In brief: there's more to taking a test than the subject matter of the test, from test anxiety to comfort with the mechanisms of standardized tests. NCLB actually evened that out a bit, as now it's common to teach "test taking" as a skill in itself, sad as that is. Also, both abstract math and critical thinking take some practice, which you're going to get more of in some schools than others. Vocabulary has been de-emphasized, but that's obviously similar.
But all of that can be studied statistically. You can look at the test result to college success correlation by income tier and to the two-factor analysis to figure out how to adjust.
I had no idea that UNLIMITED could be so...well...limiting!
Back in the days of dial-up, "unlimited" meant "unlimited minutes of being connected", as there were places like Compuserve that would charge you $2/minute or something just to connect to their service. So back when small ISPs were still a thing, "unlimited" was clear to all as "unlimited minutes", which with dial-up was, amusingly, about the same amount of monthly data as today's "unlimited" plans.
Obviously the commonly-understood meaning of "unlimited" for data plans had changed, but there's no talking reason to marketroids.
Te repeat sibling post a bit: these tests are basically IQ tests. IQ is the best predictor of high school success, colleege succes, and life success (better than wealth of parents), with a correlation of about 0.5 IIRC, meaning it explains about 25% of results. As noted above, tests like this aren't entirely fair for low-income test-takers, for a variety of cultural reasons, but work quite well for the mainstream.
IIRC the next two predictors of success after IQ are wealth of parents, and conscientiousness. While you can measure conscientiousness with a personality test in a non-competitive setting, people just lie on personality tests when there's something at stake, so using a test for that is useless. Looking a how well someone did in school, after adjusting for IQ and family wealth, is a good way to get a read on conscientiousness and also a good predictor of performance, but not as good as IQ.
Yes, but it's easy for the admissions process to adjust scores for impoverished backgrounds. It doesn't even run afoul of laws against racial quotas if you base it just on poverty.
For students from the top half or so of the economic system, tests are quite predictive. Not enough to use them in isolation, but they correlate better with success than any other individual measure.
The tests are still the most predictive tool, but there are many useful tools.
Yeah. The premise is great! But seeing as we're a mostly "service based" economy now, what's the consequences when we only need to hire a fraction of the people currently working *IN* services?
They move on to new services, which people can now afford because other things are cheaper. There are successful startups now for (internet shopping-style) lawn mowing, car washing, dry cleaner pick-up/delivery, all sorts of recurring business like that. Stuff you could easily do yourself, but hey, if it's cheap enough, why not have someone else do it?
As with every historical displacement of workers, new jobs are created because the middle class can afford more, normally goods or services that only the rich could afford before. There are lots of well-funded start-ups getting investor attention right now for just such services. Guess what will be popular and make your own millions from your start-up.
Gas is amazingly cheap, while replacing the furnace in the attic is all kinds of impractical. I expect new houses will be built with gas heating for some time to come, mostly because gas stoves are popular and once you've run the gas line to the house, heating everything else with gas makes sense.
The Earth's average temperature is rising and would be rising even if humans did not exist. That is wrong. They would swing back and forth, like they always did...
You're not really disagreeing with him. It will still swing back and forth, regardless of human activity. It would still be going up right now, regardless of human activity. The speed at which it goes up matters, though.
Nature on average is very slow giving time for living things to adapt and change. Climate change is suppose to occur on the scale of thousands of years
Temperature drops can be very fast during each wave of glaciation in our current ice age. Temperature rises are what's typically slower, although there are some spikes in the ice core records.
We're already causing such a huge animal extinction event that it's big enough event to match the extinction of dinosaurs
Maybe it will go that far, but it hasn't yet. Mostly we're affecting other species by taking land for our needs.
I'm not sure if people can honestly sacrifice their standard of living even slightly to accomplish a reversal until it practically blows in their front door.
I'm not sure they should. At any rate I'm sure that people should decide democratically, not have any reduction in standard of living imposed on them by some aristocracy.
Energy storage technologies are about increasing efficiencies of power generation. So power companies are paying less in fuel for power that is just wasted.
Enabling "renewable" power sources to be base load is a big win, and requires energy storage if you don't have other sources able to take up the slack.
But it won't get us off fossil fuels entirely. A big chunk of consumed power (about a third IIRC) is "primary thermal". From blast furnaces in a steel mill to home heating with gas, we burn a lot of fuel in ways that electricity is never involved. Especially for heavy industry, it won't all be solar.
Partly but the other big reason is that the two major forms of renewable energy - solar and wind - both rely on intermittent power sources which are not always available. If you can store this energy for use at night or on a calm day then there is no need to burn any fuel at all.
This is a huge win, to be sure. Of current power technologies, only solar scales to 10 billion people consuming at American rates. But solar only scales with energy storage that scales with it.
