We have cram schools, Sylvan, Huntington etc. They aren't as prevalent as they are in Asia, but if the public schools are perceived as getting any worse they could become so. They are godawful expensive so only they benefit the kids whose parents can afford them.
How does general intelligence factor in? Could it be that those at "the upper end of the income scale" are on average more intelligent?
I was never at "the upper end of the income scale" but I spent a significant time of my summers during elementary/middle school reading. Using a public library isn't what I would consider an upper-class activity.
How do you measure "intelligence" in your question? Our means of measuring intelligence is very sensitive to stimulation and personal experiences-- all things that suffer in lower income brackets for a variety of reasons.
Yes, but do you expect a politician to come right out and tell the members of the teachers union, that as a whole they suck?
You expect anyone who doesn't suck to join their ranks given the amount of shit they receive? I avoided the job like it was plague, and so did you. Further alienating an entire profession from the White House doesn't do anything to encourage the kinds of people you want to be teachers to do so.
I'm wondering if, as a civilization, we are still trying to accommodate some lingering after-effects of the women's rights movement (please read all of my comment before modding down for chauvinism). So if you are smart, talented, and have a master's degree, why would you work in a school for crap pay and no respect?
For a long time, the absolute best and brightest college-educated women became teachers because that was one of the only career options available (along with office help and nursing). We had a whole societal subclass devoted to being instructors and that has been diluted somewhat by the opening of career paths that were not available before. Notice there is also a shortage of good nurses. (The same effect isn't seen in secretaries because computers are doing a lot of the work that the "office girl" once did.)
We haven't really come to terms with the fact that we now need to actively attract smart, talented people into teaching with real incentives. The problem gets worse as the last generation of teachers who because teachers because they had to are retiring.
Has anyone considered adding a bit of science to the discussion? Not as a curriculum subject (no doubt covered in other threads) but rather - applying a bit of science to the question of "what is the optimum schedule for learning?"
Think about it - there must be a series of attention "ramps" during the day, week and year, where the ability to absorb knowledge is better than at other times.
Do we do math better before or after gym class? Is there any point to having a math class at all immediately after lunch? Are business classes enhanced after physical competition?
Would a 6am start kick start the day or is 10am better? Note that we have evolved to have half our numbers awake and on guard at night [citation somewhere].
Should we survey people in some way to determine whether they're day learners or night learners (and teachers too, to match the learning profile).
There must be hundreds of questions and answers to this. I suspect we've refined our way into a low-energy orbit, and it isn't getting us anywhere very quickly. We need to learn smarter, not longer, from the stats in TFA.
Isn't what you propose exactly the sort of soft social science that engineers make fun of here on Slashdot?
I love that some of the Youtube comments get modded down so you can't read them. It reminds me of the scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail when the guy in the mob shouts out "More witches!" and the rest all look at him like he's the idiot.
Imagine a MMO where you can play at home on OS X, but when you go on the road, hop online for some 'short missions' or so.
Why hasn't anyone done this??? I thought of this back when the DS came out with its built-in wifi. You could do side-quests or crafting or other subgames while on the road (iPhone/DS/PSP) and have the results of this reflected in the main game on your PC or console. That this still doesn't exist baffles me.
There are enough good games that I'm not going to finish my want-list before the Wii reaches EOL. But I have other hobbies, including gaming on my DS. People for whom video gaming is their primary leisure activity need more than one console (and probably a PC) no matter which console they buy.
In the 1970's through 80's game sold to a much smaller market meaning they had much fewer sales from which to recoup R&D costs. The games themselves also came on physical cartridges which were very expensive to produce, pushing the per item manufacturing cost up considerably.
Modern games come on optical discs that cost pennies each to manufacture, and sell to a huge market where R&D is almost the only cost that needs to be recouped (
Games back in the day could also be coded entirely by two people in a week. They didn't have high-res textures or pages upon pages of dialogue read by actors in a recording studio.
I tried waiting until games went on clearance and I ended up in a game "debt" where now I'm just getting around to games I should have beaten years ago. I just started Metroid Prime 2. I'm almost certainly not going to get around to Ghostbusters before the Wii reaches EOL. I don't know what people are talking about when they say there aren't enough games on the Wii; just the WiiWare downloadables could keep me occupied until the Wii2 comes out.
It's not really for people who can see and hear. It's more for blind people who are always going to be more aware of the sounds around them.
Well, there's a point where adjusting everyone's technology for the sake of the handicapped crosses the line into impracticability, if not outright irrationality. I think this is one of those times.
But hey, it makes the politicos who are promoting this nonsense look good in the polls.
You don't know that the implementation of this is going to be impractical.
And the only people who never acquire a disability are those who die young.
I have personally seen truck drivers, park, get out of their vehicle, and verbally warn otherwise perfectly rational adults to move out of the way because they have gotten so acclimated to the reverse beep that they tune it out completely.
I'm willing to bet the wheels on pavement are enough of a sound for someone who is constantly using hearing to find out what is going on around them.
I had the experience of being sneaked up on by a Prius on in a narrow street last year. The ground was very clean (none of the loose salt/sand that is often on the roads in the northeast) and its gas engine must have been off-- that vehicle was absolutely silent. I gained an appreciation for the issue of lack of vehicle noise that day. Perhaps at 60mph tires make a noise, but at the low speeds on streets they aren't always discernible.
Recent law changes have made ALS approval much more streamlined. It is less likely now that the approval process will get stalled out until the patient is dead (which was the reality not all that long ago). The ALS Association is a great resource which has a lot of devices that are available for loan. Families can send the device back when the patient is done with it. With children with severe disabilities like Down Syndrome, think about the overall cost savings associated with providing a communication system in very early childhood, which will lead to language and cognitive gains that would not have otherwise been possible. Instead of a severely mentally retarded individual, effective communication can make the person employable and reasonably independent. I don't know how high they could "lift up" but at least you could get them to reach their bootstraps. (And if you "[citation needed]" me I swear I will dump a reading list on you so long that you'll demand a masters degree when you get to the end of it).
The only place I'd take issue with you here is that no one anywhere gets an AAC device in lieu of speech therapy; and for the people who need it, no amount or type of therapy will make natural speech adequate to meet their needs. A major part of the speech therapist's job is teaching the person how to use the device for effective communication and to make sure it is programmed optimally. If I could do this for my clients and bill a single-payer, it would make me happier than anything since I could spend more time with my clients and less time with corporate bureaucrats. (And all of y'all who think the reverse is true have clearly not tried to get reimbursement out of a private insurer).
The alternative is to let Medicare bureaucrats, who are not doctors...
I'm sure many Insurance Company bureaucrats in places to decide your care are also not doctors. One difference, however, may be that Medicare bureaucrats have no profit motive.
I'm not trying to start an argument, it's something to consider.
I say this as a health care provider and a citizen: I'd take a government bureaucrat over an insurance corporation bureaucrat any day. One doesn't give a shit one way or the other if you get what you want, the other has a vested interest in keeping you from getting what you want.
The medical classification (from the government) for this type of device is "speech-generating device." This is a really old term from back when speech synthesis was computationally difficult (AT&T DECtalk was state-of-the-art) and portable computers were expensive. Professionals in this field refer to them instead as "augmentative and alternative communication" because we acknowledge that there is much more to communication than just speech. The rules limit assistive tech to only the vocal mode, which isn't natural... people without disabilities communicate in a variety of ways. The mode that I am using to communicate with you right now is just as natural as oral speech, but I require an augmentative device to do so.
It'll be amazing how many people suddenly come down with "disabilities"
Isn't that how autism started?
The "autism epidemic" started when the education and psych worlds figured out how to differentially diagnose between mental retardation and something else. MR diagnoses have dropped at about the same rate as autism has increased. This is a Good Thing, because they are different things and have different effective treatments. Now if we could get fuckwads like Jenny McCarthy to stop spouting bullshit about autism on TV, we'd maybe make even more progress.
#1. The dedicated devices have a lot of features that aren't implemented in commodity hardware. Kid with autism with full use of his hands: iPod Touch is great. Someone like Stephen Hawking... not so much. #2. An adult whose disability prevents him from having a job with which to earn $400 is going to still need some help affording it. The issue here is that the entities who do that help will pay the $8000, but not $400, which makes everyone's premiums higher.
I'm friends with the guy who created Proloquo2Go. P2G You're right, the big names in the field don't want things like that to exist.
But I understand their point of view. The margins on their products are high because the sales volumes are incredibly low. And their products are providing people with their ability to communicate, their customers' lives go on hold if the device goes down, that's pretty close to mission-critical. Right now AssistiveWare is a two-person shop. The head designer does all of the support, which is becoming tough. As more people use it, it is going to reach "grow or sell" stage. (A similar issue recently happened when a promising young startup BlinkTwice just sold out.
In the end, I think the manufacturers are going to need to get out of hardware sales altogether and focus on software development, but they can't do it yet until the funders start to cover hardware made by mass-market computer makers (like a Panasonic Toughbook).
The funding system is completely bewildered by the existence of general-purpose devices serving the same functions as a medical device. Part of this is their expectation of efficacy testing for medical devices. Right now, no one does efficacy testing for specific devices for a few reasons: a) extraordinarily low incidence of speech-language disorders, b) heterogeneity of that population requiring each device be heavily customized (goodbye experimental control), which together means that a study of sufficient scale would have to be an expensive, nationwide, multi-center thing, c) by the time that got done, Moore's Law will have kicked in and the device will be a generation behind, and d) universities who can do such testing (correctly) don't want to be seen as a single vendor's bitch. No devices right now are truly "FDA-approved."
What we're working on instead is a more general theoryâ" evidence-based best-practices that can be applied to anything. With the tremendous variation in types of disability, once they get the device a speech-language therapist, occupational therapist and a rehabilitation engineer are just going to tear the thing down and rebuild it from scratch anyway.
The way it is done now is individuals borrow one, get some trial therapy, and the clinicians use the data from those trials to justify a device to the insurer as effective and medically necessary.
you're not going to find a significant number of personnel entering the service with prior brain damage.,
Post-concussion syndrome is exceptionally difficult to diagnose. Will the military really turn away the captain of the high school football team because of his six or seven concussions?
Slashdot Mirror
We have cram schools, Sylvan, Huntington etc. They aren't as prevalent as they are in Asia, but if the public schools are perceived as getting any worse they could become so. They are godawful expensive so only they benefit the kids whose parents can afford them.
How does general intelligence factor in? Could it be that those at "the upper end of the income scale" are on average more intelligent?
I was never at "the upper end of the income scale" but I spent a significant time of my summers during elementary/middle school reading. Using a public library isn't what I would consider an upper-class activity.
How do you measure "intelligence" in your question? Our means of measuring intelligence is very sensitive to stimulation and personal experiences-- all things that suffer in lower income brackets for a variety of reasons.
Yes, but do you expect a politician to come right out and tell the members of the teachers union, that as a whole they suck?
You expect anyone who doesn't suck to join their ranks given the amount of shit they receive? I avoided the job like it was plague, and so did you. Further alienating an entire profession from the White House doesn't do anything to encourage the kinds of people you want to be teachers to do so.
I'm wondering if, as a civilization, we are still trying to accommodate some lingering after-effects of the women's rights movement (please read all of my comment before modding down for chauvinism). So if you are smart, talented, and have a master's degree, why would you work in a school for crap pay and no respect?
For a long time, the absolute best and brightest college-educated women became teachers because that was one of the only career options available (along with office help and nursing). We had a whole societal subclass devoted to being instructors and that has been diluted somewhat by the opening of career paths that were not available before. Notice there is also a shortage of good nurses. (The same effect isn't seen in secretaries because computers are doing a lot of the work that the "office girl" once did.)
We haven't really come to terms with the fact that we now need to actively attract smart, talented people into teaching with real incentives. The problem gets worse as the last generation of teachers who because teachers because they had to are retiring.
Has anyone considered adding a bit of science to the discussion? Not as a curriculum subject (no doubt covered in other threads) but rather - applying a bit of science to the question of "what is the optimum schedule for learning?"
Think about it - there must be a series of attention "ramps" during the day, week and year, where the ability to absorb knowledge is better than at other times.
Do we do math better before or after gym class? Is there any point to having a math class at all immediately after lunch? Are business classes enhanced after physical competition?
Would a 6am start kick start the day or is 10am better? Note that we have evolved to have half our numbers awake and on guard at night [citation somewhere].
