CategorySociety

This Tiny Country Feeds the World

African drought? “Water isn’t the fundamental problem. It’s poor soil,” he says. “The absence of nutrients can be offset by cultivating plants that act in symbiosis with certain bacteria to produce their own fertilizer.” The soaring cost of grain to feed animals? “Feed them grasshoppers instead,” he says. One hectare of land yields one metric ton of soy protein, a common livestock feed, a year. The same amount of land can produce 150 tons of insect protein.

From This Tiny Country Feeds the World, National Geographic.

 

Are you a student? Your personal data is there for the asking

According to FERPA, directory information, “would not generally be considered harmful or an invasion of privacy if disclosed”. But Figueroa said colleges can pretty much decide what to include, which could mean a student photo, student ID and parents’ names, address, and where they were born, in addition to the list above.

Source: Are you a student? Your personal data is there for the asking – Naked Security

Britain Turns to Chinese Textbooks to Improve Its Math Scores

The teaching method, known as the “mastery” approach, is based on the idea that all students can succeed in learning mathematics when given proper instruction. Whereas teachers in the West might describe a concept and then assign problems for students to solve individually, the mastery method is more interactive. Teachers frequently pose questions to students who are then expected to precisely explain both solutions and underlying principles in front of their classmates.

Source: Britain Turns to Chinese Textbooks to Improve Its Math Scores – The New York Times

While textbooks were translated directly from Chinese, an elementary task involved pairing images …

But at least one pair had to be changed, he said. The bird and cage in the original became a bird and a tree in the English edition — a not-so-subtle metaphor, perhaps, for the different approaches to teaching.