The government would have to replace all speed limit and mile marker signs across the country, roads would not line up with measured distances, as well as many other things. You also need to consider that every piece of software and every table of elevations and distances that engineers use when building such systems are not in metric. It is not just a matter of using a few conversions here and there; it's a matter rewriting software, referring to old designs, and many other factors. When my government is over $12,300,000,000,000 in debt, "getting on with the times" is the last thing on which I'd want it to waste more money.
To me, the issue is with peer review is "who are the peers?" if the peers aren't capable of vetting the methods, how valid are their reviews?
For example, I've dated a few psychology majors, and spent time hanging out with their psych major friends. One thing is certain: they aren't mathematicians.
This isn't surprising, since they don't want to be mathematicians, and any discussion of mathematical topics in such a group generally devolved into finding ways they could reduce the number of math classes they needed to take. Fair enough, I feel the same way about psychology classes. However, if any of them ever decide to do any research, and I have no doubt that a few will, their results will only be as meaningful as the quality of their statistical analysis. I reiterate here my point that they are not mathematicians, and add that I have seen no evidence to suggest that those with higher levels of education in the field are likely to be any more knowledgeable regarding mathematics, so how can they give a realistic opinion of whether the analysis is correct?
Let's assume by some miracle that the author of the paper has the resources to get a mathematician to at least look over their math. As a computer scientist with a minor in applied math, I feel qualified to say that mathematicians are not computer scientists. There are whole classes of bugs, many of which are relatively obvious to someone with a reasonable grounding in computer science, that applied mathematicians seem to be unaware of. It's probably not a big deal if they're working in Matlab, Mathematica, or Minitab, but it certainly can be a problem on the occasions where they go out and write their own code (like, say, large climate simulations).
All I'm saying is that, if the results of a paper are based on custom software, someone with some actual computer science training should be looking at the code as part of the peer review process. Additionally, I would hope that someone with some real math training is looking over the math, though I doubt this is the case for journals that aren't directly related to the field.
Errors are only errors if they are reported by the "right" people?
They're still errors, they just might not be relevant to the science. The real problem is errors being reported by the wrong people.
Let's say we have a climate simulation in which our model is accurate and the code doing the actual analysis 100% bug free, but we used a toolkit for the UI that has 100 bugs. Does Rush Limbaugh care that those bugs aren't part of the code we wrote? Or that they don't affect the results at all? Or that they're in parts of the widget set that we didn't even use in our UI? NO! He'll be on the radio as soon as he hears about it, screaming to his army of dittoheads that our results are invalid because our model is full of bugs, and that's going to be echoed by every other conservative pundit and politician by the end of the week, entered into Congressional testimony related to emissions policy as if it were fact, putting yet another barrier in front of the actual scientists who have actual valid results.
I'm not intending to argue against openness here, just pointing out a very large pitfall (notice I did not say "potential" pitfall, it's pretty much guaranteed to go like that).
In fact, the arctic could melt completely and 20% of Florida could go underwater and you'd still deny anything was happening or that anything should be done about it.
What's wrong with adding a floating point to an integer? Isn't the resul a floating point? And if you store that result in an integer, then the result is a truncation to integer, isn't it?
The problem is that it isn't defined behavior (in C/C++ anyway), so the results are what the person who implemented that function in your compiler/library thought they should be. Yes, what you describe is the most common result if you don't explicitly cast it, but is certainly not guaranteed. C++ (maybe C also) has a variety of casting options for float to int conversion if you want to define the behavior, including truncation and a few different rounding styles. If you're doing a simulation based on a mathematical model, that behavior is certainly something you should be aware of, otherwise you run the risk of having junk results.
Of course, the only reason I know this is because I took an (elective) class from a guy who thought it might be important for us to know. I would bet that a large number of computer scientists, even those well versed in C/C++, have never given it any thought at all. I'm fairly certain that my Numerical Analysis professors weren't aware of it, and it's quite clear that GP isn't. If you're expecting truncation, but your compiler thinks rounding is better, that's certainly going to be introducing errors into your results. If the coders of all the other models you're comparing to (per another post by the GP) are making the same assumptions, you run a high risk of erroneously assuming that your results are more accurate than they really are.
Yeah, that's what I was saying. If your results are derived from computer simulations, then "peer review" should include CS people and applied math people to make sure that your math was right and it was not implemented in a way that gives bogus results. (Good math implemented poorly is no better than bad math implemented well).
yes, that is supposed to be the point of peer review. The problem is in defining who the peers are. How many mathematicians or software engineers are reviewing papers for climate science journals? I'm going to go out on a limb and say "zero". Considering the fact that most of the results being published are based on mathematical models that have been run on computers, it seems that having the code available to folks with expertise in those domains is necessary for validation.
No, I really don't need to know much about what the software as a whole is doing in order to find meaningful bugs. All I need is basic competence in computational mathematics and enough knowledge of the language you used to make sense of your algorithm. Questions like "is your implementation of the equation you are using stable?" will tell me all I need to know about the validity of your results, and chances are good that I can do that with an undergraduate level of education in applied math. Your assertion that I need your rarefied level of expertise in climate science in order to analyze your code is pure arrogance.
I don't claim to be an expert in any of the relevant fields, but I've done enough work on error analysis to know how deceiving results can be, and how easy it is to induce seemingly significant patterns into an analysis through what seem like innocuous coding decisions. Once the validity of your results is established, I have no problem relying on you to interpret them. Without being able to examine your code though, you're no more reliable than a street preacher yelling about how The End Is Upon Us!
As a math and computer nerd who grew up in a family of artists, I couldn't disagree more.
All groups define words as they are needed and they are often different than how they are used by the laymen.
This is true, every field has it's jargon.
Computer nerds do it far more often than artists. There's nothing pretentious about it, but often outsiders see it is some kind of elitism, when in truth it's a way of keeping communications simple.
In number of words you may be correct (though I'm far from convinced), but there are critical differences in how it is done.
Computer nerds often redefine words to describe something new, which doesn't have a name yet. This is different from the scientific use of Latin only in that Latin is pretty much a "dead" language, and English is very much "alive". The objective is to facilitate communication about new ideas, and the new definitions are rarely, if ever, imposed outside of those specialized discussions.
In the art world, however, terms are frequently defined and used with the specific purpose of establishing "in" and "out" groups, and those arbitrary redefinitions are frequently imposed on outsiders in order to show how "ignorant" they are. Indeed, if you claim this is not pretentious or elitist, then I say you must be trying to arbitrarily redefine those terms to suit your own argument, which is a common annoying habit I've found among the artistic community.
One can't deface graffiti anymore than one can trash garbage.
What a ridiculously ignorant statement.
A lot of graffiti has the primary purpose of marking gang territory. When those are defaced with other pieces of graffiti it is a sign of gang territorial disputes. Defacement is in fact the intention of the second artist.
Where you really show your ignorance, though, is in the implication that graffiti can't be art. Do you honestly believe that art needs to be officially sanctioned for it to have any validity?
Traditional characters also make a lot more sense.
Definitely true. My teacher was actually Taiwanese, but the department had decided to teach simplified, so that's what she did. When she did show us the traditional form of some radicals they made a lot more sense.
The characters aren't actually simplified (Kanji characters are akin to traditional characters), but about 10% are Kanji-specific.
There is some definite simplification there. For example, the character for "rice" has been reduced to basically an X in kanji. In other cases, characters have not necessarily been simplified, but maybe just evolved in a slightly different direction. The Chinese character set isn't really a good match for Japanese IMO (they can't show verb conjugations for example), so instead of developing a simplified set like the PRC did, they created their own phonetic alphabets: hiragana and katakana. Both sets are actually made up of extremely simplified kanji, and most (possibly all, my Japanese isn't very good) hiragana and katakana characters retain a meaning as an individual word.
If I know Mandarin, I can still write down directions for my Cantonese taxi driver, or communicate with Japanese and (to a lesser extent) Korean people due to the fact that the characters are the same across regional and national boundaries.
Maybe, maybe not. Are you using traditional or simplified characters? Someone from Taiwan speaks mandarin natively, but may not understand simplified characters, since they still use the traditional set there (a Taiwanese girl sat next to me in my Beginning Mandarin class, her sole purpose being to learn simplified characters). Similarly, someone from China is almost guaranteed to speak Mandarin, but will not be familiar with traditional characters unless they are highly educated in a field that requires them (history, etc) or spent additional time learning them on their own (also, keep in mind that the PRC government grossly exaggerates their literacy rate).
Many Kanji (Japanese characters) are also simplified, but not in the same way as the Chinese simplified set. Additionally, Japanese is a very different language from Chinese, so while a Japanese person might recognize the characters, the sentence is so grammatically different that it's unintelligible. Japanese typically don't use kanji alone anyway, frequently adding hiragana to indicate pronunciation and verb conjugatioons (which don't exist in Mandarin).
I have no direct experience with Korean use of Chinese characters, but my understanding based on conversations with South Korean friends is that it's similar to what the Japanese have done.
No, they trained with wooden swords because wood is cheap, and there's no reason to risk damaging an expensive metal blade when you aren't actually trying to kill someone. It's also pretty hard to put a good edge on a wooden sword, which also has some pretty obvious advantages in a training environment. However, wood is certainly not more dense than metal, and it's pretty hard to make a wooden sword that's even close to the weight of the real sword you're trying to copy, let alone heavier. If heavier training swords swords were used (citation?) they were made of metal.
The gaming industry does use outsourcing, and they have the same problems with it that everyone else does (ie, what you asked for and what you get are almost never the same thing). According to a game studio recruiter I recently had a conversation with, outsourcing has lead to the creation of a new job title, "Technical Artist", whose job is basically to make the outsourced stuff work the way it's supposed to.
That said, perpetual crunch time is not universal in the industry. The few guys I know in the industry seem to have fairly reasonable schedules, but they don't work for EA or Rockstar.
It depends a lot on the society. I have a friend who grew up very poor (as in one meal every few days) in China, yet talking about it today her main complaints have to do with the social stigma of poverty in Chinese society. She was discriminated against by both students and teachers due to her economic status, since Chinese society tends to assume that any problem you're having is your own fault. Additionally, appearances are extremely important, so that fact that she had only one school uniform, which was faded and patched, was a big problem for her.
Well, I have to call shenanigans right back at you then, since I have lived in California all my life, have met plenty of homeschoolers (as well as other alternative education ideas such as Waldorf and Montessori), and so far all of the homeschooling parents I've met were nutballs.
Roughly half of the homeschooling parents I've met have been fundamentalist Christian nutballs who didn't want their kids learning about evolution or sex. These ones I find particularly amusing, since their daughters invariably dropped out of college by the middle of their second year with a drug habit, and often pregnant to boot.
The rest have been adherents to the hippie philosophy. They have various things they don't want their kids learning about, such as violence, societies imposed gender roles, etc... basically anything you can name that is fundamental to being human animals, instinct if you will, and therefore cannot be avoided, only dealt with.
Yes, they are all nutjobs. It seems perfectly reasonable to call them so given that my observation of their results has been adults who were utterly unprepared to function as adults in the real world, and invariably turned to drugs and/or alcohol when they finally had to face it. Even the one exceptional result I mentioned previously was an avid pot smoker. So really, I think calling them nutballs is perhaps even a bit generous.
I know people that have to homeschool because their kids are sick exist, and that is a perfectly commendable reason, but I've met only one of them. That particular kid is doing as well as can be expected, given that her health problem is congenital and at 30 she's doubled all medical predictions of her lifespan. I don't include her in my above assessment since she has so many emotional issues related to her illness that it would be rather unfair to start blaming them on homeschooling.
I'm sure that other varieties of non-nutty homeschooling parents exist -- your reasons seem quite sensible for example -- but I've never met any of them (on the internet doesn't count.)
At any rate, my intention was not to bash homeschooling in general, but to hopefully provide some useful food for thought. Perhaps you should go and read the last paragraph of my previous post again, and you will see that was my intention.
As for my observations, you can deny them all you want, but that doesn't make them untrue. Perhaps I have only noticed the crazy ones, it's not like I go around asking everyone I know if they were homeschooled. however, my experiences with the products of homeschooling are common enough that it has become the stigma of homeschooling in the US. That's something you're just going to have to live with. I sincerely hope is that your kid doesn't turn out like the others I've met, and that was my only reason for posting.
One last point: I personally believe that math and reading are very important, take great pleasure in being good at both, and make every effort to share those joys (along with the fun of science) with my own daughter. However, my time in the corporate world has taught me that in "the real world", sadly, mere attendance does win out.
Or possibly spoken like someone from the USA(or just a believer in evil)
Really? That's all you said there? It certainly seems to me that you strongly implied that the US vote was a vote for evil, which sounds suspiciously like arguing in favor of resolution (albeit by fallacy).
No, they are not. That is a myth that the public school industry would like you to believe. As a home schooling parent, I can tell you, that the percentage of religious nutjobs outside of homeschooling is WAY higher than those inside. This ratio might be different in other parts of the country, but at least her in California, it is definitely the case.
Sorry, but every homeschooling parent I've met has been a religious nutjob, and I've lived in California my entire life. Not all of them were Christian (my home town has a serious hippie infestation), but so far they've all had some pretty nutty ideas and used homeschooling as a way to socially and ideologically isolate their kids. As one might expect, the results were children that were effectively socially retarded
I have met one (and only one) person whom I consider well served by being homeschooled, but I never met her parents, so I can't say anything about them other than that they raised a pretty amazing daughter. So yeah, once in a while it gets done right, but that's pretty rare in my experience. For the most part, I have to agree with xaxa's assessment.
However, forewarned is forearmed, as they say, and 5 is a good age to start getting your child involved in more social activities if you haven't already. I recommend team sports, which have the added value of teaching him, in a hopefully positive way, that he is not the center of the universe. That's certainly something that seems to be lacking in the typical homeschool curriculum.
You'd set back the creation of digital media in a big, big way if you undermine the creators like that.
Spoken like a businessman (ie, not an artist). The truth is that while the current media moguls stood back wringing their hands, actual artists would still be creating and exploring the new medium, and many of them would be quite happy to have a more direct link to the public.
There's no shortage of artists in the world who create simply because they feel compelled to, and plenty of them are finding ways to make money at it that don't depend on antiquated business models based on artificial scarcity.
...and that the number of undernourished people had grown to about 923 million worldwide...
And you've just defended the very position you were trying to argue against. The current model of aid, which is what you mean by "right to food", has done nothing to fix the problem, and in fact actually makes it worse.
while we're waiting for that, how about if you give some evidence that the kind of aid you're espousing actually helps in the long term. In other words, give us some evidence that this guy is wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
...because the rest of us have ten fingers and count things in base 10.
Thanks for finally explaining why machinists are so anti-metric.
The government would have to replace all speed limit and mile marker signs across the country, roads would not line up with measured distances, as well as many other things. You also need to consider that every piece of software and every table of elevations and distances that engineers use when building such systems are not in metric. It is not just a matter of using a few conversions here and there; it's a matter rewriting software, referring to old designs, and many other factors. When my government is over $12,300,000,000,000 in debt, "getting on with the times" is the last thing on which I'd want it to waste more money.
That sounds like a whole lot of jobs to me.
To me, the issue is with peer review is "who are the peers?" if the peers aren't capable of vetting the methods, how valid are their reviews?
For example, I've dated a few psychology majors, and spent time hanging out with their psych major friends. One thing is certain: they aren't mathematicians.
This isn't surprising, since they don't want to be mathematicians, and any discussion of mathematical topics in such a group generally devolved into finding ways they could reduce the number of math classes they needed to take. Fair enough, I feel the same way about psychology classes. However, if any of them ever decide to do any research, and I have no doubt that a few will, their results will only be as meaningful as the quality of their statistical analysis. I reiterate here my point that they are not mathematicians, and add that I have seen no evidence to suggest that those with higher levels of education in the field are likely to be any more knowledgeable regarding mathematics, so how can they give a realistic opinion of whether the analysis is correct?
Let's assume by some miracle that the author of the paper has the resources to get a mathematician to at least look over their math. As a computer scientist with a minor in applied math, I feel qualified to say that mathematicians are not computer scientists. There are whole classes of bugs, many of which are relatively obvious to someone with a reasonable grounding in computer science, that applied mathematicians seem to be unaware of. It's probably not a big deal if they're working in Matlab, Mathematica, or Minitab, but it certainly can be a problem on the occasions where they go out and write their own code (like, say, large climate simulations).
All I'm saying is that, if the results of a paper are based on custom software, someone with some actual computer science training should be looking at the code as part of the peer review process. Additionally, I would hope that someone with some real math training is looking over the math, though I doubt this is the case for journals that aren't directly related to the field.
Errors are only errors if they are reported by the "right" people?
They're still errors, they just might not be relevant to the science. The real problem is errors being reported by the wrong people.
Let's say we have a climate simulation in which our model is accurate and the code doing the actual analysis 100% bug free, but we used a toolkit for the UI that has 100 bugs. Does Rush Limbaugh care that those bugs aren't part of the code we wrote? Or that they don't affect the results at all? Or that they're in parts of the widget set that we didn't even use in our UI? NO! He'll be on the radio as soon as he hears about it, screaming to his army of dittoheads that our results are invalid because our model is full of bugs, and that's going to be echoed by every other conservative pundit and politician by the end of the week, entered into Congressional testimony related to emissions policy as if it were fact, putting yet another barrier in front of the actual scientists who have actual valid results.
I'm not intending to argue against openness here, just pointing out a very large pitfall (notice I did not say "potential" pitfall, it's pretty much guaranteed to go like that).
In fact, the arctic could melt completely and 20% of Florida could go underwater and you'd still deny anything was happening or that anything should be done about it.
Well yeah... it's Florida!
What's wrong with adding a floating point to an integer? Isn't the resul a floating point? And if you store that result in an integer, then the result is a truncation to integer, isn't it?
The problem is that it isn't defined behavior (in C/C++ anyway), so the results are what the person who implemented that function in your compiler/library thought they should be. Yes, what you describe is the most common result if you don't explicitly cast it, but is certainly not guaranteed. C++ (maybe C also) has a variety of casting options for float to int conversion if you want to define the behavior, including truncation and a few different rounding styles. If you're doing a simulation based on a mathematical model, that behavior is certainly something you should be aware of, otherwise you run the risk of having junk results.
Of course, the only reason I know this is because I took an (elective) class from a guy who thought it might be important for us to know. I would bet that a large number of computer scientists, even those well versed in C/C++, have never given it any thought at all. I'm fairly certain that my Numerical Analysis professors weren't aware of it, and it's quite clear that GP isn't. If you're expecting truncation, but your compiler thinks rounding is better, that's certainly going to be introducing errors into your results. If the coders of all the other models you're comparing to (per another post by the GP) are making the same assumptions, you run a high risk of erroneously assuming that your results are more accurate than they really are.
Yeah, that's what I was saying. If your results are derived from computer simulations, then "peer review" should include CS people and applied math people to make sure that your math was right and it was not implemented in a way that gives bogus results. (Good math implemented poorly is no better than bad math implemented well).
yes, that is supposed to be the point of peer review. The problem is in defining who the peers are. How many mathematicians or software engineers are reviewing papers for climate science journals? I'm going to go out on a limb and say "zero". Considering the fact that most of the results being published are based on mathematical models that have been run on computers, it seems that having the code available to folks with expertise in those domains is necessary for validation.
No, I really don't need to know much about what the software as a whole is doing in order to find meaningful bugs. All I need is basic competence in computational mathematics and enough knowledge of the language you used to make sense of your algorithm. Questions like "is your implementation of the equation you are using stable?" will tell me all I need to know about the validity of your results, and chances are good that I can do that with an undergraduate level of education in applied math. Your assertion that I need your rarefied level of expertise in climate science in order to analyze your code is pure arrogance.
I don't claim to be an expert in any of the relevant fields, but I've done enough work on error analysis to know how deceiving results can be, and how easy it is to induce seemingly significant patterns into an analysis through what seem like innocuous coding decisions. Once the validity of your results is established, I have no problem relying on you to interpret them. Without being able to examine your code though, you're no more reliable than a street preacher yelling about how The End Is Upon Us!
As a math and computer nerd who grew up in a family of artists, I couldn't disagree more.
All groups define words as they are needed and they are often different than how they are used by the laymen.
This is true, every field has it's jargon.
Computer nerds do it far more often than artists. There's nothing pretentious about it, but often outsiders see it is some kind of elitism, when in truth it's a way of keeping communications simple.
In number of words you may be correct (though I'm far from convinced), but there are critical differences in how it is done.
Computer nerds often redefine words to describe something new, which doesn't have a name yet. This is different from the scientific use of Latin only in that Latin is pretty much a "dead" language, and English is very much "alive". The objective is to facilitate communication about new ideas, and the new definitions are rarely, if ever, imposed outside of those specialized discussions.
In the art world, however, terms are frequently defined and used with the specific purpose of establishing "in" and "out" groups, and those arbitrary redefinitions are frequently imposed on outsiders in order to show how "ignorant" they are. Indeed, if you claim this is not pretentious or elitist, then I say you must be trying to arbitrarily redefine those terms to suit your own argument, which is a common annoying habit I've found among the artistic community.
One can't deface graffiti anymore than one can trash garbage.
What a ridiculously ignorant statement.
A lot of graffiti has the primary purpose of marking gang territory. When those are defaced with other pieces of graffiti it is a sign of gang territorial disputes. Defacement is in fact the intention of the second artist.
Where you really show your ignorance, though, is in the implication that graffiti can't be art. Do you honestly believe that art needs to be officially sanctioned for it to have any validity?
Traditional characters also make a lot more sense.
Definitely true. My teacher was actually Taiwanese, but the department had decided to teach simplified, so that's what she did. When she did show us the traditional form of some radicals they made a lot more sense.
The characters aren't actually simplified (Kanji characters are akin to traditional characters), but about 10% are Kanji-specific.
There is some definite simplification there. For example, the character for "rice" has been reduced to basically an X in kanji. In other cases, characters have not necessarily been simplified, but maybe just evolved in a slightly different direction. The Chinese character set isn't really a good match for Japanese IMO (they can't show verb conjugations for example), so instead of developing a simplified set like the PRC did, they created their own phonetic alphabets: hiragana and katakana. Both sets are actually made up of extremely simplified kanji, and most (possibly all, my Japanese isn't very good) hiragana and katakana characters retain a meaning as an individual word.
If I know Mandarin, I can still write down directions for my Cantonese taxi driver, or communicate with Japanese and (to a lesser extent) Korean people due to the fact that the characters are the same across regional and national boundaries.
Maybe, maybe not. Are you using traditional or simplified characters? Someone from Taiwan speaks mandarin natively, but may not understand simplified characters, since they still use the traditional set there (a Taiwanese girl sat next to me in my Beginning Mandarin class, her sole purpose being to learn simplified characters). Similarly, someone from China is almost guaranteed to speak Mandarin, but will not be familiar with traditional characters unless they are highly educated in a field that requires them (history, etc) or spent additional time learning them on their own (also, keep in mind that the PRC government grossly exaggerates their literacy rate).
Many Kanji (Japanese characters) are also simplified, but not in the same way as the Chinese simplified set. Additionally, Japanese is a very different language from Chinese, so while a Japanese person might recognize the characters, the sentence is so grammatically different that it's unintelligible. Japanese typically don't use kanji alone anyway, frequently adding hiragana to indicate pronunciation and verb conjugatioons (which don't exist in Mandarin).
I have no direct experience with Korean use of Chinese characters, but my understanding based on conversations with South Korean friends is that it's similar to what the Japanese have done.
No, they trained with wooden swords because wood is cheap, and there's no reason to risk damaging an expensive metal blade when you aren't actually trying to kill someone. It's also pretty hard to put a good edge on a wooden sword, which also has some pretty obvious advantages in a training environment. However, wood is certainly not more dense than metal, and it's pretty hard to make a wooden sword that's even close to the weight of the real sword you're trying to copy, let alone heavier. If heavier training swords swords were used (citation?) they were made of metal.
BTW, when a company tells you that they are like a family (yes, it happened a few times !), you can be sure that they'll make you work like a slave.
Right... Family... you know, those people you can get to do work for you for free.
The gaming industry does use outsourcing, and they have the same problems with it that everyone else does (ie, what you asked for and what you get are almost never the same thing). According to a game studio recruiter I recently had a conversation with, outsourcing has lead to the creation of a new job title, "Technical Artist", whose job is basically to make the outsourced stuff work the way it's supposed to.
That said, perpetual crunch time is not universal in the industry. The few guys I know in the industry seem to have fairly reasonable schedules, but they don't work for EA or Rockstar.
I've been paying $15/month for unlimited data on AT&T for years now.
And where exactly did you get this deal? Unlimited data on AT&T has been costing me $30/month since I got my Blackberry 2 years ago.
It depends a lot on the society. I have a friend who grew up very poor (as in one meal every few days) in China, yet talking about it today her main complaints have to do with the social stigma of poverty in Chinese society. She was discriminated against by both students and teachers due to her economic status, since Chinese society tends to assume that any problem you're having is your own fault. Additionally, appearances are extremely important, so that fact that she had only one school uniform, which was faded and patched, was a big problem for her.
One year olds bite because they're teething. Just give them something else to chew on. Pork rib bones are excellent for this.
Well, I have to call shenanigans right back at you then, since I have lived in California all my life, have met plenty of homeschoolers (as well as other alternative education ideas such as Waldorf and Montessori), and so far all of the homeschooling parents I've met were nutballs.
Roughly half of the homeschooling parents I've met have been fundamentalist Christian nutballs who didn't want their kids learning about evolution or sex. These ones I find particularly amusing, since their daughters invariably dropped out of college by the middle of their second year with a drug habit, and often pregnant to boot.
The rest have been adherents to the hippie philosophy. They have various things they don't want their kids learning about, such as violence, societies imposed gender roles, etc... basically anything you can name that is fundamental to being human animals, instinct if you will, and therefore cannot be avoided, only dealt with.
Yes, they are all nutjobs. It seems perfectly reasonable to call them so given that my observation of their results has been adults who were utterly unprepared to function as adults in the real world, and invariably turned to drugs and/or alcohol when they finally had to face it. Even the one exceptional result I mentioned previously was an avid pot smoker. So really, I think calling them nutballs is perhaps even a bit generous.
I know people that have to homeschool because their kids are sick exist, and that is a perfectly commendable reason, but I've met only one of them. That particular kid is doing as well as can be expected, given that her health problem is congenital and at 30 she's doubled all medical predictions of her lifespan. I don't include her in my above assessment since she has so many emotional issues related to her illness that it would be rather unfair to start blaming them on homeschooling.
I'm sure that other varieties of non-nutty homeschooling parents exist -- your reasons seem quite sensible for example -- but I've never met any of them (on the internet doesn't count.)
At any rate, my intention was not to bash homeschooling in general, but to hopefully provide some useful food for thought. Perhaps you should go and read the last paragraph of my previous post again, and you will see that was my intention.
As for my observations, you can deny them all you want, but that doesn't make them untrue. Perhaps I have only noticed the crazy ones, it's not like I go around asking everyone I know if they were homeschooled. however, my experiences with the products of homeschooling are common enough that it has become the stigma of homeschooling in the US. That's something you're just going to have to live with. I sincerely hope is that your kid doesn't turn out like the others I've met, and that was my only reason for posting.
One last point: I personally believe that math and reading are very important, take great pleasure in being good at both, and make every effort to share those joys (along with the fun of science) with my own daughter. However, my time in the corporate world has taught me that in "the real world", sadly, mere attendance does win out.
Or possibly spoken like someone from the USA(or just a believer in evil)
Really? That's all you said there? It certainly seems to me that you strongly implied that the US vote was a vote for evil, which sounds suspiciously like arguing in favor of resolution (albeit by fallacy).
No, they are not. That is a myth that the public school industry would like you to believe. As a home schooling parent, I can tell you, that the percentage of religious nutjobs outside of homeschooling is WAY higher than those inside. This ratio might be different in other parts of the country, but at least her in California, it is definitely the case.
Sorry, but every homeschooling parent I've met has been a religious nutjob, and I've lived in California my entire life. Not all of them were Christian (my home town has a serious hippie infestation), but so far they've all had some pretty nutty ideas and used homeschooling as a way to socially and ideologically isolate their kids. As one might expect, the results were children that were effectively socially retarded
I have met one (and only one) person whom I consider well served by being homeschooled, but I never met her parents, so I can't say anything about them other than that they raised a pretty amazing daughter. So yeah, once in a while it gets done right, but that's pretty rare in my experience. For the most part, I have to agree with xaxa's assessment.
However, forewarned is forearmed, as they say, and 5 is a good age to start getting your child involved in more social activities if you haven't already. I recommend team sports, which have the added value of teaching him, in a hopefully positive way, that he is not the center of the universe. That's certainly something that seems to be lacking in the typical homeschool curriculum.
You'd set back the creation of digital media in a big, big way if you undermine the creators like that.
Spoken like a businessman (ie, not an artist). The truth is that while the current media moguls stood back wringing their hands, actual artists would still be creating and exploring the new medium, and many of them would be quite happy to have a more direct link to the public.
There's no shortage of artists in the world who create simply because they feel compelled to, and plenty of them are finding ways to make money at it that don't depend on antiquated business models based on artificial scarcity.
...and that the number of undernourished people had grown to about 923 million worldwide...
And you've just defended the very position you were trying to argue against. The current model of aid, which is what you mean by "right to food", has done nothing to fix the problem, and in fact actually makes it worse.
while we're waiting for that, how about if you give some evidence that the kind of aid you're espousing actually helps in the long term. In other words, give us some evidence that this guy is wrong.