It’s the same kind of process tech behemoths like Amazon and Google employ to predict the buying behavior of consumers. And many of the universities and colleges that are applying it have seen impressive declines in the number of students who drop out, and increases in the proportion who graduate. The early returns are promising enough that it has caught the attention of the Obama Administration, which pushed for schools to make heavier use of data to improve graduation rates at a White House higher education summit last week.

The report, by the National Council on Teacher Quality, a nonprofit group that advocates tougher teacher standards, finds that while teachers in places like Atlanta, Pittsburgh and Columbus, Ohio, can reach a high salary benchmark relatively early in their careers, teachers in New York City, San Francisco and Fairfax County, Va., must work more than three decades to hit comparable salary levels, when adjusted for the cost of living in the cities.

TT - Hôm qua, Tổ chức Minh bạch quốc tế (TI) đã công bố bảng xếp hạng “Chỉ số nhận thức tham nhũng năm 2014” của 175 quốc gia và lãnh thổ tham gia khảo sát.
Xếp đầu bảng là Đan Mạch (92/100 điểm). Trong nhóm 10 quốc gia và lãnh thổ xếp hạng cao nhất còn có New Zealand, Phần Lan, Thụy Điển, Singapore. Các nước “đội sổ” có Afghanistan, Sudan, CHDCND Triều Tiên.
Việt Nam xếp thứ 119 với số điểm đánh giá về nhận thức tham nhũng vẫn không đổi trong ba năm là 31.

In May, the journal Science published a study, led by a young University of Virginia psychologist, Thomas Talhelm, that ascribed these different orientations to the social worlds created by wheat farming and rice farming. Rice is a finicky crop. Because rice paddies need standing water, they require complex irrigation systems that have to be built and drained each year. One farmer’s water use affects his neighbor’s yield. A community of rice farmers needs to work together in tightly integrated ways.
Not wheat farmers. Wheat needs only rainfall, not irrigation. To plant and harvest it takes half as much work as rice does, and substantially less coordination and cooperation. And historically, Europeans have been wheat farmers and Asians have grown rice.

Thực tế cho thấy những nơi không nuôi dưỡng được nhân tài sẽ thua cuộc hoàn toàn. Bởi lẽ ngày nay, sự dịch chuyển xuyên biên giới của trí tuệ và của giới hàn lâm là không gì cản được.
Giáo dục ĐH đang mở rộng quy mô tăng trưởng trên phạm vi toàn thế giới với một tốc độ chưa từng có nhưng ấn tượng nhất là ở châu Á. Từ năm 1998 đến nay, số sinh viên ở Trung Quốc đã tăng từ 6 triệu lên đến 29 triệu - là hệ thống lớn nhất thế giới. Ấn Độ có 11 triệu sinh viên, lớn thứ ba trên thế giới. Ở Việt Nam, mức tăng cũng không kém ấn tượng: từ 160.000 sinh viên năm 1993 tăng đến 2.177.299 năm 2013, tức 14 lần trong vòng 20 năm.

The year’s notable fiction, poetry and nonfiction, selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review.

The best in picture books, middle grade and young adult fiction and nonfiction, selected by the children’s book editor of The New York Times Book Review.

The year’s best books, selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review.

For me, the great discovery of 2014 was the work of Elizabeth Harrower, an eighty-six-year-old Australian novelist who lives quietly in Sydney, and who has not published a novel since the nineteen-sixties. Her Australian publishers, Text, have been magnificently persistent in their advocacy of her work—chiefly, persuading Harrower to allow them to publish her fifth and last novel, “In Certain Circles”(Text), which she abruptly withdrew on the eve of its publication in 1971. “In Certain Circles,” which appeared this year in the U.S., is a polished, funny, bleak novel about the subject that has continuously obsessed Harrower: the relations between men and women, specifically the dynamics of power at play in those relations in an era of sanctioned sexism.

Pawel Pawlikowski’s “Ida” is by far the best movie of the year. Ida (Agata Trzebuchowska), the young novice ordered by her Mother Superior to investigate her past before taking orders, has a mysteriously blank oval face and wide-open eyes upon which the joys and miseries of the world play. Ida, as it turns out, is Jewish. Her aunt and real-world tutor, Wanda Gruz (Agata Kulesza), now a minor state judge, formerly a big-shot in the Communist regime, has been twice betrayed—by the slaughter of the Polish Jews, abetted by many Poles, and by the devolution of post-war Communist idealism into Stalinist fraud and oppression. The film portrays the meeting of innocence and knowledge, of course, but so much more as well, and displays one of the most expressive uses of black-and-white cinematography in the history of the medium.