Around the world, education is the largest recipient of philanthropic giving by a large margin, but in the United States, funders are moving away from investing in K-12 schools in favor of early childhood and higher education.

Funders have been both fast and thoughtful about how to work with national and local partners to listen to needs from the field, identify best practices, and deploy resources quickly, says Celine Coggins.

"This pandemic has given us an opportunity to think boldly about students' educational needs and how to creatively respond to them," says Katherine Haley.

"Folks in some foundations are quietly expressing frustration that they've been cautioned to stay in their lane and only fund things aligned with their pre-COVID strategy," says Stacey Childress.

BACKGROUND:

The ability of the decades-old Boston and Philadelphia criteria to accurately identify infants at low risk for serious bacterial infections has not been recently reevaluated.

Timing, preparation and control are essential to getting paid fairly. This infographic by Adzuna is guide on how you can navigate your way to a salary increase.

The Ratline: Love, Lies and Justice on the Trail of a Nazi Fugitive

Deepfakes, or doctored videos, have mostly been used to harm the reputations of celebrities and politicians. Now the AI-assisted technology is being used to trick companies out of big money.

Today there are discounts on the Dell Insprion 15 5000 laptop, 12.9-inch iPad Pro, a few SSD and HDD storage devices, the second-generation AirPods, and more.

"King of King Court" by Travis Dandro, published by Drawn & Quarterly, has won the 2020 Lynd Ward Prize for Graphic Novel of the Year. Penn State University Libraries sponsors the juried award and its administrator, the Pennsylvania Center for the Book.

The International Crisis Group is honoured to announce the creation of the Giustra Fellowship for Conflict Prevention, made possible by a generous gift of $1 million from Canadian businessman and philanthropic leader Frank Giustra through The Radcliffe Foundation. Mr. Giustra has been a long-time advocate for Crisis Group, providing transformational financial support since joining its Board of Trustees in 2005.

By Sr. Joan L. Roccasalvo, C.S.J.

“It’s back to school,” the many ads remind us.  The noble work of education will soon begin anew.  

The word, educate, from the Latin educere, means to lead out of. Educators worthy of the name lead their students out of the darkness of ignorance to the light of truth, knowledge and wisdom. 

The Catholic Philosophy of Education

To realize its Divine mission, the Church has developed a view of education that claims the right over all other agencies to make final decisions about the education of its youth. 

There are several principles of the Catholic philosophy of education that mark it with distinction.  With the obvious age-appropriate adaptations, they affect all ages and academic levels. 

Belief in a Personal God

First, that belief in a personal God is essential to all Catholic thinking in any and every phase of human activity. This includes formal education which proclaims Jesus as its primary Exemplar.  It follows that the Church rejects any philosophy of education or position that sacrifices the eternal and supernatural to the temporal and natural (V.P. Lannie, “Catholic Education IV,” The New Encyclopedia 5: 168).

Academic Excellence

Second, Catholic education imparts far more than amassing facts and information.  Scholarship and faith belong together, the whole person, seeking ultimate Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.  Students should be taught to wonder at the goodness and truth surrounding them. Catholic education builds character. It develops in its students a Catholic moral compass and a Catholic sensibility to understand how society and democracies function. The curriculum’s first order of business is academic formation and excellence. Students must learn correct grammar and use language skillfully, even artfully. This means reading well, writing with imagination, precision and power, and speaking the country’s predominant language correctly. It is typically true that whoever uses the right word thinks precisely and persuasively as in the famous Hopkins’ poetic line, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” 

English is a difficult language to master, but it must be said that immigrants to this country often learn to speak better English than those who are born here. In the musical, “My Fair Lady,” the character of Henry Higgins sings, “Why Can’t the English Teach Their Children How to Speak.”  He lampoons Americans’ mutiliation of English with the line, “Well, in America, they haven’t used it in years.” A playful jab, but jab it is.

Catholic and Christian Humanism

Third, in Catholic humanism, God is found not just in the sacred but also in the secular where Christian values and virtue can be uncovered.  The religious and the profane are mutually inclusive, “charged with the grandeur of God.” Whatever is human is inherently Christian.  No enterprise, no matter how secular, is merely secular for we live in a universe of grace and promise. 

The humanities are associated with depth, richness, feelings, character and moral development. This is why the literary and refining arts are so important.  Their purpose is to impart wonder and enjoyment, sensitize the feelings of students and eventually influence their behavior.  The humanities are intended for all students and not just for the elite.

The Student and the Educator

Fourth, St. Thomas Aquinas puts it concisely: Education is a lifelong process of self-activity, self-direction, and self-realization. The child is the center of attention, the “principal agent,” in the educational process. 

