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Showing posts from 2016

Going away with money and making a currency that counts to unity always.

Going to the beginning of the problem and taking a different way to solve it, instead of money and currency. https://goldsilver.com/hidden-secrets/episode-1/ Note: Money Vs Currency The difference is not money (gold and silver) has value, and currency doesn't have. Actually, they both don't have any value, as it doesn't serve our need. The real difference is we can't create money with time and effort. To take the decision now, we need to understand the past and break the reproducible patterns that don't work in the past, to have a better future. Need Require (something) because it is essential or very important rather than just desirable Need is something that is required for us to thrive. Our actual needs are the concrete object like food, clothing, mobiles, computers, services like education, electricity, water, air and endless list. Some of it like air and water, which doesn't require any exchange (we do sell purified water), as they are sufficie

Future of Money: Removing the negative impacts of money

Just got an idea, we have two types of money, one required for short time for doing an exchange and other for storage. Name it: Exchange bitcoin and Storage bitcoin A centralized server (bitcoin bank) to generate bitcoin money who will keep track of money. Exchange bitcoins will come with an expiry date of one/two month. After bitcoins, are expired you have to reactivate your bitcoins from the centralized generator using your valid identity. In this way, money will remain accountable, can't be misused by anyway and money also can't be concentrated. Also, you can get bitcoins for storage (storage bitcoins), which can never be used to buy services or goods, you can get the storage bitcoins from bitcoin bank exchanging your exchange bitcoin. Storage bitcoins will be tagged with your identity, so you can't exchange it with anyone. Only you can exchange it through bitcoin bank to get exchange bitcoin. Also no chance of hacking, freedom of p2p exchange. No problems at

How to make India cashless economy in limited time and solve cash crunch?

Some of the steps that need to be taken: 1) First, inform retailers and shops to use eMoney wallets such as SBI Buddy for taking payments. Also, people to pay with these wallets. It's the MOST IMPORTANT step. Informing is not an easy step, it requires the support of media, all politicians, and volunteers . Digital money transfer through IMPS also costs about Rs 24 per transaction. This has to be completely removed. Transfer costs should be same as that of payment gateways. There is another problem: server load. Are our bank servers ready to make such a huge amount of transaction? How many transactions a bank server per minute can make? I think it has the limited capacity now because transaction fails many of the time, also we don't get OTP. So in order to solve the server issue we need to distribute the load among different apps. With a limited number of transactions possible per an hour. A merchant should install all the apps together to get money, just like merch

Questioning beyond textbook exercises and making an own (alternative) hypothesis to explain. Is it allowed in our education system?

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Hypothesis and Scientific Theory Our education system problem: Teachers prepare questions and students answer it by learning  from explanation of the book. We don't teach our kids to question and also come up with their own hypothesis or explanation. In some generous schools, even though teacher encourages to question what student don't understand, but they are hesitant to encourage difficult questions that have no answers or questions that teacher doesn't know. By this method, we are just stopping our kids to imagine or be creative. So, let me go with the example, some very interesting questions that students asked in class. 1) Water and ghee, why does ghee floats in water? According to the book, water is polar and ghee is nonpolar, so water repel out ghee and they get separated from each other. But why ghee floats in water? Water has the molecular weight of 18 g/mol, while ghee is a long chain hydrocarbon, its molecular weight is much larger than water. S

Organic and Inorganic chemistry of Chemistry book in India: All about rote learning

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Organic and Inorganic chemistry of Chemistry book in India: All about rote learning Most part of organic chemistry is all about remembering names and steps of reactions. It promotes VERY LITTLE comprehension of mechanisms and working of the reactions. Are these questions? Ridiculous Please do compare the content and questions with international books such as Chemistry: A Molecular Approach of Nivaldo J. Tro for Inorganic and Organic part, and also Organic Chemistry as a Second Language by David Klein In organic and inorganic class, the teacher usually teaches the blackboard, not the students, because the content of the book is just about steps of reactions and alien names with no understanding. Please design the syllabus and book accordingly that makes organic and inorganic chemistry interesting , increases curiosity and promotes comprehension and inquiry . e.g. Do students know why carbon makes life, not silicon even if both can form 4 bonds?

Discipline, what is it and why do we need it?

