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UT Austin Ranks No. 50 in World University Rankings

The University of Texas at Austin ranked No. 50 in the most recent Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2016-2017 .

UT Austin ranks No. 25 among U.S. universities and No. 10 among U.S. public universities. Two other Texas universities were ranked in the top 200. 

The London-based Times Higher Education examines 13 factors in five separate areas to determine excellence teaching, research, influence of research, innovation and international outlook.

UT Austin’s highest marks were in its influence of research, as measured by the number of times faculty members’ studies are cited by peers; overall research, which includes funding, number of articles published and quality; and teaching, which is based largely on the university’s reputation among scholars.

Times Higher Education is the latest in a series of rankings this year recognizing excellence at the flagship university. UT Austin lands at No. 30 in U.S. News and World Report’s ranking of the best global universities, while the Nature Index ranks the university as No. 25 in the world among academic institutions for research productivity. 

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Forbes: UT Austin No. 17 on Best Value Colleges List

Pursuit of a degree is an investment in the future, and Longhorns can expect a strong ROI.

Forbes recently ranked UT Austin No. 17 in the nation and No. 10 among public universities on its 2016 list of Best Value Colleges. 

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A new type of colossal galaxy, a 9-month-old baby’s life is saved by a 3D printed heart replica, and scientists made a new synthetic life form!

Get This Week in Science in Under 2 Minutes!

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Longhorns Show Prowess in March Madness of Academics

March Madness is here, and both the Texas Men’s and Women’s Basketball teams are competing for national titles in the NCAA Tournament.

But what if the Longhorns’ fates were based on how they perform in the classroom instead of how they play on the hardwood court? According to Inside Higher Ed, UT Austin would still be a sure bet.

Read more: http://utex.as/1pRmDrR

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Paging Noah Wyle.

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Mapping The Universe

Karl Gebhardt is an expert in trying to measure the currently un-measureable. A professor of astrophysics in the Department of Astronomy, he has spent most of his career focused on understanding the role that black holes play in the formation of a galaxy. 

Now he is helping to lead a new scientific revolution: the quest to understand dark energy, a mysterious force that makes up 70 percent of the matter and energy in the universe.

Continue reading: http://utex.as/1RHzq6n

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Shadow a Student Challenge helps administrators understand kids

The national, weeklong challenge was created through a partnership between the “School Retool” professional development program, Stanford University’s d.school, IDEO design and innovation consultants and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. According to the Shadow a Student website, 1,440 educators in 26 countries pledged to shadow students, jot down their observations and then debrief with their staffs to discuss “hacktivities” – or short-term solutions – to challenges faced by their students. In California, 277 educators signed up to participate.

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We can give students the gift of knowing how their own brains work. There are many teen-friendly resources for learning about the working of the adolescent brain, and learning about this opens the door for teens to better understand their own responses and impulses.

The path to healthy social skills is working through the drama, not avoiding it. We know that practicing a skill strengthens our brain’s neural pathways associated with that skill, making it more readily accessible in the future. When we support our students to practice, mess up, reflect, and try again, we guide their brains through healthy development.

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Virginia is adding computer science to every K-12 school

Guest post by Chris Dovi, co-founder of CodeVA

When we launched CodeVA in 2013, my wife, Rebecca Dovi, and I had in mind the simple goal of making sure that Virginia students didn’t fall behind.

Last week, Virginia took a giant leap forward toward becoming a national leader in computer science. CodeVA helped convince state legislators to pass a law making computer science a topic that will be taught in all schools, and to all Virginia students from kindergarten through 12th grade.

The new bill adds “computer science and computational thinking, including computer coding” to Virginia’s Standards of Learning.

Over the next few years, computer science standards will be reviewed and adopted that integrate concepts, and expose students to real-world uses of computer science. Virginia has long provided basic access to computer classes to all high school students through a statewide virtual learning school, but now coding courses also will be added to what students can take.

The road to Virginia’s victory started very differently

 In January, lawmakers introduced legislation to allow computer science to count for foreign language credits. We knew there were problems.

Had any of the bills become law, they might have further confused schools on just what constitutes computer science. CodeVA had already found that many classes considered to be computer science by the state were instead productivity software classes. Luckily, all of the lawmakers who proposed foreign language bills were well intentioned, and determined to do right by Virginia kids. But none were aware that state universities wouldn’t accept high school diplomas that substituted computer programming languages for French or Chinese. And what would people think about students missing out on foreign languages?

We made it our mission to educate them. With the help of Microsoft, all five bills were soon set aside in favor of a single substitute bill carried by Del. Tag Greason. Not a bad bit of teamwork.

The bill passed both the Virginia House of Delegates and the Senate on unanimous votes, with the nod of the Virginia Department of Education, and blessings from stakeholders like the Virginia Educators Association, superintendents, and the school board association.

