And this is at odds with the Arctic ice melting due to global warming how?
It's not! This is exactly my point!
You cannot look at one aspect of one region in one layer of the atmosphere and consider it to be the nail in the coffin, case closed. It's like seeing someone with a headache and saying he's certainly got swine flu.
I'm not arguing against global warming. Please reread my post if you got that impression. The Earth is most definitely warming. We've diagnosed that in countless ways that are much less anecdotal than ice melting.
My point is that we are consuming ourselves with countless anecdotes of things like this and missing the real questions, which I listed above.
It looks like the ABC Australia author took part of this article and added his own interpretation. Notice that Dr. Allison is not quoted in the crucial sentences on either article. My guess is that the scientific journalists (who are not scientists themselves) are putting words in his mouth.
Australian Antarctic Division glaciology program head Ian Allison said sea ice losses in west Antarctica over the past 30 years had been more than offset by increases in the Ross Sea region, just one sector of east Antarctica. (emphasis mine)
"Sea ice conditions have remained stable in Antarctica generally," Dr Allison said.
I'm more inclined to believe this is closer to Dr. Allison's view as it encompasses long range thinking and there's a direct quote attached.
Dr Allison said there was not any evidence of significant change in the mass of ice shelves in east Antarctica nor any indication that its ice cap was melting. "The only significant calvings in Antarctica have been in the west," he said. And he cautioned that calvings of the magnitude seen recently in west Antarctica might not be unusual. (emphasis mine)
"Ice shelves in general have episodic carvings and there can be large icebergs breaking off - I'm talking 100km or 200km long - every 10 or 20 or 50 years."
So this is where the ABC article is getting it's information. Dr. Allison is saying that these are episodic carvings but that over a long period it's stable. The ABC author is just looking at the carving going on this year and created a sentence (that is not a direct quote from Dr Allison) saying that Antarctic is losing ice. This is a myopic and misinforming view in my opinion, as it's short term and does not represent the overall situation in Antarctica.
Someone should also tell the Antarctic ice to stop growing. Just Google antarctic ice to see.
The environment is so complex that you can't just point at some melting/growing ice and say we're all doomed/saved. These kinds of arguments skirt the main issues which are:
How much is man influencing THIS warming trend and how much is part of the same natural cycle that has occured many times before?
(Note: the current warming trend started well before the industrial revolution. Look at just about any data that includes 1000s of years (ice cores, Sargasso sea, etc) and you'll see it clearly. Are we increasing the natural trend already in motion? If so, by how much?)
Does warming help are harm the life on Earth? Can we conserve the life it harms, and prepare for the life it helps?
Does increased CO2 in the atmosphere help or harm life on Earth?
The answer to that seems to be both as the biosphere has increased a great deal (plants are being fertilised) but the coral reefs are suffering due to ocean acidification.
The final concern is that the Earth will get SO hot that there will be a tipping point where there will be an effect called a "positive feedback loop" in which the heat will somehow cause the Earth to get hotter and hotter. As almost all things in nature work in negative feedback with multiple buffers coupled with the fact that the Earth has been much hotter in the past, I find this scenario to be closer to Science Fiction than anything else.
From the article:
84 percent of scientists say the Earth is getting warmer because of human activity.
This is true but it's spun, worded with an agenda. Many of those same scientists believe that the amount we're adding to the natural cycle is minuscule, insignificant, or may actually help the environment.
... with vi, your keyboard becomes a huge specialized text-editing gamepad with almost a hundred buttons. Each of them has at least two functions, shifted and unshifted, so you have almost two hundred functions at a single keypress (not counting Shift).
Politicians grabbing at money via legislation that's difficult to monitor and enforce, so that companies will invest in technologies that are inefficient or don't exist yet? How is this a flawed system?
even if you quit smoking, you don't actually reduce your chances of getting lung cancer.
The information you got is either wrong or very short sighted.
Our bodies are not static and unchanging. After you quit smoking it's not like your lungs never change from that state. They may never be as healthy as if you had never smoked, but healthy habits will certainly have an affect on your chances of getting lung cancer.
Until the current study, which used a computer model of the Earth's climate system and biosphere to simulate the effect of geoengineering on climate and the ocean's chemistry, the potential impact of such a scheme on ocean acidification had never been calculated.
This is a computer model. The people who wrote it may very well be correct, but they are the ones that wrote the variables and input the numbers. This should not be thought of on the same level as experimentation or direct observations in the real world. This is not evidence, and there are no new concrete findings.
