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…
Author: Loknath Das
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…
Amid the cascade of revelations from Michael Wolff’s incendiary book about the Trump administration, one Twitter user posted a screenshot Thursday night of what looked like an especially stunning excerpt. It described how the president, on his first night in office, had complained that White House televisions did not carry “the gorilla channel” and that Trump spent hours a day watching gorilla programming his staff subsequently produced to satisfy his simian appetite. The excerpt, of course, was satire. But that was not clear to the countless people who spread it like wildfire across the internet, where the gag commingled with actual…
The island is blackened; a red ribbon tangled among a single tree’s branches. A blocky person stands on a rock contemplating death; the red ribbon draped around its neck. Candles line the perimeter of the rotating platform, though none are lit. After a bit of time, a terrifying dark settles in. It’s a polygonal vignette that seeps of disturbing imagery, though it’s not without reason. Kurt Young and Nikola Kostic, of Mokuni Games and KBros Games, respectively, created Jukai: Ocean of Trees in 2016. You can see the game in action above and download it here. (Chih-Tang Chang, also of Mokuni Games, did…
Government has appointed Arif Ahmed Khan as secretary of Ministry of Finance, Geo News reported Saturday. Khan was presently serving as secretary of Economic Affairs Division and has also served as secretary interior. The post had fallen vacant after the previous secretary, Shahid Mehmood, retired. However, reports emerged that Mehmood will be appointed as an adviser to the finance minister. This is not the only change the ministry has undergone in the last three months or so. On December 26, last year, Member National Assembly Rana Muhammad Afzal took oath as Minister of State of Finance, in a ceremony held…
SACP General Secretary Blade Nzimande has slammed President Jacob Zuma’s announcement of free tertiary education during his address at the Joe Slovo commemoration held at the Avalon Cemetery in Soweto on Saturday morning. Nzimande, the former Minister of higher education who was in the spotlight during #FeesMustFall protests, said while the move was welcomed, there was no indication where the money would be coming from. “It is very important the announcement made by Zuma must be clarified as a matter of urgency. If we don’t handle this correctly, a train is coming,” he said. “Can we afford free Higher Education,…