Should we survey people in some way to determine whether they're day learners or night learners (and teachers too, to match the learning profile).
There must be hundreds of questions and answers to this. I suspect we've refined our way into a low-energy orbit, and it isn't getting us anywhere very quickly. We need to learn smarter, not longer, from the stats in TFA.
Isn't what you propose exactly the sort of soft social science that engineers make fun of here on Slashdot?
I love that some of the Youtube comments get modded down so you can't read them. It reminds me of the scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail when the guy in the mob shouts out "More witches!" and the rest all look at him like he's the idiot.
Imagine a MMO where you can play at home on OS X, but when you go on the road, hop online for some 'short missions' or so.
Why hasn't anyone done this??? I thought of this back when the DS came out with its built-in wifi. You could do side-quests or crafting or other subgames while on the road (iPhone/DS/PSP) and have the results of this reflected in the main game on your PC or console. That this still doesn't exist baffles me.
There are enough good games that I'm not going to finish my want-list before the Wii reaches EOL. But I have other hobbies, including gaming on my DS. People for whom video gaming is their primary leisure activity need more than one console (and probably a PC) no matter which console they buy.
In the 1970's through 80's game sold to a much smaller market meaning they had much fewer sales from which to recoup R&D costs. The games themselves also came on physical cartridges which were very expensive to produce, pushing the per item manufacturing cost up considerably.
Modern games come on optical discs that cost pennies each to manufacture, and sell to a huge market where R&D is almost the only cost that needs to be recouped (
Games back in the day could also be coded entirely by two people in a week. They didn't have high-res textures or pages upon pages of dialogue read by actors in a recording studio.
I tried waiting until games went on clearance and I ended up in a game "debt" where now I'm just getting around to games I should have beaten years ago. I just started Metroid Prime 2. I'm almost certainly not going to get around to Ghostbusters before the Wii reaches EOL.
I don't know what people are talking about when they say there aren't enough games on the Wii; just the WiiWare downloadables could keep me occupied until the Wii2 comes out.
I've found that "completely open-book" is common in statistics courses. I don't think that is the case for other kinds of maths or science courses.
Scare away? I'd chase that car down the road throwing rocks at it.
Both work. My sister-in-law drove through some too-deep water and the inside of her engine got wet. It stopped making noise.
It's not really for people who can see and hear. It's more for blind people who are always going to be more aware of the sounds around them.
Well, there's a point where adjusting everyone's technology for the sake of the handicapped crosses the line into impracticability, if not outright irrationality. I think this is one of those times.
But hey, it makes the politicos who are promoting this nonsense look good in the polls.
You don't know that the implementation of this is going to be impractical.
And the only people who never acquire a disability are those who die young.
I have personally seen truck drivers, park, get out of their vehicle, and verbally warn otherwise perfectly rational adults to move out of the way because they have gotten so acclimated to the reverse beep that they tune it out completely.
I'm willing to bet the wheels on pavement are enough of a sound for someone who is constantly using hearing to find out what is going on around them.
I had the experience of being sneaked up on by a Prius on in a narrow street last year. The ground was very clean (none of the loose salt/sand that is often on the roads in the northeast) and its gas engine must have been off-- that vehicle was absolutely silent. I gained an appreciation for the issue of lack of vehicle noise that day. Perhaps at 60mph tires make a noise, but at the low speeds on streets they aren't always discernible.
Recent law changes have made ALS approval much more streamlined. It is less likely now that the approval process will get stalled out until the patient is dead (which was the reality not all that long ago). The ALS Association is a great resource which has a lot of devices that are available for loan. Families can send the device back when the patient is done with it.
With children with severe disabilities like Down Syndrome, think about the overall cost savings associated with providing a communication system in very early childhood, which will lead to language and cognitive gains that would not have otherwise been possible. Instead of a severely mentally retarded individual, effective communication can make the person employable and reasonably independent. I don't know how high they could "lift up" but at least you could get them to reach their bootstraps. (And if you "[citation needed]" me I swear I will dump a reading list on you so long that you'll demand a masters degree when you get to the end of it).