However, I am a little concerned about the "pressure water" storage system which replaced reservoirs with high pressure underground storage. This might work but it seems that you are replacing the limitations of reservoirs with the complications of fracking which has been shown to cause severe, localized earthquakes. Batteries seem a far safer way to go if you need to overcome the limitations of pumped storage schemes.
You're just proving that hippies are going to complain about every solution, so best just to ignore their whining.
Your freedom ends where it touches and restricts my freedom.
No, it obviously doesn't. Everything each of us do, or choose not to do, negatively affects someone else in some small way. Everything.
Freedom involves accepting small harm or risk from others: that's just how freedom works. Only children (and Sith) deal in black-and-white absolutes.
It's a quantitative question, and such questions can be hard because we're talking about things that are hard to quantify.
People obviously do have the fundamental, natural right to do what they want with their property. That's what "property" means. If you want to restrict that fundamental right, the burden of proof is on you to show the harm avoided exceeds the freedom lost. And these things are hard to measure, so it had better exceed it a lot. Further, you need to show that your rights-restricting proposal restricts freedom the least of all the ways you might solve the problem.
Amazon is not a person. Amazon is a huge corporation.
That's a disingenuous argument coming from you.
With anyone else I'd argue that people don't somehow lose rights by acting as a group, but I know you don't actually believe individual should have these rights either.
It's not about person vs corporation - you want the government to have the power to tell everyone "no, you can't throw that away". Stop with your silly "corporations are evil" emotional appeal - it's transparent and irrelevant.
Amazon isn't disposing of things improperly - that's not the argument being made. They're disposing of things correctly - the argument is whether they have the right to dispose of what they want to dispose, not about how things are disposed.
Trying to force businesses to sell items below cost (in this case, to make them lose money vs disposal cost) never ends well.
The Nazis were elected into power as socialists, and forwarded a socialist agenda until the Night of the Long Knives. This is the very problem with the modern left: concentration of power in the government, heedless of the dangers when the wrong person takes that power. Progressives can't seem to see this danger even when protesting in the streets about "Donald Trump the Fascist".
"Not real Communism" killed over 160 million people. Can we please stop trying for more "Not real Socialism".
I just wish they weren't so spartan - even the Model S is very utilitarian for its price. At least for the Model 3, expectations are lower at that price and the cars have better fit and finish than most the competition, to help make up for the stripped down interior.
They are measuring defects instead of eliminating them by design.
"Boss, boss, my new design eliminates all defects!" "Interesting claim. What numbers do you have to back that up?" "Well, ummm,...." "Try measuring defects for a while, old design and then new. Tell me if it gets better."
Only to rule out the one special snowflake case in which it changes with time and distance in exactly the combination necessary such that for any object the location based variance perfectly offsets the time based variance, as otherwise the light-speed delay combined with observing objects many thousands of light years apart in distance from us would revel the change with respect to time.
Nah, the laws of physics will be the same from the dawn of time until next Tuesday. They they'll change.
Any change would also affect the observer and the measurement device.
Ever tried to debug a problem from timestamps in log files, where the problem turned out to be clock drift? Non-trivial for sure, but possible.
What this experiment shows is that the clocks kept the same time as one another). That's something. It doesn't really show that the laws of physics are the same everywhere, just that any gradient is quite shallow across the small area the Earth traversed during the experiment. Still, it's worthwhile to do such diligence, because the underlying assumptions are so very fundamental to scientific thought that no one questions them in other work.
Experiments that confirm what everyone assumes to be true, assumes at such a deep level that its below conscious thought, those are valuable.
Still, Feynman one talked about how we could be sure there was not another fundamental force because of a similar experiment: the attraction between two uncharged masses was measured over months with extraordinary precision, and the results were as expected. That was wrong. The experiment simply wasn't accurate enough to detect dark energy, pulling the masses apart every so slightly. And dark energy is the dominate force at work in the universe, so it's a heck of a thing to miss.
So, keep doing experiments to confirm our most basic assumptions, because we can never be sure we aren't missing something.
That is because they are "Assault Flamethowers", just like the "Assault Revolver" and "Assault Shotgun"... soon to be followed by the "Assault Car" and "Assault Steakknight" and "Assault Baseball bat". Come on, get with the narrative, already!
I assure you you have nothing to fear from the "Assault Steak Knights", as we only assault cows.
Slashdot Mirror
In brief: there's more to taking a test than the subject matter of the test, from test anxiety to comfort with the mechanisms of standardized tests. NCLB actually evened that out a bit, as now it's common to teach "test taking" as a skill in itself, sad as that is. Also, both abstract math and critical thinking take some practice, which you're going to get more of in some schools than others. Vocabulary has been de-emphasized, but that's obviously similar.
But all of that can be studied statistically. You can look at the test result to college success correlation by income tier and to the two-factor analysis to figure out how to adjust.