I have built computer models, dynamic systems, and other complex processes for over 20 years, and I can tell you that it is extraordinarily easy to create computer models that spew out meaningless results. And the more complex the model, the easier it is to get such a mess.
Everything on Earth (and much in space) affects the oceans which cover 70% of it. The complexity is enormous.
Computer models (when done well) can be useful tools to guide us to where we should be doing the actual research. Ocean acidification is a real issue, and I applaud the people at Carnegie Melon's Dept. of Ecology for attempting to tackle this. But we should stop giving computer models the same emphasis as findings in the real world.
Er, where do you live that the world doesn't work like that? I'd like to join you. Actually, you're right, achievers don't get to the top of the social pyramid, sociopaths and psychopaths get to the top of the social pyramid. Achievers generally get distributed through the pile where they're needed. But don't pretend the pyramid doesn't exist in our societies. It does, as anyone who's actually tried to work their way up from the bottom can attest.
I'm not sure where you're putting your values here. You mention "social pyramid". I'm guessing you don't mean likeable, helpful, socially adept people since you mention sociopaths and psychopaths. If you're going plainly on the "how much money do they make", which I'm guessing you are, then my answer is two-fold.
1)
Perhaps the problem is that so many people equate higher pay with success.
The 'goal' becomes 'to make more money'. It's a reasonable 'means', but it's a stupid 'goal'.
I would argue that someone who loves what they do but is paid little is more successful in life than someone with a large salary who doesn't like their job. How successful is someone really, if they spend half of their waking hours unhappy?
Therefore, all you really have to do monetarily is be stable. Go do what interests you. That's true success.
2)
Even if it was solely about money, the richest people are either born into it, or have built successful companies on their own (which does not require straight A's on any tests). While a few have been promoted to modestly rich, this is more dependant on if their bosses like them. I can't imagine a boss saying, "Well you're not a team player, and I don't like you, but you scored well on the test I gave, so here's your promotion."
Tests are efficient at evaluating the level of knowledge of the student. They can be more or less effective, depending on how they are designed. Probably most tests are not very effective, but then neither is some amorphous "gut-feeling" of the teacher, excreted into a report, about how well or ill they think the student is "enhancing their life goals." Also, tests can serve the very useful purpose of reducing the subconscious biases of class and/or race discrimination that different teachers may be prone to.
Getting a job is mostly based on an interview. Getting a promotion is mostly based on your boss.
Perhaps the only case in which grades have an effect on how much money is made is if someone is applying to a large company straight out of college, and the HR department needs a way to whittle down the number of candidates that get an interview. A 4.0 GPA looks nice. After that, it's more about what you did while in the work force.
So how do tests help the person taking them? Why do we even need to assess students? To help the HR departments of large companies?
Education should prepare the student for the real world.
Agreed.
In the real world, your livelihood depends on not failing (at work, your family, whatever).
First, I'd say it's sad to see anyone who just lives their life constantly trying not to fail in structures someone else has built for them. I know people who do this. I love them as people, but it's sad.
If you're one of these people, then I really hope you take time out to think about and respect why certain rules and structures are in place, rather than blindly trying to follow them all the time. If you're constantly worried about following things to the letter, the most you can possibly achieve is mediocrity. You'll only produce what everyone else produces, and you can only be as good as the system someone put in place for you.
Mistakes and failures are how we learn, and should be looked on in a much more positive light. No one should try to make them, or risk disaster, but if we're not making little mistakes all the time then we aren't trying new things.
Unfortunately schools have become more about preparing you for standardized tests and such rather than giving you a real education with the information you actually will use in life
I believe this hits the nail on the head.
Paradigm Shift
There should be a paradigm shift into thinking why we educate in the first place.
If we are trying to pidgin-hole people and put them into their place on a pyramid, with the achievers on top and the average in their places below, well then our system is perfectly set up for that. Fortunately, the real world doesn't work like that outside of a totalitarian state.
If instead we think of education as helping the human being develop so that he reaches his potential and gets more out of life, then our educational systems will only work well for the upper echelon and is poorly designed for most human beings. Tests are a prime example.
Why tests?
There is educational value in studying but actually taking tests is an extremely inefficient use of time. When a student takes them, either they know the material, or they don't. They can't look up or learn the material during that time. If development was the goal, that time would be better spent studying, practising, or testing themselves. Tests as they are, are more for grading purposes (hence administrational purposes) and only provide the student with a motivation not to fail.