The instructor is the “essential mover” who teaches by the witness of his or her example and consistently brings to their lessons a high degree of preparedness. The teacher’s role is critical to Catholic education (Ibid).  The students’ real life situations initiate the process of learning.   Educators lead their students out beyond their life setting—their Sitz-im-Leben.  Experience teaches students to discover for themselves by engaging the five senses. This includes, for example, making or doing beautiful art forms or listening to beautiful music. Affectivity must be channeled in socially-accepted ways. For the most part, “Rap” culture exalts anti-social affectivity.

In his apostolic exhortation, “Evangelii nuntiandi,” Pope Paul VI reflected: “Today students do not listen seriously to teachers but to witnesses, and if they do listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses.”  

Catholic educators teaching in public schools can adapt Catholic principles to the public school curriculum especially when these are also embraced by other faith-traditions.    

The Benedict Effect

At his papal election in 2003, why did Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger take the papal name Benedict?  It was the Benedictine monks, who, systematically and comprehensively, rebuilt Europe after the barbaric invasions of Rome in the 5th century. Some European leaders refuse to acknowledge Europe’s Christian roots and, specifically, the Church’s role in building on Greco-Roman culture, Christianizing it, and handing it on to future generations. At a time when Europe was cast in darkness, the Church led it out of the darkness; the Church was Europe’s light. Not opinion, but fact.

St. Benedict, the Benedictine Order, and the Monastic Centuries

In the middle of the sixth century, a small movement changed the landscape of the European world.  Benedict of Nursia (480-547) introduced a new way of life and thinking that has brought vitality to contemporary men and women. He laid the foundation of Benedictine monastic life with his monks first at Subiaco and Rome, and then at Monte Cassino.  

Benedict composed his Rule of disciplined balance that fostered order and peace.  If “pray and work” (ora et labora) was the Benedictine motto, the way to live it was through beauty, piety, and learning.  Every monastery was built on an expansive tract of land, and  eventually, it became a miniature civic center for the townspeople.  One could say that the monks sacralized the landscape.  

Monastic Schools

Of the many contributions the Benedictine monks made to European culture, education remained a prominent value. In the Middle Ages, education was conducted within the confines of the monastery by monks, and later, by nuns.  They offered religious and general education to youth who intended to enter the monastic or clerical life and to youth who were preparing for public life.  They lived at home.  Young children of six or seven years of age were taught the basics. The majority, especially potential monks and nuns, were taught to read Latin, writing, chant, arithmetic, and learning how to read time on the sundial. The main text was the Psalter.  From the eighth century onward, students were taught the seven liberal arts, the trivium, grammar, logic, and rhetoric, and the quadrivium, arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, and music.  The ideal monastery of the Benedictine Order was that of Saint Gall in present-day Switzerland where the town flourished around the monastery.

In our century, Catholic education continues to flourish across the world in developed and in developing countries.

Conclusion: Catholic Education in the United States

The Encyclopedia of Catholicism asserts that “throughout history, there is likely no more compelling instance of Catholic commitment to education than the school system created by the U.S. Catholic community.  The story of American Catholicism goes back to the very first Catholic settlers in the New World.” 

Despite the various declarations of freedom in early American history, anti-Catholicism prevailed through groups such as the Know-Nothing Society of the 1850s.  They existed to eradicate Popery, Jesuitism, and Catholicism.  

Between 1840 and 1900, at least sixty European religious orders of women and men were teaching in this country’s parochial schools. 

Conclusion

Finally, the philosophy of Catholic education integrates several aspects of the faith into the curriculum but always in age-appropriate ways: Biblical tradition, Early Christian Church plus heresies and the results,  Spirituality and prayer, Liturgy,  Doctrine, Ecumenism:  a study of the world religions and the Third World.

Today, apologetics is needed more than ever to defend the Church against old and new approaches to anti-Catholicism.  Our students should be taught the art and skill of civil debate—to learn the principles, internalize them, anticipate opposing views, and then defend the principles. 

(This précis of the philosophy of Catholic education has been presented in its ideal conception and not necessarily as it exists with the integrity described.)

With SA bonds now rated as junk or non-investment grade, life for ordinary South Africans just got worse.

The high-end discrete graphics cards will reportedly target the PC gaming market and data centers, putting pressure on AMD and Nvidia. Intel hired a former AMD exec to lead the effort.

