Newsy.com is a startup headquartered across the street from the Missouri Journalism School that is betting that a curatorial approach to video-based media stories is the way to ensure unbiased coverage.

This post from ReadWriteWeb gives an overview on the company’s founder, business model, and approach– specifically it’s off-to-the-races iPad app. A quick browse through Newsy’s site yields a range of short video clips that explore U.S. and global news stories like congressional efforts to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and fraying relations between North and South Korea. And then there are the slightly more frivolous stories ranging from partisan attacks to frog invasions.

Newsy’s structure of piecing together clips from a range of news sources and then posing a question dodges any useful journalistic attempt at analysis, but if used as a discussion launcher or a starting point for a more in-depth exploration of a given topic, these clips should be a useful tool in the classroom.

George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs sponsors a rich array of events devoted to world affairs. Now, a Multimedia Center on the school’s website allows faculty and students to experience and learn from events they could not attend in person. In the school’s own words:

The Elliott School’s Web Video Initiative capitalizes on our robust events program that brings hundreds of scholars, policymakers, diplomats, journalists, and other world leaders to the GW campus each year. Our goal is to share our extraordinary on-campus resources with the broader community to advance understanding of important international issues.

Program topics include U.S. – China economic relations, the implications of Nuclear Weapon-Free Zones, foreign policy challenges in Africa and Latin America, global women’s issues, and many more.

Public Agenda is a nonpartisan non-profit that seeks to bridge “the gap between American leaders and what the public really thinks about issues … in American life.”

Public engagement and the need to grapple respectfully with tough issues are key threads running throughout the materials on the Public Agenda website. Their Citizen’s Survival Kit covers a host of high-profile policy issues and features the tag line “Get the Facts. Consider the Choices. Stay Involved”– a good blueprint for informed civic engagement of any sort. A particularly salient policy issue in light of Arizona’s tough new stance and the upcoming midterm elections is immigration. Public Agenda includes an issue guide on the subject as well as the results of a survey in which legal and illegal immigrants were asked about their attitudes toward life in the United States.

Energy policy is another area of emphasis on Public Agenda’s website. This page provides case studies of foreign nations held up as alternative energy exemplars and provides a host of class discussion points.

And for anyone worried enough about the federal deficit to want to watch it increase on a real-time basis, you can find a National Debt Clock widget here to add to any web page. (Yes, that’s it below.)

Pretty much everyone is in agreement that happiness is a great thing. This time of year, I’m sure many academics and students feel a temporary sense of happiness when finals are over and summer begins… or at least is close to beginning. But what about the non-students and non-academics out there? What makes them happy?

Studies of happiness in cross-national comparison abound. Depending on which survey and which year you are looking at, the Danes are the happiest people in the world – or the Costa Ricans, or the Nigerians. What makes the citizens of these nations happy? Again, that depends on which report you read: economic security in Denmark, the lack of an army and an emphasis on sustainability in Costa Rica, and the absence of materialism in Nigeria.

Bringing happiness to the political science classroom certainly makes for great discussion. For research methods classes, happiness studies lend themselves to discussions of variables, measurement, hypotheses, and cross-national comparisons. In political theory classes, students might wonder what the links are between different types of political systems and happiness – for example, is it true that “democracy makes people happy?”  Given the wave of democratization in the last few decades, this is an interesting question.

In comparative politics classes, we might take up the issue of research design and comparability: how well do concepts such as “happiness” with their subjective and cultural connotations travel across different countries and regions of the world? Political economy courses might study the correlations between economic systems or indicators and national happiness.

Here are a few happiness websites you might want to explore (many others only require a Google search):

The World Values Survey describes Ronald Inglehart’s study,  according to which happiness has increased over time in most countries where data are available. The website also provides access to the data on which the study was based. The Happiness Show discusses two different ways in which studies have measured happiness, resulting in different rankings: if people are just asked how happy they are, Nigeria emerges as the winner, but if satisfaction with life is also included, Puerto Rico ranks first (Zimbabwe has the lowest score).

Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times Op Ed speculates on the reasons why Costa Ricans are the happiest people on earth. In this 60 Minutes piece, Morley Safer presents a tongue-in-cheek take on Denmark as happiest country. This Bloomberg Businessweek article on global happiness suggests, perhaps unsurprisingly, that money still matters.

And then there’s this Map of World Happiness created by Adrian White, an analytic social psychologist at the the University of Leicester:

One of the things I enjoy most about the MPSA is the chance to meet and speak with people I may have only communicated with by phone or e-mail. So when Kiki Caruson of the University of South Florida came by Soomo’s booth to introduce herself in person, it was sort of like having a long-lost cousin drop in for a visit. A lively discussion broke out in the midst of demoing Americans Governing, and I discovered that Kiki is secretly a number-cruncher at heart…and knows, well, people we already consider friends of Soomo. Like Phillip “Hutch” Pollock, the author of our Statistical Analysis and Politics assignments. (Okay, they both teach in Florida and the academic world doesn’t need to play 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon in order to connect the kinship dots– but, still, it was fun!)

In addition to knowing how to discuss research methods and statistical software in a way that doesn’t cause my throat to close up, Kiki shared an online simulation site that has worked well in her classes.

LegSim.org allows instructors to incorporate a class-wide, online legislative simulation into their courses for a fee of $12 per student enrolled. Simulations based on the U.S. House of Representatives, state legislatures, and the European Union are available on the site. And it’s easy to get a feel for how this simulation might work in your own course via a virtual tour as well as a test drive that gives you a clear understanding of what a student will experience.