Should our education be centered around not failing? Or should it be centered around aiding people with their lives?
Education as an aid to development
Many famous classical composers (like Aaron Copland) went to study under a woman named Nadia Boulanger. She was famous, well respected, and something you could put on a resume. She didn't give tests, she just worked with you on your craft. Why can't universities use a similar model? Or any schools for that matter? They would work with you on the material you came to study, period.
There have to be other ways to motivate pupils other than paying them.
There are.
There are psychological sensitivities that focus motivation during different stages of development.
3 - 6 yr olds are developing their senses and are therefore keenly interested in differentiating them. Show them activities that they can do by themselves using materials for geometric differentiation or color differentiation and it will keep their attention.
Their brains are also especially sensitive to language (wanting to know names of things), order (learning how to keep things in place), and other things.
It's the age of "what?"
6 - 12 yr olds are sensitive to the imagination (the seemingly extraordinary), morality (what's fair?) and social interaction (play society). Give them stories and activities based in on those, and they will keep their attention.
It's the age of "why?"
12 - 18 yr olds want to find their individuality and become adults. Give them purposeful adult activities that actually have meaning and impact on the people around them and that will keep their attention. They no longer want a 'play society', they want the real thing, and they want to be able to do it themselves.
It's the age of "how?"
18 - 24 yr olds are another developmental stage similar to the 2nd. The brain finishes forming part of the frontal lobe (involved in the evaluation of outcomes) around 24.
It's developmental psychology, and I really wish schools would employ more of it in their methods, like these schools started to.
Perhaps the problem is that so many people equate higher pay with success.
The 'goal' becomes 'to make more money'. It's a reasonable 'means', but it's a stupid 'goal'.
I would argue that someone who loves what they do but is paid little is more successful in life than someone with a large salary who doesn't like their job. How successful is someone really, if they spend half of their waking hours unhappy?
Therefore, all you really have to do monetarily is be stable. Go do what interests you. That's true success.
I have to say, the misconceptions in both the summary and many of these comments raised my blood pressure.
For some reason education runs deep with people.
Everybody and anybody thinks they're an expert and has opinions. But barely any of them can tell you the core psychological differences between different ages of children. A 4 yr old is VERY different than a 6 yr old in what motivates them and what their brains are receptive to. And an 11 yr old and 13 yr old are extremely different as well. Development is NOT linear. And while sitting an adult down and lecturing to them may be the best way to transfer knowledge to adults, it is completely unnatural for nearly every stage of childhood development. So they end up hating learning and we have to resort to 'tricks' like this to entice them.
The main difference between a successful genius like Edison or Da Vinci and an average person, is that the genius is fascinated by things and loves to work on them.
This program itself is a band-aid. It may very well be helpful in desperate areas. But it's a band-aid on top of a very deep problem in the structure of what we think 'education' should be. When the critics argue that "paying kids corrupts the notion of learning for education's sake alone", it doesn't matter. The way the current system is set up, there's no way that a majority of the kids are going to love learning.
I'm a certified teacher in the US. By pure chance I came across a school that used a method spread by a Dr. Montessori (the same method that Larry Page & Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, credit as a major factor in their success).
The first thing that struck me is how eager these kids were to work on things and find things out on their own. The smartest kids were well beyond most of the ones I knew in mainstream education and the slower kids STILL loved learning. Then I realized how happy the children were. Yes, there are always problems, but very few were bored and no one sat around like a broken shell of a human waiting for the day to be over.
I ended up getting my certification in Montessori elementary education, and the classes were MUCH more thorough and in depth then when I went for my mainstream certification. Now I feel like I was somewhat amateurish when I taught before. I had little idea about how to really work with the psychological sensitivities of each age and turn them into something truly developmentally constructive.
Only a small part of development is the transference of knowledge, which seems to be the main focus of current mainstream education (and what this little pay-for-grades project helps with). But if the aim is switched to aiding human beings in their life and development, then we start to use knowledge as a tool.
We use the knowledge to develop the brain, rather than trying to drop knowledge into an undeveloped mind as if it's an empty container waiting to be filled. This kind of development is what I think Einstein was talking about when he said, "Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school."
This program that pays children for their grades is like painting on old, crumbling house. It does help a bit, and it definitely looks nice. But I'd rather get inside and strengthen the architecture. The paint will wear off eventually.
You've used the word 'evolve' in the sense of development, advancement or maturity. These are subjective terms.
