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"Sick of hearing that social media is just a buzzword? Are you looking for hard statistics so that you can prove to your boss that social media is worth the investment? Looking for some pick up lines at the next social media meetup?"

"The frustrations teenagers experience with school are more a case of statistics and lack of experience than that of work ethic or "attitude" problems. These statistics are not tied to socioeconomic status, weight or time spent in a seat; they're genetic and experiential. We have a bell curve of abstraction and experience, and we're only beginning to think about how to honor that."

"If you're managing social media for your business, it might be useful to know about some of the most surprising social media statistics this year. Here are 10 that might make you rethink the way you're approaching social media."

Now ability grouping has re-emerged in classrooms all over the country - a trend that has surprised education experts who believed the outcry had all but ended its use. A new analysis from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a Census-like agency for school statistics, shows that of the fourth-grade teachers surveyed, 71 percent said they had grouped students by reading ability in 2009, up from 28 percent in 1998. In math, 61 percent of fourth-grade teachers reported ability grouping in 2011, up from 40 percent in 1996. "These practices were essentially stigmatized,"

"Six weeks into Coursera's Passion Driven Statistics course from Wesleyan University, students received a notice that they would participate in a new kind of peer-based grading exercise for their final projects. While nothing has been said publicly about the experiment until now, this marks a radical departure from the usual quiz-based examinations provided by MOOCs."

"OpenStax College, the year-old Rice University startup that produces free online textbooks, will more than double the number of fields in which it has titles by 2015, the university announced today. A grant from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation will allow OpenStax College to add to its current offerings in physics and sociology, and its two new biology books and an introductory anatomy text coming out this fall. The new titles will be in precalculus, chemistry, economics, U.S. history, psychology and statistics, Rice said, toward its goal of producing high-quality open-source books in the 25 most-enrolled college courses. OpenStax says its existing two texts have been downloaded more than 70,000 times so far."

"According to online salary database, PayScale.com, the skills on this list have seen the biggest drop in market value over the last few years. "These skills are associated with jobs the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts to have slow to no growth over the next 10 years," says Katie Bardaro, Director of Analytics at PayScale.com. "Often, to be successful in your career, you need to have multiple skills to set yourself apart," says Bardaro. "

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have the potential to enable free university-level education on an enormous scale. A concern often raised about MOOCs is that although thousands enrol for courses, a very small proportion actually complete the course. The release of information about enrollment and completion rates from MOOCs appears to be ad hoc at the moment - that is, official statistics are not published for every course. This data visualisation draws together information about enrollment numbers and completion rates from across online news stories and blogs.

"Twitter with its short and snappy messaging is very dependent on mobile usage and smart phones. The rise of the visual web is making Pinterest and Tumblr the fastest growing social networks on the planet. Google+ is no longer an afterthought and is embedded in Google's web assets including Gmail, local checkins and the mobile Android ecosystems."

"The University of Toronto is committed to exploring new ways of teaching and sharing knowledge in the 21st Century, and its participation in the two platforms Coursera and EdX are an essential part of this. Instructors from the university have already launched very well received "Massive Open Online Courses" on subjects ranging from programming to aboriginal education, statistics to mental health and psychology. To further our understanding of these new course formats, the Office of Online Learning Strategies (OLS), together with the course instructors, have developed an extensive research program around MOOCs and flipped classrooms"

"The National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) and its Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) provide the most official data on colleges and universities in the United States. At long last they have started to include data fields for online education (technically distance education, the vast majority of which is online) starting with the preliminary data released through Fall 2012 term. Despite all of the talk about data and measuring online programs, we can only now start to get official information from a central source rather than relying on surveys or institutional data."

"Faculty and students at UC Davis, meanwhile, are developing what they call "hyperlibraries" of faculty writings, homework questions, research and other content available online that are then vetted, and, like a Wikipedia page, constantly expanded and adapted to meet specific needs. The goal is to produce e-textbooks in the chemistry, biology, statistics, math, physics and geology fields - dubbed ChemiWiki, BioWiki, MathWiki, etc. - that eventually will supplant traditional texts, which can cost up to $300 per copy, said UC Davis chemistry professor Delmar Larsen. A pilot study of the ChemWiki last spring found that students in a general chemistry class who used the online materials would have spent about $125,000 had they bought new textbooks, Larsen said."

"he rate of unemployment still stands stubbornly close to 8 per cent, while millions of unemployed workers have given up looking for jobs, taking them out of the official statistics of the jobless. Yet, the US Labor Department shows 3 million jobs requiring special skills that remain unfilled. "

"The paper's authors measured two types of goal setting, performance based and task based. After surveying close to 4,000 college students in two field experiments, they found that performance-based goals -- setting a goal to earn a certain grade in the class used for the survey -- didn't have a statistically significant effect on whether a student actually got that grade. But when students set their goals on the tasks required to earn those grades, they performed better over all, even though that wasn't explicitly their goal."

"the automated text-analysis tool will be tested in a statistics course this fall. For three semesters, students in that class have responded to the same writing prompts, producing hundreds of essays on the same topics. The M-Write team has pored over those papers, identifying the features of papers that met the assignment criteria and those that missed the mark. The findings will be used to design an algorithm that makes the text-analysis tool look for those features."

"The Jupyter Notebook is an open-source web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and narrative text. Uses include: data cleaning and transformation, numerical simulation, statistical modeling, data visualization, machine learning, and much more."

"Between 2006-07 and 2011-12, average published tuition and fees at public four-year colleges and universities increased by about $1,800 in 2011 dollars, an annual rate of growth of 5.1% beyond inflation. The average net tuition and fees in-state students pay after taking grant aid from all sources and federal education tax credits and deductions into consideration increased by about $170 in 2011 dollars, an annual rate of growth of 1.4% beyond inflation."

"Despite statistics showing that more college admissions officers, as well as hiring managers, check applicants' Facebook pages, many teenagers are still lax about social media security, continuing to post content that is detrimental to their online reputation. Michael P. Grace, president and CEO of Virallock, spoke with AllFacebook about the mistakes that high school and college students are making on Facebook and how they can clean up their acts for a better future."

"Instead of using Facebook primarily as a communication device with friends (there's Facebook messages for that purpose), Grace said students should use their profiles as secondary resumés. If a student is applying to a college and their application shows that they were involved in, say, Model U.N. or the choir, they should have some kind of evidence of their activities. Likewise, if volunteer work is mentioned, teens should make sure they have photos of that on their Facebook page. When a college admissions officer or a hiring manager sees a prospect's Facebook page, they want to see evidence of positivity and accomplishments. Grace says taking this kind of approach can help young people stand out from their peers."