CNN news 2012-01-21 加文本

cnn news 2012-01-21

AZUZ (voice-over): Researchers say this new frog species is the world`s smallest vertebrate. You can see just how small. It doesn`t even take up half of that dime. Scientists discovered the frog in the island nation of Papua, New Guinea, where it lives in tropical forests.

What`s fascinating is that the researchers think these animals are born directly as frogs. They don`t go through the tadpole stage. Scientists think the frogs will be helpful in studying extreme body size.

AZUZ: More than 13 million Americans are out of work. The big question that you hear from a lot of young people is if they will be able to find a job when they graduate from college. Poppy Harlow has a report on one major where students are getting job offers before they even get a diploma.

POPPY HARLOW, cnnMONEY.COM (voice-over): Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg may have dropped out of college, but back on campus, computer science is hot, and students with coding skills are burning up the job market.

HARLOW: By graduation, how many companies reached out to you about working for them?

TAL SAFRON, NYU COMPUTER SCIENCE GRADUATE: I`d say between 10 and 20 have reached out to me, just before graduating.

HARLOW: How many job offers did you get?

SAFRON: Around four or five.

HARLOW: You haven`t even graduated yet. How many companies have reached out to you?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Between 10 and 20.

HARLOW (voice-over): It`s a common story for computer science majors.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Most of my friends who are also CS students do have the same similar feeling. They`re not -- they`re not really worried about jobs.

HARLOW (voice-over): Just look at tech job postings to see the demand. At NYU, that translated into a 94 percent placement rate for computer science grads last spring. For the class of 2011, computer science majors did the best on the job hunt.

HARLOW: Fifty-six percent had a job offer before graduation compared with 41 percent overall.

What do your friends tell you who aren`t computer science majors about getting a job?

SAFRON: They think I don`t live in reality.

HARLOW (voice-over): An average starting salary of 66,000 bucks and job security may be why the major is taking off, with enrollment at NYU up 50 percent since 2007.

EVAN KORTH, ASSOC. PROF., NYU, COMPUTER SCIENCE: Many students, whether they`re computer science majors or not, are starting to understand that coding is literacy of the future, and they`re -- they want to get in on that.

HARLOW (voice-over): Tal and Naditja (ph) both participated in a summer program offered by Hack NY, founded by Evan and Columbia Professor Chris Wiggins to cultivate the talents of budding tech stars and show them their career choices are broader than just Google and Goldman Sachs.

CHRIS WIGGINS, PROF., COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, APPLIED MATH: Result first at no.

HARLOW (voice-over): The hacking community may speak a slightly different language.

WIGGINS: I mean, you can present PageRank, Google`s fundamental algorithm, as an important eigenvector problem and then they sort of --

HARLOW: Eigen what?

WIGGINS: An eigenvector.

HARLOW (voice-over): But one thing is crystal clear: this is where the jobs area.

KORTH: I get email every day, asking me if I have a student that could build X or build Y.

HARLOW: But is this just a fad? I mean, are the jobs here today, gone tomorrow?

KORTH: Is the Internet going to be gone tomorrow?

HARLOW: No.

KORTH: I don`t think the jobs will be gone tomorrow, either.

HARLOW (voice-over): In New York, Poppy Harlow, cnnmoney.

AZUZ: A lot of important events are coming up on Monday, all inspired by the same man, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the leader of the American civil rights movement in the 1950s and `60s.

AZUZ (voice-over): His memorial on the National Mall in Washington was unveiled last year, but the federal holiday honoring Dr. King dates back 26 years. It`s held on the third Monday in January because that`s around the time of his birthday, January 15th.

Even though we`re off the air on Monday, and many businesses and schools will be closed, the Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service is described as a day on, not a day off. What this means is Americans are encouraged to get out and volunteer.

It could be helping at a nature conservancy or cleaning up a local park. And it`s in the spirit of Dr. King`s work to make the country a better place to live.

Using art to honor MLK, the lasting impact of teachers, measuring BMI in schools and hip-hop that helps kids: these are a small sample of the stories up right now on cnn`s new education blog. It`s called the "Schools of Thought." It`s awesome. It`s about all things education. Check it out today at cnnstudentnews.com.

AZUZ: And before we go, if you`ve ever been forced to look at someone`s vacation pictures, we guarantee they didn`t look like this.

AZUZ (voice-over): This is a time-lapse video of one man`s journey around the world. He quit his job, grabbed his camera and just took off. Seventeen countries, 25,000 miles, all of that in less than a year. He used more than 6,000 pictures to make this video, but he actually snapped more than 10,000 time-lapse shots and 15,000 pictures and videos on his trip.

AZUZ: Spending that much time behind the camera could make you "shutter," although it obviously "lens" its to some incredible pictures. That ends our journey for today. We`re off on Monday for Martin Luther King Day. We hope you enjoy the weekend. Look forward to seeing you on Tuesday.