Biological evolution has a very different meaning. It's merely the process of variation / selection / heredity. It does not mean that something becomes more complex or more intelligent (although certain complexities and intelligences do tend to help with survival in the wild, and therefore those traits might stick around).
So, yes, whoever makes more babies will have more of their traits spread around. There's a good chance that about 1 in 12 men in Asia (and therefore 1 in 200 men worldwide) are descendants of Genghis Khan.
we need to be careful that politicians do not get talked into putting legislation in place that, in the end, ends up looking stupid.
or even worse, introduces new problems without solving the intended ones.
Charles Dunstone's wording is better when talking to politicians.
Politicians know that new problems will always arise, so it's not much of a deterrent. But they do NOT want to look stupid.
Shall I even mention the leap of faith required to even consider whether those same 2 animals evolved in the first place?
If you have:
variation
heredity
selection
It's impossible NOT to have evolution.
We observe these 3 things every day, in every new baby plant and animal.
Variation: We see mutations in every baby. Brothers (who are not twins) do not look exactly alike, and do not have exactly the same traits. We can observe that this is because mother and father give different halves of their DNA to each AND we observe mutations occuring within the embryo.
Heredity: We observe those same traits being passed on to the next generation.
Selection: The organisms with traits that make it easier to survive long enough to reproduce will have more of their traits passed on. (They'll be making more babies.)
These mutations are not selective to a specific sub-set of traits. They go across the board effecting every trait of an organism. Nature is constantly changing every aspect of every organism right in front of our eyes, with every new birth. If we do this for millions of years it's impossible NOT to have an incredibly different organism at the end.
The misconception comes from the idea that an ape gave birth to a human. This is simply not the case. The change was very gradual, changing trait upon trait over time. Today's apes are VERY different from the apes of the past.
The only reason we separate and classify into Homo erectus, sapians, neanderthalensis, etc. is to make sense of it all. We give different words to groups of organisms that have different traits. They're basically the same living thing with slightly different traits.
Where we draw the line and call things different species, races, etc? Well it's very difficult, and so we're constantly refining what names we give to groups with different traits. But they're just NAMES. The traits change all the time.
This gradual change in traits that we observe happening RIGHT NOW is what many people call evolution. There's LOTS of evidence (bones & fossils) to say that this has always happened.
When observing all of this right in front of our eyes, it actually takes a leap of faith to say things don't evolve. Even the last 2 Catholic Popes (heads of a very non-liberal organization) have understood and agreed with it. Once you see it, you have to say, "I don't believe my eyes." And THAT is the true leap of faith.
Whether it pans out or not, I exceptionally like this part of the introduction to his paper, which I believe highlights the weakness of string theory.
Hundreds of years of theoretical and experimental work have produced an extremely
successful pair of mathematical theories describing our world. The standard model of particles and interactions described by quantum field theory is a paragon of predictive excellence.
General relativity, a theory of gravity built from pure geometry, is exceedingly elegant and
effective in its domain of applicability. Any attempt to describe nature at the foundational
level must reproduce these successful theories, and the most sensible course towards unification is to extend them with as little new mathematical machinery as necessary.
The further
we drift from these experimentally verified foundations, the less likely our mathematics is
to correspond with reality. In the absence of new experimental data, we should be very
careful, accepting sophisticated mathematical constructions only when they provide a clear
simplification.
And we should pare and unite existing structures whenever possible.
I know you were modded funny, but I actually just followed your little "guide" step by step; installing gnome-do, and setting up all the bindings in compiz.
Not because I wanted to obfuscate things for others, but because I'm still fairly new to Linux and it's actually a pretty nice setup. Thanks for the ideas (^_^)
I say if we hand it over we do so on the condition that certain things stay the way they are.
How would we enforce that condition? Here we have the EFF fighting within US law to enforce that condition. If it's in international hands, who's going to fight for it when people push the limits and it gets corrupt? Under what law? How many nations will care?
Capitalism may be the quickest way to get to the true communistic ideal, not like the totalitarian states of the USSR, East Germany, North Korea, etc. Those were/are mainly dictatorships run by elite groups hiding under the veil of fairness and community.
Lightly regulated capitalism has shown to be the quickest "means to the ends" of technological progress and efficiency that the world has seen so far. The more efficiently we can satisfy our survival needs, the more time we have for altruistic endeavours.
The fact that there ARE still problems gives a motive to want to change those problems.
The idea that we can make a difference, without an oppressive, "overlord" state calling the shots, allows the motive to be put into action.