Dictionary meaning of discipline: the practice of training people to obey rules or a code of behavior, using punishment to correct disobedience So discipline is all about rules and punishment for not obeying it. To go deeper into discipline we should question, What should be the rules? And what should be the punishment? Without defining the two, we can't really address discipline issue. Most of the time neither the rules are defined and made public. Neither the rules are practical enough to be followed. The first step should be to define the classroom rules, rules must be simple so that students remember the rule, as no one will remember complex rules: While I teach I have made 4 rules that work pretty well. 1) As I teach with discussion friendly, inquiry-based learning, I faced a big problem, where students always try to talk out of the context and irrelevant things. So I made a rule that for half an hour no one will talk or ask any irrelevant questions (not related to

Bacteria and Competition: How it's similar to human? and Why we should have family planning?

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Growth of the bacteria refers to an increase in bacterial numbers When bacteria is grown in a liquid nutrient medium, the population is counted at many time intervals, and we get a bacterial growth curve that represents growth of cells over time. Why bacterial growth curve is so important? It gives the idea to learn about the impact of competition in the simplest way. It gives the answer what happens to a population when resources are limited. Bacterial growth best suits even to describe the human population. In science, there are 4 phases, but for simplistic understanding, without any scientific jargon it can be three stages: Thrive, Survive, and Deteriorate Image from wikipedia (A: Lag phase, B: Log phase, C: Stationary phase, D: Death phase) Stage 1: Thrive In this phase bacteria has sufficient resources, so bacteria flourish, prosper or grow vigorously. In science, it's the lag phase and log phase. In the lag phase, there is no cell division, but cells are n

Jupyter notebook to write notes and exercises, learn by applying knowledge

Jupyter notebook can be used to make your notes and solve exercises with programming without using pen and paper. In order to write notes, you can use markdown which is a very simple markup language and can be learned within 15mins to get started. You can use latex and Unicode characters to write equations and symbols. To learn latex you can use google, e.g. website https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Mathematics Jupyter notebook can be used in any subjects where the calculation is required, such as physics, mathematics, economics, even biology etc. No need to scratch your head, if you forgot the formula, or made mistakes in calculation when done with pen and paper. Learn by applying things that will be useful in real life situations Everyone should learn code, in early age just like other subjects. One computer to each child is required. https://github.com/amiyatulu/teaching_chemistry View: https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/amiyatulu/teaching_chemistry/blob/master

When to respond to the attackers? Are you giving free airtime to them?

If you are popular and have power, everything you do, share influences others. Anything you speak or write publicly, it's shared by thousands of people. So it's become very important to learn how to speak and write publicly.  You become the center of information, which gets transferred to everyone. Whatever you speak is most likely to be attacked because different people have different opinions, and some may have vested interest to attack. More controversial the topic is more attackers you will have. As a human we dislike attacks, so we start defending the attacks. Does responding to the attacks helps? In most of the time, it doesn't. You are only giving free airtime to them, knowing that you will respond, they will attack with a greater intensity. So what to do in such situation? If the critic is as popular as you, he/she can propagandize his opinion in a biased manner, even spreading rumors, non-factual, partial information that is logically correct to convince peo

Completely simplifying UTS Ticketing System which can be used everywhere

Simplifying UTS Ticketing System which can be used in every station: We need two things: 1) OTP generator in Station (To track the location, no requirement of GPS) 2) A mobile app for payment and entering the OTP Railways job is to provide a unique account id and password to each customer after authenticating them. Use that unique account id and password to register on the app. You can add and change the mobile number. You can also change the password. When you go to the station, in the OTP generator, enter the unique account id, and get the OTP displayed on the OTP generator. OTP can also be sent to the mobile. OTP will work only for 15 mins etc. Enter the OTP on the registered mobile app, choose the route, pay and get ticket by SMS Payment can be done with using payment gateways or with balance kept on the account. You can add balance with payment gateways, may be with depositing money through railways or directly through gateways when you have no balance in your account

Way mathematics is taught, need a disruptive change

Mathematics needs a disruptive change, students who are not better problem solvers in all other fields are bad in it. UNDERSTANDING how the calculation works is the most important step to test and analyze a problem. A most common problem with students who are scared of mathematics is not understanding how fractions work. What will happen if you divide a decimal number between 0 and 1 with 1000 and 10,000 etc? What will happen if you multiply it with 1000 and 10,000 etc.? What is the meaning of 1/3 * 1/4? What is actually happening in it? How to divide a smaller number, for example, a decimal number between 0 and 1,  with a bigger number? What are you actually doing in this way, how will you explain it with the example, such as a cake or tiles? How to subtract a decimal number between 0 and 1 with a number greater than one? Fractions are everywhere, you will find not a single field in which you will not find its (mathematics) application, whether you do physics, chemistry,

