Ah, finals. A monotonous, stressful rite of passage for high school and college students around the world. Controversies regarding their ultimate efficacy have resulted in schools as notable as Harvard purging final exams from the curriculum altogether. But educators still need a way to ensure the material sinks into their pupils’ brains, and the more innovative ones out there have whipped up some viable alternatives. Many prove far more applicable to the syllabus than a mere test, making it far easier for students to visualize exactly how everything works. Check out some of the following when searching for inspiration about creative ways to wrap everything up without lessons unsticking.

2. Advanced Newsweek

Journalism students at University of Gloucestershire spend their last week of class applying their lessons to real-world problems rather than rehashing them out through essays and exams. Advanced Newsweek challenges them to operate their very own news conglomerate, with online, television, and radio branches - and all the stressors that entails. One can easily see how this final exam alternative benefits soon-to-be graduates in the long run!

Wednesday's Indonesia earthquake was similar in magnitude to the devastating 2004 quake, but there was no tsunami. The difference? Location. 

A powerful earthquake and aftershock struck the Indian Ocean off of northern Indonesia Wednesday, triggering tsunami watches and evacuations throughout the Indian Ocean basin, from Australia to Kenya.

The first temblor, a magnitude 8.6 quake, struck at 2:38 p.m. local time, along a segment of a fault on the sea floor some 269 miles southwest of the coastal city of Banda Aceh, capital of Aceh province. A second, 8.2 magnitude quake struck two hours later roughly 120 miles south of the first quake's epicenter.

Both quakes occurred at relatively shallow depths – 14 miles and 10 miles – beneath the sea floor, according to data gathered by the US Geological Survey's National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colo.

So far, the quakes appear to have done little damage and caused no fatalities, although people felt the shaking as far away as the east coast of India. In Banda Aceh, many residents streamed into the streets when the shaking began, according to press reports from the city.

Memories of the disastrous December 2004 earthquake and tsunami remain fresh. The event left 230,000 dead throughout the Indian Ocean basin as the tsunami in some locations reached heights of up to 90 feet.

Though both of Wednesday's large quakes join the magnitude 9.1 event in 2004 event as “great” earthquakes – the strongest of six categories – the initial temblor Wednesday reportedly pushed only a 30-inch-high surge of water onto Indonesia's west coast.

In addition, the 2004 event released nearly six times as much energy as the first quake that struck on Wednesday and some 22 times more energy than the second.

The difference? Location, suggests Amy Vaughan, a geophysicist with the National Earthquake Information Center.

The 2004 rupture occurred along the northern reaches of a subduction zone that hugs the west coast of Indonesia and defines the arc of Indonesia's islands.

The quake occurred in a section of the zone where a vast patch of crust known as the Indian plate is sliding beneath the much smaller Burma plate. Quakes along such subduction zones tend to generate the planet's most violent temblors because the surface areas sliding past each other are large.

Researchers estimate that the patch of the subduction zone affected in the 2004 quake covered an area roughly the size of California. The amount of slip along the length of this patch was 50 feet.

Along the deep-sea trench that marks the subduction zone, the quake lifted the overlying crust several yards. The sudden upward shove along the length of the rupture zone generated the enormous tsunamis the region experienced.

Today's quakes occurred farther offshore and on a different type of fault, Ms. Vaughan explains.

The faults involved Wednesday are so-called strike-slip faults that sit squarely on the Australian plate, another of the plates forming the subduction zone off Indonesia. Strike-slip faults tend to be vertical cracks in the crust. This means that the plates usually slide by each other without radically altering the height of the sea floor.

By contrast, the thrust faults along a subduction zone run diagonally downward from the sea floor as one plate slips under the other. This increases the possibility of disturbing the height of the sea floor. It also means the area of the surfaces sliding past each other is much greater than during a strike-slip rupture.

“We've had a series of these occur since 2004,” Vaughan says, referring to undersea quakes on the Australian plate. The most recent occurred in January – a magnitude 7.2 quake whose epicenter was only about 13 miles from that of the 8.6 quake on Wednesday.

The faults involved in Wednesday's quakes are oriented in the same direction as the general direction of travel the Australian plate itself is following, suggesting that the ruptures are tied to the plate's movement, although to some degree the event also may represent the crust's continued adjustment to the major change the 2004 event brought to the region, Vaughan says.

Study abroad isn’t just a luxury, these days it’s a rite of passage for many students around the world. While more and more students in Asia and the U.S. are venturing overseas, a recent survey shows that just 57.2% of Japanese students, once the prototypical image of expat learners during the bubble, are interested in an overseas academic experience.

The survey, published by the Japan Youth Research Institute, polled over 8,000 students from China, South Korea, Japan and the U.S. in 2011. Even though 58.1% of Japanese students had been abroad, they ranked lowest of the four countries in terms of interest in a study abroad experience. In comparison, 82.4% in South Korea and 62.5% in China and were interested.

So why has enthusiasm waned in Japan? It’s not economic reasons, as only 19.5% of Japanese said that money was a barrier. And it’s not because they’ll miss home – only 10.3% said that was a consideration, compared with 30.4% of Chinese, 54.2% of Koreans and 58.1% of Americans.

The biggest reason that Japanese students cited for not wanting to study abroad was that life in their home country was easier at 53.2%, followed by “language barrier” and “lack of confidence in living alone” with 48.1% and 42.7% respectively, three criteria that the other students also ranked highly.

It could be due to apathy among Japanese boys. Some 20.4% of Japanese high school boys surveyed said they had no interest at all in study abroad, the highest of any of the countries surveyed. In comparison, 65.9% of Japanese girls said they were very or somewhat interested.

The lukewarm enthusiasm for study abroad in Japan is not a surprise given other recent data. Up from a low in 1986 of only 14,297 students, the number of Japanese study abroad students has been declining since it hit a peak of 82,945 in 2004, according to the OECD. In recent years, their Asian counterparts seeking an academic experience abroad have surged, and 2.25 million Chinese studied abroad in 2011.

The survey gives some indication of why this might be so when it breaks down the reasons that students do want to study abroad. While all of the 42.1% of Japanese students who wanted to study abroad said they one day wanted to work in an international setting, only 14.4% said going abroad would help them get a job. That’s much different from the goals of Chinese students, many of whom gave better academics abroad and better chances of being hired as incentives for leaving home.

Most Japanese companies have fixed hiring schedules and only accept graduates immediately after they have left school. The rigid system could be a deterrent to Japanese students, compared with their Chinese, Korean and U.S. peers who don’t face such strict hiring practices and might be more flexible to study abroad while at university.

It's becoming more and more popular these days to back up your data to the cloud. Your iPhone does it. Your tablet does it. And one day, perhaps soon, your doctor could be able to send a backup of you to the cloud.

The concept sounds far fetched, but that's exactly what Amazon and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are up to. The collaborative effort is called the 1000 Genomes Project, and has already compiled 1,700 human genomes - essentially, the recipe for making 1,700 different people. Previously, this kind of data was only available to researchers by mailing data disks back and forth. The Amazon initiative now makes all that data available to genetic researchers via the Amazon cloud.

Already, the project has amassed 200 terabytes worth of data on human DNA, and is on track to add another 100 terabytes' worth of data soon. Researchers believe that by having so much data on human genetics readily available, they'll be better able to home in on the role genes play on disease. According to Matt Wood, head of the project at Amazon, "This is the seed to create a tree of data."