Education
Students’ book bags will soon be considerably lighter, as e-books replace traditional textbooks within three years, predicts the New Media Consortium, an international nonprofit organization exploring media technologies.
Other advantages of the technology, such as ease of updating and sharing material and enabling multimedia experiences and online access, give learners a powerful drive to push textbook publishers to move more quickly to ebooks.
In addition, augmented reality with computer-generated imagery will be common on university campuses within two to three years, and gesture-based interfaces for computing will arrive within five years, according to the Consortium’s Horizon Report 2011.
Source: New Media Consortium, www.nmc.org.
A government’s coerciveness, its capacity to protect itself, and its citizens’ ability to mobilize against it are the three key factors in determining how vulnerable a country may be to civic violence.
The Domestic Political Violence Forecasting Model, developed by a team of political scientists from Kansas State and Binghamton universities, has already successfully predicted unrest in Tunisia, Peru, Ecuador, Ireland, and Italy.
The model shows that outbreaks of violence are not limited to repressive states, but can also predictably occur in Western democracies. The researchers warn that responding to unrest with crackdowns on human rights tends to fuel insurgency rather than suppress it.
Sources: Kansas State University, www.k-state.edu. A list of the top 37 countries projected to experience civil unrest through 2014 is available at the Domestic Political Violence Forecasting Model, http://radicalism .milcord.com/blog.
Teenagers may seem to spend most of their lives on the Internet, but when they need answers to intimate questions about sexuality and health, they are more likely to seek information from parents and other people they trust.
According to a study by the Guttmacher Institute, high-school students are wary of Internet sources because they know that much of the content is user generated and thus likely to be incorrect. Also, having to sort through a sea of prurient content to find useful information may be another deterrent to many young users.
There are sites offering a great deal of accurate, useful, teen-friendly information about sexuality on the Internet, however. Capitalizing on teens’ trust in their parents and schools could help these sites bridge the information gap, the study’s authors conclude.
Source: Guttmacher Institute, www.guttmacher.org.
If sharks wrote the news, the headlines would be apocalyptic. Sharks can claim only a handful of human fatalities a year (just six deaths from 79 attacks worldwide in 2010), while humans kill between 30 million and 70 million sharks a year in fisheries. Thirty percent of all shark species are now threatened or near threatened with extinction.
As human populations increase and more people enjoy recreation in sharks’ habitats, the number of shark-on-human attacks is likely to continue to increase, says University of Florida ichthyologist George Burgess.
But another consequence of rising human populations is demand for fish. Sharks seeking their next meal are lured into growing numbers of fishing lines, Burgess explains.
Sharks are also directly sought for their fins, used in popular East Asian dishes. Only 13 of the top 20 shark-catching nations have developed protection plans, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts.
Sources: University of Florida, www.ufl.edu. Pew Charitable Trusts, www.pewtrusts.org.
The metrosexuals have grown up, settled down, and gotten serious about their manly duties, which increasingly include shopping for things besides tools at Home Depot. Men want to feel cool when they shop, and they need the experience to be convenient, whether online or in stores.
Hetail—marketing to the mainstream male consumer—involves understanding what appeals to them and curating their experience, writes Euro RSCG Worldwide PR blogger Karina Meckel. One-stop shopping and an atmosphere appealing to a specific aesthetic (academic, sporty, nostalgic, casual, or rock star, for example) are ways to please the masculine shopper.
Source: Euro RSCG Worldwide PR, http://euroscgpr.com.