The Open Source community exemplifies this.
Despite its many flaws, capitalism is the quickest breeding ground for altruistic communal endeavours. When computer communication became efficient, an Open Source community was inevitable.
Good luck trying to preserve the detail if you're shooting something that's rusty in the sun without losing the shadows completely or blowing the highlights all to hell.
I met a photographer at a fair who was selling a digital photograph of a covered bridge. He explained to me that he took 2 photographs at different exposures: 1 to get the detail of the dark inside portion, and another to get the rest of the scenery. Then he photoshopped them together.
IANAPhotographer but I'd imagine you could use a similar technique as long as the shadows on your rusty thing in the sun aren't moving.
Slashdot Mirror
And this is at odds with the Arctic ice melting due to global warming how?
It's not! This is exactly my point!
You cannot look at one aspect of one region in one layer of the atmosphere and consider it to be the nail in the coffin, case closed. It's like seeing someone with a headache and saying he's certainly got swine flu.
I'm not arguing against global warming. Please reread my post if you got that impression. The Earth is most definitely warming. We've diagnosed that in countless ways that are much less anecdotal than ice melting.
My point is that we are consuming ourselves with countless anecdotes of things like this and missing the real questions, which I listed above.
It looks like the ABC Australia author took part of this article and added his own interpretation. Notice that Dr. Allison is not quoted in the crucial sentences on either article. My guess is that the scientific journalists (who are not scientists themselves) are putting words in his mouth.
Australian Antarctic Division glaciology program head Ian Allison said sea ice losses in west Antarctica over the past 30 years had been more than offset by increases in the Ross Sea region, just one sector of east Antarctica. (emphasis mine)
"Sea ice conditions have remained stable in Antarctica generally," Dr Allison said.
I'm more inclined to believe this is closer to Dr. Allison's view as it encompasses long range thinking and there's a direct quote attached.
Dr Allison said there was not any evidence of significant change in the mass of ice shelves in east Antarctica nor any indication that its ice cap was melting. "The only significant calvings in Antarctica have been in the west," he said. And he cautioned that calvings of the magnitude seen recently in west Antarctica might not be unusual. (emphasis mine)
"Ice shelves in general have episodic carvings and there can be large icebergs breaking off - I'm talking 100km or 200km long - every 10 or 20 or 50 years."
So this is where the ABC article is getting it's information. Dr. Allison is saying that these are episodic carvings but that over a long period it's stable. The ABC author is just looking at the carving going on this year and created a sentence (that is not a direct quote from Dr Allison) saying that Antarctic is losing ice. This is a myopic and misinforming view in my opinion, as it's short term and does not represent the overall situation in Antarctica.
The environment is so complex that you can't just point at some melting/growing ice and say we're all doomed/saved. These kinds of arguments skirt the main issues which are:
(Note: the current warming trend started well before the industrial revolution. Look at just about any data that includes 1000s of years (ice cores, Sargasso sea, etc) and you'll see it clearly. Are we increasing the natural trend already in motion? If so, by how much?)
The answer to that seems to be both as the biosphere has increased a great deal (plants are being fertilised) but the coral reefs are suffering due to ocean acidification.
The final concern is that the Earth will get SO hot that there will be a tipping point where there will be an effect called a "positive feedback loop" in which the heat will somehow cause the Earth to get hotter and hotter. As almost all things in nature work in negative feedback with multiple buffers coupled with the fact that the Earth has been much hotter in the past, I find this scenario to be closer to Science Fiction than anything else.
From the article:
84 percent of scientists say the Earth is getting warmer because of human activity.
This is true but it's spun, worded with an agenda. Many of those same scientists believe that the amount we're adding to the natural cycle is minuscule, insignificant, or may actually help the environment.
... with vi, your keyboard becomes a huge specialized text-editing gamepad with almost a hundred buttons. Each of them has at least two functions, shifted and unshifted, so you have almost two hundred functions at a single keypress (not counting Shift).
A vim Paperclip Assistant in action.
The sign language users are apes (the ones without tails).
Politicians grabbing at money via legislation that's difficult to monitor and enforce, so that companies will invest in technologies that are inefficient or don't exist yet?
How is this a flawed system?
even if you quit smoking, you don't actually reduce your chances of getting lung cancer.
The information you got is either wrong or very short sighted.
Our bodies are not static and unchanging. After you quit smoking it's not like your lungs never change from that state. They may never be as healthy as if you had never smoked, but healthy habits will certainly have an affect on your chances of getting lung cancer.
