Test Scores for U.S. 13-Year-Olds Show Lowest Math and Reading Levels In Decades

The last time math performance was this low for 13-year-olds was in 1990.

Pandemic Stimulus Aid May Not Be Doing Enough to Help Schools

Elizabethton City Schools in Tennessee provided English tutoring this year for 404 elementary and middle school students with the increased funding.

10 PhD Viva tips from an examiner

I did a mock viva for someone recently, and I shared lots of my views on a successful viva based ion examining around 50 PhDs over the years, so I thought I’d share them here. This relates to the UK viva system, which is usually an open-ended defence, with two examiners discussing the thesis with the candidate. Things vary quite differently elsewhere. These are obviously just my views, and I’m generally a ‘nice’ examiner, I want people to enjoy the experience and to pass. Most examiners I’ve met are the same, but one does hear the occasional horror story. So here’s my top ten tips:

• Have a nice opening summary – it’s common to start with a friendly, settling in question along the lines of “can you summarise your main contributions?” or “why were you interested in doing this research?”. See my point below about answering the actual question, but what these are inviting you to do is to give a brief summary of your work. Sometimes a presentation will be allowed or encouraged, it’s worth checking. Note here that it is a brief summary. The examiners are likely to work through the thesis chapter by chapter, so you do not need to give the whole thesis in a one hour monologue. Five or ten minutes here, just as an opening.
  
• Don’t over-prepare answers – you may well have a mock viva with your examiners beforehand and they will identify some questions that may be answered. It’s important to remember though that there is no set list of questions to ask from the examiners. They are likely to ask you things you hadn’t predicted, and not ask you things you thought would definitely come up. So while it’s good to have some ideas as to what you will answer if queried about your methodology choice, say, there is a danger of preparing something akin to a script. You can end up being thrown when different questions are asked, or not answering the actual question. You know your thesis better than anyone, so trust in your ability to be able to respond in the moment.
  
• Answer the question being asked – sometimes candidates will give a long, detailed answer to something which wasn’t really necessary. This may be because they were expecting a certain question, as mentioned above, or they think the examiner is asking something different. So, listen carefully, and answer what is actually being asked, and if you’re not sure…
  
• Ask for clarification if needed – this is obvious but more important than you might think. Sometimes the examiner might be asking a fairly straightforward question to which they just want a yes or no answer, and you think they’re after something else and after a 30 minute defence of your methodology they say “so that’s a yes?”. Ask if you’ve understood the question if you’re not sure.
  
• Don’t be too defensive – as I said, most examiners are sympathetic, but they are meant to test the robustness of your research. So they’re going to pick at bits. What you don’t want to do is end up in an argument, so firstly ask for clarification if you think you’re being unfairly criticised (I’ve certainly seen vivas where there has just been a misunderstanding), and don’t get too defensive. Sometimes it’s best to just say, “yes, I see your point, I’ll take that on board”
  
• Be honest(ish) – I would advise against trying to trick examiners, or hide flaws, they’re usually good at digging these out, and don’t like to feel as though you were trying to con them. For example, hiding small data samples behind percentages. So be honest – eg it’s ok to say “I would have explored this more fully, but I didn’t have time”, or “my methodology was partly influenced by the practical access I had to data”. The (ish) part I added there relates to my next tip, some people feel like it’s an interrogation and they crack – you don’t need to reveal to the examiners that in reality you really didn’t understand the conceptual theory you’re using and you were crying into your books every night.
  
• Don’t talk yourself out of a pass – some candidates seem determined to talk themselves down maybe it’s the imposter syndrome kicking in. Most examiners will accommodate this to a degree, but if every question is responded to with a comment along the lines of “I just made it up”, “that bit isn’t very good”, etc, you can get to a stage where you have examiners doubting their judgement about the work.
  
• Expect some revisions – it’s rare, but I’ve seen some people take the idea of being asked to do revisions as a personal affront. A pass without revisions is very rare. So expect some, and also be very clear exactly what is required (they should provide you with a list of required changes). Don’t do more than they suggest, and don’t argue about the ones you’re asked to do (unless really unreasonable).
  
