Sign reads:

I am a 21 year-old student from Finland.
It makes me sad to hear how Americans are suffering.
Here, our taxes are high but we all benefit from them.
I grew up in the countryside and always had access to the same services that people in the city did.
My university is known around the world in my field and my education is not only free, but my government pays ME to go to university. Everyone has a right to this.
Everyone has a right to the best healthcare, there is no such thing as health insurance.
I am young now and able to take risks and pursue my passion because I will never have to worry about starving if I loose my job or my business fails.
I know that when I am old my state pension will be there for me so that I can enjoy my retirement.
We call this the Nordic Model, and under it we live well and our businesses are among the most competitive in the world. I am grateful to have been born a citizen of a country that cares for its people, and I hope that one day the USA will take example from us.
I am the 99%.

This says it all.

We are all connected, by our actions and by our love.


Chris Vlahos's Photos
Recent headline of the San Francisco Chronicle. Female humpback whale who had become entangled in a spiderweb of crab traps and line weighted down by hundreds of pounds of traps that caused her to struggle to stay afloat. She also had hundreds of yards of line rope wrapped around her body, tail, torso and a line tugging in her mouth.

A fisherman spotted her just east of the Farallon Islands and radioed an environmental group for help. Within a few hours, the rescue team arrived and determined that she was so bad off, the only way to save her was to dive in and untangle her. They worked for hours and eventually freed her.

When she was free, the divers say she swam in what seemed like joyous circles. She then came back to each and every diver, one at a time, and nudged them, pushed them gently around as she was thanking them.

Some said it was the most incredibly beautiful experience of their lives. The guy who cut the rope out of her mouth said her eyes were following him the whole time, and he will never be the same.

May you, and all those you love, be so blessed and fortunate to be surrounded by people who will help you get untangled from the things that are binding you. And, may you always know the joy of giving and receiving gratitude.
By: Chris Vlahos

This is NOT an optional read.  It is the most important thing you will read today, tomorrow, or in the next year.  We must address this problem.  We owe it to the author, her son, 27 shattered families in CT and ourselves.

via Supporting Gifted Learners

Amazing!

Stunningly awesome!

G-R-I-T and plenty of it! Way to go, Annie! And Nicholas Maxim too.

Source: http://ilovecharts.tumblr.com/post/18799187345/speaking-of-uninterested-gheorghe-muresan-cannot#notes

More on Finnish Education

An wealth of riches to explore.

Via Occupy San Francisco

via +Andrea Kuszewski

'Nuf said!

This bit of brain ecstasy brought to you by +Andrea Kuszewski.

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Awesomely amazing!

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Mapping a Living Brain, Neuron by Neuron

It looks like an oddly shaped campfire, but it is activity of individual neurons across a larval fish brain. It is the first time that researchers have been able to image an entire vertebrate brain at the level of single cells.

Brain function relies on communication between large populations of neurons across multiple brain areas, a full understanding of which would require knowledge of the time-varying activity of all neurons in the central nervous system. Here we use light-sheet microscopy to record activity, reported through the genetically encoded calcium indicator GCaMP5G, from the entire volume of the brain of the larval zebrafish in vivo at 0.8 Hz, capturing more than 80% of all neurons at single-cell resolution. Demonstrating how this technique can be used to reveal functionally defined circuits across the brain, we identify two populations of neurons with correlated activity patterns. One circuit consists of hindbrain neurons functionally coupled to spinal cord neuropil. The other consists of an anatomically symmetric population in the anterior hindbrain, with activity in the left and right halves oscillating in antiphase, on a timescale of 20 s, and coupled to equally slow oscillations in the inferior olive.

NATURE Methods | Article:
http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nmeth.2434.html

Video Nature: nmeth.2434_video_s4

Brain Activity Map Project: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_Activity_Map_Project

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This pretty much says it all.

Misguided as well as mean-spirited. How about addressing root causes like poverty, poor job prospects and an educational system that doesn't begin to meet their needs or the needs of society?

Learning from our mistakes may contribute more to mastery than how much we practice.

The ever inspiring +Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman on inspiration. : )

Congratulations Occupy Wall Street. You've sparked a global movement for economic justice. Keep it up. Let's create a world we'd ALL like to live in.

via The Christian Left & +Tammy Aburto-Pratt

For anyone who wonders what's fueling the Occupy movement:

Watch this!!  It'll restore your faith in the beauty and creativity of humanity.

Update on a classic.

Yes indeed!

"Is this home schooling or regular school? Who cares? He's learning. More important, his curriculum hits the basics but also works for him. Nobody expects all young people to download the same 20 or 30 songs on iTunes. Why should they be limited to the same dozen or so classes for school? And if you think that public education will never change because it's too big, I'd point out that the music business looked like an invincible Goliath before digital technology raised its slingshot."

<3 this!

h/t Supporting Gifted Learners

Long but well worth the time.

Can physicists produce insights about language that have eluded linguists and English professors?

Love this! Grad school alt-ed style.

+Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman's latest on creativity and flow. Enjoy!

h/t +David Dobbs 

Love this!!

I wish every teacher understood this basic fact which is true for adults as well as children!

"[A]llowing the children to make their own interesting and surprising connections meant they enjoyed their experiences much more, without losing anything from the learning aspect of it."

No maybe about it!

I think this will interest you, +Scott Barry Kaufman. 

Good move, CA!

slinky physics fun! :D

Words to live by:

(Source unkown. Shared by a friend on FB.)

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Triumph.