Building scientific real world problem-solving temper among students by transforming our entrance exams

Using just MCQs for entrance exams has many drawbacks. MCQs just test examiner way of thinking, not students, neither it tests originality of students. MCQs don't test what approach a student took to solve the problem, or why he/she was unable to solve it. Also, even if (s)he knows the strategy to solve the problem, many times (s)he can't reach the solution, because of mistakes in intermediate steps. The result is losing the marks. There are situations like unable to do the calculations, unable to recall the formula, even if he/she understand how the formula works. How many times you as a student feel frustrated for doing irrelevant silly mistakes and lose marks? I find many being frustrated for doing minor calculation errors, unable to recall even if they know it. Students are treated in a manner as if they are completely not allowed to make any mistakes. A question in chemistry about the rate of reaction does not test your logarithmic knowledge of mathematics. Even th

PISA sample question: Why I was unable to solve a question?

In a test, it's important to know the thinking process of a student, why a student is able to solve a problem and most importantly why he/she COULDN'T. If you understand why he/she couldn't do in details, you can address his/her problem and take corrective measure. TEST QUESTIONS (LEVEL 5) CLIMBING MOUNT FUJI Mount Fuji is a famous dormant volcano in Japan. QUESTION: The Gotemba walking trail up Mount Fuji is about 9 kilometres (km) long. Walkers need to return from the 18 km walk by 8 pm. Toshi estimates that he can walk up the mountain at 1.5 kilometres per hour on average, and down at twice that speed. These speeds take into account meal breaks and rest times. Using Toshi's estimated speeds, what is the latest time he can begin his walk so that he can return by 8 pm? The answer says 11 a.m., but the problem with me is understanding the question itself. I didn't know the meaning of trail, so I checked the dictionary,  which says a long line or se

Students and lecturers of India should be asked to review research articles

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Peer-review increases critical thinking, questioning, and reasoning skills among research faculties should be given in projects to earn credits, not just for publishing paper, in universities A peer-reviewer decides and introspects the authenticity of the article. Finding the error in a technical article requires rigorous effort and knowledge about the subject. Also, a peer-reviewer contribution is outstandingly important and shouldn't be ignored when compared with the author. Post-publication peer-review and pre-publication peer-review, both can be given to research faculties, so that they can earn credit for it. What projects can be given to students at elementary schools and undergraduate or higher  level? Let's talk about a project at undergraduate level: After a particular concept of a subject is taught, e.g genetics, students can be asked to review an article searching the database such as PubMed using the keyword. Let them describe a particular article in the

Collaborative work like questioning and answering, how its even possible in an exam oriented environment in India?

While going through the article http://www.learningscientists.org/blog/2016/7/7-1 ,  Learn How to Study Using... Elaboration, it made me think of my past education or even present schooling system in India from my siblings. It's like turning the education system upside down, just changing everything, from teacher centric to student-centric. But how it will be possible? Here the reasons that don't allow it to happen because: 1) Exam oriented environment Exam oriented environment in India, marks means everything, no matter how you secure it, through copying, through cramming, memorizing or any method you like. You are judged through your marks. Even to tackle it CCE was brought. But it has become even a greater failure because of our smart teachers who could circumvent the effort, by distributing marks for free, showing good scores to parents and everyone. The end result is negligible learning due to CCE. 2) Lack of time Leave about a lazy teacher for a while, what abou

Books that promote critical thinking among science students at undergraduate level

Most undergraduate and post graduate books in India are not well written, promote rote memorization, state board books are just full of errors, you can't even read a page while solving problems without finding errors in the answers given. A book is not a book, if any statement you pick, does not say something useful, does not allow you to think. In the age of the internet, where data is enormous and easily available, we need a method to extract knowledge from these data.  Books allow presenting information in a form that  we can understand, grasp it as it is written in a concise and precise manner.  We need books that allow not filling the vessel but kindling the flame. Books that promote critical thinking. Here are some the books which our students and especially teachers need to follow and should be in every library: Conceptual Physics, by Paul G. Hewitt The book is very well written, the book almost relate everything in physics with real world examples. You will under

In order to understand a student understanding, ask how they are imagining things?