• It’s an exam to be passed – if you view the viva like a car driving test that is to be passed, rather than some existential rite of passage, it’s probably going to be a lot easier. Do what you need to do, get the pass, move on. In a year’s time no-one will care (probably including you) that you had to add in an extra page on the examiner’s pet topic even though you didn’t feel it was necessary. Be pragmatic about the whole thing.
  
• Enjoy it – I always say this to my students. I know it can be stressful, but by the time you get to the viva, assuming you’ve done the work, listened to your supervisors and got a decent thesis, then it can be an experience to be enjoyed. You’ve been doing this research for three or more years. You have bored friends and family about it, no-one knows this subject in more detail than you. And now you get to have a long, detailed conversation with two people who really want to hear about it, you can go into all the detail you want without friends’ eyes glazing over. Enjoy that moment.

Just my experience of course, mileage may vary. If you have a doctoral viva coming up, good luck!

U.S. History Scores for 8th Graders Plunge

The dip in civics performance was the first decline since the test began being administered in the late 1990s.

Carbon Maps helps the food industry reduce their climate impact

Meet Carbon Maps, a new French startup that raised $4.3 million (€4 million) just a few weeks after its inception. The company is building a software-as-a-service platform for the food industry so that they can track the environmental impact of each of their products in their lineup. The platform can be used as a basis for eco ratings.

While there are quite a few carbon accounting startups — like Greenly, Sweep, Persefoni and Watershed — Carbon Maps isn’t an exact competitor as it doesn’t calculate a company’s carbon emissions as a whole. It doesn’t focus on carbon emissions exclusively either. Carbon Maps focuses on the food industry and evaluates the environmental impact of products — not companies.

Co-founded by Patrick Asdaghi, Jérémie Wainstain and Estelle Huynh, the company managed to raise a seed round with Breega and Samaipata — two VC firms that invested in Asdaghi’s previous startup, FoodChéri.

FoodChéri is a full-stack food delivery company that designs its own meals and sells them directly to end customers with an important focus on healthy food. It also operates Seazon, a sister company for batch deliveries. The startup was acquired by Sodexo a few years ago.

“On the day that I left, I started working on food and health projects again,” Asdaghi told me. “I wanted to make an impact, so I started moving up the supply chain and looking at agriculture.”

And the good news is that Asdaghi isn’t the only one looking at the supply chain of the food industry. In France, some companies started working on an eco-score with a public agency (ADEME) overseeing the project. It’s a life cycle assessment that leads to a letter rating from A to E.

While very few brands put these letters on their labels, chances are companies that have good ratings will use the eco-score as a selling point in the coming years.

But these ratings could become even more widespread as regulation is still evolving. The European Union is even working on a standard — the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF). European countries can then create their own scoring systems based on these European criteria, meaning that food companies will need good data on their supply chains.

“The key element in the new eco-score that’s coming up is that there will be some differences within a product category because ingredients and farming methods are different,” Asdaghi said. “It’s going to take into consideration the carbon impact, but also biodiversity, water consumption and animal welfare.”

For instance, when you look at ground beef, it’s extremely important to know whether farmers are using soy from Brazil or grass to feed cattle.

“We don’t want to create the ratings. We want to create the tools that help with calculations — a sort of SAP,” Asdaghi said.

So far, Carbon Maps is working with two companies on pilot programs as it’s going to require a ton of work to cover each vertical in the food industry. The startup creates models with as many criteria as possible to calculate the impact of each criteria. It uses data from standardized sources like GHG Protocol, IPCC, ISO 14040 and 14044.

The company targets food brands because they design the recipes and select their suppliers. Eventually, Carbon Maps hopes that everybody across the supply chain is going to use its platform in one way or another.

“You can’t have a true climate strategy if you don’t have some collaboration across the chain,” Asdaghi said.

Carbon Maps helps the food industry reduce their climate impact by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch