San Jose State University’s online education pilot held the promise of real course credit without the hassles of attending class in person. It hasn’t worked that way in practice, however, and both SJSU as well as its partner Udacity have suspended their plans for fall courses. Quite simply, there have been too many flunkies so far — while 83 percent of students completed their sessions this spring, no more than 44 percent of any given class earned a passing grade. SJSU and Udacity will use the break to learn what went wrong and retool the program, although it’s not clear just when (or if) internet-based classes will resume. Online education is far from finished when similar for-credit trials have yet to begin; for now, though, SJSU students will have to drag themselves to the lecture hall.
So far, 15 children have died of heatstroke after being left alone in cars, this summer. More than 500 have died since 1998, and 73 percent of those cases were babies under the age of 2.
Red Castle Productions has created a PSA to prevent more tragedies. In the powerful video above, actors reenact what could happen if a child is left in a car for a short time — it can take as little as 15 minutes to suffer life-threatening injuries. The video also shows what to do if you ever notice a child alone in a car.
In March, The Huffington Post began talking to teens and adults throughout the U.S. about their experiences with gun violence. This is one person’s story. You can read others here.
This past spring, HuffPost met with a group of teens and young adults at Washington’s Potomac Gardens housing project on Capitol Hill. In one-on-one interviews, they discussed their own encounters with violence and the culture of guns. The threat was always there — in school, at the basketball court, at the subway stop. Here are two voices from those individual sessions.
Erica, 15, tells the story of seeing a gun for the first time and the impact that crime had on her.
Authorities say that the death of a man who was on the witness list in the trial of mobster James “Whitey” Bulger is suspicious.
The body of Stephen “Stippo” Rakes was found on Wednesday in Lincoln, Mass. The cause of death is yet unknown, and the Middlesex district attorney’s office reported that there were “no obvious signs of trauma.”
An unnamed law enforcement source told New England Cable News that the death is being investigated as suspicious. The cause of death is pending a complete autopsy and toxicology results.
Add this one to your ever-growing book of video game enthusiasts against downloadable additions (DLC) to video games connected to the internet: Trey Parker says no to the whole mess for The Stick of Truth. The South Park-themed game will be released by the end of this year – right in time for the holiday season – but it’ll be cut to a standard size where its creators originally slated it to have so much content it would have taken many, many years to complete.
Speaking up at a Comic Con panel was none other than one of the two originators of the South Park universe, Parker dropping the F-bomb on the idea that they’d take the “extra content” they’d created for the game and release it as DLC. The plan instead, it’s readily understood, is that the content will be filtered into the South Park television series. The television series meanwhile has no end in sight – even if it has to be a web-based series some time in the future.
NOTE: Just in case you’re not up-to-date on the THQ bankruptcy situation – The Stick of Truth was picked up by Ubisoft. For the save!
What you’ve got with The Stick of Truth is a game that Parker reminded the audience this week is heavily inspired by the likes of The Legend of Zelda and recent epic-scale releases like Skyrim. That’s not to say it’ll be released with next-level eye-searing graphics.
On the contrary.
South Park: The Stick of Truth will continue the construction paper cut-out legacy that is the origins of the series. You’ll see some fancy “3D” graphics as appear here and there throughout the television series, but for the most part you’ll be staying quite flat. Make it go!
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama will make stops in Illinois and Missouri next week to draw attention to the economy and to measures he argues will help step up the recovery.
The White House says Obama will travel Wednesday to Galesburg, Ill., and Warrensburg, Mo., to make his case for spending on infrastructure and for universal pre-school programs. Obama is also expected to highlight the economic benefits of overhauling immigration laws.
An F-1 thruster that the Bezos team recovered from the sea floor.
(Credit: Bezos Expeditions)
Saturday marks 44 years to the day since the late Neil Armstrong set the first human foot on the moon. And on the eve of this milestone, Jeff Bezos — a guy who wants to sell you everything on Earth while also preserving our means for escaping its bonds — says his team has finally identified the remains of one of the rockets that took that Apollo 11 team the first leg of the journey toward our satellite.
Crowdsourcing is all the rage these days, so why not apply the concept to shooting a video? That’s exactly what Lexus did when it got together over 200 fans to each shoot frames for a promotional video. What makes the clip unique is that all of the images were captured and posted via Instagram.
The short film, called #LexusInstafilm captured a walk-around of the new 2014 Lexus IS, by instructing each of its Instagrammers to stand (or lie down) in a specific location to capture their still image. 3D mapping technology was used to identify the precise locations where each image needed to be snapped in order to stitch together the final stop-motion video.
Each individual captured their image, applied Instagram filters and posted them with a specific hashtag so they could be filtered and edited into the video sequence later the same day.
Here’s the final video, along with a little behind-the-scenes footage from the shoot:
Sure, it seems like a whole lot of labor to capture just a few seconds of video, but it’s still a creative way to let so many people could contribute to a single video.
As a young Army officer in Vietnam, Jack Jacobs walked into an ambush that killed dozens of his troops in just a few seconds. He responded by single-handedly fighting off repeated Viet Cong attacks. He overcame his own life-threatening injuries to make several trips through enemy fire to evacuate allied wounded.
He saved 14 lives. His country decorated him with the Medal of Honor.
More than 40 years later, Jacobs, a retired colonel, and his fellow Congressional Medal of Honor recipients are bringing their conspicuous gallantry to the cause of education. They are offering students priceless lessons in character, courage and selfless service.
As low-tech as it may be, the pencil has managed to still keep itself relevant—despite the endless graphite-free ways we can communicate these days. That being said, it doesn’t mean it couldn’t use an upgrade, and we love how Tous Les Jours has managed to combine the convenience of a mechanical pencil with the feel of a traditional wooden writing instrument.
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