Until the current study, which used a computer model of the Earth's climate system and biosphere to simulate the effect of geoengineering on climate and the ocean's chemistry, the potential impact of such a scheme on ocean acidification had never been calculated.
This is a computer model. The people who wrote it may very well be correct, but they are the ones that wrote the variables and input the numbers. This should not be thought of on the same level as experimentation or direct observations in the real world. This is not evidence, and there are no new concrete findings.
I believe this guy says it pretty well in the beginning of his video:
I have built computer models, dynamic systems, and other complex processes for over 20 years, and I can tell you that it is extraordinarily easy to create computer models that spew out meaningless results. And the more complex the model, the easier it is to get such a mess.
Everything on Earth (and much in space) affects the oceans which cover 70% of it. The complexity is enormous.
Computer models (when done well) can be useful tools to guide us to where we should be doing the actual research. Ocean acidification is a real issue, and I applaud the people at Carnegie Melon's Dept. of Ecology for attempting to tackle this. But we should stop giving computer models the same emphasis as findings in the real world.
Er, where do you live that the world doesn't work like that? I'd like to join you. Actually, you're right, achievers don't get to the top of the social pyramid, sociopaths and psychopaths get to the top of the social pyramid. Achievers generally get distributed through the pile where they're needed. But don't pretend the pyramid doesn't exist in our societies. It does, as anyone who's actually tried to work their way up from the bottom can attest.
I'm not sure where you're putting your values here. You mention "social pyramid". I'm guessing you don't mean likeable, helpful, socially adept people since you mention sociopaths and psychopaths. If you're going plainly on the "how much money do they make", which I'm guessing you are, then my answer is two-fold.
1)
Perhaps the problem is that so many people equate higher pay with success.
The 'goal' becomes 'to make more money'. It's a reasonable 'means', but it's a stupid 'goal'.
I would argue that someone who loves what they do but is paid little is more successful in life than someone with a large salary who doesn't like their job. How successful is someone really, if they spend half of their waking hours unhappy?
Therefore, all you really have to do monetarily is be stable. Go do what interests you. That's true success.
2)
Even if it was solely about money, the richest people are either born into it, or have built successful companies on their own (which does not require straight A's on any tests). While a few have been promoted to modestly rich, this is more dependant on if their bosses like them. I can't imagine a boss saying, "Well you're not a team player, and I don't like you, but you scored well on the test I gave, so here's your promotion."
Tests are efficient at evaluating the level of knowledge of the student. They can be more or less effective, depending on how they are designed. Probably most tests are not very effective, but then neither is some amorphous "gut-feeling" of the teacher, excreted into a report, about how well or ill they think the student is "enhancing their life goals." Also, tests can serve the very useful purpose of reducing the subconscious biases of class and/or race discrimination that different teachers may be prone to.
Getting a job is mostly based on an interview. Getting a promotion is mostly based on your boss.
Perhaps the only case in which grades have an effect on how much money is made is if someone is applying to a large company straight out of college, and the HR department needs a way to whittle down the number of candidates that get an interview. A 4.0 GPA looks nice. After that, it's more about what you did while in the work force.
So how do tests help the person taking them? Why do we even need to assess students? To help the HR departments of large companies?
Education should prepare the student for the real world.
Agreed.
In the real world, your livelihood depends on not failing (at work, your family, whatever).
First, I'd say it's sad to see anyone who just lives their life constantly trying not to fail in structures someone else has built for them. I know people who do this. I love them as people, but it's sad.
If you're one of these people, then I really hope you take time out to think about and respect why certain rules and structures are in place, rather than blindly trying to follow them all the time. If you're constantly worried about following things to the letter, the most you can possibly achieve is mediocrity. You'll only produce what everyone else produces, and you can only be as good as the system someone put in place for you.
Mistakes and failures are how we learn, and should be looked on in a much more positive light. No one should try to make them, or risk disaster, but if we're not making little mistakes all the time then we aren't trying new things.
Unfortunately schools have become more about preparing you for standardized tests and such rather than giving you a real education with the information you actually will use in life
I believe this hits the nail on the head.
Paradigm Shift
There should be a paradigm shift into thinking why we educate in the first place.
If we are trying to pidgin-hole people and put them into their place on a pyramid, with the achievers on top and the average in their places below, well then our system is perfectly set up for that. Fortunately, the real world doesn't work like that outside of a totalitarian state.
