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governments suppressing their people, electric grid is very exposed to both humans hacking

You know that requires random numbers right, large quantities that even if humans where good at generating random numbers they wouldn't be able to do fast enough.

But humans are terrible at generating random numbers, say to someone pick a number and my guess is it will generally be between 1 and 10, and whole. Even then there I the distribution will not be even. https://www.education.com/scie...

Tens of millions of Universities? Oh my indeed!

ahh, the troll, the last resort of the defeated. better luck next time.

Now lets drop the snark for a second, because I want to ask you a serious question.

Immediately after I gave you webpage citations, several of them, and then said "I can give you hundreds more", and the challenge to tell Universities that they are trolling the world with a problem, that you actually thought that I was talking about individual students, and not the Universities that are experiencing the problem that I was giving the links to?

And lest we forget, I answered you in the same vein as you replied, which to the trained eye, looks kinda snarky, but if you declare that trolling, then you were as well. P So since I've cleared that, is it your opinion that the problem does not exist, and that the Universities are making this up?

In some ways, this is like the remedial classes that are taught at Universities for Algebra, or other ares that placement tests show that a student is deficient in.

The big difference is that the deficiency is held by the parents of the students, who have not learned the final courtesy of parenting - letting your child become an adult. In my University, as the problem presented itself and would not go away, they eventually separated the parents from the students for special parental orientation. And it was much more traumatic for the parents by far. And only partially successful, as 18 years of overprotection doesn't go away just because someone tells you you are interfereing in your adult child's emotional growth.

Another part of the disservice we have done to them is the self esteem movement, a cornerstone of the millenial's education and socialization, has failed and failed badly.

https://www.psychologytoday.co...

http://www.albertmohler.com/20...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

side note - when the President of the Southern Baptist Theological seminary and the Huffpost agree on something, we might pay attention.

http://www.education.com/magaz...

http://articles.latimes.com/20...

Regardless, the millennials were badly let down, by their parents inability to parent, and by societies belief that if you constantly tell someone they are special and the best, that they will grow up to be special and the best. Neither idea actually worked very well. Self esteem, that cornerstone of the millenial's upbringing, as it turns out, is earned, not conferred by praising every tiny thing a person does. A young person should not have either high or low self esteem. It is something developed, not inculcated. They should be encouraged and told about what they might be, but not told they have achieved greatness for sharpening a pencil.

And another corrosive element often shared by sports people is that if a person puts their mind to it, they can be anything at all that they want. Nope, nope nope. I can never be a female supermodel, and although athletic, I will never set a record in a marathon. Just won't. Wrong body style. I can wish and try as hard as I can, but I will fail.

And yet, I have very high esteem. It's built on what I have done in life, and my many achievements. All of them earned, and earned well.

No, ALL plants move. Some move more perceptibly than others. The two examples I gave were "Very noticeable movement", but even grass moves.

There are several mechanisms by which a plant may be able to move. The most common is "Phototropism", but there are other forms of plant movement, including those responding to tactile stimulous, and many others

Your argument is what needs work.

From an ideal standpoint it looks as if super-intelligent kids is something every parent would want. However there are some drawbacks. First, IQ is only a rough measure of intelligence, there are many factors involved and success in life is not immediately linked to IQ. See Unabomber, etc. Also super intelligent kids may not be that easy to handle. They typically hate school and may actually do poorly in school. They demand much more attention from parents (more activities, more time with them, etc). There is plenty of evidence that IQ is also linked to the environment kids grow in, so simply selecting the gene stuff and thinking this may be enough will not work. Intelligence is also linked to curiosity and independence and so perhaps to more risky behaviours. Finally there is a correlation with very high IQ and some severe forms of mental illness.

All in all, there is a cluster of reasons why the average IQ of the population is 100. High intelligence is not always that comfortable. Think of Sir Winston Churchill, hero of the battle of England, most effective Prime Minister in a time of war, Nobel prize winner in litterature. He had severe depression all his life (his "black dog"). I agree we should raise the general IQ though, cautiously.

