A selection of three essential articles read aloud from the latest issue of The Economist. This week, the dream and danger of decentralised finance, how America is substantially reducing child poverty (10:02) and a defence of, like, “like” (18:57)
Tag Archives: United States
Remembering 9/11: How It Unfolded 20 Years Ago
Infographic: Final Tokyo Olympics Medal Count
Education: How Common Core Failed In U.S. Schools
First implemented in 2009, Common Core was an ambitious initiative to revolutionize the American education system. National leaders from Bill Gates to President Obama supported the idea and it cost an estimated $15.8 billion to implement. Years later, research showed the new curriculum had minimal impact on student performance. So why did Common Core fail? Can a common curriculum be successful for all students? Watch the video to find out.
Seabirds: Scientists Save Black-Footed Albatross From Rising Sea Levels
Most black-footed albatross nest on sandy beaches in Hawaii—but rising sea levels threaten their eggs and chicks. Researchers in Mexico and the United States came up with a way to save these birds: having young albatross hatch and imprint on an island 6000 kilometers away with higher ground. Watch to see the journey of these black-footed albatross. Read the story: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/…
Science: Rise Of ‘Exascale Supercomputers’ (Video)
The next generation of computing is on the horizon, and several new machines may just smash all the records…with two nations neck and neck in a race to get there first.
The ENIAC was capable of about 400 FLOPS. FLOPS stands for floating-point operations per second, which basically tells us how many calculations the computer can do per second. This makes measuring FLOPS a way of calculating computing power. So, the ENIAC was sitting at 400 FLOPS in 1945, and in the ten years it was operational, it may have performed more calculations than all of humanity had up until that point in time—that was the kind of leap digital computing gave us. From that 400 FLOPS we upgraded to 10,000 FLOPS, and then a million, a billion, a trillion, a quadrillion FLOPS. That’s petascale computing, and that’s the level of today’s most powerful supercomputers. But what’s coming next is exascale computing. That’s zeroes. 1 quintillion operations per second. Exascale computers will be a thousand times better performing than the petascale machines we have now. Or, to put it another way, if you wanted to do the same number of calculations that an exascale computer can do in ONE second…you’d be doing math for over 31 billion years.
Views: ‘Aerial America – Peak Americana’ (Video)
Eager for an escape? Here’s one you can take without leaving your couch! These Peak Americana clips are a taste of what’s to come when Aerial America starts streaming on #ParamountPlus on March 4th.
Travel: ‘Top 25 Places To Visit In The USA’ (Video)
The USA is home to some of the world’s most beautiful places! From the Hawaiian Islands to the historic East Coast, the United States offers so many destinations to visit.
Tropical Travel: ‘The Hawaiian Islands’ (Video)
The Hawaiian Islands are an archipelago of eight major islands, several atolls, numerous smaller islets, and seamounts in the North Pacific Ocean, extending some 1,500 miles from the island of Hawaiʻi in the south to northernmost Kure Atoll.
Video timeline: The five largest and most scenic Hawaii islands: Kauai (0:00), Maui (4:21), Big Island (8:50), Molokai (13:18) and Oahu (15:55).
Aerial Travel: ‘Hawaii – The Island State’ (4K Video)
Hawaii is a U.S. state located in the Pacific Ocean. It is the only state outside North America, the only island state, and the only state in the tropics. Hawaii is also one of a handful of U.S. states to have once been an independent nation.