I had no idea that UNLIMITED could be so...well...limiting!
Back in the days of dial-up, "unlimited" meant "unlimited minutes of being connected", as there were places like Compuserve that would charge you $2/minute or something just to connect to their service. So back when small ISPs were still a thing, "unlimited" was clear to all as "unlimited minutes", which with dial-up was, amusingly, about the same amount of monthly data as today's "unlimited" plans.
Obviously the commonly-understood meaning of "unlimited" for data plans had changed, but there's no talking reason to marketroids.
Te repeat sibling post a bit: these tests are basically IQ tests. IQ is the best predictor of high school success, colleege succes, and life success (better than wealth of parents), with a correlation of about 0.5 IIRC, meaning it explains about 25% of results. As noted above, tests like this aren't entirely fair for low-income test-takers, for a variety of cultural reasons, but work quite well for the mainstream.
IIRC the next two predictors of success after IQ are wealth of parents, and conscientiousness. While you can measure conscientiousness with a personality test in a non-competitive setting, people just lie on personality tests when there's something at stake, so using a test for that is useless. Looking a how well someone did in school, after adjusting for IQ and family wealth, is a good way to get a read on conscientiousness and also a good predictor of performance, but not as good as IQ.
Yes, but it's easy for the admissions process to adjust scores for impoverished backgrounds. It doesn't even run afoul of laws against racial quotas if you base it just on poverty.
For students from the top half or so of the economic system, tests are quite predictive. Not enough to use them in isolation, but they correlate better with success than any other individual measure.
The tests are still the most predictive tool, but there are many useful tools.
Do we know if the amazon store does NOT take cash?
The Amazon Go store has no checkout or register of any kind. You check in, pick up what you want, and walk out.
Yeah. The premise is great! But seeing as we're a mostly "service based" economy now, what's the consequences when we only need to hire a fraction of the people currently working *IN* services?
They move on to new services, which people can now afford because other things are cheaper. There are successful startups now for (internet shopping-style) lawn mowing, car washing, dry cleaner pick-up/delivery, all sorts of recurring business like that. Stuff you could easily do yourself, but hey, if it's cheap enough, why not have someone else do it?
As with every historical displacement of workers, new jobs are created because the middle class can afford more, normally goods or services that only the rich could afford before. There are lots of well-funded start-ups getting investor attention right now for just such services. Guess what will be popular and make your own millions from your start-up.
Gas is amazingly cheap, while replacing the furnace in the attic is all kinds of impractical. I expect new houses will be built with gas heating for some time to come, mostly because gas stoves are popular and once you've run the gas line to the house, heating everything else with gas makes sense.
So hippies like to claim.
The Earth's average temperature is rising and would be rising even if humans did not exist. ..
That is wrong. They would swing back and forth, like they always did.
You're not really disagreeing with him. It will still swing back and forth, regardless of human activity. It would still be going up right now, regardless of human activity. The speed at which it goes up matters, though.
Nature on average is very slow giving time for living things to adapt and change. Climate change is suppose to occur on the scale of thousands of years
Temperature drops can be very fast during each wave of glaciation in our current ice age. Temperature rises are what's typically slower, although there are some spikes in the ice core records.
We're already causing such a huge animal extinction event that it's big enough event to match the extinction of dinosaurs
Maybe it will go that far, but it hasn't yet. Mostly we're affecting other species by taking land for our needs.
I'm not sure if people can honestly sacrifice their standard of living even slightly to accomplish a reversal until it practically blows in their front door.
I'm not sure they should. At any rate I'm sure that people should decide democratically, not have any reduction in standard of living imposed on them by some aristocracy.
Energy storage technologies are about increasing efficiencies of power generation. So power companies are paying less in fuel for power that is just wasted.
Enabling "renewable" power sources to be base load is a big win, and requires energy storage if you don't have other sources able to take up the slack.
But it won't get us off fossil fuels entirely. A big chunk of consumed power (about a third IIRC) is "primary thermal". From blast furnaces in a steel mill to home heating with gas, we burn a lot of fuel in ways that electricity is never involved. Especially for heavy industry, it won't all be solar.
Partly but the other big reason is that the two major forms of renewable energy - solar and wind - both rely on intermittent power sources which are not always available. If you can store this energy for use at night or on a calm day then there is no need to burn any fuel at all.
This is a huge win, to be sure. Of current power technologies, only solar scales to 10 billion people consuming at American rates. But solar only scales with energy storage that scales with it.
However, I am a little concerned about the "pressure water" storage system which replaced reservoirs with high pressure underground storage. This might work but it seems that you are replacing the limitations of reservoirs with the complications of fracking which has been shown to cause severe, localized earthquakes. Batteries seem a far safer way to go if you need to overcome the limitations of pumped storage schemes.
You're just proving that hippies are going to complain about every solution, so best just to ignore their whining.
