No, you do not need to be a medical doctor to have a well-paying career in the health care field.

These careers are booming for two reasons: The population is aging, and people want to live as long as they can in good health, and new health care technologies add considerably to their options and your career opportunities.

[Browse our list of health care degree programs]

Begin by making up for key high school sciences you may have missed or dropped. You will need them to understand the technical side of your work. If you got poor marks, many credit science courses are available as online or continuing education, so you can better your marks, without leaving your current situation, before you apply. Keep track of volunteer work you do that promotes health, because it demonstrates your serious interest in the field.

Most fields allow you to start in an entry level position with a certificate from an accredited institution, but for career advancement, acquire an Associates or Bachelors degree. Make sure that the school you choose is accredited by the specific body responsible for that field. Online programs should usually be supplemented by interaction with patients and training in use laboratories or with medical equipment.

Health care careers in general often require shift work (nursing, for example), but with advancement and seniority, you can choose shifts you find convenient more easily.

But now let’s look at careers and their approximate salaries: Continued…

Martin Hilbert and his colleague Priscilla Lopez have calculated how many bytes of data humans have accumulated to date, going back to ancient times and including the newest electronic storage devices: a grand total of 295 exabytes.

Since there are 1,000 petabytes in an exabyte, and 1,000 terabytes in a petabyte, and 1,000 gigabyties in a terabyte, this means that humans have so far in history generated 295 trillion gigabytes of information. Think of this as trillions and trillions of 1-gig thumbdrives. Add to this that the rate of electronic storage capacity is increasing by 58 percent a year, and we have a huge data glut.

We might therefore think of higher education as charting road maps through this vast sea of information.

SOURCE: news.cnet.com

The above graph, linked to from inflationdata.com, shows how the rate at which higher education has been increasing in cost vastly outstrips the rate for everyday items. Many factors have unduly inflated the cost of higher education, not least the ready availability of government loans to fund education and thus subsidize, and even encourage, educational institutions in raising their prices.

This disparity between education inflation and ordinary inflation has now even been indexed by contrasting the CPI (consumer price index, which is based on a basket of ordinary goods) with the HEPI (higher-education price index, which is based on the cost of higher education — see commonfund.org).

All this suggests that the market for online and distance education will skyrocket in coming years as the benefit of a campus-based education recedes in the face of ever-increasing debts that students and families incur when they go the traditional campus-based route.

The Foreign Language Assistance Program (FLAP) of the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) is making grants to a handful of schools around the country to institute an Arabic language and culture curriculum at the middle school level. Arabic studies at these schools would be mandatory:

http://dfw.cbslocal.com/…arabic-classes

This is creating some controversy, but it raises an interesting possibility whether Arabic studies, even at this early age, may provide exciting career opportunities down the line.

You’re off to school. You’re going to be facing many new challenges. What you don’t need is to be wasting lots of time and energy. You need to get things done quickly and efficiently. For that, you’ll need the assortment of products listed here. All of these products are electronic. We live in an electronic-digital age, and highly effective students make the most of the opportunities such products provide.

As you go through this list, you’ll find some overlap. For instance, your cell phone / SmartPhone can serve as a camera. So too, your laptop computer can play DVDs and Blu-ray. In our experience, it’s best to have dedicated units for each of the main tasks and sources of information you’ll be facing as a student. All-purpose electronics that are advertised as “doing everything” often don’t do anything particularly well. By contrast, we’ve found dedicated electronics get the job done, are easier to use, and less liable to bugs and break-downs.

Here, then, is our list of 10 must-have products: Continued…

Amy Chua’s “Tiger Mom” method of child-rearing and education raises an intriguing possibility. Tiger Moms don’t just require hard work and excellent performance from their kids. They require that their kids be number one at all the things that the Tiger Moms regard as important (which, for Ms. Chua, left out sports and drama). Ms. Chua, for instance, recalls her father, when he attended an assembly at school for her during her childhood, becoming incensed that she had only achieved the second spot in some area of achievement, telling her that she should never again disgrace him and the family in this way (suggesting also that the reason Ms. Chua is a Tiger Mom is that her father was a “Tiger Dad”).