If instead we think of education as helping the human being develop so that he reaches his potential and gets more out of life, then our educational systems will only work well for the upper echelon and is poorly designed for most human beings. Tests are a prime example.
Why tests?
There is educational value in studying but actually taking tests is an extremely inefficient use of time. When a student takes them, either they know the material, or they don't. They can't look up or learn the material during that time. If development was the goal, that time would be better spent studying, practising, or testing themselves. Tests as they are, are more for grading purposes (hence administrational purposes) and only provide the student with a motivation not to fail.
Should our education be centered around not failing? Or should it be centered around aiding people with their lives?
Education as an aid to development
Many famous classical composers (like Aaron Copland) went to study under a woman named Nadia Boulanger. She was famous, well respected, and something you could put on a resume. She didn't give tests, she just worked with you on your craft. Why can't universities use a similar model? Or any schools for that matter? They would work with you on the material you came to study, period.
It's money I think. It's hard to advertise.
There have to be other ways to motivate pupils other than paying them.
There are.
There are psychological sensitivities that focus motivation during different stages of development.
Their brains are also especially sensitive to language (wanting to know names of things), order (learning how to keep things in place), and other things.
It's the age of "what?"
It's the age of "why?"
It's the age of "how?"
It's developmental psychology, and I really wish schools would employ more of it in their methods, like these schools started to.
Perhaps the problem is that so many people equate higher pay with success.
The 'goal' becomes 'to make more money'. It's a reasonable 'means', but it's a stupid 'goal'.
I would argue that someone who loves what they do but is paid little is more successful in life than someone with a large salary who doesn't like their job. How successful is someone really, if they spend half of their waking hours unhappy?
Therefore, all you really have to do monetarily is be stable. Go do what interests you. That's true success.
I have to say, the misconceptions in both the summary and many of these comments raised my blood pressure.
For some reason education runs deep with people. Everybody and anybody thinks they're an expert and has opinions. But barely any of them can tell you the core psychological differences between different ages of children. A 4 yr old is VERY different than a 6 yr old in what motivates them and what their brains are receptive to. And an 11 yr old and 13 yr old are extremely different as well. Development is NOT linear. And while sitting an adult down and lecturing to them may be the best way to transfer knowledge to adults, it is completely unnatural for nearly every stage of childhood development. So they end up hating learning and we have to resort to 'tricks' like this to entice them.
The main difference between a successful genius like Edison or Da Vinci and an average person, is that the genius is fascinated by things and loves to work on them.
This program itself is a band-aid. It may very well be helpful in desperate areas. But it's a band-aid on top of a very deep problem in the structure of what we think 'education' should be. When the critics argue that "paying kids corrupts the notion of learning for education's sake alone", it doesn't matter. The way the current system is set up, there's no way that a majority of the kids are going to love learning.
I'm a certified teacher in the US. By pure chance I came across a school that used a method spread by a Dr. Montessori (the same method that Larry Page & Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, credit as a major factor in their success).
The first thing that struck me is how eager these kids were to work on things and find things out on their own. The smartest kids were well beyond most of the ones I knew in mainstream education and the slower kids STILL loved learning. Then I realized how happy the children were. Yes, there are always problems, but very few were bored and no one sat around like a broken shell of a human waiting for the day to be over.
I ended up getting my certification in Montessori elementary education, and the classes were MUCH more thorough and in depth then when I went for my mainstream certification. Now I feel like I was somewhat amateurish when I taught before. I had little idea about how to really work with the psychological sensitivities of each age and turn them into something truly developmentally constructive.
Only a small part of development is the transference of knowledge, which seems to be the main focus of current mainstream education (and what this little pay-for-grades project helps with). But if the aim is switched to aiding human beings in their life and development, then we start to use knowledge as a tool.
We use the knowledge to develop the brain, rather than trying to drop knowledge into an undeveloped mind as if it's an empty container waiting to be filled. This kind of development is what I think Einstein was talking about when he said, "Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school."
I urge any parents to look into the Montessori method, and visit a school in your area if you can. But understand that some schools use the name without really using the method.
This program that pays children for their grades is like painting on old, crumbling house. It does help a bit, and it definitely looks nice. But I'd rather get inside and strengthen the architecture. The paint will wear off eventually.
You've used the word 'evolve' in the sense of development, advancement or maturity. These are subjective terms.
Biological evolution has a very different meaning. It's merely the process of variation / selection / heredity. It does not mean that something becomes more complex or more intelligent (although certain complexities and intelligences do tend to help with survival in the wild, and therefore those traits might stick around).
So, yes, whoever makes more babies will have more of their traits spread around. There's a good chance that about 1 in 12 men in Asia (and therefore 1 in 200 men worldwide) are descendants of Genghis Khan.
we need to be careful that politicians do not get talked into putting legislation in place that, in the end, ends up looking stupid.
or even worse, introduces new problems without solving the intended ones.
Charles Dunstone's wording is better when talking to politicians.
Politicians know that new problems will always arise, so it's not much of a deterrent. But they do NOT want to look stupid.
A: So what do you do for a living?
B: I tickle orangutan babies and then write about it.
Shall I even mention the leap of faith required to even consider whether those same 2 animals evolved in the first place?
If you have:
It's impossible NOT to have evolution.
We observe these 3 things every day, in every new baby plant and animal.
These mutations are not selective to a specific sub-set of traits. They go across the board effecting every trait of an organism. Nature is constantly changing every aspect of every organism right in front of our eyes, with every new birth. If we do this for millions of years it's impossible NOT to have an incredibly different organism at the end.
The misconception comes from the idea that an ape gave birth to a human. This is simply not the case. The change was very gradual, changing trait upon trait over time. Today's apes are VERY different from the apes of the past.
The only reason we separate and classify into Homo erectus, sapians, neanderthalensis, etc. is to make sense of it all. We give different words to groups of organisms that have different traits. They're basically the same living thing with slightly different traits.
Where we draw the line and call things different species, races, etc? Well it's very difficult, and so we're constantly refining what names we give to groups with different traits. But they're just NAMES. The traits change all the time.
This gradual change in traits that we observe happening RIGHT NOW is what many people call evolution. There's LOTS of evidence (bones & fossils) to say that this has always happened.
When observing all of this right in front of our eyes, it actually takes a leap of faith to say things don't evolve. Even the last 2 Catholic Popes (heads of a very non-liberal organization) have understood and agreed with it. Once you see it, you have to say, "I don't believe my eyes." And THAT is the true leap of faith.
The competing theory is right here. AND it will be testable as soon as CERN is up and running.
Whether it pans out or not, I exceptionally like this part of the introduction to his paper, which I believe highlights the weakness of string theory.
Hundreds of years of theoretical and experimental work have produced an extremely successful pair of mathematical theories describing our world. The standard model of particles and interactions described by quantum field theory is a paragon of predictive excellence. General relativity, a theory of gravity built from pure geometry, is exceedingly elegant and effective in its domain of applicability. Any attempt to describe nature at the foundational level must reproduce these successful theories, and the most sensible course towards unification is to extend them with as little new mathematical machinery as necessary.
The further we drift from these experimentally verified foundations, the less likely our mathematics is to correspond with reality. In the absence of new experimental data, we should be very careful, accepting sophisticated mathematical constructions only when they provide a clear simplification.
And we should pare and unite existing structures whenever possible.
The human brain is simply a pattern matching engine designed to find the most appropriate response in order to maximize survival.
"simply"?! How can you not be in awe of such a machine? I counter your implied apathetic bias with my own bias of amazement. (^_^)
I know you were modded funny, but I actually just followed your little "guide" step by step; installing gnome-do, and setting up all the bindings in compiz.
Not because I wanted to obfuscate things for others, but because I'm still fairly new to Linux and it's actually a pretty nice setup. Thanks for the ideas (^_^)
I say if we hand it over we do so on the condition that certain things stay the way they are.
How would we enforce that condition? Here we have the EFF fighting within US law to enforce that condition. If it's in international hands, who's going to fight for it when people push the limits and it gets corrupt? Under what law? How many nations will care?
We could just throw money into a giant hole.
The Open Source community exemplifies this.
Despite its many flaws, capitalism is the quickest breeding ground for altruistic communal endeavours. When computer communication became efficient, an Open Source community was inevitable.
Good luck trying to preserve the detail if you're shooting something that's rusty in the sun without losing the shadows completely or blowing the highlights all to hell.
I met a photographer at a fair who was selling a digital photograph of a covered bridge. He explained to me that he took 2 photographs at different exposures: 1 to get the detail of the dark inside portion, and another to get the rest of the scenery. Then he photoshopped them together.
IANAPhotographer but I'd imagine you could use a similar technique as long as the shadows on your rusty thing in the sun aren't moving.