look at it on that mac!