It is, however, a sad fact of mathematics that the number one spot in any endeavor can only be held by a single individual. So the intriguing possibility here is what if two or more Tiger Moms have children in the same school, in the same grade, competing for the same distinction. A teacher with a fiendish streak might have some fun here, pitting the moms against each other, to the entertainment and good times of all, save the Tiger Moms and their offspring. All this, of course, is said tongue in cheek. Forcing kids to be number one seems an ill-conceived way to achieve excellence. Such an approach neglects the fact that children have diverse talents. Moreover, it inculcates a fear of failure that can only be painful when the competition finally gets stiff enough so that the number one spot is no longer attainable.

But perhaps most worrisome is all the outstanding people that would be left in the dust if Ms. Chua’s approach were commonly employed. Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, and Winston Churchill would hardly have fared well under Ms. Chua’s tutelage. Each of them were in some ways quite average in their early life, and thus would have been completely unacceptable to Ms. Chua. It remains to be seen whether her two daughters will achieve anything like the distinction of these three.

Science Magazine has posted its most famous scientists of the last 200 years:

Welcome to the Science Hall of Fame, a pantheon of the most famous scientists of the past 200 years. This interactive database uses an objective and literal measure of fame: the frequency with which the full names of scientists appear in books published between 1800 and 2000. This is an example of “culturomics” (see the Research Article by Michel et al. in the 14 January 2011 issue).

Look up scientists by name — or sort the data by column — to see their impact in milliDarwins (mD): one-thousandth of the average annual frequency that Charles Darwin’s name appears in English-language books from the year he was 30 years old (1839) until 2000. Click the mD value to see a chart of their data over time.

This first version of the Science Hall of Fame is a rough draft. There are classification errors, and many famous scientists are excluded at this point for technical reasons. Please read the article introducing The Science Hall of Fame. To explore the data further and hear interviews with famous scientists, visit the supporting site. You may also share your thoughts about this new view of scientists’ impact across society and history.

Interestingly, Bertrand Russell heads the list.

Are boys between 3 and 13 being left behind in American education? Ali Carr-Chellman argues that they are:

Perfect essay? Okay, we can’t do perfect. But your target is getting accepted at the university or college of your choice, here are some ideas for a scream-free writing experience that might help:

1. Relax. Yes, the admissions essay is important. And you want to do your best. But relaxation is your secret weapon. If you do everything right—and blow yourself out of the building anyway—it probably wasn’t the right school for you. Here are some relaxation techniques used by professional writers. Chances are, you will find at least one of them useful.

2. Start drafting the essay in your mind long before you think you need to. Actually, you can start drafting it any time you like. While your essay needs to be tailored to the institution to which you aspire, most of them will ask the same basic questions. And you can work on the same basic answers long in advance.

3. It is best to begin by freewriting for a fixed period, perhaps 20 minutes, recording your responses to the guideline questions. If there are no specific guidelines, focus on the life experiences that shaped and taught you, as well as what you hope to achieve in life. Explain why you want admission to that particular school and highlight the personal qualities that will help you succeed. Keep and then expand on the freewriting material that seems to say what you intended.

4. Organize your essay around a central theme that emerges from your freewriting. Depending on the essay’s length, it’s best to develop three or at most five sub-themes that flow naturally from the theme. An essay with too many sub-themes can distract the reader, like a story with too many characters.

5. When talking about yourself, focus on what you learned from others. None of us see ourselves clearly. People will learn far more by hearing who made an impression on you than they will by hearing a lecture on yourself.

6. When recounting life experiences—no matter how challenging—don’t tell loser stories, and especially don’t tell sore loser stories. Explain what you did to overcome challenges and why that experience makes you an asset to the university. If tempted, remind yourself: Nobody out there can make life right for me. Either I make it right or it just stays wrong.

7. At the same time, do resist the temptation to sound like “the very student the selection committee is looking for!” if that image does not feel like you. Otherwise, if you do get accepted, prepare to be The Very Student for four whole years. You’ll end up loathing a person you can’t divorce. Well, how can you? They don’t exist.

8. Don’t get frustrated because what you have written so far is not a Pulitzer Prize shoo-in. You never saw Shakespeare’s waste basket either, but you’d probably feel better if you could. It’s better not to get fussed by details at this point. We polish our gems after we cut them.