Your freedom ends where it touches and restricts my freedom.
No, it obviously doesn't. Everything each of us do, or choose not to do, negatively affects someone else in some small way. Everything.
Freedom involves accepting small harm or risk from others: that's just how freedom works. Only children (and Sith) deal in black-and-white absolutes.
It's a quantitative question, and such questions can be hard because we're talking about things that are hard to quantify.
People obviously do have the fundamental, natural right to do what they want with their property. That's what "property" means. If you want to restrict that fundamental right, the burden of proof is on you to show the harm avoided exceeds the freedom lost. And these things are hard to measure, so it had better exceed it a lot. Further, you need to show that your rights-restricting proposal restricts freedom the least of all the ways you might solve the problem.
Amazon is not a person. Amazon is a huge corporation.
That's a disingenuous argument coming from you.
With anyone else I'd argue that people don't somehow lose rights by acting as a group, but I know you don't actually believe individual should have these rights either.
It's not about person vs corporation - you want the government to have the power to tell everyone "no, you can't throw that away". Stop with your silly "corporations are evil" emotional appeal - it's transparent and irrelevant.
Amazon isn't disposing of things improperly - that's not the argument being made. They're disposing of things correctly - the argument is whether they have the right to dispose of what they want to dispose, not about how things are disposed.
Trying to force businesses to sell items below cost (in this case, to make them lose money vs disposal cost) never ends well.
The Nazis were elected into power as socialists, and forwarded a socialist agenda until the Night of the Long Knives. This is the very problem with the modern left: concentration of power in the government, heedless of the dangers when the wrong person takes that power. Progressives can't seem to see this danger even when protesting in the streets about "Donald Trump the Fascist".
"Not real Communism" killed over 160 million people. Can we please stop trying for more "Not real Socialism".
I just wish they weren't so spartan - even the Model S is very utilitarian for its price. At least for the Model 3, expectations are lower at that price and the cars have better fit and finish than most the competition, to help make up for the stripped down interior.
So disappointed it wasn't a goatse link. Still, next best thing I guess.
They are measuring defects instead of eliminating them by design.
"Boss, boss, my new design eliminates all defects!" ...."
"Interesting claim. What numbers do you have to back that up?"
"Well, ummm,
"Try measuring defects for a while, old design and then new. Tell me if it gets better."
Bloomberg has published a slew of negative stories about Tesla,
The financial press exists to call bullshit on corporate numbers.
. Musk announced that Tesla is producing 3500 cars per week, while Bloomberg's estimate is 2560.
Corporate propaganda or investigative journalism: which is more credible? I wonder.
Only to rule out the one special snowflake case in which it changes with time and distance in exactly the combination necessary such that for any object the location based variance perfectly offsets the time based variance, as otherwise the light-speed delay combined with observing objects many thousands of light years apart in distance from us would revel the change with respect to time.
Nah, the laws of physics will be the same from the dawn of time until next Tuesday. They they'll change.
Sure, but if the question is "do the laws of physics change over time", well, you have to keep testing over time.
Any change would also affect the observer and the measurement device.
Ever tried to debug a problem from timestamps in log files, where the problem turned out to be clock drift? Non-trivial for sure, but possible.
What this experiment shows is that the clocks kept the same time as one another). That's something. It doesn't really show that the laws of physics are the same everywhere, just that any gradient is quite shallow across the small area the Earth traversed during the experiment. Still, it's worthwhile to do such diligence, because the underlying assumptions are so very fundamental to scientific thought that no one questions them in other work.
Experiments that confirm what everyone assumes to be true, assumes at such a deep level that its below conscious thought, those are valuable.
Still, Feynman one talked about how we could be sure there was not another fundamental force because of a similar experiment: the attraction between two uncharged masses was measured over months with extraordinary precision, and the results were as expected. That was wrong. The experiment simply wasn't accurate enough to detect dark energy, pulling the masses apart every so slightly. And dark energy is the dominate force at work in the universe, so it's a heck of a thing to miss.
So, keep doing experiments to confirm our most basic assumptions, because we can never be sure we aren't missing something.
It's a unique word and it is confusing as it seemingly breaks standard rules for singular possessives
Its and it's are similar to whose and who's, no not quite unique.
AFAIK, the only other exception for singular possessives is the rule idiomatic/cliche possessive expressions.
"Bob Jones's shoes", but "Davy Jones' Locker".
"Frances's toe", but "Achilles' heel".
But those at least are spelled like they're pronounced.
That is because they are "Assault Flamethowers", just like the "Assault Revolver" and "Assault Shotgun"... soon to be followed by the "Assault Car" and "Assault Steakknight" and "Assault Baseball bat". Come on, get with the narrative, already!
I assure you you have nothing to fear from the "Assault Steak Knights", as we only assault cows.