It was surprising to see the following page on the Apple site considering Steve Jobs' letter criticizing Flash. It states that Adobe Flash Player the "standard for delivering high-impact, rich web content" and can be "deployed immediately across all browsers and platforms".

This may be a standard description for the Flash Player, but it's not something one would expect to find on Apple's website considering their stance on Flash.  

As this interactive visualization of world statistics demonstrates, Flash is not only about advertising, games, videos and tedious website intros. Flash is the the dominant framework for Rich Internet Applications, followed by Java and Silverlight. But none of these are allowed on the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch.

If only Apple would follow those words on it's own website.

I was at BakaFORUM recently to present EduTube - the Basel_Karlsruhe Forum on educational and societal TV and media. The presentation focused on EduTube's mission to organize and rank the best online educational videos.

It was a great opportunity to listen to and meet others working in the area of educational media, from organizations such as BBC, EdutubePlus and Teachers TV.

You can download my presentation here:

• Download as PowerPoint
• Download as a PDF

This image from the presentation tells you what EduTube is all about: mining YouTube for gold nuggets, the best educational videos, from amongst millions of videos.

And this was one example used to illustrate the problem with finding educational videos on YouTube (the first search result for "biology"). Although YouTube's search has improved considerably, finding the educational gold nuggets can still be quite a challenge.

A minor milestone has been reached at EduTube.org with over 1000 educational videos now categorized and organized. Thanks to all our contributors, as well as anonymous contributors, for making this happen!

1000 videos is a small fraction of all the free educational videos online. But only a very small fraction of online educational videos are of high quality and appealing to a wide audience. EduTube aims to categorize and organize the best - the "crème de la crème". The EduTube Top 100 educational videos represent the top videos on EduTube based on popularity, rating and educational value. This may be as close as one might get to a list of the best free educational videos that are online today.

For those who are more interested in fun, 'edutaining' videos, there is the Most Popular educational videos page. Some of these are less educational than others, but they can inspire you to learn more about various subjects.

The most popular section has several lists. You can watch the most popular educational videos All Time, or the most popular videos for specific years: 2008, 2007 and 2006 (it may seem like online educational videos have been around for years, but it is quite a recent phenomenon).

To provide you with some numbers on the popularity of these videos: the 100 most popular videos listed on this site are watched at least 1000 times per day on the video hosting site. The 40 most popular educational videos are watched at least 10 000 times a day. That might not compete with the likes of Madonna or Shakira, but it's an impressive number of viewers and shows how much interest educational videos can generate. Perhaps this is a hint for teachers on how to make their classes more interesting - use video!

Thank you for your contributions and for visiting EduTube.

- The EduTube team.

The graph below (created using StatPlanet) shows that the world still has long way to go in achieving gender equality. The y-axis shows the percentage of parliament seats held by women, the x-axis shows the ratio of estimated female to male earned income, and the bubble size indicates GDP per capita (PPP). Read more.

So what does the graph indicate?

1. Not a single country comes close to achieving gender equality in income

In most countries, women earn only 25-75 percent as much as men. The countries that come closest to the gender equalizing figure of 1 are Sweden (=0.84) and Kenya (=0.82). The lowest are the Palestinian Territories (0.12), Saudi Arabia (0.17) and Oman (0.2), where women are estimated to earn less than a quarter of what men are earning. 

2. Women outnumber men in parliament in only one country in the world - Rwanda

See also the BBC article women to rule Rwanda parliament.

3. Wealthier countries do not necessarily have higher gender equality

This is indicated by the fact that the larger bubbles (= richer countries) are all over the graph. For example, the United States (in the middle of the graph) is far behind Rwanda and Angola when it comes to gender equality in parliament.

4.  A country may do well on one gender indicator, but very poorly on another

Kenya and Papua New Guinea, shown in the bottom right of the graph, are examples of this. When it comes to earned income, women are quite well off in comparison to other countries. However, both countries fare poorly if we look at the percentage of seats in parliament held by women, which is only 9.8 % for Kenya and a miniscule 0.9 % for Papua New Guinea.

The indicators from the graph above are shown seperately as thematic maps below: Ratio of estimated female to male earned income, and percentage of parliament seats held by women (also made with StatPlanet).