9. While writing, treat the word count as your friend, not your enemy. Keep an eye on it as you go, and decisions about what to put in and what to leave out are much easier. For example, you will probably need to distinguish between what is “interesting” and what is “essential” to your theme. Knowing you have only 300 words left will help. And always remember, the key to good writing is the Delete key.

11. Get someone who understands the admissions process to read your essay, and be prepared to revise based on their input. Some ideas travel well; others don’t.

12. When everything else is done, put the essay away for a day or so, and go do something else. You cannot appraise your work while it is still echoing in your head. When you get back to it, you will find one of two things: Either it needs a bit of work or it needs a lot of work. In the latter case, you will be glad you built in that extra time at the beginning.

And best of luck!

Email

• 107 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2010.
• 294 billion – Average number of email messages per day.
• 1.88 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
• 480 million – New email users since the year before.
• 89.1% – The share of emails that were spam.
• 262 billion – The number of spam emails per day (assuming 89% are spam).
• 2.9 billion – The number of email accounts worldwide.
• 25% – Share of email accounts that are corporate.

Websites

• 255 million – The number of websites as of December 2010.
• 21.4 million – Added websites in 2010.

Web servers

• 39.1% – Growth in the number of Apache websites in 2010.
• 15.3% – Growth in the number of IIS websites in 2010.
• 4.1% – Growth in the number of nginx websites in 2010.
• 5.8% – Growth in the number of Google GWS websites in 2010.
• 55.7% – Growth in the number of Lighttpd websites in 2010.
• Web server market share: Apache – 59.4%; Microsoft – 22.2%; nginx – 6.6%; Google – 5.9%; Lighttpd – .5%; Other – 5.4%.

Domain names

• 88.8 million – .COM domain names at the end of 2010.
• 13.2 million – .NET domain names at the end of 2010.
• 8.6 million – .ORG domain names at the end of 2010.
• 79.2 million – The number of country code top-level domains (e.g. .CN, .UK, .DE, etc.).
• 202 million – The number of domain names across all top-level domains (October 2010).
• 7% – The increase in domain names since the year before.

Internet users

• 1.97 billion – Internet users worldwide (June 2010).
• 14% – Increase in Internet users since the previous year.
• 825.1 million (42.0%) – Internet users in Asia.
• 475.1 million (24.2%) – Internet users in Europe.
• 266.2 million (13.5%) – Internet users in North America.
• 204.7 million (10.4%) – Internet users in Latin America / Caribbean.
• 110.9 million (5.6%) – Internet users in Africa.
• 63.2 million (3.2%) – Internet users in the Middle East.
• 21.3 million (1.1%) – Internet users in Oceania / Australia.

Social media

• 152 million – The number of blogs on the Internet (as tracked by BlogPulse).
• 25 billion – Number of sent tweets on Twitter in 2010
• 100 million – New accounts added on Twitter in 2010
• 175 million – People on Twitter as of September 2010
• 7.7 million – People following @ladygaga (Lady Gaga, Twitter’s most followed user).
• 600 million – People on Facebook at the end of 2010.
• 250 million – New people on Facebook in 2010.
• 30 billion – Pieces of content (links, notes, photos, etc.) shared on Facebook per month.
• 70% – Share of Facebook’s user base located outside the United States.
• 20 million – The number of Facebook apps installed each day.

Web browsers

• 46.9% – Internet Explorer.
• 30.8% – Firefox.
• 14.9% – Chrome.
• 4.8% – Safari.
• 2.1% – Opera.

Videos

• 2 billion – The number of videos watched per day on YouTube.
• 35 – Hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute.
• 186 – The number of online videos the average Internet user watches in a month (USA).
• 84% – Share of Internet users that view videos online (USA).
• 14% – Share of Internet users that have uploaded videos online (USA).
• 2+ billion – The number of videos watched per month on Facebook.
• 20 million – Videos uploaded to Facebook per month.

Images

• 5 billion – Photos hosted by Flickr (September 2010).
• 3000+ – Photos uploaded per minute to Flickr.
• 130 million – At the above rate, the number of photos uploaded per month to Flickr.
• 3+ billion – Photos uploaded per month to Facebook.
• 36 billion – At the current rate, the number of photos uploaded to Facebook per year.