Slashdot Mirror
Domain: americanthinker.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to americanthinker.com.
Stories · 3
-
Do E-Readers Spell the Demise Of Traditional Schooling?
Attila Dimedici writes "I came across a an article this morning that suggests that the Nook and the Kindle have changed things in such a way that schools are becoming obsolete. His premise is that the ideal way to teach children is by a tutor ..., [and] the Nook and the Kindle have allowed large amounts of written material on many different subjects to become accessible enough that parents can tutor their children at a price that just about everyone can afford." The author is a bit off-base on the nature of the public schooling, but easy access to resources like Project Gutenberg and Wikibooks certainly removes some barriers to self-study and the limitations of the 20+ child classroom. -
The Intentional Flooding of America's Heartland
Hugh Pickens writes "Joe Herring writes that sixty years ago, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began the process of taming the Missouri by constructing massive dams at the top to moderate flow to the smaller dams below, generating electricity while providing desperately needed control of the river's devastating floods. But after about thirty years of operation, as the environmentalist movement gained strength throughout the seventies and eighties, the Corps received a great deal of pressure to include specific environmental concerns into their Master Water Control Manual, the 'bible' for the operation of the dam system, as preservation of habitat for at-risk bird and fish populations soon became a hot issue among the burgeoning environmental lobby. The Corps began to utilize the dam system to mimic the previous flow cycles of the original river, holding back large amounts of water upstream during the winter and early spring in order to release them rapidly as a spring pulse. 'Whether warned or not, the fact remains that had the Corps been true to its original mission of flood control, the dams would not have been full in preparation for a spring pulse,' writes Herring. 'The dams could further have easily handled the additional runoff without the need to inundate a sizable chunk of nine states.' The horrifying consequence is water rushing from the dams on the Missouri twice as fast as the highest previous releases on record while the levees that protect the cities and towns downstream were constructed to handle the flow rates promised at the time of the dam's construction." -
How To Misuse Statistics
Attila Dimedici writes "This story does a great job of showing how statistics are misused by comparing the incidence of voting for Democrats to the incidence of cancer. While the story has a strong ideological bias, it does a good job of poking fun at the way politicians (and others) misuse statistics."