The only place I'd take issue with you here is that no one anywhere gets an AAC device in lieu of speech therapy; and for the people who need it, no amount or type of therapy will make natural speech adequate to meet their needs. A major part of the speech therapist's job is teaching the person how to use the device for effective communication and to make sure it is programmed optimally.
If I could do this for my clients and bill a single-payer, it would make me happier than anything since I could spend more time with my clients and less time with corporate bureaucrats. (And all of y'all who think the reverse is true have clearly not tried to get reimbursement out of a private insurer).
I'm sure many Insurance Company bureaucrats in places to decide your care are also not doctors. One difference, however, may be that Medicare bureaucrats have no profit motive.
I'm not trying to start an argument, it's something to consider.
I say this as a health care provider and a citizen: I'd take a government bureaucrat over an insurance corporation bureaucrat any day. One doesn't give a shit one way or the other if you get what you want, the other has a vested interest in keeping you from getting what you want.
This is an important point.
The medical classification (from the government) for this type of device is "speech-generating device." This is a really old term from back when speech synthesis was computationally difficult (AT&T DECtalk was state-of-the-art) and portable computers were expensive. Professionals in this field refer to them instead as "augmentative and alternative communication" because we acknowledge that there is much more to communication than just speech.
The rules limit assistive tech to only the vocal mode, which isn't natural... people without disabilities communicate in a variety of ways. The mode that I am using to communicate with you right now is just as natural as oral speech, but I require an augmentative device to do so.
It'll be amazing how many people suddenly come down with "disabilities"
Isn't that how autism started?
The "autism epidemic" started when the education and psych worlds figured out how to differentially diagnose between mental retardation and something else. MR diagnoses have dropped at about the same rate as autism has increased. This is a Good Thing, because they are different things and have different effective treatments.
Now if we could get fuckwads like Jenny McCarthy to stop spouting bullshit about autism on TV, we'd maybe make even more progress.
It's not medically necessary, except when it is.
#1. The dedicated devices have a lot of features that aren't implemented in commodity hardware. Kid with autism with full use of his hands: iPod Touch is great. Someone like Stephen Hawking... not so much.
#2. An adult whose disability prevents him from having a job with which to earn $400 is going to still need some help affording it. The issue here is that the entities who do that help will pay the $8000, but not $400, which makes everyone's premiums higher.
I'm friends with the guy who created Proloquo2Go. P2G You're right, the big names in the field don't want things like that to exist.
But I understand their point of view. The margins on their products are high because the sales volumes are incredibly low. And their products are providing people with their ability to communicate, their customers' lives go on hold if the device goes down, that's pretty close to mission-critical.
Right now AssistiveWare is a two-person shop. The head designer does all of the support, which is becoming tough. As more people use it, it is going to reach "grow or sell" stage. (A similar issue recently happened when a promising young startup BlinkTwice just sold out.
In the end, I think the manufacturers are going to need to get out of hardware sales altogether and focus on software development, but they can't do it yet until the funders start to cover hardware made by mass-market computer makers (like a Panasonic Toughbook).
The funding system is completely bewildered by the existence of general-purpose devices serving the same functions as a medical device. Part of this is their expectation of efficacy testing for medical devices. Right now, no one does efficacy testing for specific devices for a few reasons: a) extraordinarily low incidence of speech-language disorders, b) heterogeneity of that population requiring each device be heavily customized (goodbye experimental control), which together means that a study of sufficient scale would have to be an expensive, nationwide, multi-center thing, c) by the time that got done, Moore's Law will have kicked in and the device will be a generation behind, and d) universities who can do such testing (correctly) don't want to be seen as a single vendor's bitch. No devices right now are truly "FDA-approved."
What we're working on instead is a more general theoryâ" evidence-based best-practices that can be applied to anything. With the tremendous variation in types of disability, once they get the device a speech-language therapist, occupational therapist and a rehabilitation engineer are just going to tear the thing down and rebuild it from scratch anyway.
The way it is done now is individuals borrow one, get some trial therapy, and the clinicians use the data from those trials to justify a device to the insurer as effective and medically necessary.
you're not going to find a significant number of personnel entering the service with prior brain damage.,
Post-concussion syndrome is exceptionally difficult to diagnose. Will the military really turn away the captain of the high school football team because of his six or seven concussions?