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Aphantasia , is about not able imagine the image vividly, does it trouble to create new imagination? I have always a difficulty from childhood, for recalling the image vividly, I can’t get into details of the image. In order to remember a person's face, I need to meet up with the person again at least 3 or 4 times.  Even I have trouble in navigation. But all the issues are based upon generalized context, but there are exceptions. For example, I will reach the place second time again without trouble, if I  think of/ paid attention to the landmarks, I can recognize the person with his/her face again, if I think of or paid attention to the details of his/her face while the meeting. But in common I usually can’t recall the faces vividly,  but many have a very excellent capabilities imagining person's face or knowing the direction of a place which they have visited just once. I scored http://www.bbc.com/news/health-34039054  22 out of 40 in the test of Aphantasia. But doe

Making an effective Parents Teachers Meeting in India: Comprehensive ideas to get started

1) Parents Participation : One of the major challenges that need to be overcome is the lesser engagement of parents. Do most parents attend parents teacher meeting? What are the reasons that a parent don't appear in the meeting (in private or govt. schools)? Reasons can be many such as lack of time, uninformed about the meeting because the invitation is not done properly or ignorance towards the education of their children as in the case of govt schools. So how can we deal with it? 2) Meeting Guidelines: In order to make the meeting productive, there needs to be everyone participation. In a usual meeting, parents sit as a passive listener most of the time and  a bunch of teachers give oration about education. But, such situation should be discouraged in the meeting. The meeting is about discussing problems faced by students and even school and how it can be solved by the involvement of parents. So, before we convene a meeting even, a lot of work has to be done about specifics

How can central open schools such as NIOS can make a revolutionary step in the field of Personalized Education?

Most schools are overloaded with students. Usually, a single classroom in popular schools in your locality must be having more than 30 students in a particular class. To give students a personalized experience, it’s all most impossible for these schools. So, students rely on personal tuitions to meet the requirement of the students. All most all parents that have a good income, provide personal tuitions to their children. So, what role NIOS has to play? NIOS can promote mini-schools with 10-20 students in class with laboratory facilities and required teachers. They don't need to have all the classes for Std 1 to 12th. Any particular class for a startup would do, based on teacher availability. But for it, a lot of processes has to be done by NIOS. 1) Designing Curriculum  Design the best curriculum from Class I to Class 12 with book recommendation, training teachers for best practices of teaching that works (with giving complete research and statistical data of its working)

How practicals are done in India? How should it be done through inquiry-based approach?

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Practicals in school and colleges are all about writing records. They spend most of the time on writing records, drawing fancy diagrams without even knowing anything about what they are writing/drawing. Teachers also award students whose records are only visually appealing, not on the content/or not whether students have understood what they are doing. e.g. recently I heard from a student that teacher managed to throw the notebook because she was writing in a rough notebook. So, classes are all about writing records that teacher dictates with giving a very little practical knowledge I even don't blame the teacher. He/she does the same thing what she/he has been taught in her/his times of college. So it just a repetition/ritual way of doing things what has been done since the inception of colleges. So, how it should be fixed through inquiry-based approach? It can be fixed by bringing a change in curriculum. Let's look at the syllabus of practical. Just one or two lines

How should teacher selection be done in a transparent manner in India and keep them accountable?

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Mostly in the current procedure, a teacher is appointed by entrance exam or a bunch of questionnaires by senior faculties or administrator. (Keeping all different kinds of corruption or lobbying that takes place aside) But this process does not guarantee a good teacher. A modern educator should have many other psychological, pedagogical and leadership skills/features that are not tested in this procedure. The current procedure only tests the amount of subject knowledge/information they have, which can only be used as the first line of defense to get a good teacher. So, instead of selecting a single teacher from the interview, 3 to 5 etc. teachers must be selected and should be given few classes to teach the students. These classes should be recorded, and voting must be done by students, faculty members and experts based upon the questions asked in the voting. The questions can be such as does the lecturer/teacher increases curiosity on the subject, do they understand the subject p

Why do doctors need to conduct research in India and how it can be done?