No printer required. The sound quality of these is arguably better too.

No, the primary problem is poverty.

If you control for socioeconomic status, a whole lot of the differences in testing just go away.

But, you say, isn't America a rich country? Yes, it is, but we also have a huge poverty and especially child poverty problem. Not just in relative terms, but also in absolute terms due to high inequality. Within the OECD, we have above average poverty and child poverty (absolute meaning that most OECD countries have a lower percentage of the population live below the US poverty line). We also have lots more wealthy people, of course, but that doesn't make children with low SES learn better, while the educational benefits of high SES eventually hit diminishing returns.

In short, standardized tests largely test the socioeconomic status of the student body, and not the quality of schools or teachers.

This particular test also appears to be norm-referenced rather than criterion-referenced, so it's a poor choice for evaluating student or teacher performance in different states (whereas it might be useful for comparing school curricula in different states; e.g., to critique California's science curricula).

Of course, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't also fix other problematic aspects of our educational system, but "let's dissolve teacher unions and throw out the bad teachers" isn't going to fix much. For starters, you'd either end up doing very little or end up with a teacher shortage: because being a teacher in America, as opposed to, say Finland is a comparatively low-status, low-income profession. Note that low-income is relative; it's not that teachers are necessarily starving, but the income you make based on a MAT degree is much lower than what you can get out of many other graduate degrees -- so, why go into teaching unless you're either (1) truly motivated or (2) can't hack it elsewhere? Contrast that with Finland, where teachers are well-paid, highly regarded people; a graduate degree is required (though university education is basically free) along with additional practical training; as a result, Finnish schools get to pick from the best of the best.

http://www.education.com/gift-guide/ has some education related gift ideas.

It certainly raises a red flag for me when you consider that a single vaccine can give a child an exposure 5-10x the OSHA limit for mercury poisoning.

Really? From childhood.com: "An infant who is exclusively breast-fed will ingest more than twice the quantity of mercury that was ever contained in vaccines and fifteen times the quantity of mercury contained in the influenza vaccine."

And: "Thimerosal — a preservative still used in the influenza vaccine — contains a different form of mercury called ethylmercury. Studies comparing ethylmercury and methylmercury suggest that they are processed differently in the human body. Ethylmercury is broken down and excreted much more rapidly than methylmercury. Therefore, ethylmercury (the type of mercury in the influenza vaccine) is much less likely than methylmercury (the type of mercury in the environment) to accumulate in the body and cause harm."

Are you going to argue that we should stop breastfeeding our children, since through breastfeeding children ingest a larger quantity of a more harmful form of mercury than was ever contained in vaccines?

And where are you getting the OSHA limit from? All I can find on their website is a limit on the air concentration of mercury, which is an entirely different issue.

All true, although the comparison of a single exposure to a lifelong exposure is a bit of a stretch. Particularly, since as you pointed out, since ethyl mercury is expelled from the body pretty quickly compared to methyl mercury which tends to accumulate.

What do you mean by "large"? According to this chart, the vaccine with the most mercury (Influenza-A) contains only .025mg of mercury, and is a one-time dose; this is much lower than OSHA's air-exposure limit of 0.1mg/m^3 per work week, if you somehow managed to ingest all of that mercury vapor.

And, as noted, most vaccines now contain zero mercury.

So much for your point ;)

The OHSA limit is 0.01mg/m^3 for long term occupational air exposure. The EPA daily intake limit is 0.1 micrograms/kg/day. Prior to 2000, the average round of vaccines for a 6-month infant contained 187.5 micrograms of thimerasol, almost three times the calculated exposure limit of 65 micrograms, based on this EPA guideline. (ref AAP, 1999, interim report; United States schedule, Tables 1 and 2). It's even worse for a small, underweight child.

Even the FDA cites isolated cases where far lower exposure has caused neurological problems http://www.fda.gov/BiologicsBloodVaccines/SafetyAvailability/VaccineSafety/ucm096228.htm#guid.

