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Matt Parker is a highly enthusiastic Mathematician whose life goal is to make people more excited about Maths. Using a range of presentations and hands-on activities, he communicates Maths in a very engaging and entertaining way. Matt talks about Mathematics for organisations including the Royal Institution and the BBC and he was the People's Choice Award in the 2009 national Famelab competition. His favourite number is currently 496.

Matt will visit any school in the UK to deliver a day of engaging presentations and dynamic workshops.

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This is one of the most cheering stories I have heard for a long, long time.

Charlie, who is now 7, has decided that he needs to raise some money to help those affected by the disaster. In order to do this he has decided to do a Sponsored Bicycle ride around our local park – South Park in Fulham. He is aiming to complete 7 laps (about 5 miles) of South Park this weekend and is hoping that you will sponsor him so that he can raise money for UNICEF to help with their HAITI disaster appeal.

TERRIFIC

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"Ten-year-old boys completed significantly more work when they worked in groups than when they worked in pairs with another child."

"Boys identify themselves as members of the group, not as an individual in a group."

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Design thinking goes like this: firstly, immersion, whereby the designers research the problem by plunging themselves into it – talking to the people they're trying to help, working with them, interviewing experts. Secondly, synthesis – whereby they gather together their findings and look for patterns. Third, ideation – brainstorming solutions to the real problems identified by stage two. Then comes prototyping, making mock-ups of solutions to try out against the problem. After that comes the product. Only at the end, at the prototyping stage, are judgments made; until then, all ideas are given equal weight.

… design thinking places the designer at the heart of the innovation process… the methodology gives a firm framework within which a wider team can work. It takes the cliché of the lone creative mind being struck with genius, and replaces it with a process that a whole team can follow. Creativity, therefore, isn't a thing that magically appears, but a process you work through.

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But what Mr. Lanier is missing is the sheer fun of a lot of social-media interaction and the way it has brought non-geeks into the computer world. As I look at the social Web that he finds sterile and overly corporatized, I see Tea Party activists, "caveman diet" enthusiasts and model-rocketry devotees—among countless others—coming together and finding ways to collaborate, organize and socialize as never before. I see individuals and small groups acquiring creative power and the sort of organizational reach that only large companies or governments once had. Ordinary Americans are experiencing the same kind of buzz and excitement that used to be known only to the "digerati" elite in the halcyon days of the early 1990s.

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Youthful fascination with collectivism is in part simply a way to address perceived "unfairness." If everyone shares, then a young person arriving on the scene fresh will not have less than an older person who has been around for a while.

This is all harmless enough, but the pattern can be manipulated in dangerous ways. I don't want our young people aggregated, even by a benevolent social-networking site. I want them to develop as fierce individuals, and to earn their living doing exactly that. When they work together, I hope they'll do so in competitive, genuinely distinct teams so that they can get honest feedback and create big-time innovations that earn royalties, instead of spending all their time on crowd-pleasing gambits to seek kudos. This is not just so that they and their children will thrive, but so that they won't become a mob, which, as history has shown us again and again, is a vulnerability of human nature.

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CyberMentors is all about young people helping and supporting each other online.

If you're being bullied, or are feeling a bit low, or are maybe troubled by something and you're not sure what to do or who to talk to, then CyberMentors is where you can go for help. It doesn't matter how big or small you think the problem is, or whether you're being targeted online or offline, CyberMentors are here to listen and support you.

The best thing about it is that CyberMentors are young people too. It's never easy talking about bullying, and many young people have told us that they would prefer to speak to another young person if they could. That's why CyberMentors are young people like you, who have been trained and are volunteering their time online to help you. It's still important however, that you talk to your parents or teachers if you can.

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In order to build a telegraph, a 12-volt battery, light bulb socket, wire cutters and more are needed. Get the right materials to build a telegraph with tips from a science teacher in this free video on building a telegraph.

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Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible; it may vary over time; it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over the members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities, personalities, or intentions of the people involved. The very fact that we are individuals, with different talents, predispositions, and backgrounds makes this inevitable…

…
Structurelessness becomes a way of masking power, and … is usually most strongly advocated by those who are the most powerful … As long as the structure of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few and awareness of power is limited to those who know the rules.

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Soon, no human will know the answer. More and more decisions are made by the emergent interaction of multiple communicating systems, and these component systems themselves are constantly adapting, changing the way they work. This is the real impact of the Internet: by allowing adaptive complex systems to interoperate, the Internet has changed the way we make decisions. More and more, it is not individual humans who decide, but an entangled, adaptive network of humans and machines.

…

We are co-dependent, and not entirely in control.

We have embodied our rationality within our machines and delegated to them many of our choices, and in this process we have created a world that is beyond our own understanding. … We have linked our destinies, not only among ourselves across the globe, but with our technology. If the theme of the Enlightenment was independence, our own theme is interdependence. We are now all connect

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I feel sorry for my old friend and colleague, but I can only conclude that she is, in both her successes and her failures, the architect of her own fate. In her determination to get to the top, she may be an example of a woman having to fight even harder than a man to achieve such goals. So she has proved not only that you can be both a woman in chic suits and a scientist, but also that a female scientist can be just as competitive and ambitious as any man.

But what bothers me, and other scientists, is that she does not seem much to value science itself. The absolute heart of what it means to care about science is that you care about the evidence – that your opinions are based not on what you would like to be true but on what is found by research to be true.

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The DKP system is an entirely self-enforcing mechanism; yet its effectiveness among gamers who adopt it runs at close to 100%. This is because it works; because it is transparent and meticulously fair; and because it has been laboriously calibrated over time to prevent collusive bidding or other kinds of cheating.

Neither playing Warcraft nor building a virtual polling booth in Second Life is likely to win many votes for a British political party in 2010, of course. And spending 24 hours a day in either environment is unlikely to do much for anyone's conversational abilities. But it's high time we began to understand games on their own terms, with all the potentials and dangers that entails: as arguably the most powerful models we have for connecting and motivating, and understanding those vast, disparate groups of people a digital age throws together.

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We [google] have taken the unusual step of sharing information about these attacks with a broad audience not just because of the security and human rights implications of what we have unearthed, but also because this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech.
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These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

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nlike many other mind-mapping tools, VUE can go a step beyond the mind map, turning your brainstorms into slide presentations so you can share them with others. They're laid out so viewers can walk through the information contained in your map in a way that helps them understand how the concepts are laid out. VUE has tons of features that are likely to appeal to novice and expert mind-mappers alike

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Today the stage is Afghanistan — a near-failed state controlled by a weak central government, essentially devoid of basic infrastructure. The lessons of Liberia may help. Both countries are relatively underdeveloped and have a war-ravaged modern history. What's more, Afghans and Liberians both lack a sense of national identity as such and often identify first by ethnic group and second as Afghan or Liberian. These factors are challenges for creating a national army in a place where the majority of the population is illiterate, tribal or local loyalties trump patriotic allegiance, and ethnic blood feuds are ancient and deep.

Here, then, is an account of some of the decisions and obstacles we wrestled with in Liberia — an experience that taught me the challenges of creating soldiers and policemen whom children run toward for protection, rather than away from in fear.

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