Author: Loknath Das

1. Social media vs reality In 2017, roughly a third of the 7.6 billion global population were social-media users, and about a quarter had Facebook accounts. This isn’t a dramatic increase from 2016, but still. Social media is big, and it’s changing the world. In a literal sense, augmented reality has altered the way people experience the world. Admittedly, its main manifestation in 2017 was people of all ages searching the streets for Pokémon characters, and the anti-climactic launch of Snapchat’s spectacles. But the AR/VR arms race is undoubtedly on, with Apple and Google investing furiously in this technology. Then…

The US reality star Kim Kardashian is known for the pictures she keeps sharing on the internet. Every post of her somehow gets viral on the social media. The Kardashian family makes headlines every now then, whether it’s the Jenner sisters or their mother, Kris Jenner. Other than the gossips about their show ‘Keeping up with the Kardashians’, fans totally look forward to their Instagram and Twitter posts. Kendall Jenner was recently in the news after she was seen at ‘The Golden Globes’ event in her black flowy gown. And now, the elder sister, Kim Kardashian, has broken the internet…

Also known as the small-cap effect, this refers to a theory which states that shares of companies with smaller market capitalisation usually offer higher returns to investors than large-cap stocks. One of the reasons is that smaller firms generally have greater growth opportunities ahead of them, which in turn leads to a greater appreciation of their stock prices. The small firm effect was famously studied by Nobel laureate Eugene Fama and Kenneth French in their 1992 paper “The Cross-Section of Expected Stock Returns”. Source:-thehindu

The premier of Western Australia, Mark McGowan, has abandoned a plan to close the School of the Air and reversed other education funding cuts after a campaign led by the National party, which said the proposal was unfair to regional areas. McGowan announced the reversal on Thursday, saying: “upon reflection we realise we took it too far when it comes to education services and we now need to get the balance right.” The move reverses the funding cuts to the School of the Air, the gifted and talented program, and Northam College, which provides accommodation to out-of-town students at the wheat-belt town.…

Damian Hinds has been announced as England’s education secretary in the prime minister’s cabinet reshuffle. He will replace Justine Greening, who is leaving the government. Ms Greening, the first comprehensive-educated Tory education secretary, refused a switch to the Department for Work and Pensions, the BBC understands. Mr Hinds, a former DWP minister, went to a Catholic grammar school in Altrincham and then studied at the University of Oxford. School funding The MP for East Hampshire is a former chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Social Mobility. Mr Hinds wrote on Twitter that he was “looking forward to working with…

Ihave a totally unproven theory that Justine Greening took heart from the massed ranks of female rebellion at Sunday’s Golden Globes ceremony and refused to do what she was told when finally summoned to Downing Street on Monday night. Either way, time’s up for Theresa, not Justine, I’d say. Greening’s bold refusal to be moved from her role as secretary of state for education in the prime minister’s damp squib of a reshuffle could well prove to be one of the decisive moments in the eventual toppling of Theresa May. In the short term, however, Greening’s departure is bad news for education and for independent-minded women in Tory…

Learning and innovation go hand in hand. The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow. – William Pollard Which forces and trends will drive the next 20 years of K-12 education innovation? We’re asking this question at NewSchools Venture Fund as we celebrate our 20th anniversary this year. In this spirit, here are three big, important questions for 2018, the answers to which have implications not only for the coming year, but for the next decade and beyond. Is education technology poised for a new wave of innovation? Several years ago, I often…

Suppose you have two loans. The first is a student loan of $40,000 with an interest rate of 6 percent, and the second is a credit-card balance of $12,000 with an interest rate of 11 percent. You find that at the end of each month, you have about $1,000 left over, and you want to use it to pay down the principal on your debts. That’s sensible. So how much do you put toward each loan? The rational thing to do would be to pay off the 11 percent loan before even starting to repay the 6 percent loan. This…

When Iranian authorities cracked down on the internet this month in an attempt to suppress unrest, tech entrepreneur Milad Nouri did what he has grown accustomed to doing: He found a way around the censors. Like other Iranians dependent on the web, Nouri was at first set back when the Supreme National Security Council restricted access to social media applications and servers commonly used to bypass Iran’s cloistered internet. “We weren’t able to communicate to our users and we lost payments,” Nouri said. PAID POST WHAT IS THIS? Dr. Gundry reveals the No. 1 toxic vegetable you should never eat. Watch…

Millions of Americans use social media daily. But that doesn’t mean they love it. Or so they say. Some of the most-used social media products in the world — Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram — are also some of the ones that Americans have strong negative feelings about, according to a recent Harris Poll that surveyed more than 2,000 U.S. adults online last month. Case in point: Twitter. The service has 330 million monthly active users around the world, as of last September, and the U.S. president uses it to threaten nuclear war and blast the news media. Most people — 89…