When this change is officially signed into law in July, Virginia will be the first state to require computer science to be integrated at all K-12 levels. After that, the Virginia Department of Education will get to work developing standards for each grade level.

All of this means lots more hard, but rewarding, work ahead for us, with help from our partner Code.org.

It’s time to train a whole lot of teachers!  

CodeVA, an independent nonprofit, was Code.org’s first national affiliate partner. Since 2014, CodeVA has trained teachers in 33 Virginia school districts, impacting tens of thousands of Virginia students.

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This startup is manufacturing 3D printers out of a garage in Nairobi, Kenya

Roy Ombati is no ordinary engineer. Last year, when he was 26, he co-founded African Born 3D Printing (AB3D) with his classmate, Karl Heinz, from Cameroon. When you meet these young men and a young lady co-worker, Wendy Banja, you see in their eyes and demeanour the passionate entrepreneurs that they are.

[…]

They decided to take part in a project that was supported by a Dutch non-governmental organisation, Hivos, dubbed “Happy Feet”, which was supposed to print customised shoes for people with feet deformed by jiggers.After printing a number of shoes, they wanted to scale up and take the printers nearer to the people who needed the service most.

Due to the high capital cost of purchasing several 3D printers at Sh500,000 for each location, they abandoned their dream and decided to make their own printers in the hope that they would one day be able to make larger printers and distribute them throughout the country.

Since then, they have manufactured more than 40 printers, sourcing all materials locally. They sell each printer for Sh35,000, way cheaper than similar imported ones, which cost more than Sh200,000. They supplement their sales through printing car parts, plastic prototypes and other plastic gadgets. They also manufacture the raw material used to print a product.

The raw material is made from waste plastics, so AB3D closely works with garbage collectors to harvest the plastics and shred them into pellets, which are then converted into a strand that feeds into the printer to create a product. They also collect e-waste and use most of it to build printers.

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Spring Forward: Who Resets the Tower Clock?

Across the Forty Acres, Longhorns stay on schedule with the help of the magnificent clock atop the UT Tower. 

And twice each year when the time changes with the start and end of Daylight Saving Time, the Tower’s clock springs forward and falls back to help keep everyone on time. 

So when you “spring forward” this Sunday, how does the Tower’s clock get reset? 

Six dedicated Facilities Services employees maintain the more than 3,000 clocks across campus. Each of these clocks is connected to one of two systems: synchronous or impulse. While more recently constructed buildings use the synchronous system, the Tower and other more historic buildings on campus use the impulse system, which is controlled by a single master clock. 

Manufactured in 1931, the master clock controlling the impulse system is housed in the Main building in the Clock Shop. While the motor mechanism controlling the Tower’s clock is about 8 feet tall and 4 feet wide, the master clock is only about a foot tall and looks like an antique wall clock. 

To “fall back” to regular time, one of the employees assigned to clocks adjusts the master clock, causing the impulse clocks to also “fall back.” But when it’s time to “spring forward,” the impulse-system clocks have to be manually reset. 

In the impulse system, the master clock sends electrical impulses to the clocks, causing the clock mechanisms to move and show the correct time. For the Tower’s clock, a set of weights on chains provides stored energy that operates the clock.

When an impulse from the system reaches the clock mechanism, a weight that’s connected to a gear drops a fraction of an inch, moving the clock hands. When the weights reach the floor, an electric motor pulls them to the top of the chain to start the process again. 

Trimmed in gold leaf and 12 feet in diameter, the clock’s four faces were installed in 1936, with hands so shiny people at first had difficulty seeing the time. 

The 307-foot Tower was completed in 1937 and is UT Austin’s most distinguishing landmark. It’s considered a symbol of academic excellence and personal opportunity. 

Learn more about the #UTTower’s history, and sign up to get email alerts when we light the Tower.

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Where are the most marginalized girls on International Women’s Day? Not in school

Despite all the efforts and progress made over the past 20 years, girls around the world are twice as likely as boys to remain completely excluded from education. And the situation is even worse when we look past the global averages to three regions: sub-Saharan Africa, South and West Asia and the Arab States.

In sub-Saharan Africa, more than 30 million children between the ages of 6 and 11 are out of school. Some of these children will start at a later age but many more will remain entirely excluded, with girls facing the biggest barriers. Within this marginalized group, 9.5 million girls will never set foot in a classroom compared to 5 million boys, according to UIS projections.

The gender gap is even wider in South and West Asia, where 80% of girls out of school will never start compared to 16% of out-of-school boys. About 4 million girls across the region will remain excluded from education compared to almost 1 million boys.

In the Arab States, girls form the majority of the millions of children excluded from school, although precise estimates are impossible to produce with the conflict raging in Syria.

(via Where are the most marginalized girls on International Women’s Day? Not in school | Global Partnership for Education)

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Children who learn the thinking and problem-solving skills from philosophy make greater gains in math and language arts.