1) Time A medical student in India spends negligible time in conducting research. And after becoming a doctor, with the burden of overwork to check patients, they find almost no time to conduct research. How can they do a case study, if they don't spend enough time with the patient? 2) Using Lab equipment for research Whole medicine department in India is limited to determining the disease through the medical diagnostic procedure, and then prescribing medicines or surgery for cure. We have all sophisticated medical equipment from MRI scanner to high sensitive blood testing machines for different diseases. But none are used for research purpose. Neither most data produced by the medical department are used in research or statistical analysis due to lack of digitalizing and lack of storing in a central repository. 3) More doctors India being a second largest populated country in the world, the requirement of doctors, should be second largest to have a decent amount of doctor

What strategical mistakes do we make in the Lab as a team in Indian context?

1) Clarity of riddle that needs to be solved, in the research you are doing. The question in research should identify the problem and how to solve the problem. We cannot expect everything to occur in serendipity, by doing random stuff without knowing what is the problem. 2) Pretending to work Research supervisors are obsessed with the amount of time spent on work you do, instead of quality work. For doing research, we need to think, we need to discuss the problem with our team as a total. Research cannot be done after you are exhausted because you cannot think at that time. All members come from a different psychological environment with different passions and mindset. So, it important to bring their mindset into solving the problem, instead of forcing them to only work. Usually, students come to build their career and earn money. Many are almost not interested in doing research because of the environment they get. So, they start to pretend to work to appease the supervisor and get

Hilarious pedagogy tests of India

Link to the questions Questions that you can't stop laughing... 1. Which statement is not applicable to objective type of question? a) More content can be covered. b) Correct measurement is possible. c) Quick and correct valuation is possible d) Measuring more than one learning objective is possible. Well, the answer is bit unambiguous, like any other standard examination, correct measurement of student ability is not possible. Yes, in objective type questions, more content can be covered, quick and correct valuation is possible (I mean is possible, but most of the time error in valuation occurs, there may be many different reasons for it). Also measuring more than one learning objective is also possible if question setter works on it. 2. "Nothing succeeds like success", this statement is based on which law of learning as propounded by Thorndike? a) Practice b) Readiness c) Effect d) Recency Nothing succeeds like success means "success leads to op

Framework for collaborative design of curriculum in Schools, Colleges and Universities

India requires a website for National Curriculum Framework for collaborative design of curriculum in Schools, Colleges and Universities In India, curriculum/syllabus of different subjects is usually obsolete. To make things, even more, worse, different states and university have a different syllabus which they never update based on present and future requirement. Also, getting a degree in advanced specialization course e.g. such as Machine Learning, Robotics is a distance dream in India. What a website of National Curriculum Framework needs to solve? 1) Should be used to for collaborative design of curriculum, where everyone is free to suggest their inputs, whether University lecturers, researchers, entrepreneurs, students etc. It will bring everyone on one platform. 2) Different colleges and Universities, need not have to design a different syllabus for a single subject, but a single syllabus will do, by an inclusive effort of everyone. CBCS will take care of the diversity/aut

Some of the points that NEP (National Education Policy) of India should have.

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How MOOCs + Open Lab can rescue our education system?

MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are most affordable (even free), but the problem with it is practicals. Can a student earn a degree in subjects like Mechanical Engineering, Aeronautical Engineering, Biotechnology or any other subjects that require expensive practical equipment with doing MOOCs? It's not possible because there is no way to do practical experiments. So along with MOOCs, our education system should provide Open Laboratories What Features Should Open Laboratory have:  First, it can be opened by anyone after getting approval from the government. Open Laboratories can buy cutting-edge equipment based on the technology that is required in different courses. Open Laboratories should have the freedom to buy based on how much they want to spend. They need not have to buy all the equipment, just like colleges. This will cut the expenses of open laboratories. It will also promote entrepreneurship. They should have qualified researchers or teachers who know the worki

How open review and data analysis of exam will change our education system?

As our education system is not transparent, and as we don't have the data, we are actually unable to find the problems, so unable to address them. So what is an open review of an exam? After the evaluation of answer script is completed, its scanned copy has to be uploaded to a website for public review. Also, analysis of the answers should be conducted, in which questions students are securing more marks, which questions are difficult to solve and students are not performing well in the questions. Complete statistical data should be produced, student wise, school wise, district wise and state wise. What are the advantages? It has no disadvantage. With this procedure, we can address most of the problems in the exams. Schools and colleges will be more accountable, no malpractice will be there, students will know their fault, where they have scored less and where they have scored more, teachers will evaluate paper accurately This should be done at every level of education, f