Scientists Secretly Discuss Synthesizing The Human Genome
New York Times
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5/13/16
"Organizers said the project could have a big scientific payoff and would be a follow-up to the original Human Genome Project, which was aimed at reading the sequence of the three billion chemical letters in the DNA blueprint of human life. The new project, by contrast, would involve not reading, but rather writing the human genome — synthesizing all three billion units from chemicals. But such an attempt would raise numerous ethical issues. Could scientists create humans with certain kinds of traits, perhaps people born and bred to be soldiers? Or might it be possible to make copies of specific people?”
Brooks: More Important Than Grit Is Intrinsic Motivation
New York Times
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5/10/16
"I don’t know about you, but I’m really bad at being self-disciplined about things I don’t care about. For me, and I suspect for many, hard work and resilience can only happen when there is a strong desire. Grit is thus downstream from longing. People need a powerful why if they are going to be able to endure any how.”
What Is Adaptive Learning? EdSurge Goes Deep On The Question
EdSurge
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5/10/16
"“Adaptive learning” is a popular edtech buzzword, used by curriculum and learning management systems alike. Enthusiasts promise this technology has the ability to make educational experiences more personal, efficient and scalable. Yet, there’s a big problem. There’s very little clarity around what this technology does, doesn’t do and how it actually works.”
Explore: Interactive Map Of Recent Education Research
Digital Promise
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5/10/16
"The map was built using data from nearly 100,000 articles published between 2005-2014, found in 183 academic journals from the Web of Science database. We analyzed the bibliographic record (title, keywords, author, cited references, and abstract) for each article and created a bibliographic coupling network, to link articles sharing at least two common references.”