THE MEZZANINE GALLERY TO EXHIBIT HUGH PHIBB’S “WHAT THE WATER SAID…” WATERCOLORS Wilmington, Del. (January 24, 2018) – What the Water Said…Flowers, Places & Faces will be on view in the Mezzanine Gallery from February 2-23, 2018. A free opening reception to meet the artist will be held on Friday, February 2 from 5-7 p.m. […]

Szymon Talaga and Andrzej Nowak: Real-world social networks often exhibit high levels of clustering, positive degree assortativity, short average path lengths (small-world property) and right-skewed but rarely power law degree distributions. On the other hand homophily, defined as the propensity of similar agents to connect to each other, is one of the most fundamental social processes observed in many human and animal societies. In this paper we examine the extent to which homophily is sufficient to produce the typical structural properties of social networks. To do so, we conduct a simulation study based on the Social Distance Attachment (SDA) model, a particular kind of Random Geometric Graph (RGG), in which nodes are embedded in a social space and connection probabilities depend functionally on distances between nodes. We derive the form of the model from first principles based on existing analytical results and argue that the mathematical construction of RGGs corresponds directly to the homophily principle, so they provide a good model for it. We find that homophily, especially when combined with a random edge rewiring, is sufficient to reproduce many of the characteristic features of social networks. Additionally, we devise a hybrid model combining SDA with the configuration model that allows generating homophilic networks with arbitrary degree sequences and we use it to study interactions of homophily with processes imposing constraints on degree distributions. We show that the effects of homophily on clustering are robust with respect to distribution constraints, while degree assortativity can be highly dependent on the particular kind of enforced degree sequence.

Here Mudassar Ahmed Khan has explained with an example, how to show jQuery DatePicker Calendar when the Bootstrap FontAwesome Glyphicon Icon is clicked. Basically, this article will explain how to replace the jQuery DatePicker Calendar Icon with Bootstrap FontAwesome Glyphicon Icon so that when the Bootstrap FontAwesome Glyphicon Icon is clicked, the jQuery DatePicker Calendar is shown.

Agency: GSS Closing Date: 6/2/2020

Designers Liam + Jord have created a series of minimalistic history-inspired “logos” for cities affected by World War II as part of RT’s tribute project #VictoryPages featuring cities such as Moscow, Warsaw, Berlin, and Hiroshima.
Read Full Article at RT.com

What's up with Apple Wallet?

Gangetic dolphins, gharial and freshwater turtles are among the major species found in the region. More than 75 per cent of the critically endangered Gharial population is based in the sanctuary.

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Maestro Harout Fazlian led the 90 performers of the LPO from their respective homes, recording them using mobile phones, laptops and Zoom chat

In part 1 of this 3-part blog series, we’ll delve into phishing and take a look at how you can protect yourself by deploying a strategy of threat protection for your company.

Phishing. It’s been around for nearly three decades, and it’s not going away anytime soon. And, as we move into the 2020’s, phishing has expanded to a variety of different techniques that utilize fraudulent URLs, malicious attachments, and more.

As stated in our previous blogs, phishing messages rely on social engineering. Security awareness for all employees is key when it comes to protecting against phishing attacks due to the veil of lies within emails/links/attachments.

1 Seychellois Rupee = 2.9412 Philippine Peso

1 Trinidad and Tobago Dollar = 7.4724 Philippine Peso

1 Swedish Krona = 5.1674 Philippine Peso

1 Slovak Koruna = 2.2739 Philippine Peso

1 Serbian Dinar = 0.4656 Philippine Peso

1 Polish Zloty = 12.009 Philippine Peso

1 Qatari Rial = 13.8683 Philippine Peso

1 Indian Rupee = 0.6688 Philippine Peso

1 Pakistani Rupee = 0.3163 Philippine Peso

1 Sierra Leonean Leone = 0.0051 Philippine Peso

1 New Taiwan Dollar = 1.6912 Philippine Peso

1 Thai Baht = 1.577 Philippine Peso

1 Turkish Lira = 7.1229 Philippine Peso

1 Singapore Dollar = 35.7436 Philippine Peso

1 Mauritian Rupee = 1.2716 Philippine Peso

1 Nepalese Rupee = 0.4175 Philippine Peso

1 Bangladeshi Taka = 0.5941 Philippine Peso

1 Moldovan Leu = 2.8318 Philippine Peso

1 Colombian Peso = 0.013 Philippine Peso

1 Uruguayan Peso = 1.1705 Philippine Peso

1 Uzbekistan Som = 0.005 Philippine Peso

1 Russian Ruble = 0.6879 Philippine Peso

1 Iraqi Dinar = 0.0424 Philippine Peso