As you pointed out, the FDA placed restrictions on the use of thimerasol in child vaccines. A large portion of vaccines like the flu shot still do. It's not uncommon to see pneumonia and flu vaccinnes administered to kids outside of the official guidelines from the drug maker. In some cases, thimerasol-free child versions of some vaccines simply are not available.

I'm not saying I agree that thimerasol is causing autism. In fact, I'm a bit skeptical. I'm saying that there is no concrete data proving it's absolutely safe for 100% of the population. Given the doubts and some conflicting data, it's safer to be conservative.

As another interesting point of data. I recall reading that 5% of contact lens wearers are sensitive to thimerasol containing saline solutions. I'm not how this compares to internal injection though.

But the large volume of anecdotal evidence should be enough to get the vaccine manufacturers to consider stopping the use of thimerasol as the preservative.

According to the CDC, "Since 2001, no new vaccine licensed by FDA for use in children has contained thimerosal as a preservative, and all vaccines routinely recommended by CDC for children under six years of age have been thimerosal-free, or contain only trace amounts, except for multi-dose formulations of influenza vaccine."

And even better, from later down on that page:

"Unfortunately, we have not seen reductions in the numbers of children identified with autism indicating that the cause of autism is not related to a single exposure such as thimerosal."

It certainly raises a red flag for me when you consider that a single vaccine can give a child an exposure 5-10x the OSHA limit for mercury poisoning.

Really? From childhood.com: "An infant who is exclusively breast-fed will ingest more than twice the quantity of mercury that was ever contained in vaccines and fifteen times the quantity of mercury contained in the influenza vaccine."

And: "Thimerosal — a preservative still used in the influenza vaccine — contains a different form of mercury called ethylmercury. Studies comparing ethylmercury and methylmercury suggest that they are processed differently in the human body. Ethylmercury is broken down and excreted much more rapidly than methylmercury. Therefore, ethylmercury (the type of mercury in the influenza vaccine) is much less likely than methylmercury (the type of mercury in the environment) to accumulate in the body and cause harm."

Are you going to argue that we should stop breastfeeding our children, since through breastfeeding children ingest a larger quantity of a more harmful form of mercury than was ever contained in vaccines?

And where are you getting the OSHA limit from? All I can find on their website is a limit on the air concentration of mercury, which is an entirely different issue.

It's quite likely that some small percentage of people are unusually sensitive to mercury, and a large dose can trigger autism in them.

What do you mean by "large"? According to this chart, the vaccine with the most mercury (Influenza-A) contains only .025mg of mercury, and is a one-time dose; this is much lower than OSHA's air-exposure limit of 0.1mg/m^3 per work week, if you somehow managed to ingest all of that mercury vapor.

And, as noted, most vaccines now contain zero mercury.

So much for your point ;)

Roger Sessions did a simple order-of-magnitude estimate. Order-of-magnitude estimates are common practice in science and engineering and were especially used by the great estimator Enrico Fermi, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist: http://www.education.com/activity/article/Fermi_middle/ http://physics.suite101.com/article.cfm/fermi_problems_physics_estimation If you don't like the numbers, provide your own values, justify them, and calculate your own estimate. Or work up an entirely different approach, describe it, and calculate your own estimate. Either approach would give a basis for informed dialogue.

Education.com has a write up on each of the canidates views on education:

http://www.education.com/magazine/article/John_McCain/

http://www.education.com/magazine/article/Barack_Obama/

Education.com has a write up on each of the canidates views on education:

http://www.education.com/magazine/article/John_McCain/

http://www.education.com/magazine/article/Barack_Obama/

Back when I worked for Davidson/Knowledge Adventure/CUC Software/Cendant Software/Havas Interactive (I left before they became Universal Interactive and were subsequently shut down), we released the "Animaniacs Wacky Pack". This was a very fun game for PC and Mac, comprising (I seem to recall) four activities: miniature golf, a maze game, and a couple more I can't remember now. It was in about 1997, and I went from writing the tech support FAQ for the game to coding the installer for the second release; got my name in the scrolling credits for that one. Sadly, I can't find any evidence of its existence now.